So, West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller is now concerned about the adverse impact the Senate climate bill will have on his coal-producing state (”EPA Proposes Tough Greenhouse-Gas Rules for Big Industries,” U.S. News, Oct. 1).
This is the same Sen. Rockefeller who, with Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, sent a threatening letter in 2006 to Exxon Mobil Chairman Rex Tillerson because of that company’s support for science-based opposition to the spurious claim that man-made greenhouse gas is causing global warming, a letter that provoked an editorial rebuke from the Journal (”Global Warming Gag Order,” Review and Outlook, Dec. 4, 2006), and probably figured in Exxon-Mobil later being bullied into joining the costly and futile crusade to “combat climate change” by targeting the mere traces of greenhouse gas that remain in the atmosphere after a few hours.
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We’re about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He’s also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.
The House of Representatives has passed climate legislation that started out as an attempt to reduce carbon emissions. It has morphed into an engine for raising revenues by selling carbon dioxide emission allowances and promoting “renewable” energy.
The bill requires electric utilities to get 20% of their power mostly from wind and solar by 2020. These renewable energy sources are receiving huge subsidies all to supposedly create jobs and hurry us down the road to an America running on wind and sunshine described in President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.
Yet all this assumes renewable energy is a free lunch a benign, “sustainable” way of running the country with minimal impact on the environment. That assumption experienced a rude awakening on Aug. 26, when The Nature Conservancy published a paper titled “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America.” The report by this venerable environmental organization posed a simple question: How much land is required for the different energy sources that power the country? The answers deserve far greater public attention.
By far nuclear energy is the least land-intensive; it requires only one square mile to produce one million megawatt-hours per year, enough electricity for about 90,000 homes. Geothermal energy, which taps the natural heat of the earth, requires three square miles. The most landscape-consuming are biofuels ethanol and biodiesel which require up to 500 square miles to produce the same amount of energy.
Coal, on the other hand, requires four square miles, mainly for mining and extraction. Solar thermal heating a fluid with large arrays of mirrors and using it to power a turbine takes six. Natural gas needs eight and petroleum needs 18. Wind farms require over 30 square miles.
This “sprawl” has been missing from our energy discussions. In my home state of Tennessee, we just celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Yet there are serious proposals by energy developers to cover mountains all along the Appalachian chain, from Maine to Georgia, with 50-story wind turbines because the wind blows strongest across mountaintops.
Let’s put this into perspective: We could line 300 miles of mountaintops from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Bristol, Va., with wind turbines and still produce only one-quarter the electricity we get from one reactor on one square mile at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.
The 1,000 square-mile solar project proposed by Mr. Salazar would generate, on a continuous basis, 35,000 megawatts of electricity. You could get the same output from 30 new nuclear reactors that would fit comfortably onto existing nuclear sites. And this doesn’t count the thousands of miles of transmission lines that will be needed to carry the newly generated solar power to population centers.
There’s one more consideration. Solar collectors must be washed down once a month or they collect too much dirt to be effective. They also need to be cooled by water. Where amid the desert and scrub land will we find all that water? No wonder the Wildlife Conservancy and other environmentalists are already opposing solar projects on Western lands.
Renewable energy is not a free lunch. It is an unprecedented assault on the American landscape. Before we find ourselves engulfed in energy sprawl, it’s imperative we take a closer look at nuclear power.
Mr. Alexander is a Republican senator from Tennessee and a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A21
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Solar and Wind-Power Proposals Draw Opposition From Residents Fearing Visual Blight; a Dilemma for Some Environmentalists
Technology changes, but human nature doesn’t. Environmentally friendly energy projects are running into the same cries of “not in my backyard” that stymied a previous generation of alternative-power efforts.
Associated Press
Proposed renewable-energy projects have been drawing opposition from people who worry about marring landscapes. Above, a solar-power facility in the Mojave Desert.
Even as Americans tell pollsters they are eager for alternatives to fossil fuel, some are fighting proposals for solar and wind projects and for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that would be needed to carry the cleaner energy to market. The protests echo grass-roots opposition that has blocked nuclear plants and energy-producing trash incinerators for decades.
The new backlash is fueled by worries that renewable-energy projects would occupy vast amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power. Either renewable projects would have to be centralized and sprawling, covering many square miles apiece, or they would need to be distributed in pieces across millions of rooftops and lawns.
Renewable-energy projects would reduce pollution and combat climate change. The trade-off is that many more people would have to see wind turbines, solar panels and other energy infrastructure near their homes in order to diminish the need for coal mines and other fossil-fuel facilities.
“Anywhere I walked on this property, we’d be able to view them and we’d be able to hear them,” says Tina FitzGerald, who lives with her family on a 12-acre Vermont farm near where a developer has proposed erecting five wind turbines, each about 400 feet tall. “There should be a place for these — someplace that isn’t going to impact families quite so much.”
In California, which is considering a goal of producing a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, some residents are fighting proposals to build vast solar-energy plants in the Mojave Desert, one of the most remote and reliably sunny spots in the U.S. Up and down the East Coast, meanwhile, residents are opposing plans for wind farms, fearing they will mar views and lower property values.
![[Energy proposals]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AR448_Crow_DV_20090903185057.jpg)
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Americans aren’t alone in their skittishness. In the U.K., which also aims to generate about one-third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, local opposition is holding up proposed wind projects. Resistance in Ontario led the Canadian province to pass legislation in May establishing a framework for locating renewable-energy sites; local opponents will be able to challenge projects on environmental or safety grounds, but not for aesthetic reasons.
In a report last year, the Paris-based International Energy Agency cited “not in my backyard” sentiment as among the top five threats to the growth of renewable energy world-wide.
The U.S. has to make a tough choice, says Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that supports giving the federal government more authority to push renewable-energy projects forward. That will be necessary, he says, to curb the country’s dependence on foreign oil and its greenhouse-gas emissions. “You have to ask yourself: At what point do priority national interests need to override local goals?”
The clash over whether it is more important to produce nonpolluting domestic energy or to protect environmentally valuable places poses a dilemma for some longtime activists.
Calvin French, a 72-year-old retired high school English teacher, has belonged to the Sierra Club all his adult life. Leaders of the environmental group are working with California officials to help pick sites for big renewable-energy transmission lines as a way to combat climate change. But many club members, including Mr. French, want to protect their favorite places.
His battlefield is the Carrizo Plain, a 460-square-mile swath of grassland about 115 miles north of Los Angeles that is traversed by the San Andreas Fault.
The parched, rugged expanse is home to species including the endangered kit fox and the antelope-like pronghorn. It also is one of the most alluring spots for solar panels in the nation’s most populous state. There is prolific sunlight. Much of the land has been subdivided into farms, meaning that acreage no longer can be defended as untouched. And there is a high-voltage line nearby, with capacity to carry solar power to the public.
Amid local opposition, county and state officials for months have been mulling three big solar-energy projects that together would amount to some of the biggest solar arrays in the world.
“Big things like global warming” are difficult to understand, says Mr. French. “But you can go out into a beautiful place and say, ‘This needs to be protected.’ That’s easy to understand.”
Around the world, countries that have rolled out fossil-fuel alternatives most aggressively have used heavy-handed government action to address such sentiment. France, for example, now produces about 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. But France’s national government manages the country’s nuclear-construction program, and it has pushed ahead for decades despite sometimes-heated public protests.
Lawmakers in the U.S. Congress now are fighting over how much power the federal government should have in getting energy projects built. Many renewable-energy proponents say a massive network of new transmission wires would have to be built to bring large supplies of renewable power to population centers. A Senate committee passed a bill in June that would give the federal government authority to decide where to put new power lines if states, which now make those decisions, move too slowly.
The drive for more federal control has the support of many executives in the electric industry, who say the new transmission lines should be available for energy from all sources, including fossil fuel. But there is plenty of opposition to giving Washington that power. Some lawmakers from densely populated states don’t want big new transmission lines running through their land. Many state utility regulators also object to an increased federal push.
Caught in the middle are states where renewable energy suddenly is big business. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal likens his state’s wind boom to the coal rush that hit Wyoming three decades ago in the wake of an energy shock.
At a wind-energy conference in Wyoming last month, Gov. Freudenthal, a Democrat, delivered a stern warning to wind-turbine developers, telling them to make sure their projects don’t harm a small bird called the sage grouse.
“What I have is an obsession with making sure that the economy of this state continues to function, and it won’t if that bird gets listed,” according to his office’s transcript of his remarks.
Anything that nudges the sage grouse toward the federal government’s list of endangered species, he explained, would trigger land-use restrictions that would jeopardize Wyoming’s main economic engine: the production of coal, oil and natural gas. “Generally in this state, we support economic development,” he told the wind developers. But “when all of a sudden it ends up in our backyard, our view changes a lot.”
Jeffrey Ball responds to reader questions at WSJ.com/Currents. Email him at powershift@wsj.com
By Keith Johnson
Crude oil futures rose above $73 on optmisim that rising stock markets signal the beginning of a sustained global recovery, and with it a return to demand for oil,Bloomberg reports.
Libya was once the El Dorado for new oil exploration. Not anymore, notes the WSJ, as Big Oil bails out of the country due to “arbitrary laws, Draconian contractual terms and Byzantine bureaucracy.”
Health care may not be popular; the administration’s energy and climate plans, however, still enjoy majority support from Americans, though clean-energy is a bit more popular than the cap-and-trade part of the program, from a new poll in the WaPo.
Count bankers among those boosters: New U.S. rules could clear up a regulatory thicket and make U.S. firms more attractive as takeover targets, thus fueling an M&A boom, in Deal Journal. Meanwhile, remember those fake letters sent to Congress? The lobbyists say they’re victims of a “deliberate fraud” by a temp worker, in the WSJ.
Bjorn Lomborg wraps up the latest work on climate change from the Copenhagen Consensus, in the WSJ: “A technology-led effort would have a much greater chance of actually tackling climate change. It would also have a much greater chance of political success, since countries that fear signing on to costly emission targets are more likely to embrace the cheaper, smarter path of innovation.”
Indonesia aims to slash emissions by as much as 40% by 2030 by limiting deforestation, in Reuters. Just as well, because the annual bill for adapting to climate change—building flood defenses and the like—could top $200 billion a year, a new report shows, in the FT.
California takes another step toward European-style support for clean energy, but with a twist: The state’s proposed feed-in tariff would have variable, not fixed, pricing, at Greentech Media.Oregon, for its part, is banking on clean tech to be the motor of job creation, in the WSJ.
All those programs in the U.S. are giving fresh hope to the Japanese solar industry, which is preparing to regain its global leadership, in The Economist.
Britain faces some of the same choices the U.S. does: More nuclear power or try for clean coal? The problem is that Big Ben is ticking, because so many power plants will be shut down in coming years, in Climate Wire.
Finally, good old charcoal is making a comeback. The Economist looks at the promise of “biochar” to help both agriculture and the fight against climate change.
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By Keith Johnson
The big debate over climate legislation seems to be boiling down not to polar bears, ice sheets or light-switch taxes, but simply to jobs.
No longer the poster bear (AP)
Take Repower America, the group that aims to put into practice former vice president Al Gore’s renewable-energy dreams. It has another national ad out now—not featuring that gruffy, jeans-wearing farmer who railed against foreign oil, but a regular Joe in his kitchen just itching for one of those 1.7 million green jobs we keep hearing about.
“I’m not looking for a bailout, just a good-paying job. That’s why I like this clean-energy act,” he says in the spot. That sounds eerily like the argument the White House green-jobs boss Van Jones is making these days. And like thearguments coming out of the Apollo Alliance, a group dedicated to promoting so-called green jobs.
On the other side of the aisle, opposition to the Waxman-Markey bill—and whatever the Senate does—is zeroing in on the very same question. The Heritage Foundation figuresthe cap-and-trade plan will end up hurting economic growth and destroying—not creating—millions of jobs. Even many Democrats are worried about the potential for environmental regulation to whack U.S. manufacturing industries.
To that end, opponents of congressional legislation appear set to take a page from the health-care debate and plan to organize anti-climate bill rallies across the country later this month; the fliers planned for the rallies start off by arguing the climate bill will cost two million American jobs.
As the political theater raises the curtain, the clash could obscure a more fundamental issue: Does the U.S. have a long-term energy vision? If so, what is it?
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To the Editor:
Re “Climate Loopholes” (editorial, July 22):
It’s good to see The Times casting a critical eye on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. Letting coal-fired power plants off the hook would certainly be a big step backward in efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Bogus offsets will also allow polluters to game the system as the world heats up.
The closer we look at this legislation, the more apparent it becomes that we have hitched our climate-control wagon to the wrong horse. Even if we achieve the reductions in carbon dioxide called for in this bill — an uncertain prospect — it will be too little and too late.
An analysis by the Carbon Tax Center shows that a steadily rising tax on carbon emissions over the next decade will yield far greater reductions in carbon dioxide levels. Revenue from such a tax could be returned to Americans through payroll or income tax cuts to balance higher energy costs.
The carbon tax-and-dividend is simpler and more effective than cap-and-trade. As you so aptly concluded in your editorial, the “Senate Democrats should not settle for half-measures.”
Charles Komanoff
Co-director, Carbon Tax Center
New York, July 22, 2009
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By Keith Johnson
The latest cause of angst these days is America’s standing in the clean-technology race with China.
Anxious times (AP)
In the space of a few months, China’s apparent leadership in clean energy and America’s apparent backwardness have become something of a shibboleth. That is crystallized today in a Washington Post op-ed by venture capitalist John Doerr and General Electric boss Jeff Immelt, both of whom have a lot invested in making sure clean energy really is the next big thing. To wit:
This [competitiveness] crisis is particularly evident in America’s worldwide standing in the next great global industry, green technology. There is no topic of greater importance to America’s economic future.
They argue that China indisputably has the lead in clean-energy technology, citing its massive investment in wind power and the relative paucity of big U.S. clean-energy companies, in stark contrast to America’s domination of IT.
But China’s approach to clean tech is Chinese—that is, top-down, heavy-handed, and with none of the horse-trading that characterizes every U.S. debate about energy policy. Not for nothing did Tom Friedman entitle one of the chapters in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded” as “China for a Day.” The two pillars of China’s clean-energy boom have been massive government intervention and a heavy dose of protectionism.
Recognizing that, Messrs. Doerr and Immelt go on to say: “How can we catch up? Not through protectionism or massive government intervention but through the power of good old home-grown innovation.”
Without missing a beat, they then say: “But our government’s energy and climate policies are our principal obstacle to success,” before reeling off a laundry list of five things the U.S. government needs to do. That includes setting a cap on emissions and a price on carbon; tougher renewable-energy mandates; tougher energy-efficiency standards; more federal research dollars; and an active U.S. trade policy to open up new markets for clean-tech exports.
To be sure, China has made some huge strides in clean tech—Warren Buffet didn’t invest in a Chinese battery maker for charity.
But if China’s clean-energy leadership is so apparent, why is China’s overriding obsession to secure all the Western clean-energy technology it can?
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By Keith Johnson
Forget all the haggling with China, India, and parts of the U.S. Congress—the real obstacle to a global climate-change treaty might be accurately measuring greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.
That’s the warning from the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council to the head of NASA. The upshot? Without a sophisticated satellite that can track global emissions, it will be hard to know what everybody is really up to: “[C]urrent methods for estimating greenhouse gas emissions have limitations for monitoring a climate treaty.”
NASA had such a sophisticated satellite—the Orbiting Carbon Observatory—which failed to reach orbit in February. The space agency is considering trying again—thus the letter from the NAS pointing out just how useful such satellites can be.
While the original satellite would have only flown for two years, and covered a small swathe of the earth, it could have provided accurate baseline information against which to measure global progress reducing emissions. Now, there’s not even that much. Which complicates the whole climate fight, to say the least:
National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available. Existing instruments and methods for remote monitoring of atmospheric CO2 are not able, with useful accuracy, to distinguish fossil fuel emissions from natural fluxes or to verify trends in fossil fuel emissions, such as reductions against a baseline […] The existing atmospheric CO2 sampling network of ground stations, aircraft, and satellites is not well designed for estimation of emissions from large local sources distributed around the globe.
Whether or not NASA takes the message to heart, the scientists are hoping the Obama administration will: The letter was copied to both chief climate negotiator Todd Stern and presidential science adviser John Holdren.
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Kappa and Trade
Green the Greeks, a student organization at UCLA, is trying to educate the school’s Greek system about sustainability issues. Frats and sororities use a disproportionate amount of energy, the group says, so it’s aiming to “harness the resources of the Greek community for the environment,” its website explains. The rush to get eco-friendly is happening elsewhere, too: At Dartmouth, the Green Greeks Program involves a sustainability coordinator in each house who orchestrates composting, recycling, and energy conservation. Green Greeks at the University of Michigan held a recycling competition that raised almost $1,500 and recycled over 60,000 cans and bottles. Who nu?
Paper Chaste
Applying to college means the liberal use of caffeine, SAT words, and … paper: more than 750 million pieces of it every year, according to Students Plant the Seed. Don’t want to join the ream team? Apply electronically, an option available at hundreds of colleges nationwide. Start by checking out the websites of the schools of your choice; many allow e-admissions. In addition, nearly 350 schools accept the online applications provided by the nonprofit group The Common Application. The SPS site, meanwhile, lets you petition colleges to support electronic apps — and the group is aiming to plant 9,388 trees, the number it estimates are cut down each year to produce all that wasted paper.
Tray Chic
In a move that will leave many a student without a winter sled, colleges around the country are going trayless. Though some students may worry about balancing their plates as they move through bustling cafeterias, ditching trays means big energy and water savings — up to half a gallon of water is saved for every tray that doesn’t need to be washed. It also means less food waste and may even cut down on the Freshman 15 (although the Freshman 5 just isn’t as catchy). No word on a substitute shield for food fights.
Keeping It Reel
Pop some organic popcorn for the touring Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival On Campus, which visits colleges nationwide with a three-hour lineup of incite-ful action shorts and documentaries. Student groups can invite the tour to campus to show one of several themed lineups — wildlife, agriculture, activism, etc. The energy-themed set includes the provocative consumer-culture critique The Story of Stuff. Watch the film trailers.
Wheelie Cool
A growing number of colleges are launching or expanding their bike-loan or bike-share programs, aiming to get students, faculty, and staff out of their cars. California State University’s Fresno campus has had a bike program for seven years; it makes about 100 bikes available for rental each semester. The University of California-Berkeley is starting up a program with 20 bikes available on campus for students to use for up to a day at a time; a $15 charge for the semester covers bike use, a lock, a map, and a light. Auburn University complements its bike-sharing program with a bike maintenance shop in the student union building. Wisconsin’s Ripon College this year offered free mountain bikes and locks to the incoming class if they agreed not to drive to or park on campus, and more than 60 percent took the wheel deal.
Flush With Success
Forget girls gone wild; dorms gone green is the new (albeit less libidinous) collegiate stereotype. Wake Forest University fitted its dorms with low-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads, and Energy Star appliances. American University renovated a dorm with low-VOC paint and eco-friendly flooring. And don’t pooh-pooh composting toilets, now in the College of the Atlantic’s green dorms and Warren Wilson College’s popular EcoDorm, which also uses collected rainwater and passive solar heating.
Om Cooked Meals
Iowa’s Maharishi University of Management says it’s the first college in the U.S. with an all-organic, vegetarian, freshly prepared menu; others, like the University of California-Berkeley, are in the process of obtaining organic certification. Colgate student Nina Merrill’s food blog Organic on the Green rounds up efforts to increase sustainable, local, or organic food on various campuses. And Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College takes food uber-local with corn on the quad. There, six-foot-tall plants are almost ready for harvesting, and freshmen students are required to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma to learn about the twisted path that conventionally grown corn takes on its way to their plates.
Rank and Smile
The Princeton Review this summer started ranking colleges on greenness, with 11 schools receiving top honors. Kaplan’s newly released 2009 college guide lists 25 green colleges, and other rankers include the Sierra Club and the Sustainable Endowment Institute’s “College Sustainability Report Card.” Arizona State, Bates, University of New Hampshire, University of Washington, College of the Atlantic, Harvard, and Yale make several of the lists. The last three made Grist’s list of green colleges, too.
Waste Not, Want Rot
Greening the caf is great, but what happens after lunch? Three of Yale’s dining halls this summer tried a pilot program to turn campus food waste into compost for eventual sale to local homeowners, and a new dining hall at Colorado State has two pulpers to compact food waste so leftovers can be composted. But Ohio University wins bragging rights for the country’s biggest on-campus, in-vessel composting system, which turns leftovers into rich soil in a quick two weeks (and gets half its energy from solar power).
Fare Play
Forget what you heard in high school — riding the bus is hip. Especially if you’re aboard the University of Montana’s new 50-seat biodiesel bus, which is clean, smooth, comfy, and best of all, free. Traditional bus service is becoming limited on some campuses due to rising gas prices, but schools like Duke and the overalls-conjuring University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh are expanding their bus service off-campus and at night. California’s Butte College runs the biggest community college transportation system in the state, which helped it win the National Wildlife Federation’s grand prize for campus global warming solutions.
Vow-ers That Be
Not content to let students have all the fun, college presidents are joining hands (and putting pen to paper) to stop global warming. By signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, presidents pledge to come up with comprehensive plans for cutting their schools’ greenhouse-gas emissions and moving toward carbon neutrality. Though the pledge is less than two years old, more than 550 presidents have signed on, at least one from every U.S. state.
Move-in and Groovin’
Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University just had its first-ever “Green Move-In,” which included a paperless check-in system for dorms and designated recycling areas for moving boxes. Instead of passing out heaps of unwanted orientation literature, the school encouraged students to print out just the info they wanted or consult maps and handouts posted in common areas. “Green Move-In” was inspired by last semester’s successful “Green Move-Out,” in which volunteers gathered up and recycled 3,000 pounds of food, 2,200 bags of clothing, and 4,500 books left behind by students who’d vacated the dorms.
Semester in Green-land
Flying halfway around the world may seem like the antithesis of green, but studying abroad for a semester just got a little more sustainable. The Green Passport program offers information about everything from eating locally to volunteering, and includes a pledge in which students promise to minimize their impact on the environment, be culturally respectful, and give back to their host community. In that same spirit, Middlebury College in Vermont now offers grants to students who plan to research sustainability issues or do eco-projects during their study-abroad experiences.
Hooky, Line, and Sinker
Gas prices are hitting rural colleges especially hard, and some are responding creatively by condensing classroom days or moving instruction online. Some students at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, which has five campuses spread over 100 miles, couldn’t afford the commute for thrice-weekly classes, so the school created twice-weekly hybrid courses that are supplemented by extra work at home and online. Lakeshore Technical College in Wisconsin this summer cut out all Friday classes because most students are commuters and there’s no bus line near the school. Officially sanctioned hooky!
Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of “climate change delusion.”
Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.
Such anxiety over current events is not a new phenomenon. Worries about contemporary threats, such as nuclear war or AIDS, have historically been woven into the mental illnesses of each generation. But global warming could have a broader and deeper effect on mental health, even if indirectly.
“Climate change could have a real impact on our psyches,” says Paul Epstein, the associate director for the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Over this century, the average global temperature is expected to rise between 1 degrees and 6 degrees Celsius. Glaciers will melt, seas will rise, extremes in precipitation will occur, according to scientists’ predictions.
There is evidence that extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods, cyclones, and hurricanes, can lead to emotional distress, which can trigger such things as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, in which the body’s fear and arousal system kicks into overdrive.
After Hurricane Katrina, rates of severe mental illness - including depression, PTSD, anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and a variety of phobias - doubled, from 6.1 percent to 11.3 percent, among those who lived in affected regions, a 2006 study by the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group said.
Rates of mild-to-moderate mental illness also doubled, from 9.7 percent to 19.9 percent.
“After a disaster, people can feel inadequate, like outside forces are taking control of their lives,” said Joshua Miller, a professor at the Smith College School for Social Work who responds to disasters worldwide. “They can’t see a positive future. They tend to lose hope or become depressed.”
Severe disasters also destroy the infrastructure needed to provide mental health care, and forcibly displace people, severing social connections when people need them most, Miller said.
Climate change is expected to create about 200 million environmental refugees by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body established within the United Nations to evaluate causes and consequences of global warming.
Of course, no one can predict what effect warming will have on our psyches. The links between mental illness and the weather can be tenuous or even downright contradictory. Depending on which studies you read, suicide is more common, less common, or equally common in hot weather. Ditto dry weather.
But even in the face of uncertainty, specialists say the indirect effects of global warming could be substantial.
Though much of the anxiety centers on the possibility of extreme weather events, global warming will also transform the natural environment in a more gradual way, they say. These changes could have their own effect on mental health.
“It’s not all trauma,” said Carol North, a psychiatrist who runs the trauma and disaster program at the Dallas VA Medical Center. “Some of it’s a quiet decline of quality of life.”
Indeed, climate change may eventually deplete natural resources, make it more difficult for people to live off the land, and disrupt the global food supply.
“That will mean declining socioeconomic status and quality of life across the world,” North said, and “depression, demoralization, disillusionment.”
In India and Australia, where severe droughts have already taken a toll on agriculture, researchers have noted an uptick in suicides among farmers.
On the other side of the globe, the changing Arctic climate is expected to make hunting and fishing far more difficult for the people who live there. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment says that such changes threaten Inuit culture, and that increases in domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide may result.
Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Australia’s Murdoch University, has examined the psychological distress people experience in the face of this kind of slow, but chronic, change in their environments. His work with Australian communities living in areas changed by strip mining or drought revealed that people felt disconnected from nature, were no longer able to find solace in it, and they felt helpless.
“Climate change is a massive driver of change in people’s home environment,” Albrecht said. “These changes become sources of chronic stress.”
Albrecht and his colleagues developed and verified an Environmental Distress Scale, designed to identify stresses related to the degradation of external environments.
“We tend to consider ourselves highly mobile global citizens, but we have a very profound connection to our environment,” Albrecht says. “We tend to take that for granted.”
So what’s to be done? We need to train people to administer “psychological first aid,” Smith’s Miller said. That means making sure people feel safe after a natural disaster, and educating them about the kinds of psychological responses they might experience.
In the long term, we may also derive some psychological benefit from banding together with other citizens to mitigate the effects of global warming. Taking action might not only give us back a sense of our own sense of efficacy against a powerful outside force, but also help us build community and social ties that offset stress, said Epstein and other specialists.
“Getting involved can be an antidote to the depression that can come from the overwhelming realizations that we have to face . . . ,” Epstein said. “It can be empowering to realize that what you do is effective.”
Emily Anthes can be reached at emily@emilyanthes.com. 
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