but at the same time, around 100,000 people took to the streets of glasgow to advocate for more climate action. around the globe, people marched for the same cause.

soon after the conference, the house of representatives passed the build back better bill, approving over $2 trillion in spending, much of which is allotted to combat climate change throughout the next decade. yet to be approved by the senate, the bill’s spending overall is more than a trillion dollars less than president joe biden’s original proposal. among the list of ideas proposed by the bill is the first-ever civilian climate corps, a federally funded program to provide america’s youth with environmental protection and reclamation jobs. both cop26 and the bill reveal insights into what the future of climate change advocacy looks like for youth around the world.

in conversation with me on november 22, washington post climate reporter and planet forward advisory councilmember tik root analyzed what happened in the conference, or maybe more appropriately, what didn’t happen, and how the future of climate action may be shaped by cop26 and the build back better bill. 

podcast transcription:

helen bradshaw  0:02  
the united nations climate conference, cop26, wrapped up on november 12 in glasgow. i’m planet 世界杯欧洲预选赛免费直播 helen bradshaw. and in the aftermath of the climate discussions, i sat down with washington post climate solutions reporter tik root to learn his key takeaways from the conference, and what the future of climate action could look like for young adults.

our first question is, what do you think are the most important and potentially impactful promises to come out of cop26?

tik root  0:38  
i mean, i think they accelerated the pace at which they’re going to be making ndc reporting commitments. i believe it went from five years to one. so i think there’ll be some increased reporting on that front. but i think the story of cop is largely what’s what’s not there? more than more than what is there? and i think there’s, i think there was pretty, pretty widespread disappointment with with the deal, that deal that was reached out to conference. you know, there was some language about fossil fuels. but i think, you know, advocates would say that it’s, it was pretty watered down from from some of the original calls. and most importantly, you know, there was a, there was a call for, for countries of the global north to meet its commitment over $100 billion a year in funding for the global south. but it doesn’t appear that there was a increase in that, in that funding, which i think would be really, which which country i’d say is really necessary to keep some of the climate finance and emissions targets on track. so overall, i’d say that people were fairly disappointed with what came out of glasgow, but it will be, it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with that going forward.

helen bradshaw  2:15  
so in response to a lot of what was happening, there were many protests led largely by youth, indigenous people and people from the global south. do you think young people can or should play a role in holding governments accountable for their claims of action?

tik root  2:30  
i mean, i think that can be a question, you know, is answered by your question. they were there. and i think greta thunberg said, a bit of a tone for the conference at the beginning with her, bla bla bla, quote, which i think you saw, you know, boris johnson reiterate and a few others. so, i mean, they’re clearly having an impact, and they’re clearly being, being taken relatively seriously as, as participants in this process. you know, whether they can have a more direct role? that’s an interesting question. i know that the un calls for increased participation in a lot of its unfccc documents and in the paris agreement, but i think there’s not a lot of concrete plans as to make that happen.

helen bradshaw  3:21  
can you think of any ways that young activists in particular can work to hold their governments accountable or to make them adhere to the claims of action that they’ve created?

tik root  3:29  
yeah, no. i think you i think you’ve seen, you’ve seen people like greta thunberg and the friday’s for future, you know, garner significant media attention and significant, you know, attention globally. and so i think, i think you start to see it, definitely register on, you know, global leaders who are reiterating the phrases or some of the demands, and i think you’ve seen some of these small country nations as well make their voices heard, you know, what, what leverage they ultimately have on the final decision, as i guess up to the negotiators, but they’re certainly not unnoticed t would seem.

helen bradshaw  4:14  
along those lines, similar, just in vein to talking about young peopl, the house passed the build back better bill on friday. i know in an article recently for the washington post, you touched on the new civilian climate corps proposed by the bill, if this becomes a reality, how do you think it’ll impact young people?

tik root  4:30  
it will be really interesting and the expansion of, i mean, the biden administration called it for the creation of a civilian climate corps and in many ways, it’s an  expansion of the [unintelligable] corps to include a lot of climate focused jobs and you know, dating back to fdr, ccc, you know, they tried to harken back to that program, which was, you know, fairly beloved in its time. i think it’s going to be an employment opportunity and employment option for many youth around the country, if it passes, if it gets implemented, you know, it’s unclear exactly what the timeline would be but you know as soon as a couple years from now there could be an option for kids coming out of high school and college to join the ccc… again.

helen bradshaw  5:21  
do you see it being a largely youth-run organization in the sense that, you know, its majority comprised of youth? or what do you think the breakdown of that could look like?

tik root  5:31  
yeah, my understanding is there’s likely going to be age requirements. i haven’t seen exactly what that might look like. but my understanding is it’s very much geared towards youth and young people.

helen bradshaw  5:43  
the us is responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s co2 emissions, despite only making up less than 5% of the total world population, based on the steps outlined during cop and the potential for the build back better bill to become law is the us promising to do their fair share to combat climate change?

tik root  5:58  
i mean, i think the data shows that pretty much every country is on track to not meet their – the the ndcs and the emissions targets that they promised, i believe that includes the us, but even if they were on track, it doesn’t, it’s not enough of emissions reduction to keep us below a 1.5 degrees celsius of warming. and so i guess the question is, if the paris agreement, you know, tries to keep 1.5 in sight, and the us and other countries targets wouldn’t allow that, and they’re not on track to even meet those targets, i guess it’s you know, yeah, i can let other people say whether that means you’re doing enough to combat climate change, but there definitely appears to be that. and glasgow didn’t change that and i think this is one of the biggest disappointments people have this glasgow’s that it kept the world on track to blow past 1.5 and possibly even two degrees celsius of warming, which is not what the paris agreement calls for.

helen bradshaw  7:14  
you can find tik’s most recent work in the washington post. for planet forward, i’m helen bradshaw.

transcribed by https://otter.ai

podcast transcription:

helen bradshaw  0:02 
what bat data scientist tina chang remembers most about visiting bats in virginia isn’t seeing the scary creatures of halloween stories, or even the sweet animals of children’s picture books. what she remembers is the overwhelming number of dead bats from white-nose syndrome.

tina cheng  0:20 
it’s really heartbreaking to walk in and see these sick bats. sometimes you would find carcasses in caves as well. and these were, this was especially devastating, going to some caves where are these biologists that come for years. they go to these spots and they know exactly where the bats are because they come back every year. and we would return with these researchers and not only with the bats not be there, but we would see bones on the floor. and that was also really heartbreaking.

helen bradshaw  0:54 
amid the bat linked pandemic that spread between people across the world, covid-19, bats in the us are facing an epidemic of their own with white-nose syndrome. since the discovery of white-nose syndrome in upstate new york in 2006, potentially 10s of millions of bats across the country have died. white-nose syndrome attacks hibernating bats in the form of a fungus pseudogymnoascus destructans, known as pd. this fungus then attaches spores of itself to the bats. these spores are what we see as the white fuzz on bats’ noses, hence the name. but how does a little white fuzz on a bat’s nose cause so much death?

rich geboy  1:34 
yeah, so that’s a great question.

helen bradshaw  1:37 
that’s the us fish and wildlife’s white-nose syndrome coordinator for the midwest, rich geboy.

rich geboy  1:43 
the bats themselves typically will acquire a white fuzz on their muzzle or on their wings. and as it grows into the tissue of the bat’s muzzle, or the wing, or the tail membrane, that will then become set in the effects of the disease.

helen bradshaw  2:05 
the effect of the disease, cheng says in blunter terms, is that it causes the bats to come out of torpor in the winter when they aren’t supposed to and…

tina cheng  2:14 
and then they burn through their fat reserves. and many of them die of starvation.

helen bradshaw  2:19 
but mammoth cave resource management specialist, rickard toomey, says there is hope in the form of vaccination. 

rickard toomey  2:27 
there are tons of people working on cures, mitigations, vaccines, probiotics, all sorts of different approaches, trying to do exactly that: make the bats more immune.

helen bradshaw  2:45 
cheng and geboy say these vaccines and probiotics have not been developed nearly as quickly as our own covid-19 vaccines or shown as encouraging of results.

tina cheng  2:55 
so there have been several probiotics that were under investigation and brought to different levels of trial. so i helped to work on one that’s a bacterial probiotic, it’s naturally found on the skin of bats. and the idea is just to try and amplify that on the skin of bats to provide some type of protection. there have not been any trials, including the one that i worked on, which has shown an increase in survival yet. it’s not to say that this type of intervention is not fruitful or worth continuing. but it has not yet shown really promising results. 

rich geboy  3:43 
there have been a number of scientists looking at this out of the national wildlife health center in madison, wisconsin, essentially trying to develop this vaccine. and with the eventual hope of leading to increased survival from bats. at this point, it’s not there, but they’re still in the development phase of that.

helen bradshaw  4:06 
but dissemination of these medicines would be tricky. america’s millions of bats can’t just book an appointment for a shot. 

tina cheng  4:14 
i think the idea was to get the vaccine in some kind of spray, and then to spray it on bats and then when they groom themselves, which they do quite a bit, then they would ingest the oral vaccine and get vaccinated.

helen bradshaw  4:28 
in the meantime, precautions have been put into action in places like mammoth cave. at this point, these measures are less so for keeping white-nose syndrome out as they are for keeping it in. park visitor alex weaver experienced the bleach bath journey firsthand.

alex weaver  4:43 
so as i saw the, the little thing that we walked through, i was i was kind of confused. i was like i just i don’t know what these are for. so i wasn’t sure if it was more for the protection of the people or agriculture outside of the caves. but after a little bit of questions, i realized this for the bats. i don’t really see too many bats while i was down there. but i figured they, they need protection just like anybody else. so it’s got to follow the little bat rules.

helen bradshaw  5:15 
anti-bat sentiment from the pandemic, and the fact that bats are the primary carrier of rabies in the state of illinois, aren’t helping awareness or support for a cure either. author and journalist david quammen, of outsider magazine and the new york times, says an international fear of bats has deep historical roots, largely based on false information.

david quammen  5:35 
in some cultures, there are these negative impressions of bats, fears of bats, because they are peculiar. they are mammals that fly. bats, in fact, do carry a lot of different kinds of viruses, of which rabies is the most famous and the most scary, because it has the highest case fatality rate. but the fact is that if we leave bats alone, then there’s very, very, very little chance of us getting infected with their viruses. there was a concern that this pandemic not be turned into another excuse for persecuting bats. because there is a high likelihood that this virus originated in a form of bat and the bat didn’t come looking for a human. humans, in some way, still undiscovered, put themselves in a situation where they, they gave the virus an opportunity to spill over from a bat into a human fatefully.

helen bradshaw  6:40 
even if an effective vaccine or probiotic is developed, and even if it’s successfully administered, it’s possible not all the bats can be saved in time. cornell says white nose syndrome has a mortality rate of 90 to 100% among some species of hibernating bats, meaning until a treatment is implemented, bat species like the northern long-eared bat are at risk of extinction.

rickard toomey  7:02 
in 2004, 2005, we had a big bath survey, and northern long-eared bats were almost 50% of the bats caught on the park in the summer. 800 bats were caught. post white-nose, we caught i think two of them. our catch rate on northern long-eared bats went down 99.7%. northern long-eared bats on mammoth cave national park are functionally extirpated.

helen bradshaw  7:39 
while some areas hit by white-nose syndrome have stabilizing populations of little brown bats, the future of north american bats is uncertain.

tina cheng  7:47 
there are other species that have not recovered, that are not stabilized, that have gone sometimes to zero, and will likely never come back.

transcribed by https://otter.ai