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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

by fishing1461955 Posted on February 27, 2020

When it comes to climate change, television news is covering little more than the tip of the iceberg.

That’s according to a just-released report from Media Matters for America, which found that global warming garnered a tiny sliver — well under 1 percent — of overall broadcast news coverage. The progressive research nonprofit also found that, while these news outlets did cover climate change more often in 2019 than in the year prior, the quality of coverage was “generally shallow.” And when it came to giving voice to those hit first and worst by extreme weather and other climate-related disasters, the networks fell short: People of color were “massively underrepresented” in coverage.

“In spite of the increase in coverage from 2018 to 2019, climate coverage as a whole still made up only 0.6% of overall corporate broadcast TV nightly news in 2019, showing that these programs’ climate coverage does not adequately reflect the urgency and severity of the climate crisis,” the report found.

The study analyzed four nightly news programs and four Sunday morning political shows, focusing both on segments devoted to climate change as well as substantial mentions of the topic in other segments. Yet even with significant year-to-year increases in coverage — for example, a 180 percent increase in climate coverage on nightly news in 2019 compared to 2018 — corporate broadcasters failed to substantially improve the overall quantity and quality of their climate coverage, according to Media Matters.

The analysis focused on four nightly news programs — ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, and public broadcaster PBS’s NewsHour — as well as four Sunday morning political shows: ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday. Media Matters has produced variations of this analysis annually since at least 2012, including reports in 2018 and 2017.

Among the report’s key findings for 2019:

Although the volume of climate change coverage on the corporate broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows increased 68 percent from 2018 to 2019 (142 minutes to 238 minutes), the report noted that this was not difficult to achieve because the amount of coverage in 2018 was “so pitiful” that news shows had a low bar to meet the following year. This climate coverage represented just .07 percent of the overall broadcast nightly and Sunday morning news shows in 2019.

When it came to racial and gender diversity in their climate coverage, Media Matters found that broadcast television also failed: People of color were “massively underrepresented” as news guests, even though communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Just 10 percent of guests interviewed or featured in these news segments were people of color, and 2019 was the third year in a row that representation came in at this percentage or lower.

Scientists and women were also underrepresented by broadcasters, comprising 22 and 27 percent of guests, respectively. Women of color were featured even less prominently — a troubling reminder that women “typically play second fiddle to white men” in discussions of climate change, according to Media Matters. “A lack of women’s voices in media coverage of climate change is part of a pattern of racism and sexism that these broadcast networks need to address,” the report stated.

Not all of the findings in Wednesday’s report were grim. In 2019, more than a third of climate segments on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox mentioned solutions or actions to address climate change — a significant increase over the previous two years. The broadcasters focused most often on climate adaptation and renewable energy technologies when discussing solutions, but advocacy and direct action, such as youth climate activism, were also featured. The report cited studies showing that media coverage of climate change solutions can help spur collective action from viewers. “Much of this shift in public debate to talking about solutions is being driven by TV weathercasters, who are often trusted and knowledgeable members of local news,” the study added.

Media Matters praised PBS NewsHour for its climate coverage, noting that it has outpaced its broadcast counterparts in climate reporting for the past six years. PBS Newshour aired 121 climate segments in 2019, an average of 10 segments per month. “This is more coverage than we found from the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news shows combined,” the report found.

The analysis also found that climate change coverage last year was driven in large part by reporting on the Green New Deal congressional resolution, extreme weather, climate activism, and the 2020 presidential election. Coverage of climate activism, which comprised about 16 percent of the overall climate coverage from these broadcasters, focused in large part on activist Greta Thunberg and climate strikes, which took place across the globe last year. The report also found that broadcasters did a “pretty poor job overall” covering the connection between climate change and specific extreme weather events.

Media Matters is hardly alone in its withering analysis of major media coverage of climate change — and news outlets’ failure to link global warming to wildfires and other extreme weather events that are becoming the new normal.

Some of those critics are starting to offer solutions. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Leah C. Stokes and Ph.D. candidate Emily Williams have compiled a concise fact sheet intended to help journalists and citizens understand the scientific evidence linking climate change to wildfires. They are also working on a project with Climate Signals, a science information project from the nonprofit Climate Nexus, to help journalists more easily access academic journal articles on climate change, which are typically behind paywalls, according to a radio interview Stokes gave in September.

As Grist recently reported in a story about how local journalists are tackling climate coverage, a comprehensive approach to covering climate change should include going beyond analyzing the evidence supporting global warming. John Morales, a meteorologist at NBC6 in Miami, Florida, has been covering climate change for decades. He said that local news needs to cover “how fast things are changing, the links between the observed symptoms and causes of rising temperatures, and move on to ‘what do we do about this?’”

As Media Matters made clear on Wednesday, Morales is way ahead of television’s largest news providers.

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Major news networks devoted less than 4 hours to climate change in 2019. Total.

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Trump’s environmental rollbacks are deeply unpopular with swing voters

by PhoebeKmk753134 Posted on February 26, 2020

It may be hard to tell, but in between jabs at climate science, federal science agencies, and stalwart environmental regulations, President Trump has been trying to position himself as an environmentalist. The president’s efforts to green his image go back as far as 2017, when he told business leaders, and I quote, “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment.” Do voters agree? New research shows they most certainly do not.

Swing voters in four key states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan — are squarely opposed to Trump’s environmental rollbacks. That’s the takeaway from a set of focus groups of dozens of swing voters — defined as those who switched their presidential vote from Democratic to Republican, or vice versa, between 2012 and 2016 — run by a non-partisan research groups Engagious and Focus Pointe Global.

Unlike polls, the focus groups don’t reflect the opinions of a representative sample of likely voters. Instead, they give us a glimpse into the minds of voters whose preferences could determine who will sit in the Oval Office come January. The participants were asked to rate their support for Trump’s environmental rollbacks on a scale of 1 to 10 twice: before seeing a list of 17 policies he’s gutted and after. (Those 17 policies were pulled from a comprehensive list of rollbacks compiled by the New York Times.) The groups’ ratings averaged 4.5 before seeing the rollbacks and 3.2 after.

In Florida, a state that’s particularly aware of the consequences of rising temperatures and seas, the average dropped to 2.6 after seeing the rollbacks enumerated. “Before seeing that list of rollbacks, my hand would have been up 100 percent for Trump,” one Florida focus group participant and 2016 Trump supporter said. “After seeing it, my hand was not up. I’m not 100 percent sold on him.” Another participant asked why she supported Trump less after seeing the list of rollbacks, said she didn’t know about half of those rollbacks before seeing them. “To me, it made a difference to actually see them and process it,” she said. Another participant said she didn’t expect or want Trump to roll back those regulations, despite voting for him in 2016. “He’s supposed to be protecting our country and our world,” she said. “He’s supposed to be a world leader.”

Trump’s environmental rollbacks might not be enough to prompt these swing-state voters to choose a Democrat in the voting booth — that first Florida participant who said he’s not 100 percent sold on Trump said he’s still “80 percent sold on Trump just because of a lot of the other things he stands for.” But the focus group results do show that Trump’s rollbacks are supremely unpopular with the people whose presidential votes count the most.

Other research supports the idea that climate change is an important consideration for bipartisan voters. In South Carolina, a state that votes for the Democratic nominee this Saturday, addressing climate change is a top issue. A January poll conducted by Conservation Voters of South Carolina and Audubon Action Fund found that 64 percent of all South Carolinians think climate change is a serious problem. Only 13 percent of folks surveyed for that poll self-identified as liberal, and only 31 percent said they were Democrats. It’s clear that rising temperatures aren’t just an issue for diehard Democrats anymore — other slices of the political spectrum are starting to get in on the climate action.

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Trump’s environmental rollbacks are deeply unpopular with swing voters

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Birds by the Shore – Jennifer Ackerman

by Myrna Posted on February 25, 2020

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Birds by the Shore

Observing the Natural Life of the Atlantic Coast

Jennifer Ackerman

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


From the bestselling author of The Genius of Birds , the revised and reissued edition of her beloved book of essays describing her forays along the Delaware shore For three years, Jennifer Ackerman lived in the small coastal town of Lewes, Delaware, in the sort of blue-water, white-sand landscape that draws summer crowds up and down the eastern seaboard. Birds by the Shore is a book about discovering the natural life at the ocean's edge: the habits of shorebirds and seabirds, the movement of sand and water, the wealth of creatures that survive amid storm and surf. Against this landscape's rhythms, Ackerman revisits her own history–her mother's death, her father's illness and her hopes to have children of her own. This portrait of life at the ocean's edge will be relished by anyone who has walked a beach at sunset, or watched a hawk hover over a winter marsh, and felt part of the natural world. With a quiet passion and friendly, generous intelligence, it explores the way that landscape shapes our thoughts and perceptions and shows that home ground is often where we feel the deepest response to the planet.

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Birds by the Shore – Jennifer Ackerman

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

by JustinaMcNally Posted on February 24, 2020

Christopher Sales is an environmental microbiologist, and until recently, his world was about harnessing the power of microorganisms to break down contaminants in the environment. But a resilient intruder that does not succumb to the same old tricks has shaken up the remediation community and led Sales to look outside of his field for a solution. It’s a chemical that’s been found in water, soil, and food all over the planet: PFAS.

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of chemical compounds used in carpet, waterproof clothing, nonstick pans, and many other common products, that have gone unregulated and been dumped into the environment for decades. Exposure studies have linked some forms of PFAS to thyroid disease and some cancers, but there’s very little health research on most of them. They’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down over time, and now scientists like Sales are racing to figure out how to clean PFAS up.

“PFAS is becoming a big issue,” Sales told Grist. “It’s being found in a lot of different places, and unfortunately we haven’t found a microorganism that can degrade it.”

Sales is a professor at Drexel University, and he has experimented a little bit with biological treatments for PFAS with little success. But while chatting with one of his colleagues at Drexel’s Nyheim Plasma Institute, he learned that plasma was being used to kill bacteria and other contaminants in water, and wondered if it might be effective on PFAS. Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases, and it is created by applying heat or electricity to gas. In September 2017, when the Department of Defense announced new funding for technologies to degrade PFAS, Sales asked the Nyheim researchers if they would be interested in collaborating. They secured a grant and got to work.

In January, Sales published a study detailing the results of that collaboration. After testing a new plasma-based treatment system on water samples contaminated with 12 different types of PFAS, they found that it degraded significant amounts of all of the compounds, and for some types of PFAS, the system degraded more than 90 percent of the contamination.

Degrading PFAS doesn’t necessarily remove their threat, because it can result in new, smaller molecules of PFAS. The real target, and the more challenging one, is to defluorinate them, or break apart their carbon-fluorine bond. In some of the tests at Drexel, the plasma treatment system successfully defluorinated about a quarter of the compounds.

“In terms of treatment efficiency, plasma technology ranks really high,” said Jinxia Liu, an environmental engineering professor at McGill University who was not involved in the study. Liu said that plasma treatments for PFAS are promising because they do not require any added chemicals and do not seem to produce harmful byproducts.

There are two ways to remove PFAS from water. Right now, the most widely used approach is to filter them out. But because PFAS don’t break down, filters just transfer the contamination from one medium to another. If the filter ends up in a landfill, PFAS can still seep out into groundwater. The other approach is to try to destroy the compounds altogether. Currently, the only scalable method to destroy PFAS is incineration, but that requires large amounts of heat and is very energy intensive.

Sales’ plasma treatment still requires energy, but much less. In plasma, what were once gas molecules have been broken apart, creating what scientists call a highly reactive environment. The freely floating electrons, ions, and unstable neutral atoms in this environment can be deployed as a sort of arsenal of weapons against other molecules. Depending on what the original gas was, some of these weapons will attack pollutants like PFAS. In their study, the Drexel researchers used regular air, which is cheap and abundant, as the gas.

The study results are encouraging, but they do not necessarily translate to a breakthrough in real-world decontamination efforts. The concentrations of PFAS in the water in Sales’ experiments were much higher than levels that are found in the environment. Sales said that at lower levels, the compounds become more difficult for the plasma to target. But this system was just a proof of concept on one liter of water. If Sales can secure another grant, he plans to scale the experiment up.

Another lab at Clarkson University has developed a plasma treatment system with comparable results using real groundwater samples. Last fall, the Clarkson researchers were also able to test it in the real world with a field demonstration on the groundwater at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Groundwater near military bases is notoriously contaminated with PFAS, since the chemicals have long been a key ingredient in the firefighting foam used to put out blazes during training exercises.

The EPA recently announced long-awaited plans to develop a drinking water limit for two specific PFAS compounds, PFOA and PFOS. Currently, the agency has only set a recommended “health advisory level” for drinking water of 70 parts per trillion. Although they haven’t published the results yet, Clarkson researcher Thomas Holsen told Grist that his team’s system lowered PFAS concentrations below that level at Wright-Patterson in most of the experiments. Their system can treat one gallon per minute, which doesn’t exactly compare to the filtration systems at wastewater treatment plants that process hundreds of gallons per minute. Then again, those systems don’t actually destroy PFAS.

Liu said the best application of plasma might be at the end of a treatment train, after other technologies have concentrated the contamination. “There are a lot of different treatment needs. There’s drinking water treatment, groundwater, processing water” — the kind used in industrial plants. “There’s no one solution that fits all. People need all these different technologies, and it depends on the situation,” she said.

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

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Mangrove forests protect coastlines. ‘Synthetic mangroves’ could do the same for cities.

by TorriQueale3 Posted on February 24, 2020

Humans have lots of reasons to thank mangroves. These swampy, stilt-rooted trees store massive amounts of carbon on tropical shorelines, support nurseries for a wide variety of commercially important fish species, and protect coastal areas from storm damage. Besides these benefits for people, mangroves are unique among trees because they thrive in shallow seawater that’s too salty for most living beings to grow in. To better understand exactly how mangroves can grow in the ocean yet pump freshwater up to their leaves, engineers constructed what they’re dubbing “synthetic mangroves”, pressure-driven devices that can draw freshwater out of the saltiest seas — and have the potential to help manage stormwater in cities.

The synthetic mangrove they built resembles a large French press more than a tree, but it has some version of the most important parts of a mangrove: salt-excluding “roots,” a strong “stem”, and thirsty “leaves.” In a real mangrove, the pressure difference between the leaves and the rest of the tree acts like suction on a straw, pulling water up from the roots and through the stem. Natural membranes in the roots filter out the salt. For the synthetic mangrove, the big challenge was getting the fresh water pulled up the “stem” to the leaves without creating bubbles. The team landed on a silica-based layer for the stem and hydrogel for the leaves, and they found that their synthetic mangrove performed just like a real one, even with super-salty water.

Although the design helps engineers better understand how mangroves suck up water while leaving the salt behind, we shouldn’t expect to see fake mangrove forests sprouting up in place of desalination plants — treatment centers that turn saltwater into freshwater — anytime soon. The synthetic mangrove’s elegant pressure-driven desalination process works at small scales, but a large mangrove-inspired desalination plant would foot a hefty energy bill. Instead, the engineers who created the imitation mangrove have another idea for using their wannabe trees: incorporating them into the design of cities to make buildings more resilient in the face of storm surges.

In such a city, “the buildings themselves would soak up excess groundwater and evaporate the water from their walls and roofs,” they write in a recent Science Advances article explaining their invention. Like a mangrove, these buildings would rely on pressure differences to suck the water up, making them self-reliant buffers against storms flooding city streets. At least 30 so-called sponge cities using related technologies already exist in China, and the design may gain traction as storms and storm surges increase in intensity with climate change.

As people continue clearing real, living mangrove forests in alarming numbers, it’s worth remembering that synthetic mangroves don’t replicate all of real mangroves’ benefits. . Mangrove-inspired city design is promising for protecting people from the most extreme effects of storm surges and flooding, but in many places, the best way to do that will be leaving old-fashioned, living mangrove forests intact to do what they do best.

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Mangrove forests protect coastlines. ‘Synthetic mangroves’ could do the same for cities.

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Trump blasts wind turbine emissions, says zilch about fossil fuels

by josettedriver Posted on February 23, 2020

It’s no secret that President Trump hates wind turbines. He’s had it out for them since at least 2012, when he tweeted that they’re an “environmental & aesthetic disaster,” and blamed them for murdering bald eagles. The enmity reportedly stems from an offshore wind farm that Trump feared would mar views from one of his golf courses in Scotland.

At a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Thursday, Trump made his displeasure known again, saying that the wind turbines he saw recently on a trip to Palm Springs were “closed” and “rotting.” “They look like hell,” he said.

He didn’t stop there. “When they’re making them, more stuff goes up into the air and up into the ozone, the atmosphere,” Trump said. “And they don’t say this, but after a period of time, they get tired, they get old, they get rusty and a lot of guys say hey, their useful life is gone, let’s get the hell out of here.”

The president isn’t entirely wrong about that last bit. As a recent report from Bloomberg Green points out, tens of thousands of aging wind turbine blades — which can stretch longer than the wing of a Boeing 747 — are ending up in landfills. Over the next four years, 32,000 blades will go to the landfill in the United States alone. Recycling the blades, which are built to outlast hurricanes and tornadoes, is nigh impossible.

But the environmental impact of wind turbines is nothing compared to that of oil, gas, and coal — industries that Trump has tried to prop up with every executive lever available to him. If Trump actually cared about the stuff that “goes up into the air,” he’d rail against fossil fuels, not renewables. The carbon footprint of coal is nearly 90 times greater than that of wind energy, according to the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an agency in the executive branch that Trump is the head of. The footprint of natural gas is more than 40 times greater.

Trump’s 2012 claim that wind turbines kill birds is also a half-truth: the Audubon Society estimates that wind turbines kill somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds every year in North America. But the oil and gas industry kills as many as one million birds a year, says the Bureau of Land Management. And coal, the industry Trump has vowed to save, kills nearly 8 million per year.

Come to think of it, “a lot of guys say hey, their useful life is gone, let’s get the hell out of here” would be a much better motto for fossil fuels than for wind turbines.

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Trump blasts wind turbine emissions, says zilch about fossil fuels

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Fossilized Fish Bones in the Sahara Desert Show How Diets Changed With the Climate

by Posted on February 21, 2020

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Fossilized Fish Bones in the Sahara Desert Show How Diets Changed With the Climate

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

by sseerss4tr Posted on February 21, 2020

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

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Bloomberg bombed the debate, but his climate record is pretty good

by Everett0481 Posted on February 21, 2020

In between absorbing blows from his fellow presidential contenders at the ninth Democratic debate in Nevada on Wednesday, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to present his vision for what his climate agenda might look like if he were elected the next president of the United States. He didn’t quite succeed.

That’s a testament to how bad his debate performance was — because of all the candidates on stage, the billionaire latecomer probably has the strongest climate bona fides. He’s donated millions to shutter coal plants across the United States with his “Beyond Coal” partnership with the Sierra Club, something he briefly touted Wednesday night. In the absence of federal leadership on climate, he’s worked with cities and states to negotiate emissions reductions goals as part of America’s Pledge, an initiative he helped launch.

Similarly to his answers to questions about his personal wealth and treatment of women, Bloomberg basically bungled his opportunity to respond persuasively to prompts about rising temperatures and international cooperation. Aligning himself with moderate candidates like Amy Klobuchar, Bloomberg came out in support of natural gas as a “transition fuel.” Natural gas production in the U.S. has skyrocketed in recent years due to the fracking boom, but recent research shows the fracking industry is largely responsible for a prolonged spike in methane emissions, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon in the short term. (On Thursday, a spokesperson clarified to Grist that Bloomberg believes that “while gas played a useful role in the early stages of transitioning away from coal, its role as a transition fuel has ended now that renewable energy is cheaper and gas is now a bigger source of carbon pollution than coal.”)

Also on Wednesday night, instead of taking a hard line on China — currently the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gas — Bloomberg pivoted to India, arguing that the developing country was an ”even bigger problem.” While India’s emissions are on the rise, China still emits four times as much carbon from fossil fuel use.

Pundits’ reviews of Bloomberg’s performance were overwhelmingly negative. For the time being though, it looks like Bloomberg’s stash of cash all but ensures his continued presence in the race. And if he can figure out how to communicate more clearly, the next debate is a chance to establish himself as a serious climate candidate.

So how might he do that? He could start by talking about his record. Bloomberg championed climate policies when few politicians were thinking about rising temperatures. After Superstorm Sandy ravaged parts of New York City in 2012, then-Mayor Bloomberg launched a sustainability agenda that was considered to be the most ambitious urban climate mitigation plan in the world.

He led a campaign to protect the city’s drinking water and waged a city-wide effort to revamp its garbage collection system. He created a sustainability task force and, later, a sustainability office that was tasked with tracking the city’s emissions. He attempted to introduce congestion pricing to limit car use in parts of the city. (Though that idea ultimately failed, it’s been reintroduced with more success recently.) Many of his efforts to green the Big Apple went the way of his failed ban on large sodas, but they laid groundwork for the upwelling of urban sustainability efforts happening now across the nation.

“Now you hear a lot about climate action at the national level,” Antha Williams, senior adviser for climate and environment for the Bloomberg campaign, told Grist. “But Mike was really the person who got a lot of that local work started.” That record, she said, will resonate with voters, many of whom say they consider climate change a top priority.

He can also go the Elizabeth Warren route, and get wonky. His specialty is the private sector. He could make a case for why he’s the best candidate to address corporate climate accountability. “One of the things he’s done over the past several years is lead a task force on climate-related financial disclosures,” Williams said, referencing a transparency initiative established in 2015 and chaired by Bloomberg. “That has put together a set of standards that should be reported for companies to actually show their exposure on climate change.”

Or he could set himself apart from his competitors by plugging the work he’s done on the international stage — an area where he is rivaled by only Joe Biden. The United Nations tapped him to be a climate envoy in 2014; and he also served as the head of C40, an international organization of cities committed to climate action. “When Trump walked away from the Paris climate agreement, Mike was there,” Williams said. “He was there to do the reporting that the U.S. shirked.”

Bloomberg’s climate platform checks many of the same boxes as his opponents’ plans: rejoin the Paris Agreement, halve the United States carbon emissions by 2030, invest in frontline communities to combat environmental injustice, the list goes on. As Pete Buttigieg said of those on the debate stage Wednesday night, “I’ve got a plan to get us carbon neutral by 2050. And I think everybody up here has a plan that more or less does the same. So the real question is, how are we going to actually get it done?”

Bloomberg is one of just a few candidates with an actual record to point to in answering that question. But you wouldn’t have known it from his time on stage in Las Vegas.

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Bloomberg bombed the debate, but his climate record is pretty good

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Ahead of the caucuses, Nevadans say climate change is on their minds

by xyrbrock6766 Posted on February 21, 2020

After the disastrous Iowa caucuses and far smoother New Hampshire primary, all eyes now turn to Nevada, which will hold its Democratic primary caucuses on Saturday. On Wednesday night, presidential hopefuls took to the debate stage in Las Vegas to compete for Nevadans’ affections. In between viral verbal smackdowns, the candidates took a full 16 minutes to talk about climate policy.

It was a canny choice by the moderators, which included the very first climate journalist to helm a presidential debate, to spotlight climate. That’s because Democratic caucus-goers in Nevada — and Latino caucus-goers in particular — care deeply about climate policy, according to a recent poll.

The poll, released by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and the Nevada Conservation League, reveals that 86 percent of Nevada Democrats likely to attend the caucuses on Saturday believe that the climate crisis is either “a very important issue” or “the most important issue.” And climate change is the second most important issue to likely Democratic caucus-goers, after universal healthcare, when deciding which candidate to support.

For likely Latino caucus-goers in the state, climate change is a more important issue than health care or immigration. This makes sense because climate change is not a single issue, but one that affects every other issue — and its impacts are felt differently depending on race, income, gender, immigration status, and other factors.

“Latinx communities are hit first and hardest by climate,” Rudy Zamora, program director of Chispa Nevada — an organizing program under LCV — said in a statement. “So it’s not surprising to see that climate change is the most important issue for Nevada Latinx voters in deciding who to support for president.”

A majority of those who participated in the survey said they are much more likely to vote for a candidate with a climate plan that prioritizes communities most affected by pollution, including low-income communities of color. And 43 percent say they “strongly support” a Green New Deal.

These results line up with recent national polls showing that Democratic voters believe climate change is an important issue for presidential candidates to address this election.

But the issue has particularly hit home in Nevada, which has experienced dangerous heat waves in the last few years. Since 1970, Nevada has warmed 2.8 degrees F on average. Last August, the state broke a record for the most consecutive days with temperatures over 105 degrees F. Las Vegas is the fastest-warming city in the country. And the Colorado River has been dwindling due to an increasing loss of snow in the Nevada mountains, forcing Nevadans to cut down their water use.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that climate change will be on Nevadans’ minds when they head to the caucuses this weekend.

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Ahead of the caucuses, Nevadans say climate change is on their minds

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