https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/23/climate-change-global-warming-grandparents-trying-save-earth/2589375002/
USA TODAY
For Charlene Lange, the breaking point came on her bucket-list trip to see the Northern Lights in Canada’s far north. Her tour came by plane because melting tundra caused local train tracks to sink. Now, she lobbies governors to fight climate change.
Gary Krellenstein was an investment banker who helped finance new power plants. Part of his job was examining the data on global warming so he could argue it wasn’t real. Until he found he no longer could. He spends his time today barraging his state senators with letters advocating for clean energy sources.
Susan Dobra dealt with the consequences up close and personal – literally running down a road as a massive wildfire, partly blamed on climate change, consumed her car, her home and her entire town of Paradise, California, in November. This month, she spoke before the City Council of the town she’s taken refuge in to urge it to pass a climate emergency declaration.
You might call them senior climate commandos. Each is over 60 – some well over – an age not generally thought of as being consumed by activism. And yet they, and a growing number of other older Americans, say climate change has created an all-hands-on-deck moment for humanity, a call they are compelled to answer.
Scientists said in February there’s a 99.9999% chance humans are the cause of global warming. Just seven months ago, a United Nations report said mankind must reduce fossil fuel use and dramatically increase carbon-neutral energy sources to cap the temperature rise caused by the release of greenhouse gasses at 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).
That shift must be well underway within the next 20 years if we’re to significantly reduce floods and droughts, extreme heat, tropical cyclones and sea level rise. It’s that urgent timeline that has galvanized these elders into quitting their jobs, coming out of retirement or devoting all their spare time to mobilizing.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that climate change is going to ruin the planet for my nieces and nephews,” said Mike Shatzkin, a New York publishing industry veteran who’s wound down his business to rally presidential candidates to back the reduction of carbon emissions. “I’m 71 and I expect to see the beginnings of the climate apocalypse before I’m gone.”
For Lange, speaking up after her outlook changed on that 2018 trip goes against a lifetime of habit.
“I’ve never fought publicly against or for anything before. I just kept my head down. But I’m not sitting by anymore, I’m not watching us go downhill without doing something,” she said.
The 66-year-old Iowa City, Iowa, native had “pretty much ignored” the issue of climate change, she said. But once she got home she started reading, beginning with old National Geographic magazines.
“Basically, I was a denier,” Lange said. “I was amazed at how my head has been in the sand. This stuff has been going on for 20, 30 years,” she said.
What she learned horrified her, but she said she was also “sometimes pleasantly surprised” to find all the work being done around the world to deal with the problem.
She decided that she needed to be part of that effort, a huge leap for a woman who’d grown up in a conservative family in a conservative area.
“My neighbors and my family all think I’m sort of weird and nuts for what I’m doing,” she said.
She started writing letters to the editor of National Geographic. The first one took a month. “It was an apology letter to the editor. I was apologizing for my ignorance,” she said.
Last year, Lange got involved with a group called 100 Grannies in Iowa City that works on climate issues. She’s lobbied her state Legislature and been on conference calls with governors urging them to fight greenhouse gas-producing energy sources.
“It’s called bird-dogging, where you keep asking them where they stand,” she said.
Recently, women from 100 Grannies held a sewing circle where they took fabric destined for landfill and made reusable bags out of it. They then spent a day on the University of Iowa campus handing out their bags to anyone who turned in a plastic bag.
Lange said she still finds her new role as an activist “really scary” sometimes, but she does it because “it’s been good for me to realize you can change, even in old age!”
A common thread among these elders, most of whom grew up in an era when the United States was the world’s economic and political leader, is that this is an arena where their nation needs to again be out in front.
Lange says she believes in America first. “We were first on the moon. We can be first fixing the climate,” she said. “I’m not going to watch us go downhill without doing anything.”
For Krellenstein, 62, this is “a lynchpin time where we need the United States to lead the world in. We need something the equivalent of the moon shot or the Manhattan Project.”
An engineer turned financial analyst and investment banker, he never thought the data for climate change was sufficiently convincing. Until finally it became undeniable.
“I don’t think we in this generation have faced a threat of this magnitude before,” he said.
He quickly found that utility executives he worked with didn’t want to hear about it.
“It was a career-ending move for me to begin to advise against our clients who wanted to build fossil fuel power projects. It was very difficult for me to take a firm stance,” he said.
But he felt he couldn’t do anything else. He’d looked at the computer models and they convinced him that without serious change the world is headed toward a fundamental change in the environment.
“What we’re seeing right now, these hurricanes and fires and floods, it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. People don’t realize that. Miami might be gone in 15 years,” he said.
He’s been working full time on climate change for the past two years. He fighting to keep New York state’s Indian Point nuclear power plant open until it can be replaced with a carbon-neutral renewable alternative.
“Right now, it’s going to be replaced 100% by natural gas plants,” he said.
While natural gas power plants emit about 50% less carbon dioxide than coal plants, nuclear power puts no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. He believes the real and immediate risks from climate change far outweigh the potential risks from nuclear, a point he’s made in presentations at colleges and now to elected officials.
“I worked for decades with governors and municipal officials, but I’ve never lobbied anyone before,” he said.
Leslie Wharton calls herself a “late-blooming” activist. Now 67, she still works full time as a lawyer, a career that’s kept her so busy she simply hadn’t paid much attention to the issue of climate change.
She was never much for protesting, even though she was in college during the Vietnam War.
“I didn’t go out and march. I was too deep in my studies,” she said. She ended up getting a Ph.D. in American history, then going to law school.
A six-month sabbatical gave her time to catch up on her reading. What she learned about climate change worried her as someone who had studied the rise and fall of Babylonia, Assyria and ancient Rome and Greece.
“We live in a world we think is forever. Because I had been a historian, I realized that there’s nothing guaranteed,” she said.
She lives in Montgomery County, Maryland and in 2015 she got involved with Elders Climate Action, a national group of grandparents and concerned elders who work to fight climate change. “I stepped out of my comfort zone and went to a gathering in D.C.,” she said.
It’s not something she’s really comfortable with as a “totally introverted non-activist,” but she feels she must. There’s no time to lose, she said.
“If we play our cards right, we could actually come through or we could lose it all. A lot turns on what happens in the next year, five years, 10 years. We can’t wait 10 years to start moving.”
Last month, she did a presentation on climate change at a nearby retirement community. She’s also worked with some elders in a supported living community on the nuts and bolts of political organizing.
“They have been busy protesting fracking gas pipeline construction for the past year!” she said.
Many senior climate commandos say they are probably a little more pragmatic compared with younger generations about what it takes to bring about change.
“People who have worked for 30 years realize that rather than tearing down the existing system we’ve got to work within it,” said Krellenstein.
As a former businessman, he sees real opportunities for companies that are smart enough to begin shifting their focus now. America’s undertaken enormous, important projects before and they paid off for the nation and its people, he said. He sees shifting to carbon-neutral energy as having the same positive effects.
“We did it in during World War II, and during the Eisenhower years, we built the interstate highways. This is going to have to be on the scale of the moon shot,” he said.
Older people tend to approach activism differently than younger people, said Luis Hestres, a professor of communication at the University of Texas at San Antonio who’s studying the climate change movement in the United States.
“Instead of marching or getting arrested, they’re about establishing relationships,” he said.
They tend to be more inclined to have actual face-to-face meetings, rather than doing everything online, for example. Even when they are online, it tends to be in areas such as private Facebook groups.
“They’re not on some of the more attention-getting platforms like Instagram,” he said.
Their experience of the world helps. Though sometimes it’s simply sharing what happened six months ago, as in the case of Dobra, 64.
“I know exactly what it’s like to run for your life from a climate disaster,” she said.
Dobra is an English professor at Chico State University in Chico, California, and lived in Paradise, about 20 minutes east of Chico, for 15 years. She’d known climate change was happening and had even taught courses on it. But her perspective changed on Nov. 8.
“Now it’s here, it’s at our backdoor. It burned down our town. It killed 85 people,” she said.
She estimates that about half the conditions that caused the Camp Fire, the nation’s deadliest in a century, were brought about by climate change, including drought and a massive infestation of invasive bark beetles that take advantage of climate-stressed trees, killing them and adding to combustible material in the nation’s forests.
Losing her town and everything she owned impelled her to act. “I realized it had to mean something, it had to have some purpose in my life,” she said.
After the fire, she became one of an estimated 20,000 fire refugees who moved to Chico. She began volunteering with a group to get the city to pass a declaration of climate emergency with the goal of being fossil fuel free by 2030. She passed out fliers and spoke at meetings.
She spoke at the meeting the final vote took place, on April 2, during what she described as “apocalyptic” weather. The city was lashed with a violent rainstorm at times so loud, speakers at the podium couldn’t be heard. There were tornado warnings and then phone alarms started going off as the county declared a flash flood warning, she said.
A break was declared. “We looked outside to see the streets of Chico completely flooded,” said Dobra. While the storm wasn’t linked to climate change, it gave the evening an almost surreal feeling.
When the vote was finally taken, the measure passed 5 to 1. “The mayor voted for it because ‘I have kids.’ That’s all he had to say,” said Dobra.
Having lived through the fire and now floods, the urgency is so clear to Dobra that it is sometimes surprising others don’t get it.
“Why aren’t we all stopping everything and dealing with this now?” she wonders. “What we’re doing in Chico needs to happen in every little town and ever neighborhood and every state.”
Not every senior activist is liberal. William Chapman, 59, is a proud conservative. He’s also a computer scientist who worked for years on Wall Street.
In 2016, he put together a presentation for an event at The Skeptics Society, a national scientific club based in Altadena, California. “I researched both sides of the climate debate and did a talk on it,” he said.
At the time, Washington State had a carbon tax initiative on the ballot, which made a lot of sense to him. But environmental groups such as the Sierra Club refused to support it because they didn’t feel it was progressive enough. That was when he decided to get involved.
“The environmental left is insane and is currently completely unable to fulfill their role in saving the planet,” he said.
He’s since devoted himself to debunking climate change myths. One project he’s taken on is a scientific analysis of a movie called “Climate Hustle,” which rejects the existence and cause of climate change
“My degree is in engineering, so I evaluated the science on its merits. I show the movie and serve pizza, and I stop it every few minutes and say what’s wrong with the science,” he said.
He also posted a 2,500-word review of the movie on Amazon, where the film is available for streaming.
He’s not optimistic about the future but hopes to make it less horrible.
“Probably by 2100 it will be really bad. There will probably be mass refugee situation and wars, so it will really suck. The more we do now, the less it will suck,” he said.
Getting the business world onboard is the tack Philip Kahn, 65, is taking. He got a Ph.D. in meteorology but ended up taking over the family textile business. He didn’t really do anything about climate change until 2013 when he read a book by climate scientist Jim Hansen called “Storms of My Grandchildren” and decided he had to get involved.
His goal is to keep climate activism “reality-based.” As someone who worked for 20 years in his family’s company, he understands the constraints businesses operate under.
“You have people who have very doctrinaire views on the environment who are totally disconnected from what makes a society work,” he said.
He’s more moderate, and, he likes to think, more realistic.
“We need to have a sustainable energy system but I also believe the market is a powerful way to organize that, compared to having the government run it,” he said. “The challenge of government is to regulate the economy so you don’t kill the golden goose.”
It’s also about crossing the political divide to make everyone realize this isn’t a partisan issue, he says.
“I have a lot of family who are in South Florida and they’re Republicans. I keep telling them not to have their children buy homes in South Florida, the banks are selling 30-year mortgages for that area but it’s all going to be underwater,” he said.
He’s now the co-chair of the New York City chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby and is constantly working to get more people across the political spectrum involved.
“I talk to the policeman on the corner all the way up to Congresspeople. I believe in engaging on all the levels,” he said.
The age of these new-born activists doesn’t surprise Dana Fisher, a sociology professor who directs the program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
“In my work, I’ve found that the people who are most activist tend to have a median age of 40,” she said. At the People’s Climate March in 2017, the average age was 42.
Older people are slightly less likely to say climate change is personally important to them than younger people, but only slightly.
While 57% of people between 18 and 29 say climate change is personally important to them, 46% of older Americans say the same thing, according to a survey from November by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
In New York City, Shatzkin says while he’s long been aware of climate change, two years ago he became so concerned about new scientific information coming out about the catastrophic effects of inaction that he decided he should focus all this time on the issue. He says he’s had a great life so far and realized, “maybe I can’t fix this, but I really ought to try.”
He began to wind down his publishing business in New York City starting in 2016 and got to work. “I haven’t been active in politics for 40 years. But I joined my local Democratic club,” he said.
His biggest win so far has been convincing the Four Freedoms Democratic Club in Manhattan to pass a resolution calling for Democrats to support a Republican proposal to tax carbon emissions and rebate all the money in equal shares to everybody in the country.
He’s also systematically seeing every presidential candidate as they come through New York City to talk to them about the need for a carbon tax.
“They all come through here raising money and for $250 you can walk right up to them and tell them what you think!” he said.
He is very aware of the pressure of time and worried about the consequences of sea level rise and increasing weather variability if humans don’t start lowering greenhouse gas emissions drastically.
“I worry that government and society will break down. We’re not built to withstand the changes we face,” he said.
But he sees a bright side too: more people of his age getting involved every year.
“There are lots of us,” he said. “We care about our planet.”
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