Group items tagged

Mr. Sarwari said hundreds of houses had been destroyed in impoverished areas in the Qadis District, in the southern part of the province. Men, women and children were killed, many of whom had been inside the buildings.

the death toll would most likely rise significantly, because many families were still buried under the rubble.

The first quake struck just after 2 p.m. local time, east of the city of Qala-e-Naw, the capital of a province that the Taliban swept through in July on the way to capturing Kabul in August. It registered a magnitude of 4.9, according to the United States Geological Survey. The second struck about two hours later six miles away, registering a magnitude of 5.3.

For civilians in Afghanistan, earthquakes have added to the misery of living through a war that has gone on for years. There have been several earthquakes in recent weeks along Afghanistan’s eastern borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan, data from the U.S. Geological Survey show. Most were magnitude 5 or less.

The climate portion of Build Back Better includes about $555 billion aimed at moving the American economy away from its 150-year-old reliance on fossil fuels and toward clean energy sources.

Democratic leaders are reluctant to abandon social programs such as universal prekindergarten or lower costs for prescription drugs because they provide benefits that are immediately felt by American families and would demonstrate to voters that the party can deliver on its promises.

The Build Back Better Act does include billions of dollars for research and development of so-called “carbon capture,” a technology that is not in use at any commercial scale because it is prohibitively expensive.

Voters across the political spectrum — including conservative Republicans — strongly support tax credits and rebates to consumers, businesses and landlords for energy efficient heating and cooling, solar panels, electric vehicles and other low-emissions or no-carbon technology, according to a September 2021 poll conducted by climate change communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.

If Democrats were to try to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor for a vote, they would need to be joined by at least 10 Republicans to clear a 60-vote threshold to push past a Republican filibuster.

Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “

Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.

Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.

The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.

Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”

They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.

Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.

But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.

But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.

So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.

The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.

They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.

Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?

The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?

Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.

I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.

In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.

and he refused.

Wednesday was like no day I can recall in the history of the court, opening as it did with a “joint statement” released by Gorsuch and Sotomayor in which the two announced that the “reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends.”

“I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench,” and further affirmed that Roberts would have no additional comment. In other words, everyone has clarified that Gorsuch refuses to mask, that Sotomayor cannot come to court, and that nobody has asked him to do otherwise, but also that there is nothing to see here, kindly move along.

as NPR stands behind its story, conservatives claim that NPR is lying, and liberals claim that the issue isn’t who said what, so much as one justice refusing to make the workplace safe for a colleague.

Mike Davis—a minor player in the push to confirm Donald Trump’s judges and, more importantly, a former clerk and current friend of Gorsuch. Davis criticized the NPR story on Fox News on Wednesday. He was quick to condemn Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post and Nina Totenberg at NPR for, he claimed, intentionally spreading misinformation to smear Gorsuch.

whether Gorsuch is a monster or a libertarian hero is kind of unknowable without more information and also kind of irrelevant. I just wanted the court to tell us what their public health rules were, and when, and if the justices declined to abide by their own rules, to explain why.

The Supreme Court spent a bunch of money to upgrade the air filtration system, and for months, all nine Justices sat through these oral arguments, eight of them without masks. It was not an issue. Justice Sotomayor wore a mask, the other eight didn’t. And so two Fridays ago for some reason, the science somehow changed for the two COVID [mandate] cases, and Gorsuch didn’t want to play along with that. He wasn’t going to play politics. So he continued to do what he did for the prior months and not wear his mask.

Gorsuch believes that to wear a mask in January if you were not wearing one in November is to “play politics,” rather to respond directly to the evolving situation that is the coronavirus pandemic. Which means, one must also infer, that Justices like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas are “playing politics” by wearing masks now when they didn’t do so before. This is deeply strange not just because it denies that “the science changed” around omicron (it did). It’s deeply strange in that he expressly links the change in the court’s masking policy to the public oral arguments in the vaccine-or-test cases, suggesting that the two are somehow related, rather than simply coinciding in time.

His argument, ostensibly on behalf of Gorsuch—that the decision of justices to don masks this month is all gratuitous virtue signaling about an imaginary spike in a pandemic that coincides with oral arguments on the topic—is actually one of the most damning things I’ve read all week. He isn’t saying Gorsuch wants to infect his colleague. He seems to be saying that, the science notwithstanding, masks don’t make a lick of difference and everyone aside from himself is buckling to the creeping evil of the Fauci state.

Imagine if everyone had simply put on a mask for a few weeks, not because the science was perfect, but out of respect for a colleague they loudly claim to adore.

Gorsuch still isn’t wearing a mask, and Sotomayor is still phoning in from the safety of her chambers. Call it “playing politics,” but in another time, demonstrating out of an abundance of caution some regard for your colleagues’ health—without being asked—would have merely been “leadership,” or “empathy,” or even “humility.”  That other time is long gone. We are all of us scorpions in a bottle now.

The imagery showed how the area of the iceberg changed over time. The researchers also determined its thickness using data from satellites that measure ice height. By the time it broke up, Ms. Braakmann-Folgmann said, A68a was more than 200 feet thinner overall.

When the iceberg was near South Georgia, scientists with the survey were able to deploy autonomous underwater gliders to take water samples. On the island, they used tracking devices on some gentoo penguins and fur seals, to see whether the presence of the iceberg affected their foraging behavior.

A large influx of fresh water on the surface could affect the growth of phytoplankton, at the lower end of the food change, or it could alter the mix of phytoplankton species available, he said.

The document also states that China and India, with large populations, will play key roles in determining how quickly global temperatures rise.

When it comes to the odds of countries around the world meeting the commitment made at the 2015 climate conference in Paris to keep the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius, the intelligence report said the odds were not good.

“High-emitting countries would have to make rapid progress toward decarbonizing their energy systems by transitioning away from fossil fuels within the next decade, whereas developing countries would need to rely on low-carbon energy sources for their economic development.”

That report said the military would begin to spend a significant portion of its next budget on climate analysis in its national security exercises and analysis.

Its bases are vulnerable to flooding, fires, drought and rising sea levels. Flooding harmed the Navy Base Coronado during a particularly tough hurricane year, the Naval Air Station Key West was hit by severe drought several years ago and a wildfire in 2017 burned 380 acres on Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, among myriad other examples.

Beyond harming its basic infrastructure, droughts, fires and flooding can harm the Pentagon’s the performance of its aircraft, the ability to do testing activities and a host of training exercises.

moving to directly integrate concept of climate change as a threat multiplier into all aspects of defense strategy, planning, force posture and budget,”

cited the growing United States rivalry with China as an example of why the two issues are linked. “The Pentagon must bring a climate lens to its strategic assessment of Chinese foreign policy and behavior on the world stage,” said Ms. Sikorsky, who is now director of the Center for Climate and Security. “Otherwise it will get answers to key questions about China’s strength and strategy wrong.”

The department said climate change’s effect on the Northwest Passage, the waters between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and through the Arctic Ocean, are already apparent. With the ice melting, the area has become easier to navigate and has opened it up to competition with Russia and China.

ith deadly and destructive hurricanes driving migrants to leave their homes in Central America and flee to the United States through Mexico. This has overwhelmed border officials at times since 2014 and particularly during the last six months.

looking at how climate change is already pushing people around the world to migrate, both within countries and between them. The report notes one forecast suggesting that climate change could lead to almost three percent of the populations of Latin America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa moving within their countries by 2050 — more than 143 million people.

“Even in the United States, one extreme event can result in a relatively high degree of permanent relocation of low-income populations exposed to chronic and worsening conditions over time,” the report says.

They have been grappling with record crop losses caused by frost, hail and higher temperatures, all spurred by climate change. These extreme weather conditions, which have compounded over the past five years, have led to despair and suicides in the region, as locals worry about how they will maintain the unique properties of their wines when their grape harvests persistently fail.

“This year we had terrible frost in April, then hail in June, followed by a horrible cold summer with lots of rain that caused disease in the vineyards and rotted the grapes,”

Climate Change Threatens Wine, and a Way of Life, in Jura

For all the challenges confronting him, the president attempted to stay optimistic. As Biden departed the news conference, he offered a thumbs up when asked if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — key Democratic votes — were on board with his $1.75 trillion spending package for families, health care and renewable energy. The president also shrugged off his recent decline in the polls, saying that numbers go up and down

But the policy issues also seemed to fade for Biden when asked about his time Friday with Pope Francis. The president became deeply emotional, his hands appearing to fiddle with the mask he wore as a precaution because of COVID-19.

The president did leave the G-20 with commitments by his fellow leaders on a global minimum tax that would make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes by assigning their profits to countries with low tax rates.

The president met Sunday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose office said the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere” despite tensions over human rights and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system, among other issues.

Biden heads Monday to the U.N. climate summit in Scotland, where he’ll once again face questions about whether the world’s wealthiest are doing enough to stop the warming of the Earth by moving away from fossil fuels.

Schranz’s supporters contended the mystery man had been a French policeman or soldier who had purposely interfered with the run to ensure Killy’s victory. The French hinted Schranz had made up the story."I was descending and I saw a dark shadow ahead of me," Schranz said at a news conference. "I wanted to avoid it, and I stopped. It was apparently a ski policeman."

The women's luge competition at the Grenoble Games was all but a lock for East Germany. Defending champ and gold-medal favorite Ortrun Enderlein stood in first; teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel were second and fourth. 

“A jury member acted immediately,” International Luge Federation president Bert Isatitsch said, according to UPI. "He went to the starting line and put his hands on the runners. They were warm."Isatitsch said East German officials used "foul language" when notified of the disqualification. “One waved his arms around, shouting and screaming," he told UPI. 

A month before the 1994 Winter Games, a man wielding a metal baton attacked gold- medal favorite Kerrigan during a practice at the U.S. Nationals, paving the way for Harding to win the event and to qualify for the Olympics. Soon afterward, however, it was discovered that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had planned the attack. With Kerrigan recovered—and Harding allowed to compete despite her not-yet-confirmed connection to the crime—the women’s figure skating competition became the hottest event at the Olympics. TV ratings soared.

Ice dancing got a dose of spy games in Nagano, Japan, when a Canadian judge secretly taped a conversation with another judge about picking winners before the competition.After her complaints to officials had been brushed aside, Jean Senft recorded Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov discussing skater placements as proof of her accusations. During the call, Balkov said he would vote for Canadians if Senft voted for a Ukrainian pair."The athletes are not competing on a fair playing field," Senft later told CBC News. "This isn't sport. Somebody had to get proof."

were made. (Ice dancing was not removed from Olympic competition.) "If [cheating] happens at the world championships in some small town, nobody notices," Pound said, according to The New York Times. "But in the Olympics, hundreds of millions of people are watching."

The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze edged Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier for the gold medal. But Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge, came forward, saying she was pressured by the French ice sports federation to put the Russians first. “I knew very well who would vote in favor of the Russians and who would vote in favor of the Canadians," she told Reuters. "I was almost certain that I was the one who would award the Olympic title. What I feared would happen really did.”

Le Gougne was suspended from judging for three years and banned from the 2006 Winter Games. The scandal led to sweeping judging reforms in the sport. 

living through California’s tinderbox years has convinced me to keep an eye on climate dangers; while forecasts on climate risk are inexact, making some effort to anticipate its danger when deciding where to live feels more responsible than ignoring it. And when people in California are paying a million dollars above asking price for homes in areas of high and increasing wildfire risk, isn’t that something like ignoring it?

There is a concept in behavioral economics known as a “Minsky moment,” which describes when a bull market suddenly wises up to its own unsustainability, causing a collapse in prices.

Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Architecture who studies how climate change affects housing markets, told me that a Minsky moment could be coming for high-priced homes in at-risk coastal cities. As home lenders, insurance companies and other players in the real estate business begin to better understand their exposure to climate risks, they may raise premiums or force disclosure requirements that could lower home values.

At the moment, buying a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, looks like a safe investment. But lately I have begun to obsess about the uncertainty built into the changing weather. What if three fire seasons from now proves to be one fire season too many — and, in a blink, the housing market into which we’ve invested so much of our future implodes? “In a way, climate change could begin to look like a foreclosure crisis,” Keenan told me.

It means scrapping rules about weapons exports, a huge boost in defence spending and an end to Russian energy imports. A Russian gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2 has already been suspended.

"For the foreseeable future, co-operation with Russia will not occur. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if needed, defence against Russia," Mr Schmid tells me.

Unexpectedly hawkish words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany's historical guilt and moral duty to make up for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at all costs.

Even Germany's view of its own history is changing.

Until the invasion mainstream opinion was that German reunification was thanks to dialogue with Moscow by another SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt. But now the debate has shifted, with reminders that Mr Brandt's diplomacy was backed up by strong deterrence, including a West German defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The issue of German historical war guilt has also become more nuanced. Before the invasion the government argued against weapon deliveries to Ukraine because of Nazi crimes against Russia.

"Under Putin, official Russian policy tried to monopolise the memory of the Second World War for the bilateral German-Russian relationship," explains Mr Schmid. This blinded parts of German society to the suffering of Ukrainians during he war, he adds.

Now there is a greater awareness of Ukraine's traumas under the Nazis.

Berlin's rhetoric has shifted dramatically. But some ask whether actions are following fast enough. Certainly warm words of support are not enough for Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has criticised Germany's continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.

In a BBC interview last week, Mr Zelensky called payments for Russian energy "blood money". And a planned visit to Kyiv by President Steinmeier was cancelled at the last minute.

certainly German politicians and commentators interpret the failed visit as a sign of Ukraine's distrust in the German president, who as foreign minister under Angela Merkel spent years trying to achieve peace by engaging with Russia.

"Our partners look at us, and say: OK, you do a Zeitenwende but what are you practically doing?" she says. "On sanctions we are timid and on weapons delivery, we are reluctant. So, rightly, they wonder what that Zeitenwende is about, and given that Germany is a big economic, military, political power in the middle of Europe, whatever we do makes a difference, in good ways and bad."

"This is a dilemma that Germany has created itself," argues political scientist Liana Fix, head of the Körber Foundation. "That's obviously difficult to accept for other countries, who are willing to go ahead with an embargo and have done their homework on energy diversification."

Ironically, it's a Green Party politician, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, from a party that for years has been calling for energy independence from Russia, who is having to solve this dilemma.

On military support for Ukraine, Berlin says it is prepared to send whatever weapons Kyiv needs. But there are allegations that some ministries are getting tied up in bureaucracy. Here, too, it is a Green politician, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is pushing the governing coalition to go faster. She has called for heavy weaponry, such as tanks or fighter jets, for Ukraine.

Olaf Scholz has to keep his party onside, govern in a three-way coalition and overturn Germany's guilt-laden pacifist identity overnight.

But even his allies say the chancellor should at least communicate better what's going on

Meanwhile, it feels like many individual Germans are going through their own Zeitenwende. Ariane Bemmer, a columnist for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, has written about reassessing her own feelings towards Russia. "I definitely got it wrong, it's like losing a friend,"

Like many in the former West Germany in the 1980s, she was wary of US-style cutthroat capitalism. She bought a book called Ami Go Home - she never read it, but felt it would look good on her bookshelf - and was intrigued by the reforms in Russia.

"In America you had Ronald Reagan as a president, which was a shock for us. We thought: what will he do, this crazy actor with his cowboy boots? Will he set the world on fire? Russia was a place where all the good changes were, perestroika, freedom, wind of change," she says.

Few in Germany think that now. In one recent poll, 55% of Germans said Berlin should send heavy weapons, such as tanks and fighter jets, to Ukraine to fight against Russia.

For Ariane, and many other Germans, any lingering Russophile romanticism vanished for good the day Putin's tanks rolled over Ukraine's border.

What is the reliable path into the middle class, one that requires only a willingness to work hard? It’s gone. Corporate America sent it away.

It’s part of something that is so pervasive among Americans, and especially young Americans, that one hardly notices it anymore: the feeling of being powerless against huge forces that they understand to exist far beyond their control, including the questionable—or outright evil—actions of giant corporations.

I said that one of the reasons that union membership had dried up is that OSHA had made workplaces safer. But as this article was closing, a 16-year-old boy was killed while working at the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant in rural Mississippi. According to The New York Times, Duvan Tomas Perez died “after becoming ensnared in a machine he was cleaning.”

And do you know what the company had to say about his death? It was, of course, a “tragedy,” but it wasn’t the company’s fault: “It appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual’s age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork.”

Do you know what I say to that?Strike.Boycott.Shut it down.

well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates

These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.

These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ

the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity

I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting

the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”

I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.

The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur

I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.

the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?

My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature

Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.

“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)

The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”

the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum

The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t

Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.

the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum

Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.

When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.

First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i

Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock

She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.

Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?

Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips

it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.

Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,

In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.

I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience

Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.

I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution

Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation

I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever

Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.

As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”

t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.

Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)

It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.

I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.

the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?

weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?

The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”

Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”

Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened

I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.

In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.

The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design

the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.

The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?

by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?

Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”

(Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.

One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.

This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past

When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.

If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow

One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same

One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society

To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist

To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.

one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”

There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”

“We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”

Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’ 

Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.

providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.

Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust

Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings

In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”

These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?

One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism

“many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews

This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.

Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.

One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?

Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.

One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”

The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing

it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.

“It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’

Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?

I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”

Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.

“The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.

Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.

These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week

the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.

In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”

The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.

Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.

Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”

“It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”

Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?

In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i

We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”

These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.

In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism

To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.

Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?

“People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”

“People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”

The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?

I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”

Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

“Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”

perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish

The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”

American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering

But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i

That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.

It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.

How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?

Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism

“Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”

Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”

then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.

Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”

Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.

this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.

The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.

a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?

I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe

There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor

Francis summarized accepted science and again took aim at skeptics who deny human-made climate change. He strayed beyond climate, couching artificial intelligence as representative of a worrying inclination to “increase human power beyond anything imaginable.”

“We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes,” the pope wrote.

In his new document, Francis noted how little world leaders have accomplished since then and blamed an absence of mechanisms to hold countries to their commitments, along with a “failure of conscience and responsibility.”

A Vatican delegation that attended the Paris negotiations was credited with helping to influence commitments from Poland and Catholic countries in Latin America.

Francis — who took the name of the patron saint of ecology — stands out among popes in his push to make environmentalism a core part of the faith.

He continued: “To the powerful, Pope Francis dares to repeat this question: ‘Why do you want to preserve today a power that will be remembered for its inability to intervene when it was urgent and necessary to do so?’”

Francis focused on what he described as a broken multilateral system for global decision-making and avoided calling on Catholics to take specific steps to combat climate change.

According to the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of American Catholics say the planet is warming mostly because of human activity — in line with the average among all American adults, but well behind the 90 percent figure among atheists.

“It is safe to say that many Catholics still do not view care for the environment as a central aspect of what it means to be a Catholic,” said David Cloutier, a professor of moral theology at Catholic University. “They view it as an optional activity that some Catholics might be involved in on the side, not a central commitment. But Pope Francis clearly is trying to move the church in that direction.”

During that same period, 29 states had, on average, at least one federally declared disaster a year somewhere within their borders. Five states have experienced at least 20 disasters since 2011.

The numbers exclude disaster declarations related to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Climate change is here,”

“Every single taxpayer is paying for climate change.”

By focusing on federally declared disasters, the report is able to equalize those differences, offering something close to a true accounting of which places are most exposed to climate shocks they cannot cope with on their own.

At the top of that list are five counties that have each experienced, on average, more than a disaster a year since 2011. Those counties are concentrated in two areas: Southern Louisiana (where counties are called parishes) and eastern Kentucky.

Louisiana outpaces the rest of the United States in another regard. Over the past decade, the state has received more federal disaster money per capita — $1,736 for each resident — than anywhere else in the nation, the report found. Only New York State comes close, at $1,348.

Since 2011, California has received 25 federal disaster declarations, including for wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that resulted in $2.5 billion in federal money to rebuild public infrastructure. Mississippi and Oklahoma have each suffered 22 disasters. Iowa has had 21, mostly for severe storms and flooding

Not every type of disaster is associated with climate change. For example, it’s unclear whether there is a link between rising temperatures and earthquakes. But scientists have become increasingly convinced that a warming world is contributing to worsening floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events.

The data also shows the areas least exposed to unmanageable climate shocks, at least so far. States in the Midwest, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, are among those with the smallest number of federal disaster declarations, with an average of roughly one disaster every two years.

At the bottom of the list is Nevada, which has had just three federal disaster declarations since 2011. Next door, Arizona has had just six. Yet, Nevada and Arizona ranked highest for heat-related deaths from 2018 to 2021, according to the report

“Heat has the highest mortality of all climate impacts, but their disaster declarations were so low,” Ms. Chester said. The reason: Federal disaster declarations focus on property damage more than direct human consequences like illness, injury or death.

“By better understanding risk,” she said, “we can more effectively take action together to accelerate resilience and adaptation in our nation’s most at-risk and disadvantaged communities.”

To pay for that new spending, Rebuild by Design proposes, states should impose a 2 percent surcharge on insurance premiums.

Using an insurance surtax to pay for disasters is a strategy that is already in use, in a sense. As the report notes, Florida levies surcharges on private insurance policies to make up for shortfalls in its state-run insurance program — something that’s likely to happen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

Rebuild by Design suggests reversing the chronology. Rather than taxing insurance payments to pay for disaster recovery, a state would come up with additional funds before a storm, then use that money to better prepare communities before a disaster strikes, perhaps making it unnecessary for the federal government to declare a disaster at all.

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022

We have to treat air conditioning like the necessity it’s become, making sure that everyone who needs it has access to it.

A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy?

n Germany, the Rhine — the country’s most important water transport route — was so low that some ships have been forced to reduce their cargo loads. Uniper, a German power utility, even announced Thursday that it would reduce output from its largest coal-firing power plants because insufficient coal could be shipped to the plant via the Rhine.

And in France, which gets about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy, heat waves have hampered power plants because they use water to cool their reactors. Several have been forced to reduce production over the past month, or to exceed normal temperature limits for the water that they release back into natural waterways.

“Because of climate change,” he said, “we are going to have to get used to these kinds of episodes.”

ne thing I’ve learned in my years of whining about Florida’s unsustainable trajectory in the climate era is that most Floridians don’t care.

especially if they’re newly retired to Florida. They’re here to enjoy the warm weather in a state with no income tax, not to build a better tomorrow for future generations.

Usually, it’s just nice. It’s certainly way nicer than Boston or Brooklyn, or Michigan or Minnesota, in the winter.

DeSantis has risen to national prominence behind a very Florida form of now-mine-more messaging, proclaiming this the “free state” of Florida, where you don’t have to worry about public-health scolds telling you to wear a mask or get a vaccine, or pointy-headed planners telling you where to build your house or when to water your lawn. He’s selling irresponsibility as a virtue. Worrying about consequences is for losers.

My insurer went bankrupt last month, one of six to go under in Florida this year, and the state took over my policy, as it surely did for thousands of Floridians who will now file claims. But the Republican leaders who have assumed for the past quarter-century that the feds will bail us out after the Big One were probably right. We’ve gotten too big to fail.