Are We Past the Peak of Big Oil’s Power?

The coronavirus crisis has both obscured and illuminated one of the most seismic developments on our planet in many decades: I think it's now clear that the power of the fossil-fuel industry has decisively passed its zenith. It's not a spent force by any means, but, even in the past few weeks, events have shown it to be waning where for a century and a half it has waxed...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/are-we-past-the-peak-of-big-oils-power?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Tweet from Maria Popova (@brainpicker)

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 8:34 PM on Wed, May 27, 2020: “Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.” (https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1265818699879022593?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Alan Weisman’s Thought Experiment Becomes a Reality

"The World Without Us," imagines what Earth would look like if everyone vanished.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/01/after-covid-19-will-nature-take-over?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

NYTimes.com: What a Week’s Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the Pandemic

From The New York Times:

What a Week's Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the Pandemic

Extreme weather presents an even bigger threat when economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/climate/climate-change-coronavirus.html?smid=em-share

Climate mindset (TED)

Sent to you by Phil Oliver (phil.oliver@mtsu.edu)

Tom Rivett-Carnac: How Can We Shift Our Mindset To Fight Climate Change Together?

...Coronavirus and climate - there are many ways in which they're connected. They're both global challenges that are coming at us at this moment. They both require us to step up as individuals and as society. They require us to replenish our trust in our faith in science. They require us to collaborate, and they make us realize that we are only as strong as the weakest member of our societies. And the other thing that they do is they require us to take strong action without being able to control the outcome. No one individual can take action that can prevent the spread of coronavirus. And in my talk, I talk about some of these health care workers. And what was kind of instructive to me as I looked at it was I realized that as long as you feel like you're - what you're doing has meaning and purpose, you'll take action even if you can't control the outcome. That's why those nurses, you know, so - in such an inspiring way, take such action, put themselves in such risk to do all these different things. That's also the story of transformation of the world going back generations in times of great challenge and conflict and difficulty. People couldn't control that, but they felt a sense of purpose and meaning in engaging with the issue... (continues)

"How can we wrap our minds, healthily and constructively, around the climate crisis?" TED Radio Hour Exploring the biggest questions of our time with the help of the world's greatest thinkers. Host Manoush Zomorodi inspires us to learn more about the world, our communities, and most importantly, ourselves. Read More This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Privacy Policy

Orion Magazine | Nature, Culture & Place

https://orionmagazine.org/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet by Sarah Jaquette Ray

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50747101-a-field-guide-to-climate-anxiety

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Listen to Climate Mindset on Apple Podcasts

Listen to Climate Mindset from TED Radio Hour on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ted-radio-hour/id523121474?i=1000475379081

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Tweet from Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) tweeted at 9:32 AM on Thu, May 21, 2020: After aggressive campaign by @greenpeaceusa and others, Google says it will stop selling its tech to oil companies trying to find yet more carbon. A lot of big players are starting to shun the oil boys https://t.co/WBxZxqRQK2 (https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1263477739597725698?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Climate Interactive

En-ROADS simulator website...

What Will It Take to Cool the Planet?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/what-will-it-take-to-cool-the-planet?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

NYTimes.com: Even My Strawberry Seedling Has a Virus

From The New York Times:

Even My Strawberry Seedling Has a Virus

Plants can get sick, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-plants-viruses-farms.html?smid=em-share

NYTimes.com: The End of Meat Is Here

From The New York Times:

The End of Meat Is Here

If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html?smid=em-share

Emerson and Environmental Ethics

Emerson recalled his response to an "ardent missionary"... “Other world!” answered Emerson, “there is no other world, God is one and omnipresent: here or nowhere is the whole fact” (LL 2:269). In reading nature, Emerson was not climbing up and out of Plato's cave into blinding light.

(That's God spelled n-a-t-u-r-e)



Emerson and Environmental Ethics, Susan L. Dunston, Lexington Books 2018

NYTimes: Thinking of Buying a Bike? Get Ready for a Very Long Wait

Thinking of Buying a Bike? Get Ready for a Very Long Wait
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/nyregion/bike-shortage-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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Toxic lawns

All y’all surviving this pandemic through yard work: Please don’t spray. When we poison the bugs and the weeds, we are also poisoning the turtles and tree frogs, the bats and screech owls, the songbirds and skinks. And ourselves. Via ⁦@nytopinion⁩: https://t.co/uo7qWdj4v2

— Margaret Renkl (@MargaretRenkl) May 18, 2020

Tweet by Bill McKibben on Twitter

	Bill McKibben ⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩ Thanks to 60 Minutes for a safe, socially distanced Vermont interview, and for taking seriously the idea that we're going to have to make some changes on this earth   5/17/20, 7:12 PM

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Tweet by 60 Minutes on Twitter

	60 Minutes ⁦‪@60Minutes‬⁩ Author Bill McKibben says we now have an opportunity to flatten another curve after coronavirus: "Flatten the carbon curve too… [T]hen people might look back in 50 years at this time and thank us, you know, instead of curse us." cbsn.ws/2WD56H6 pic.twitter.com/TN3T9U9iXq   5/17/20, 6:53 PM

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Michael Pollan on our broken food system

The Sickness in Our Food Supply @michaelpollan https://t.co/xEflKbxkBW via @nybooks

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 14, 2020

...The food chain is buckling. But it’s worth pointing out that there are parts of it that are adapting and doing relatively well. Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets; the popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) is taking off, as people who are cooking at home sign up for weekly boxes of produce from regional growers. (The renaissance of home cooking, and baking, is one of the happier consequences of the lockdown, good news both for our health and for farmers who grow actual food, as opposed to commodities like corn and soy.) In many places, farmer’s markets have quickly adjusted to pandemic conditions, instituting social-distancing rules and touchless payment systems. The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.

The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.

It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.

Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes. These “underlying conditions” happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes.9

Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system. (The Western diet is by itself inflammatory.) One way that Covid-19 kills is by sending the victim’s immune system into hyperdrive, igniting a “cytokine storm” that eventually destroys the lungs and other organs. A new Chinese study conducted in hospitals in Wuhan found that elevated levels of C-reactive protein, a standard marker of inflammation that has been linked to poor diet, “correlated with disease severity and tended to be a good predictor of adverse outcomes.”10

Amomentous question awaits us on the far side of the current crisis: Are we willing to address the many vulnerabilities that the novel coronavirus has so dramatically exposed? It’s not hard to imagine a coherent and powerful new politics organized around precisely that principle. It would address the mistreatment of essential workers and gaping holes in the social safety net, including access to health care and sick leave—which we now understand, if we didn’t before, would be a benefit to all of us. It would treat public health as a matter of national security, giving it the kind of resources that threats to national security warrant.

But to be comprehensive, this post-pandemic politics would also need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.

—May 12, 2020

nybooks.com

NYTimes: In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.

In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/climate/coronavirus-coal-electricity-renewables.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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When Pollution Meets a Pandemic

https://mailchi.mp/orionmagazine/the-autumn-2019-issue-is-here-3710664?e=3430e17d77

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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A peripatetic cosmic calendar

A footstep analogy: imagine each step represents a century... (The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses by Peter Brannen g'r)

Luckily, geologists have come up with some mental tricks to help us grok our place among the eons. One of them involves a footstep analogy* that goes something like the following: imagine each step you take represents 100 years of history... After only a few dozen steps—before you can even reach the end of the block—all of recorded history peters out... You would  have to keep walking for 20 miles a day, every day, for four years to cover the rest of the planet's history...

One Crisis Doesn’t Stop Because Another Starts

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/one-crisis-doesnt-stop-because-another-starts?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Tweet by EcoWatch on Twitter

	EcoWatch ⁦‪@EcoWatch‬⁩ #Trump Dismantles Environmental Protections Under Cover of #Coronavirus ow.ly/9h9m30qFIa8 ⁦‪@DeSmogBlog‬⁩ M  5/13/20, 6:00 PM

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Tweet by New Philosopher magazine on Twitter

	New Philosopher magazine ⁦‪@TheNewPhil‬⁩ 13 views on climate change, from the 'Climate' edition. pic.twitter.com/jXN7f0aU8r   5/12/20, 5:05 PM

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NYTimes.com: Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.

From The New York Times:

Climate Change Is Complex. We've Got Answers to Your Questions.

We know. Global warming is daunting. So here's a place to start: 17 often-asked questions with some straightforward answers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/climate/what-is-climate-change.html

Believe

“God,” he decides, is a code word. When the people in the book say God, they mean nature. What’s more, if God equals nature, then Jesus equals science...for science to save us we have to believe in it. https://t.co/dVz483AWSd

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 10, 2020

NYTimes: 95 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump

95 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

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A centenarian's dream

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

by 

James Lovelock

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

New beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants - as desperately slow acting and thinking creatures. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by sci-fi writers and film-makers. These hyper-intelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project.

It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Maybe, he speculates, the novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos. At the age 100, James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life. g'r

Michael Moore's Planet

I truly hope that Michael Moore does not succeed at dividing the climate movement. Too many have fought too long to build it.https://t.co/ScBWwMzoYK

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) May 1, 2020

Georgia...

on my out of her mind

These are the kind of foolish, anti-science actions that those of us who cover the climate emergency see with alarming frequency. https://t.co/DQD0IpSq68

— grist (@grist) May 2, 2020

Spinoza the environmentalist

We are nature
Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world

In his book Novacene (2019), James Lovelock writes: ‘We must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature … The Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; … an expression of nature.’

This insight resonates with the 17th-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Lovelock is the inventor of Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is one living organism that regulates and strives to preserve itself. Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ is an alternative name for what Spinoza in his Ethics calls ‘God, or nature’: the one individual who makes up the entire universe, ‘whose parts … vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole Individual’. Lovelock follows Spinoza in believing that humans and our actions are expressions of nature, even when we appear to destroy nature. He follows Spinoza too in holding that we should rejoice in what the Anthropocene has made possible: massive increases of human activity and knowledge.

But how can we feel good about 400 years of decimating the natural environment and causing anthropogenic climate change? How can we get over our feelings of guilt, fear and despair about our impact on nature – and why should we try to do so?

...We now understand, in a way that Spinoza did not, that the flourishing of ice caps, trees and butterflies does have a direct impact on our flourishing. Spinoza understands that all things are interconnected parts of nature, but he understands this in strictly metaphysical terms, not in terms of ecological systems. From his vantage in the 1660s, Spinoza would not have understood that it is good, and indeed necessary, for the preservation of human life that the ice caps remain frozen and the Amazon forest remains intact. The understanding of our profound interdependence on all of nature, in a biological sense, is a product of the knowledge we have gained in the late Anthropocene; Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson was pioneering in this regard...

Aeon (Thanks, Ed)

Tweet from Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) tweeted at 3:39 PM on Fri, May 01, 2020: I truly hope that Michael Moore does not succeed at dividing the climate movement. Too many have fought too long to build it. https://t.co/ScBWwMzoYK (https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1256322296039436289?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13