How climate change makes social inequality worse

• Ed Mahon
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  Ed Mahon comes to Spotlight PA from PA Post, where he covered state politics and policy, produced radio stories that were broadcast on public media stations throughout the state and on NPR’s national newscasts, and co-wrote a weekday newsletter. Prior to joining PA Post, Ed worked for six years as an investigative and political reporter for the York Daily Record, part of the USA Today Network. His reporting on failures in Pennsylvania’s system for protecting domestic abuse victims was a finalist in the national 2018 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists in the local reporting category. He was also part of a team whose coverage of the criminal justice system, including the aggressive use of civil asset forfeiture by York County prosecutors, received the 2018 G. Richard Dew Award for Journalistic Service from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association. Before joining the York Daily Record, Ed covered K-12 education at the Centre Daily Times in State College and worked as a stringer for suburban sections of The Philadelphia Inquirer. He grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

 Paul Papier / For the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

StateImpact Pennsylvania reporter Susan Phillips, right, moderates a panel on climate change adaptation, resilience, and social equity Thursday, Sept. 12 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Panelists are, from left, Charles D. Ellison, managing editor of ecoWURD.com; climate activist Tanya Seaman; and Jeanne Herb, climate researcher at Rutgers University.

Panel looks at better ways to communicate

Paul Papier / For the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy

StateImpact Pennsylvania reporter Susan Phillips, right, moderates a panel on climate change adaptation, resilience, and social equity Thursday, Sept. 12 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Panelists are, from left, Charles D. Ellison, managing editor of ecoWURD.com; climate activist Tanya Seaman; and Jeanne Herb, climate researcher at Rutgers University.

• Charles Ellison, the host of a show on the only black-owned talk radio station in Pennsylvania, was one of the speakers at a climate change-focused discussion in Philly on Thursday.

• Ellison said when he first started talking about the environment, his radio audience was skeptical: “Why are we talking about this? It’s a white people issue,” Ellison recalled. But Ellison said he made the connection between things like heat, pollution, and air quality, and the high rates of asthma and cancer in black and brown communities — and that message resonated with his audience.

• Thursday’s discussion and event was produced by StateImpact Pennsylvania, WHYY and the Kleinman Center. It focused on climate change and its relationship to adaptation, resilience and social equity.

• Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis, a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found. According to The Washington Post, the poll found that “a strong majority of Americans — about 8 in 10 — say that human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half believe action is urgently needed within the next decade if humanity is to avert its worst effects. Nearly 4 in 10 now say climate change is a ‘crisis,’ up from less than a quarter five years ago.”

• NPR describes a climate change protest that took place outside the White House on Friday. It was led by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish activist who sailed across the Atlantic.

• Thunberg will be one of the speakers at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Sept. 23.

Best of the rest

Dan Gleiter / PennLive

State representatives listen to Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget address. Gov. Tom Wolf delivers his budget address for the 2019-20 fiscal year to a joint session of the Pennsylvania House and Senate at the state Capitol in Harrisburg, February 5, 2019.

• The number of bills introduced and passed in the Pennsylvania General Assembly has fallen, Liz Navratil of Spotlight PA and Jonathan Lai of The Philadelphia Inquirer found. The story noted that there are limits to this type of analysis, which tracks the number of bills but not their contents.

• Liz Navratil also traveled to Poland, and she followed Gov. Tom Wolf as he toured Auschwitz-Birkenau and paid tribute to the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

• Saturday Night Live recently announced that a Mechanicsburg native would join the cast — and the new cast member swiftly faced controversy for using a racial slur in a 2018 video to describe Chinese people, PennLive reports. The story has gone national, and the comedian, Shane Gillis, issued what Vox called a “non-apology.”

• New Jersey has used its new “red flag” law more than once a day on average since the law took effect at the start of this month, WHYY’s Joe Hernandez reports. On Tuesday, more than 200 volunteers with the Pennsylvania chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America are expected to be in Harrisburg, pushing for gun legislation, including a “red flag” law that would allow judges to temporarily remove the guns of people considered a risk to themselves or others.