Editor's Note from 2023 July Networker

Clover Hogan, the 24-year old founding executive director of the Force of Nature—an organization that helps young people “turn climate anxiety into action” and works with leaders “to drive intergenerational solutions”—recently gave a speech to 1,200 people on the role of activism. Hogan described the latest phase of the fossil fuel industry’s communications maneuverings in their “decades-long war against humanity,” carried out with “the collusion of those around them.” Now that the industry can no longer deny the climate impact of its products, it turns to deflection and distraction, proffering false solutions and deriding climate activism. “They want you to give up,” Hogan said, “to become disillusioned.” She invoked heroes who came before us to help resist this tactic:

The changemakers who came before us, they knew pain. They knew grief. But they also knew tremendous courage. They dared to imagine a more just and beautiful world, especially when it felt impossible. We are here today not because we’re staring down the barrel of a grim future, but because every person who struggled before us struggled so that we might have this chance.

We cannot and will not give the fossil fuel industry and their accomplices the satisfaction of our backing down and, more to the point, we cannot and will not do that to Clover Hogan’s generation, let alone to the generations to come.

SEHN Fellow Peter Montague is a meticulous, deeply analytical writer and a dedicated champion of future generations. In this edition of The Networker, Peter contemplates the possibility of a federal government that remedies the climate crisis by mobilizing society and its resources on a scale reminiscent of the allied efforts in the Second World War. In his “Goals for Ending the Climate Emergency: A Letter to My Friends,” he provides details on how this might look and why it is imperative to take this approach. Indeed, Peter’s writing and documentation make this feat imaginable.

In this month’s rePercussion Section, Sandra Steingraber’s “On Fracking and Food, Part 2: Green Hydrogen and Green Ammonia,” keeps our eye on the ball amid the distractions of false solutions. In this case, she shows how when digging below the surface of the “no CO2 emissions” promotion of green hydrogen and green ammonia, there are serious red flags. These relate to land use, water use, and the fact that ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers, no matter how their hydrogen atoms are sourced, “are major pollutants of both air and water and are a proven cause of oceanic dead zones.”

Here at SEHN, we’ll continue to do the comprehensive thinking that both contributes to real solutions and warns against the false ones, with the data to back it up. 

Thank you to all who contributed to our June fundraising campaign. If you missed those missives, please look here, where you can learn about our recent successes, and lend your support.

Wishes for a beautiful and healthy remainder of summer,

Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN