How to Prepare for Climate Change

A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos

David Pogue

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982134587
• Categoría: Biological Sciences
• Categoría: Global Warming & Climate Change

A practical and comprehensive guide to surviving the greatest disaster of our time, from New York Times bestselling self-help author and beloved CBS Sunday Morning science and technology correspondent David Pogue. You might not realize it, but we're already living through the beginnings of climate chaos. In Arizona, laborers now start their day at 3 a.m. because it's too hot to work past noon. Chinese investors are snapping up real estate in Canada. Millennials have evacuation plans. Moguls are building bunkers. Retirees in Miami are moving inland.In How to Prepare for Climate Change, bestselling self-help author David Pogue offers sensible, deeply researched advice for how the rest of us should start to ready ourselves for the years ahead. Pogue walks readers through what to grow, what to eat, how to build, how to insure, where to invest, how to prepare your children and pets, and even where to consider relocating when the time comes. (Two areas of the country, in particular, have the requisite cool temperatures, good hospitals, reliable access to water, and resilient infrastructure to serve as climate havens in the years ahead.) He also provides wise tips for managing your anxiety, as well as action plans for riding out every climate catastrophe, from superstorms and wildfires to ticks and epidemics.Timely and enlightening, How to Prepare for Climate Change is an indispensable guide for anyone who read The Uninhabitable Earth or The Sixth Extinction and wants to know how to make smart choices for the upheaval ahead.

Chapter 1 Acclimating to Climate Change

Most people, most of the time, conceive of the climate crisis in terms of its effects on the physical world: weather, buildings, agriculture, land, animals. But if you’re a human being, there’s a less publicized challenge: preparing mentally for the new era.

The psychological costs of climate change include spikes in grief, anger, helplessness, shame, fear, disgust, cynicism, and fatalism—feelings that lead to real-world consequences like stress, drug abuse, strain on relationships, and increases in aggression, violence, and crime. “Children and communities with few resources to deal with the impacts of climate change are those most impacted,” notes the American Psychological Association.

Depression is paralyzing, and that’s why this is the first chapter in this book: You can’t take any action, in any realm of your existence, if you’re mired in hopelessness. Preparing to handle your own feelings about our planet’s destruction, therefore, must be your first step before you can take any others.

In fact, the changing climate can take two kinds of emotional toll: post-traumatic and pretraumatic.

• Post-traumatic impacts are the ones you feel when you’ve lived through an extreme-weather event. Every time a hurricane, flood, wildfire, heat wave, drought, or another eco-disaster hits a region, the affected population suffers a spike in anxiety, alcoholism, drug use, depression, suicides, and psychiatric hospitalization.
  It’s not hard to imagine why: These events usually mean experiencing damage or loss to your family, your home, your stuff, a pet, or your livelihood. Meanwhile, the stress of the situation is often magnified by disruptions in society’s infrastructure: cell service, access to food and water, medical facilities, and so on.
  People who live through one of these events may also suffer from solastalgia, a cool word for a terrible feeling. It’s homesickness while you’re still at home, because you no longer recognize the place. In the climate-crisis era, more and more people experience solastalgia—when their homes are destroyed by extreme weather, or when they’re forced to move because their community is flooded or has dried up. It’s possible to feel solastalgia even when part of your town is destroyed but not your own neighborhood.
  But even after the nuts and bolts of your life have been restored, the mental damage may not recede. Post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), a chronic disorder that persists long after the original disaster, is common among extreme-weather victims. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, half of the affected population developed an anxiety or mood disorder such as depression, and one in six people suffered PTSD. And after the 2003 California wildfires, one-third of all surviving adults fell into depression; one-quarter suffered PTSD.
• Pretraumatic stress stems from despair for our world before it has even finished becoming uninhabitable. It’s anxiety, panic, despair, and mourning over the planet’s ruined future. It’s a depression that’s made worse by the sense that nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
  It’s a big problem. In the United States, anxiety diagnoses are up 40% since 2016. Depression cases are up 33% since 2013. The suicide rate has ballooned 50% since 2003. Climate news isn’t solely responsible, but it’s not helping; 40% of Americans, for example, feel “helpless” about the deteriorating climate.

As though those psychological depressors aren’t enough, our moods in the new climate era are also affected more directly—by the heat. Dozens of studies have established a link between hot weather and impatience, irritability, and violence. For example, for each degree increase in average temperature, 2% more Americans report mental-health issues.

Validation

How’s this for good news? There’s a whole new mental-health field called ecotherapy. It’s staffed by psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in treating environmental grief, depression, or panic.

These therapists have various approaches and backgrounds, but they all seem to agree on one thing: You’re normal.

“There’s a normal range of anxiety, depression, and grief that’s associated with these issues. Any sane, feeling person would have them,” says climate psychologist Thomas Doherty.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to understand, manage, and accept these feelings. “Too much anxiety is inhibiting. It robs people of their creativity, of their joy, their quality of life,” Doherty says.

He notes that some people are inherently more vulnerable to anxiety or depression right out of the gate.

If you were a regular patient of one of these ecotherapists, the first project they’d work on would probably be validating your struggles—reassuring you that they’re real, reasonable, and sane.

Four Fueling Factors

Four compounding factors swirl around that process, which you can overcome only by recognizing them and picking them apart.

• Social pressure. Validation of your feelings can be helpful no matter what problems you’re facing. But the polarizing and controversial nature of climate change makes acknowledging your dread more complicated. You may live in a society, a workplace, or even a family that’s populated by deniers, doubters, and defeatists.
  “Interacting with people who aren’t feeling the same things you are can feel very confusing, very alienating,” says environmental psychologist Renee Lertzman. “You then tend to minimize or question your own experience, like, ‘I’m just overreacting. I’m being too sensitive. I should be handling this better. I should do this. I shouldn’t be feeling that.’ But it’s very hard, generally speaking, to move forward in any constructive way while we’re attacking ourselves.”
• Negative bias. The world hasn’t yet heated up 10 degrees. The sea levels aren’t yet eight feet higher. We still have a chance to change our fate.
  But it’s still easy to freak out now, before the worst has even come to pass—because we’re wired to fear the worst.
  “We’re built with what’s called a negative bias: We scan the environment for dangers, rather than scanning for beauty,” says Leslie Davenport, a therapist specializing in climate psychology and the author of Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change: A Clinician’s Guide. Our excellence at spotting and fleeing potential threats has long been an evolutionary advantage for our species. For thousands of generations, it’s helped us survive.
  But as the climate changes, negative bias is choking us with stress and anxiety. “On one level, it has served us,” says Davenport. “But right now, it’s working against us.”
• Avoidance. Climate change is not just any old bad news. It’s not headlines saying, “Last Blockbuster Video Store Closes Its Doors.” Instead, it’s deeply unsettling news that affects us to the core.
  “The climate crisis is nothing if not a metaphor for our gradual decline and death,” says psychiatrist and environmental activist Lise Van Susteren.
  Because the topic is so dark and so threatening, we don’t like to talk about it. Many of us keep our terror bottled up, which makes climate anxiety even more crippling. “People do their very best to avoid these topics,” says Van Susteren. “It takes me only seconds to shut a dinner party down by bringing up certain issues on climate.”
• Threats to identity. In wealthy countries like the United States, the thought of human-caused climate change can be hard to acknowledge for yet another reason: It contradicts so much of what we believe about ourselves.
  For generations, the American Way has meant that we measure success by how much we own and consume. That we’re rewarded by hard work with a first-world lifestyle. That each generation lives more comfortably than its parents.
  “All these core values that, for the most part, we’ve innocently invested ourselves in, we’re now being told, ‘That’s all wrong. This doesn’t work,’ ” says Davenport.
  The way that message hits many people, according to Renee Lertzman, is, “You have to change everything. You cannot exist the way you have been existing, and therefore you have to change your entire sense of who you are, and yourself.”
  That’s why what Lertzman calls climate melancholia can be such a devastating affliction. We’re concerned about the fate of the earth and the species, yes. But because our lifestyle is part of our identity, and that lifestyle is responsible for the problem, our sense of self is threatened.

All right, you get it: Climate despair is complex, fraught, and wired into some of our deepest psychological scaffolding.

If you do manage to complete Step 1—establishing that your feelings are legitimate—then you’re ready for Step 2. That, as it turns out, is taking action.

The Action Antidote

Depression, the clinical condition, isn’t just feeling down. It’s the feeling that your situation is terrible and you can’t do anything to change it.

“Anytime there’s a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, a sense of ‘I’m a victim, there’s nothing I can do,’ doing something has always been a therapeutic intervention,” says Leslie Davenport.

No amount of reading or thinking is guaranteed to make you feel better about the climate problem. Taking some kind of action is the only therapy that always works.

“That’s the most effective way of dealing with climate despair: to do something,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “Otherwise, it just sits inside you and churns, and you end up spending hours every day looking at the computer for more evidence of crisis and breakdown and collapse. That’s not a good basis for psychological health.”

Davenport is quick to add that action doesn’t have to mean “carrying a sign and screaming until someone handcuffs you.” Action can take hundreds of forms, in broad categories like lifestyle, advocacy, self-help, group conversation, and so on. And it can begin with very small steps.

Mitigation

One satisfying way to begin—one that doesn’t require having enough courage for public presentations or confrontations—is simply to lower your own carbon footprint. Minimize the degree to which you and your family are contributing to the problem.

Start, for example, by calculating how much CO₂ your current lifestyle is pumping into the atmosphere each year. Free online calculators like carbonfootprint.com make this job easy and pleasant (well, as pleasant as such a horrifying exercise can be).

The world brims with lists of lifestyle changes that you can make to reduce your carbon emissions. The Big Three: your transportation, your diet, and your home. So, you know, fly less, eat less red meat, drive an electric car (or ride an electric bike), take public transportation, set the thermostat at 68°F (winter) and 76°F (summer), install LED bulbs instead of incandescents.

You should feel great about joining the fight against plastic, too, because producing plastic requires massive amounts of heat, which comes from burning fossil fuels—and because seven of the ten largest plastic producers are oil and gas companies. The more plastic we use, the more petroleum they’ll extract (and the more plastic will wind up in the oceans—currently 8 million metric tons a year).

And finally, the general rule is, consume less, because the manufacture and shipping of everything produces emissions.

For a more complete list of practical ways to reduce your carbon footprint, see the free downloadable appendix to this book, “Your Carbon Footprint.” You can download it from www.simonandschuster.com/p/how-to-prepare-for-climate-change-bonus-files.

Now, you may wonder what difference your actions could possibly make. You, as an American, contribute 20 tons of CO₂ a year? Well, the airlines pump out 168 million tons a year. Cows and sheep belch and fart out 442 million tons a year. Burning coal produces 1.3 billion tons. And those are just the U.S. numbers. What possible effect could your actions have, puny mortal? Making changes to your lifestyle would be like rearranging the crackers on a plate on a deck chair on the Titanic.

It is true that if you can make only one gesture toward solv...