Meet Baela, the Twitch Streamer Who’s Also a Climate Activist

A rare combo, but an impressive one nonetheless.

Courtesy of Baela on Twitch.

If it seems like the threat of climate change is creeping ever so closer, the response to it hasn’t been full-throated yet. The United States elected its most ardent climate denialist back in 2016, and while climate change has become an important piece of Democrats’ messaging for the upcoming elections, the fact remains that the climate movement in America is at a distinct disadvantage while political capital hasn’t yet coalesced around enacting sensible climate policy, or better yet, the ambitious piece of legislation that is the Green New Deal.

The conversations surrounding Twitch as a platform remain very focused on gaming — after all, that’s where most of the attention is — but as the IRL genre started picking up steam, some have taken to an expressed appetite by the audience to do their own versions of the talk show, with the only difference being that the host is not a conspiratorial far-right demagogue.

The script of BreadTube and leftist Twitch streamers has traditionally been to form an identity that is molded by and shaped around their political beliefs. If you’re an anarchist, however niche your ideology is, an audience is bound to find your content and bolster their own sense of group identity…