If Joe Rogan needs convincing about climate change, his hometown has some ideas

At Newton South High, close to Boston, a wave of urgent action has swept through the hallways.

“All across the school, there are groups of students working to educate themselves and others about climate change,” wrote reporter Eve Cohen in The Denebola, one of Newton South’s two student newspapers.

Like young people across the US and beyond, Newton students marched in the 2019 global climate strikes. Afterwards, they worked to reduce plastic waste in the cafeteria, improve recycling and learn about the issues. Junior biology classes adopted “Climate Change Friday” with students taking turns to present a topic.

“Their end goal is to actually do an action, make a difference that will be long-lasting at Newton South,” Molly Estrada, a biology teacher, told the student paper, adding that, “if every school did that, you’d start to really see a change in our whole country”.

Newton South sits in the top 3 per cent of public schools in the country and has some wildly successful past alumni. Roger Myerson, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, is a former student along with Jonathan Mann, a leading figure at the World Health Organization who spearheaded early AIDS research. There’s actors John Krasinski and BJ Novak, actress and model Hari Nef, and director Eli Roth. And Spotify’s podcasting superstar, Joe Rogan.

Joseph James Rogan was born in Newark, New Jersey, and moved to California and Florida before his family settled in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, where he attended Newton South.

“I learned 2 wrongs only make a right if you don’t get caught, and life is too important to be taken seriously,” he quipped in his Class of 1985 yearbook.

His Newton South successors could offer a few lessons to Spotify’s $100m man, who currently finds himself at the centre of a controversy on misinformation, including an episode last week which waded into the murky waters of climate denial.

During a lengthy interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, Dr Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist famous for his anti-political correctness views, attacks on the trans community, arguments that white privilege isn’t real, and defence of the patriarchy, aired his views to an audience (of an estimated 11million people) that climate science has no basis in reality, and that solar power kills more people than nuclear, with little pushback from the host.

Dr Peterson subsequently cited a book by S Fred Singer, as his source material. Singer, who died in 2020, founded the Science and Environment Policy Project, a climate-sceptic advocacy group with financial support from the Heartland Institute, a think-tank backed by oil interests, ExxonMobil, and the Koch family, as Desmog reported.

Contrary to the scientific consensus, Singer dubbed human-caused emissions “trivial” and claimed climate models were “alarmist”. Dr Peterson did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about his statements on climate change.

The remarks compounded a mounting crisis for Spotify over Covid misinformation on Mr Rogan’s show which is exclusive to the company.

After an open letter signed by hundreds of doctors and public health professionals did little to make Spotify address the issue, rock veteran Neil Young last week asked the company to remove his music, followed by Joni Mitchell, Young’s former bandmate Graham Nash and Bruce Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren. Best-selling author Brene Brown has suspended her exclusive Spotify podcast “until further notice”. Singer-songwriter India.Arie asked for her music to be removed due to Mr Rogan’s “problematic language around race”.

During the discussion with Dr Peterson, Mr Rogan also talked about climate change, noting that he was currently reading an “intense” book on the issue.

“It’s requiring a lot of thinking, and then I have to like look at the criticisms of this guy and criticisms of the work,” Mr Rogan said. “Who believes in 10 years that Miami is going to be underwater, who believes that this is probably hyperbole and that it’s a gross exaggeration and the reality is the world sort of always goes through these cycles of change but human beings are definitely having an effect on it, but a small effect compared to cows and other things … the climate change one is a weird one.”

Climate scientists responded with dismay to the episode. “Similar anti-science spread by these two individuals about COVID-19 likely has and will continue to lead to fatalities,” Dr Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, told CNN. “Even more will perish from extremely dangerous and deadly weather extremes if we fail to act on the climate crisis. So the promotion of misinformation about climate change is in some ways even more dangerous.”

Boston University Professor Nathan Phillips, a physiological ecologist who studies land-climate interactions and lives in the Newton area, said that Mr Rogan “could be doing a lot better than pandering to fake controversy”.

Professor Phillips is a fierce critic of building new fossil fuel infrastructure, taking part in ongoing local campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience. In 2020, he went on hunger strike to draw attention to public health and safety concerns at a controversial gas compressor station in Weymouth, south of Boston.

“We just can’t do this anymore,” he told The Independent this week. “The science, the facts, and the environmental justice is clear. No one wants it, except for a very few corporate interests. Instead of Joe Rogan distracting us with the climate denial, let’s work on resilient communities.”

The Independent has contacted both Mr Rogan and Spotify for comment.

In response to the furore, Mr Rogan posted an Instagram video on Sunday. “I’m not trying to promote misinformation. I’m not trying to be controversial,” he said. “I’ve never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people and have interesting conversations.”

He noted that he would “try harder to get people with differing opinions” and “do my best to make sure I’ve researched these topics”.

While research published in 99.9 per cent of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is real and mainly caused by humans, for a real-world distillation of the climate crisis Mr Rogan need look no further than his former Beantown backyard, where the challenges are piling up.

Mr Rogan, 54, spent his teenage years in in Newton Upper Falls. He lived in a large, wooden-clad home near Echo Bridge which spans the Charles River in a scenic area known as Hemlock Gorge.

Originally a mill village, Newton Upper Falls is now largely protected as a historic area and is among the 15 per cent highest-income neighbourhoods in America.

For the town, as is true across the US, climate change can be viewed through a local lens and as part of a much bigger picture.

In the Northeast, the last few decades are the warmest in the past 1,500 years and the region is heating up faster than the global average.

Average annual temperatures have increased about 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius) or more in New England since 1901, according to the latest National Climate Assessment (NCA), a congressionally-mandated report which involves work from hundreds of scientists.

Newton’s heat is rising in line with the broader region, according to data gathered from the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, less than 10 miles from the town.

“In urban communities, heat can be a significant threat to human health, particularly in marginalised and under-resourced communities,” Dr Heather Goldstone, from the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts told The Independent.

Along with increased heat, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and leads to greater humidity. The combination can be lethal: particularly as heatwaves are now lasting longer and failing to cool off at night, amplifying health risks.

More heat and humidity makes it difficult for people who live with respiratory conditions, and vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor.

A 2020 study, led by Boston University’s School of Public Health, found that thousands of US deaths may be attributable to heat each year, far more than the 600 deaths previously estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Higher temperatures can also drive more insect-borne diseases, EPA notes. There is more likelihood of people being exposed to ticks that transmit Lyme disease (which are active when temperatures top 45F) and excessive heat also makes more of New England hot enough for the Asian tiger mosquito, a carrier of West Nile virus.

Temperature increases will have potential consequences for some of New England’s most iconic industries.

“Changes in fall weather are impacting cranberry production and maple syrup production,” Dr Goldstone says. “Changes in winter temperatures and snowfall impacts the ski industry further north.

“On Cape Cod, it’s hard to go fishing for cod now. In large part that’s because of overfishing but climate change is thought to be playing a significant role in why cod fisheries are not responding to [catch] limits, and not rebounding as expected.

“More than half of commercially-fished species have shifted from where they are found in the ocean as a result of increasing water temperatures off our coast.”

Then there’s the rain. The Northeast has seen among the most dramatic increases in extreme precipitation of anywhere in the country, leading to more dangerous and destructive flooding.

Rainfall in Boston has jumped 10 per cent since the Seventies and there has been a 71 per cent increase in how much rain falls in the top 1 per cent of storms.

A decade ago, severe downpours in Newton led to millions of dollars in damages and disrupted service on the Green Line of Boston’s light rail system. A third of city facilities flooded, according to a City of Newton climate change vulnerability assessment in 2018.

“As rainfall amounts increase, rain events similar to 2010 will become more frequent. A one-thousand year event would nearly double the rainfall experienced over three days in March 2010,” Newton’s researchers wrote.

A steady march of hurricanes and superstorms – Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Ida – have led to the loss of lives and livelihoods across the Northeast.

The fingerprint of the climate crisis is in this extreme weather. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, found that storms with sustained higher wind speeds – in the Category 3-5 range – have likely increased in the past 40 years. The ocean is absorbing over 90 per cent of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, primarily caused by burning of fossil fuels. All that warm water feeds into hurricane power.

“As is evident from Hurricane Harvey, damage and suffering from such an extreme event is severe. Indeed, flooding or extreme heat, and the resultant potential for power outages can have devastating and cascading effects during far lesser storms than a one-in-one-thousand-year occurrence,” Newton’s climate report states.

This August, Tropical Storm Fred brought another bout of flash-flooding across Boston leaving dozens of people stuck in submerged vehicles. In one terrifying snapshot from Newton, a driver narrowly escaped via his sunroof when a small brook suddenly became a powerful torrent and swept his car away.

More rainfall in Newton has raised concerns about the 12 dams that surround the area and were “most likely designed based on historic weather patterns”. More rain could mean potential breaches or failures of these dams, some of which were first built centuries ago.

“In many instances, potential impacts of a warming climate do not prompt entirely new challenges, but rather, exacerbate existing concerns,” Newton’s assessment sagely points out.

More frequent and intense rainfall could increase flooding and stormwater hazards in a town where they are already concerns. Predictably, areas of greatest concern are along waterways including the Charles River, Bullough’s Pond and number of smaller brooks that flow through town, but also less-obvious places with poor drainage.

During a serious storm in 2010, more than 700 homes and 25 city buildings were damaged, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency records. “City officials suggest that the number of homes affected by flooding may have been closer to 2,000,” Newton’s report notes.

Increased vulnerability to flooding has economic repercussions, too, particularly if it puts highways and public transport out of bounds. Eight in 10 workers who live in Newton commute to their jobs, with roughly a third heading for downtown Boston.

For coastal communities, more rain and flash floods are a double whammy with increased sea-level rise and shoreline erosion. In tourist-magnet towns along Massachusetts cherished coastline, climate impacts put at risk the infrastructure they need to operate: highways, rail lines, parking lots, pavilions, boardwalks along with “cultural landscapes and historic structures”. Saltwater intrusion poses a threat to drinking water supplies.

For Boston, the total cost of storm damages this century could range from $5bn to $100bn, depending on how the city responds to rising sea level, the US Environmental Protection Agency reports.

Newton also warns that extreme weather could lead to financial shocks for residents and business owners due to disruption, reduced spending, property damages and loss.

Some 40 per cent of Newton’s businesses are located in areas that suffer from particularly high temperatures, a specific concern for the estimated 1,800 people in the area who work outside.

“The really important thing to realise is that the impacts of climate change at this point are pervasive impacts on people’s lives and their livelihoods. They are widespread and undeniable,” Dr Goldstone said. “We’re seeing that reflected in public opinion. People are realising, ‘Oh this is climate change and it is impacting my daily life where I live.’”

Dr Goldstone pointed to the recent NOAA study which found that weather and climate disaster events resulted in the deaths of 688 people in 2021.

“This is not just about dollars and cents, it’s really about people’s lives,” she added.

While the city of Boston has developed a reputation as a leader in progressive climate action, neighbouring Newton is no shirker in this regard. The city has developed a five-year action plan through to 2025 titled “Use Less and Green the Rest” with an eye to carbon neutrality by 2050.

Among the plans are boosting clean energy with municipal solar arrays and promoting rooftop solar among residents.

Newton’s residents, workforce, and visitors will be supported in switching to electric vehicles alongside plans to install EV charging stations in village centres, schools, and other municipal sites. Biking, walking, telecommuting, public transport, and shared trips will be encouraged over single driver journeys, and supported with infrastructure.

New construction will have to meet carbon neutrality standards while old buildings will be refitted with energy efficient technology to reduce natural gas and heating oil use. At the same time, protecting natural resources and reducing consumption and waste is high on the priorities.

Prof Phillips noted that as a town, Newton is “very engaged” on climate but said that even in the most progressive places, there remains much more work to be done.

He advocates for the “democratisation of energy” – making people less reliant on centralised power grids and upping localised renewable options like individual or community solar panels and increasing battery storage. It also includes a shift from gas-powered vehicles, not just to electric cars but bikes and e-bikes. “Human-powered resilience for mobility, for example, if there’s a big gasoline spike,” he explained.

Prof Phillips cited the example of Texas (where, incidentally, Mr Rogan now lives in a $20m mansion outside of Austin). The Lone Star state last year suffered a grid-wide power outage which left more than 200 people dead during a historic deep freeze (Texas is facing more extreme cold this week, with all eyes once again looking at how the power grid will hold up).

With so much at stake, Prof Phillips says that Mr Rogan using his platform for climate misinformation is a missed opportunity.

“Joe Rogan could focus on these huge, unifying solutions rather than taking the easy way out and getting clicks with climate denial which just sets us back,” he said.

“He seems energetic, creative and engaged. He could use that in so much more of a constructive way.”