New book makes case for protest

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Even if you’re a savvy Facebook or Instagram user, you may not realize that some of the advertisements in your feed depend on the weather in your location. Keep an eye out for them: You might see a pizza chain telling you that you should order delivery because it’s too hot to cook, or a sunscreen brand warning you that the UV index is getting high. 

What does this have to do with climate change? Well, we here at Yale Climate Connections realized that we could harness this system. We could use it to deploy Facebook and Instagram advertisements that help people stay safe when dangerous weather events occur in their area – say, the heat wave roasting the U.S. East Coast this weekend. 

With support from our partners at the CO2 Foundation, we’ve been testing the idea this summer. We created heat-related campaigns that turn on and off automatically. When temperatures spike in five U.S. cities, users see a Facebook ad warning them that they need a heat safety plan. Then, as the weather cools, the advertisements switch off by themselves. It’s a simple way to get lifesaving information in front of the people who need it. 

So far, it’s working amazingly well. We’re surveying those who see the ads, and most say they’re “extremely likely” to follow our heat-safety advice.

With potentially deadly heat plaguing millions of Americans this week, the ads have switched on and are running in Miami, New York City, Minneapolis, Denver, and Phoenix. If you live in one of those cities and use Facebook, let me know if you spot one. And please stay safe this weekend.

– Sara Peach, Editor-in-Chief 

P.S. If you missed Sam Harrington and Cyndi Norrie’s conversation yesterday about heat waves, despair, climate communication, and so much more, you can watch the recording here.

A new book aims to change your image of protest

Michael Svoboda reports: 

Authors and activists Annie Leonard and Andre Carothers are optimistic about the future. It’s the present that gives them pause.

“If one takes the longer view,” Leonard said in a conversation with Yale Climate Connections before their appearance at Washington, D.C.’s Busboy’s and Poets, “we’ve made a lot of progress. “Fifty years ago, a woman couldn’t have a credit card without her husband’s permission.”

“When I was born,” Carothers added, “there were still segregated water fountains across the South.”

But there has been a backlash to hard-won rights and freedoms.

“The enemies of a multiracial, healthy, and sustainable democracy [have risen] up against all the progress we have made,” Leonard said. “Our democracy is under threat.”

In response, Leonard and Carothers set out to help concerned citizens make their way through the beleaguered present to a positive future. Protest, they want people to understand, has been an essential part of the process of expanding and protecting our freedoms and our homes, including the ecosystems that support them.

But when people try to exercise these rights, too often they are vilified in the media and harassed by authorities.

Although there’s a bronze statue of Rosa Parks in the Capitol Building now, when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus in 1955, public anger forced her to flee the city.

“We are on a mission to rehabilitate the image of protest,” Leonard said.

The vehicle for this mission is a book, “Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It.”

Through a series of historical vignettes, it shows how protest has catalyzed the socioeconomic, political, and environmental progress we take for granted today.

Visually delightful snapshots of protest

“Protest” could be described as a coffee-table book: oversize, richly illustrated, and divided into many short, easily digested chapters.

In his introduction, Carothers emphasizes “the long arc of protest,” from Socrates’ performative death to the civil actions of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela. In her introduction, Leonard describes the tactics now used to muffle or muzzle nonviolent protestors: the demonization of dissent, administrative harassment, lawsuits, and laws prohibiting protest.

The 42 chapters profile protests from 1738 – when abolitionist Benjamin Lay denounced slaveholding Philadelphia Quakers by splashing them with blood-colored berry juice – to the 2025 “No Kings” rallies that gathered in cities around the U.S.

Interspersed among these chapters are page-spreads of pithy quotes about protest and personal reflections on nonviolent civil action from 13 activists, including Jane Fonda.

The goal was to present protest in all its varieties and worldwide, from the actions of individuals, like Rosa Parks and Greta Thunberg, to the coordinated demonstrations of thousands across an entire country, as with the first Earth Day and the George Floyd memorials.

On the road, Leonard and Carothers have teamed up with local activists and organizers. Sometimes the book signing served as the opening session for an extended training program in which participants learned how to recognize and subvert the tactics authoritarians use to disable or dismantle democratic processes, norms, and guardrails. Keep reading.

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Tom Toro is the author of the cartoon collection “And to Think We Started as a Book Club…” and the creator of the comic Substack “Undiscovered Masterpieces.”