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Sunday, June 5, 2022
Oceans
The promise of natality
Hannah Arendt would agree.
The people who have devoted their lives to combating climate change keep having children...“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life”... https://t.co/J6j1xW1rzM
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 5, 2022
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Bill McKibben, American Idealist, Sours on America’s Ideals
In "The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon," an activist finds flaws in patriotism, faith and suburban life and urges fellow baby boomers to change.
In his writings, his many speeches and bullhorn exhortations, Bill McKibben comes across as one of the least cynical people on the battlefield of public opinion. He's passionate about solving problems others have given up on, about building a better world and particularly about climate change, the issue that has made him the Paul Revere of alarm about our fevered planet.
Growing up, he actually sang "Kumbaya" around a campfire — "always earnestly," he says. He won the Gandhi Peace Award and the Thomas Merton Award. One day, perhaps, he'll win the real Nobel to go with the so-called alternative Nobel, which he's already been awarded, the Right Livelihood Award. As is sometimes said about effective environmentalists, he'll make a great ancestor.
His latest book is a slim cri de coeur about the rot at the base of his biographical foundations. McKibben finds his country, his religion and the suburban lifestyle of his youth to be so flawed that he's ready to divorce much of his past... nyt
In his writings, his many speeches and bullhorn exhortations, Bill McKibben comes across as one of the least cynical people on the battlefield of public opinion. He's passionate about solving problems others have given up on, about building a better world and particularly about climate change, the issue that has made him the Paul Revere of alarm about our fevered planet.
Growing up, he actually sang "Kumbaya" around a campfire — "always earnestly," he says. He won the Gandhi Peace Award and the Thomas Merton Award. One day, perhaps, he'll win the real Nobel to go with the so-called alternative Nobel, which he's already been awarded, the Right Livelihood Award. As is sometimes said about effective environmentalists, he'll make a great ancestor.
His latest book is a slim cri de coeur about the rot at the base of his biographical foundations. McKibben finds his country, his religion and the suburban lifestyle of his youth to be so flawed that he's ready to divorce much of his past... nyt
Monday, May 30, 2022
Sunday, May 29, 2022
An essential connection
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Thursday, May 26, 2022
The Rise and Fall of America’s Environmentalist Underground
This year, one of the last fugitives of the Earth Liberation Front pleaded guilty to arson — at a moment when climate activists are again flirting with radical ideas.
...After decades in which America's environmental movement confined its activities largely to rallies, marches and other lawful forms of protest, frustrated activists have begun taking a more confrontational approach. Younger groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have blockaded roads and occupied the offices of lawmakers. During the Standing Rock protests of 2016, thousands of demonstrators sought to physically impede construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Tim DeChristopher, a founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, which supports protesters who engage in nonviolent resistance, told me that, in the 2000s, such direct action was championed mostly by a fringe group of anarchists. (DeChristopher himself was sent to prison after placing winning bids at public auctions for oil and gas leases and then refusing to pay.) Now, even staid Washington-based environmental groups, sensing an increasingly unruly mood among their base, have slowly started to embrace more radical tactics. In 2017, the Sierra Club formally lifted its 120-year ban on civil disobedience after its executive director and other senior members were arrested for strapping themselves to a gate outside the White House.
Recently, some climate activists have begun to openly contemplate the possibility — in their eyes, the necessity — of directly sabotaging the infrastructure of the carbon economy. Foremost among them is the academic Andreas Malm, whose recent book, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," calls for smashing the tools of fossil-fuel extraction as a last-ditch means of averting ecological collapse. In interviews with mainstream outlets such as Vox and The New Yorker, Malm contends that climate activists should give up their dogmatic attachment to pacifism and start to destroy the machines that actually produce carbon. While acknowledging that such attacks might fail, Malm nevertheless argues that the urgency of global warming — in the 16 years since [Joseph] Dibee's indictment, the world has collectively pumped about 500 billion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere — demands new tactics. "I think that the situation is so dire, so extreme," he told Vox, "that we have to experiment."
...
nyt
...After decades in which America's environmental movement confined its activities largely to rallies, marches and other lawful forms of protest, frustrated activists have begun taking a more confrontational approach. Younger groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have blockaded roads and occupied the offices of lawmakers. During the Standing Rock protests of 2016, thousands of demonstrators sought to physically impede construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Tim DeChristopher, a founder of the Climate Disobedience Center, which supports protesters who engage in nonviolent resistance, told me that, in the 2000s, such direct action was championed mostly by a fringe group of anarchists. (DeChristopher himself was sent to prison after placing winning bids at public auctions for oil and gas leases and then refusing to pay.) Now, even staid Washington-based environmental groups, sensing an increasingly unruly mood among their base, have slowly started to embrace more radical tactics. In 2017, the Sierra Club formally lifted its 120-year ban on civil disobedience after its executive director and other senior members were arrested for strapping themselves to a gate outside the White House.
Recently, some climate activists have begun to openly contemplate the possibility — in their eyes, the necessity — of directly sabotaging the infrastructure of the carbon economy. Foremost among them is the academic Andreas Malm, whose recent book, "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," calls for smashing the tools of fossil-fuel extraction as a last-ditch means of averting ecological collapse. In interviews with mainstream outlets such as Vox and The New Yorker, Malm contends that climate activists should give up their dogmatic attachment to pacifism and start to destroy the machines that actually produce carbon. While acknowledging that such attacks might fail, Malm nevertheless argues that the urgency of global warming — in the 16 years since [Joseph] Dibee's indictment, the world has collectively pumped about 500 billion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere — demands new tactics. "I think that the situation is so dire, so extreme," he told Vox, "that we have to experiment."
...
nyt
Monday, May 16, 2022
One Way to Do More for the Environment: Do Less With Your Yard
Every year we let more patches of our yard go wild, and every year more flowers appear in the uncut areas.
...I wonder if more people don't try to do better by the environment because they think doing better is too hard, too impractical, too expensive. In truth, you can make a difference with an effort as small as planting milkweed in a pot on a city balcony to provide food for monarch butterfly caterpillars. Making a difference can be as easy as learning to love clover and dandelions. It can be as simple as joining the No Mow May movement, a British initiative rapidly spreading across the United States, or the Garden Club of America's Great Healthy Yard Project... Margaret Renkl
...I wonder if more people don't try to do better by the environment because they think doing better is too hard, too impractical, too expensive. In truth, you can make a difference with an effort as small as planting milkweed in a pot on a city balcony to provide food for monarch butterfly caterpillars. Making a difference can be as easy as learning to love clover and dandelions. It can be as simple as joining the No Mow May movement, a British initiative rapidly spreading across the United States, or the Garden Club of America's Great Healthy Yard Project... Margaret Renkl
Sunday, May 15, 2022
A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’
Last fall, the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was asked to predict what the world will look like in 2050. He was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and the atmosphere at the summit — billed as the "last, best hope" to save the planet — was bleak.
But Robinson, whose novel, "The Ministry for the Future," lays out a path for humanity that narrowly averts a biosphere collapse, sounded a note of cautious optimism. Overcome with emotion at times, he raised the possibility of a near future marked by "human accomplishment and solidarity."
"It should not be a solitary day dream of a writer sitting in his garden, imagining there could be a better world," Robinson told the crowd.'
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/books/kim-stanley-robinson-sci-fi.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/books/kim-stanley-robinson-sci-fi.html?referringSource=articleShare
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Can Anyone Out-Plan a Pandemic?
Bill Gates has a strategy to save the world from the next infectious threat. He’s not the first.
...To believe that you need only a plan rests on an assumption that humans are rational creatures who have roughly the same values and priorities as you do, and—even more improbable—that humans are inclined to follow plans of any kind. After all, when Gates laid out a strategy for solving climate change last year, he was boldly going where world leaders had gone many, many times before without success. The United Nations has held no fewer than 26 annual climate-change conferences. The world committed to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, but failed to meet its goals. The Paris Agreement is seven years old, and the UN itself says we’re falling short. But Gates told me that the plan he offered in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster has already done some good for the planet...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/05/bill-gatess-plan-save-world-next-pandemic/629826/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Agricultural ethics
Speaking of agriculture (see next post)...
An interesting query:I am retired Professor from Colorado State University. My current interest is agriculture and the ethics of agriculture. The third edition of my book - Agriculture's Ethical Horizon was published earlier this year by Elsevier/Academic Press. I did a survey in 1999 of all the US land-grant universities to determine how many had a course on agricultural ethics. The survey was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (13:229-247, 2000). I repeated the survey but did not publish it in 2012. In 1999 there were 15 courses. In 2012 it had fallen to 9. I'm doing the survey again and write to you because your university specializes in agriculture. I write to ask if you have a course in environmental ethics and if it covers anything about agriculture and if you have a course in agricultural ethics... R. L. Zimdahl
Vaclav Smil Says Climate Activists Need to Get Real
Everything You Thought You Knew, and Why You're Wrong
A scientist and policy analyst examines the systems that rule our world, denounces easy solutions and makes the case for uncertainty.
...every fundamental aspect of modern civilization rests overwhelmingly on fossil fuel combustion. Take our food system. Readers of Michael Pollan or Amanda Little understand that it's morally indefensible to purchase Chilean blueberries or, God forbid, New Zealand lamb. But even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, and a supermarket tomato, which Smil describes as no more than "an appealingly shaped container of water" (apologies to Marcella Hazan), is the product of about six tablespoons of diesel. "How many vegans enjoying the salad," he writes, "are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?"
... nyt
...every fundamental aspect of modern civilization rests overwhelmingly on fossil fuel combustion. Take our food system. Readers of Michael Pollan or Amanda Little understand that it's morally indefensible to purchase Chilean blueberries or, God forbid, New Zealand lamb. But even a humble loaf of sourdough requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, and a supermarket tomato, which Smil describes as no more than "an appealingly shaped container of water" (apologies to Marcella Hazan), is the product of about six tablespoons of diesel. "How many vegans enjoying the salad," he writes, "are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?"
... nyt
Friday, May 6, 2022
Sunday, May 1, 2022
A ‘Life-Affirming’ Remedy for Climate Despair
Wynn Bruce's death can teach us that climate anxiety and despair can be channeled into constructive action.
One effort we support is Scientist Rebellion, a group of over 1,000 scientists around the world. They are angry and fearful of climate change, and have engaged in various forms of civil disobedience including chaining themselves to the White House fence, and covering the Spanish Parliament building with paint the color of blood.
Testimony from these scientists shows people who are radiantly alive, meeting the challenges of the moment Peter Kalmus, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has described chaining himself to a Chase Bank building in Los Angeles last month as "a profoundly spiritual experience — in some way, incredibly satisfying and empowering and hope-giving and life-affirming."
Joining a movement allows us to live for a purpose greater than ourselves, and a collective benefit of a national climate mobilization would be improved mental health. Instead of despair and alienation, we can find a sense of purpose and community in the face of the climate crisis. nyt
One effort we support is Scientist Rebellion, a group of over 1,000 scientists around the world. They are angry and fearful of climate change, and have engaged in various forms of civil disobedience including chaining themselves to the White House fence, and covering the Spanish Parliament building with paint the color of blood.
Testimony from these scientists shows people who are radiantly alive, meeting the challenges of the moment Peter Kalmus, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has described chaining himself to a Chase Bank building in Los Angeles last month as "a profoundly spiritual experience — in some way, incredibly satisfying and empowering and hope-giving and life-affirming."
Joining a movement allows us to live for a purpose greater than ourselves, and a collective benefit of a national climate mobilization would be improved mental health. Instead of despair and alienation, we can find a sense of purpose and community in the face of the climate crisis. nyt
Monday, April 25, 2022
Why Our Hope for the Planet Is Not Yet Extinct
New life is everywhere, renewing itself among us, reminding us not to give up.
...So we cling to good news in whatever form it takes. Whether it's tenuously hopeful global news (like the I.P.C.C.'s report that we still have time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change) or encouraging local news (like the people who are letting their lawns go wild to feed the bees), being reminded of what is yet possible goes a long way toward countering gloom.
...Americans are now more attuned than ever to the peril the natural world is in, and that is my greatest reason for hope. Ideological holdouts may continue to insist that climate change is a liberal hoax, and clueless people may continue to give the matter no thought at all. But these groups are no longer the norm. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming. Seventy-seven percent support research into renewable energy. The same percentage believes that children should be taught about climate change in school... Margaret Renkl
...So we cling to good news in whatever form it takes. Whether it's tenuously hopeful global news (like the I.P.C.C.'s report that we still have time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change) or encouraging local news (like the people who are letting their lawns go wild to feed the bees), being reminded of what is yet possible goes a long way toward countering gloom.
...Americans are now more attuned than ever to the peril the natural world is in, and that is my greatest reason for hope. Ideological holdouts may continue to insist that climate change is a liberal hoax, and clueless people may continue to give the matter no thought at all. But these groups are no longer the norm. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming. Seventy-seven percent support research into renewable energy. The same percentage believes that children should be taught about climate change in school... Margaret Renkl
Saturday, April 23, 2022
Friday, April 22, 2022
Earth Day 2022
Today's annual Earth Day Doodle features real time-lapse imagery from Google Earth and other sources showing the impacts of climate change across our planet.
http://www.google.com/doodles/earth-day-2022
http://www.google.com/doodles/earth-day-2022
This Earth Day, We Could Be Helping the Environment—and Ukraine
Even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the Ukrainians, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.
"For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today's Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions." Bill McKibben, continues
"For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today's Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions." Bill McKibben, continues
Monday, April 18, 2022
Ministry for the future
Kim Stanley Robinson hasn't stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. We're going to read his Ministry for the Future in Environmental Ethics this Fall, alongside Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken, and the Sunrise Movement.
"Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face." (g'r)Yes, it's a work of fiction, of the imagination; but that's the source of possibility and the power of maybe. Maybe life will be worth living, climatically speaking, in the decades to come. Dreaming it is a necessary condition of its reality.
The burning source of all our power gets a cameo chapter and speaks bluntly.
“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”
We don't need to worship Sol, but we do need to respect her. Now. KSR says this possible future had best begin no later than January 2025. The window is shrinking fast.
Friday, April 8, 2022
Barbara Kingsolver
It’s the birthday of American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (books by this author) born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in rural Kentucky and spent part of her childhood in the Congo, where her father was a physician and the family lived without running water or electricity. Both experiences left her passionate about social justice and biodiversity, issues that she explores in all her novels, especially The Poisonwood Bible (1998) — and Flight Behavior (2012) which tackles the effects of global climate change on monarch butterflies. In her memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) she described how her family moved from Arizona to a farm in Virginia, and spent a year growing all their food, from tomatoes to raising chickens and turkeys.
Kingsolver’s most recent work is a book of poetry published in 2020, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). WA
Monday, March 28, 2022
No mow
In Wisconsin: Stowing Mowers, Pleasing Bees
Can the No Mow May movement help transform the traditional American lawn — a manicured carpet of grass — into something more ecologically beneficial?
...Bees are facing catastrophic declines. In North America, nearly one in four native bee species is imperiled, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, partly because of habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change and urbanization.
Lawns typically provide poor habitat for bees. But if allowed to flower, lawn weeds — perhaps better characterized as plants other than grass — can provide rare spring food for bees emerging from hibernation.
Appleton, some 200 miles north of Chicago, is a small college town nestled on the shores of the meandering Fox River. Two assistant professors at a local liberal arts college, Dr. Israel Del Toro and Dr. Relena Ribbons of Lawrence University, knew that No Mow May was popular in Britain. They wondered if the initiative might take root here, too.
They began working with the Appleton Common Council, and, in 2020, Appleton became the first city in the United States to adopt No Mow May, with 435 homes registering to take part... nyt
...Bees are facing catastrophic declines. In North America, nearly one in four native bee species is imperiled, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, partly because of habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change and urbanization.
Lawns typically provide poor habitat for bees. But if allowed to flower, lawn weeds — perhaps better characterized as plants other than grass — can provide rare spring food for bees emerging from hibernation.
Appleton, some 200 miles north of Chicago, is a small college town nestled on the shores of the meandering Fox River. Two assistant professors at a local liberal arts college, Dr. Israel Del Toro and Dr. Relena Ribbons of Lawrence University, knew that No Mow May was popular in Britain. They wondered if the initiative might take root here, too.
They began working with the Appleton Common Council, and, in 2020, Appleton became the first city in the United States to adopt No Mow May, with 435 homes registering to take part... nyt
The Boring Bill in Tennessee That Everyone Should Be Watching
Republicans are about freedom and small government only when they’re not the ones in control of the government.
...This particular energy infrastructure bill has ramifications that go far beyond the siting of pipelines. It is part of a last-gasp effort by the fossil fuel industry to override what everybody knows, even here in Tennessee, is our green energy future. “This is a seriously big thumb on the scale in favor of the fossil fuels,” George Nolan, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center told The Tennessean. “It says if you’re a local government, you can’t touch fossil fuels.”
...
Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/28/opinion/tennessee-premption-oil-pipeline-bill.html?smid=em-share
Sunday, March 27, 2022
‘OK Doomer’ and the Climate Advocates Who Say It’s Not Too Late
' Alaina Wood is well aware that, planetarily speaking, things aren't looking so great. She's read the dire climate reports, tracked cataclysmic weather events and gone through more than a few dark nights of the soul.
She is also part of a growing cadre of people, many of them young, who are fighting climate doomism, the notion that it's too late to turn things around. They believe that focusing solely on terrible climate news can sow dread and paralysis, foster inaction, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/climate/climate-change-ok-doomer.html?referringSource=articleShare
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
What the Silicon Valley Prophet Sees on the Horizon
Stewart Brand coined the term "personal computer" and was one of the first to envision what digital technology would become. He knows it got messy. He thinks tech can clean itself up.
...Mr. Brand opened the original "Whole Earth Catalog" by writing, "We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it." In his 2007 book, "Whole Earth Discipline," he modified his call to arms: "We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it." His book endorsed nuclear power, genetically modified crops, dense cities and geoengineering.
The book was greeted by many environmentalists with outrage, and many still view him as a turncoat.
Nonetheless he has held fast to his view that nuclear power will be necessary to make the transition away from fossil fuels. At the same time, he acknowledges that he has been surprised by the rapid progress being made in other sustainable technologies. Solar got better faster than he ever expected, he said, as did battery capacity. In the end, for Mr. Brand it remains a question of perspective.
Not long ago he tweeted: "Interesting: how much bad news is anecdotal and good news is statistical. (And how invisible the statistical is.) Still, if only one of the two can be good news, I would rather it be the statistical. It accumulates toward qualitative change that lasts." nyt
...Mr. Brand opened the original "Whole Earth Catalog" by writing, "We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it." In his 2007 book, "Whole Earth Discipline," he modified his call to arms: "We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it." His book endorsed nuclear power, genetically modified crops, dense cities and geoengineering.
The book was greeted by many environmentalists with outrage, and many still view him as a turncoat.
Nonetheless he has held fast to his view that nuclear power will be necessary to make the transition away from fossil fuels. At the same time, he acknowledges that he has been surprised by the rapid progress being made in other sustainable technologies. Solar got better faster than he ever expected, he said, as did battery capacity. In the end, for Mr. Brand it remains a question of perspective.
Not long ago he tweeted: "Interesting: how much bad news is anecdotal and good news is statistical. (And how invisible the statistical is.) Still, if only one of the two can be good news, I would rather it be the statistical. It accumulates toward qualitative change that lasts." nyt
Saturday, March 19, 2022
In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things
The truth is new and counterintuitive: we have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-thingsPodcast: Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket
Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket
Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4
Elon Musk's visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us - with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what Musk missed about them. The Evening Rocket explores Musk's strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies. Follow along on Twitter @ElonMuskPodcast. From Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4. Pushkin Industries may use this feed in the future to debut new podcasts from our catalog. If you'd like to hear more from Jill Lepore, check out her podcast The Last Archive.
Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4
Elon Musk's visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us - with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what Musk missed about them. The Evening Rocket explores Musk's strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies. Follow along on Twitter @ElonMuskPodcast. From Pushkin Industries and BBC Radio 4. Pushkin Industries may use this feed in the future to debut new podcasts from our catalog. If you'd like to hear more from Jill Lepore, check out her podcast The Last Archive.
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket/id1591294233
Monday, March 14, 2022
Good news
I collect climate good news (not to ignore the bad, but to keep people motivated to make more climate good news and face the bad). pic.twitter.com/DpCWaasHKV
— Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) March 13, 2022
Friday, March 11, 2022
Tweet by Bill McKibben on Twitter
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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, March 7, 2022
The Future Is Electric (review by Bill McKibben)
Because electricity is so much more efficient than combustion, totally electrifying our country would cut primary energy use about in half.
If you're looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity's three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat waves from Canada to the Mediterranean, record fires from California to Siberia, record floods from Belgium to Henan. If people in eastern US cities looked up from reading newspaper accounts of the IPCC report, they could see a smoky haze in the sky, the product of blazes a continent away.
That haze lets us see one thing more clearly: some of the solutions long on offer—from a carbon tax to changes in personal behavior—no longer qualify as enough, at least by themselves, since they won't work as quickly as physics demands. The IPCC has told us we need to cut emissions in half in this decade to have any hope of meeting the targets set in the Paris Agreement. There's one obvious route to reaching that goal, and it's the path that Saul Griffith describes in Electrify: we must immediately figure out how to electrify everything we do, and we must supply that electricity with non-carbon energy. The era of setting things on fire—coal, gas, oil, wood—to produce power must end. Instead, we'll have to rely almost entirely on the large flame that burns 93 million miles away.
Born in Australia and educated at MIT, Griffith is now a Californian. He's an engineer and inventor, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, and a serial entrepreneur; among other things, he founded Otherlab, a research and development firm that studies energy usage across the US, and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes the movement to "electrify everything." He's apparently also apolitical (which undermines his analysis, but more on that later). What he understands, above all, is where energy comes from in our world and how it's used. His highly detailed flow charts showing things like the energy demands of outpatient health clinics—roughly equal, we learn, to those of houses of worship—are scattered throughout the book, undergirding his analysis.
As his title suggests, Griffith is fairly single-minded. Electrification is to climate change as the vaccine is to Covid-19—perhaps not a total solution, but an essential one. He begins by pointing out that in the United States, combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75 percent of our contribution to climate change, with agriculture accounting for much of the rest. (His charts, confusingly, use "CO2 emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions" interchangeably; given the emerging prominence of methane as the other significant greenhouse gas, this conflation is misleading, but not enough to dent the basic outline of his argument.) The US uses about 101 quadrillion BTUs (or "quads") of energy a year, and Griffith's data is so granular that he can tell you how much of that goes, for example, toward driving children to school and church (0.7 percent), flying military jets and transport planes (0.5 percent), or lighting billboards (0.005 percent). (continues)
Bill McKibben
If you're looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity's three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat waves from Canada to the Mediterranean, record fires from California to Siberia, record floods from Belgium to Henan. If people in eastern US cities looked up from reading newspaper accounts of the IPCC report, they could see a smoky haze in the sky, the product of blazes a continent away.
That haze lets us see one thing more clearly: some of the solutions long on offer—from a carbon tax to changes in personal behavior—no longer qualify as enough, at least by themselves, since they won't work as quickly as physics demands. The IPCC has told us we need to cut emissions in half in this decade to have any hope of meeting the targets set in the Paris Agreement. There's one obvious route to reaching that goal, and it's the path that Saul Griffith describes in Electrify: we must immediately figure out how to electrify everything we do, and we must supply that electricity with non-carbon energy. The era of setting things on fire—coal, gas, oil, wood—to produce power must end. Instead, we'll have to rely almost entirely on the large flame that burns 93 million miles away.
Born in Australia and educated at MIT, Griffith is now a Californian. He's an engineer and inventor, the recipient of a MacArthur grant, and a serial entrepreneur; among other things, he founded Otherlab, a research and development firm that studies energy usage across the US, and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that promotes the movement to "electrify everything." He's apparently also apolitical (which undermines his analysis, but more on that later). What he understands, above all, is where energy comes from in our world and how it's used. His highly detailed flow charts showing things like the energy demands of outpatient health clinics—roughly equal, we learn, to those of houses of worship—are scattered throughout the book, undergirding his analysis.
As his title suggests, Griffith is fairly single-minded. Electrification is to climate change as the vaccine is to Covid-19—perhaps not a total solution, but an essential one. He begins by pointing out that in the United States, combustion of fossil fuels accounts for 75 percent of our contribution to climate change, with agriculture accounting for much of the rest. (His charts, confusingly, use "CO2 emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions" interchangeably; given the emerging prominence of methane as the other significant greenhouse gas, this conflation is misleading, but not enough to dent the basic outline of his argument.) The US uses about 101 quadrillion BTUs (or "quads") of energy a year, and Griffith's data is so granular that he can tell you how much of that goes, for example, toward driving children to school and church (0.7 percent), flying military jets and transport planes (0.5 percent), or lighting billboards (0.005 percent). (continues)
Bill McKibben
A champion of the unplugged, earth-conscious life, Wendell Berry is still ahead of us
The writer and farmer's impassioned arguments on farming, technology, and the urban-rural divide have taken on a new urgency.
PORT ROYAL, Kentucky — Wendell Berry doesn't like screens. The 85-year-old writer doesn't own a TV, computer, or cellphone. If you call the landline at his country home in Port Royal, you won't reach an answering machine. When he reads this profile, it will be because someone else printed it out. And, if his general approach to life is any indication, he will probably take his time.
It's virtually impossible to imagine life in the modern world without our technological accessories, but Berry has consistently presented this spartan circumstance as a compelling proposition: An unplugged life, rooted in nature, he has argued, is the key to fulfillment.
As urban farms and tiny homes and movements to unplug proliferate, it's clear that Wendell Berry is, once again, ahead of us.
Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency... (continues)
Michael Pollan
PORT ROYAL, Kentucky — Wendell Berry doesn't like screens. The 85-year-old writer doesn't own a TV, computer, or cellphone. If you call the landline at his country home in Port Royal, you won't reach an answering machine. When he reads this profile, it will be because someone else printed it out. And, if his general approach to life is any indication, he will probably take his time.
It's virtually impossible to imagine life in the modern world without our technological accessories, but Berry has consistently presented this spartan circumstance as a compelling proposition: An unplugged life, rooted in nature, he has argued, is the key to fulfillment.
As urban farms and tiny homes and movements to unplug proliferate, it's clear that Wendell Berry is, once again, ahead of us.
Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency... (continues)
Michael Pollan
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
The Latest U.N. Climate Report Paints Another Grim Picture | The New Yorker
…An abridged version of the report, the so-called Summary for Policymakers, would seem to obviate the need for dystopian fiction. "The rise in weather and climate extremes," the summary notes, has already led to "irreversible impacts." Heat waves have become hotter, droughts deeper, and wildfires more frequent. These changes are "contributing to humanitarian crises" that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. What the report calls "global hotspots of high human vulnerability" include East Africa, Central America, and small island nations. So far, at least, attempts to adapt to the changes have been wildly inadequate—"focused more on planning" than actual implementation…
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-latest-un-climate-report-paints-another-grim-picture
Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age | The New Yorker
I asked him if he retains any of his youthful hope that humanity can avoid a cataclysm. He replied that he's become more careful in his use of the word "hope": "Jesus said, 'Take no thought for the morrow,' which I take to mean that if we do the right things today, we'll have done all we really can for tomorrow. OK. So I hope to do the right things today."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age
The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics | The New Yorker
…throughout American history, "whenever we have achieved a phase change it's been young people making it happen."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-youth-movement-trying-to-revolutionize-climate-politics
Thursday, February 3, 2022
Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll
From "Don't Look Up" to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.
...Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book "The Uninhabitable Earth," climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as "we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control." Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us...
Amanda Hess
...Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book "The Uninhabitable Earth," climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as "we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control." Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us...
Amanda Hess
Monday, January 24, 2022
A self-serving argument for carnivorous eating
(Or omnivorous, per Michael Pollan in "Omnivore's Dilemma"...)
If you care about animals, you should eat them. It is not just that you may do so, but you should do so. In fact, you owe it to animals to eat them. It is your duty. Why? Because eating animals benefits them and has benefitted them for a long time. Breeding and eating animals is a very long-standing cultural institution that is a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and animals. We bring animals into existence, care for them, rear them, and then kill and eat them. From this, we get food and other animal products, and they get life. Both sides benefit. I should say that by ‘animals’ here, I mean nonhuman animals. It is true that we are also animals, but we are also more than that, in a way that makes a difference...
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-care-about-animals-it-is-your-moral-duty-to-eat-them?utm_medium=Social
Trees also breathe
How Do You Mourn a 250-Year-Old Giant?
We need to stop thinking of trees as objects that belong to us and come to understand them as long-lived ecosystems temporarily under our protection. We have borrowed them from the past, and we owe them to the future... Margaret Renkl
Saturday, January 15, 2022
This Is No Way to Be Human - The Atlantic
...we need to be more mindful of what this technology has cost us and the vital importance of direct experiences with nature. And by "cost," I mean what Henry David Thoreau meant in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run..." Alan Lightman
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/machine-garden-natureless-world/621268/
Monday, January 3, 2022
An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong
Katharine Hayhoe doesn't see the love in many of her fellow Christians. She still has hope we can all do better.
Such is the grimly politicized state of science these days that the descriptors typically used to explain who Katharine Hayhoe is — evangelical Christian; climate scientist — can register as somehow paradoxical. Despite that (or, indeed, because of it), Hayhoe, who is 49 and whose most recent book is "Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World," has become a sought-after voice for climate activism and a leading advocate for communicating across ideological, political and theological differences. "For many people now, hope is a bad word," says Hayhoe, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy as well as a professor of political science at Texas Tech. "They think that hope is false hope; it is wishful thinking. But there are things to do — and we should be doing them."
... nyt
Monday, November 22, 2021
Saturday, November 20, 2021
“Our house is on fire”
"...Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018 after Sweden's fierce hot summer of wildfires and omens of disaster, sat outside the Swedish parliament every day to get her message across. Her message was simple: "Our house is on fire."
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.
Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.
Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. It's about the survival of our kind. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good..."
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/#:~:text=Greta%20Thunberg%2C%20the,not%20be%20good.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Tech Can’t Fix the Problem of Cars
Flashy new car technology may be exciting, but it might also be distracting us from what we need.
...Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn't a cure-all.
Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)
...
nyt
...Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit underway in Glasgow. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn't a cure-all.
Popularizing electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.)
...
nyt
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Greta animated
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Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Future-world
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Monday, August 23, 2021
Saturday, August 21, 2021
"This Is the World Being Left to Us by Adults"
"We will not allow the world to look away."
Last week, some of the world's leading climate change scientists confirmed that humans are making irreversible changes to our planet and extreme weather will only become more severe. This news is a "code red for humanity," said the United Nations secretary general.
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven't listened... (continues)
It is — but young people like us have been sounding this alarm for years. You just haven't listened... (continues)
Monday, July 12, 2021
Jane Goodall Still Has Hope for Us Humans
"Traveling the world I'd see so many projects of restoration, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up."
... you don't have hope, why bother? Why should I bother to think about my ecological footprint if I don't think that what I do is going to make a difference? Why not eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Displacing the human: "The Overstory”
After a Hard Day’s Writing, Michael Pollan Likes to Unwind With a Novel “Getting to read fiction purely for pleasure is the carrot I hold out for myself as a reward for the work of reporting and writing.”
...
What’s the last great book you read?
“The Overstory,” by Richard Powers, is a book that, the further I am from reading it, looms larger and larger in my imagination. My über-subject as a writer is our species’ engagement with nature, and in “The Overstory” Powers has done something no one else has done (outside of science fiction): Displace the human in favor of other species in a realistic narrative about people and the natural world...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/books/review/michael-pollan-by-the-book-interview.html?smid=em-share
A Young Naturalist Inspires With Joy, Not Doom
At 17, Dara McAnulty is becoming one of Britain’s most acclaimed nature writers, with work that touches on his autism as much as the world around his home.
MONEYDARRAGH, Northern Ireland — While he carefully stepped from one moss-carpeted rock to another, Dara McAnulty outlined his rules for nature watching.
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“You’ll never see something if you bring a camera,” he said on this coastal stretch of Northern Ireland, “and you’ll definitely never see what you’re intending to find.”
His rules quickly proved true. McAnulty had wanted to use the ramble near his home to show off the local curlew population, but it was high tide — with waves sending salt spray spurting over the rocks — and there were no birds to be seen.
Instead, he squatted down to stare into a rock pool in search of his latest obsession: shrimp. Seaweed swayed in the water, but there were no signs of marine life. Then, suddenly, he noticed the smallest movement. “Oh, there’s a shrimpy boy!” he shouted. “Oh my God, it’s amazing. Can you see it? Can you see it?”
(continues) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/books/dara-mcanulty-diary-of-a-young-naturalist.html?smid=em-share
Sunday, June 27, 2021
What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?
Ezra Klein and four environmental thinkers discuss the limits of politics in facing down the threat to the planet.
The Participants
Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.
Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of "The Ministry for the Future."
________________________________
Are our political systems even capable?
Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden's infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration's big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn't clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That's more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn't entirely the Biden administration's fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there's still a lot of room to improve.
Saul Griffith: It's not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we'll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don't know all the answers of where we're going... (continues)
Saul Griffith
Chief scientist and founder of both Otherlab and Rewiring America, a nonprofit that advocates rapid electrification to meet our climate goals.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Climate-policy director at the Roosevelt Institute and an author of the Green New Deal.
Sheila Jasanoff
Professor of science and technology studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Novelist and author, most recently, of "The Ministry for the Future."
________________________________
Are our political systems even capable?
Ezra Klein: The American Jobs Act, President Biden's infrastructure bill, includes an ambitious clean-energy standard and huge investments in renewable-energy and electric-car technologies. It is effectively this administration's big climate bill. Its passage right now certainly isn't clear. But even if it did pass in its proposed form, how far would it get us on the climate fight?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It would certainly be a good start, but it really leaves a lot to be desired. In particular, the scale is simply too small; $900 billion on climate is not enough to catalyze the pace of decarbonization we will need in order to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while providing millions of good jobs. That's more like $10 trillion over 10 years. It isn't entirely the Biden administration's fault. The reconciliation process in Congress, just because of the way that it is structured, really forces you to rely really heavily on existing programs. For example, the plan routes some of its investments in the built environment through the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant program, which has a history of being exploited by developers. It also relies heavily on existing tax credits to fund the building and deployment of clean-energy infrastructure. If the programs that we had were enough to decarbonize, they would have done that already. It is certainly better than what we have now, but there's still a lot of room to improve.
Saul Griffith: It's not even remotely close to sufficient. But something extraordinary did happen when the Biden administration came out and said it was aiming for a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It may not be binding, but that is enormously more ambitious than John F. Kennedy standing up and saying we'll go to the moon by the end of the decade. We knew how to build rockets, and we knew where the moon was. We don't know all the answers of where we're going... (continues)
Eco-philosophy
READ: @five_books asked me to recommend the best books that contemplate eco-philosophy and our place on this Earth. Check out my suggestions. #nonfiction #bookshttps://t.co/bhsUT6LvUk
— Rupert Read 🌍 (@GreenRupertRead) June 25, 2021
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Ecstatic environmentalism
From Emerson to Humboldt to Muir to Leopold to Stewart Brand to Gail Bradbrook, you could tell a history of environmentalism through the ecstatic experiences that inspired its leaders. https://t.co/cd83Z6g1zl https://t.co/HlEIeDfaqs
(https://twitter.com/JulesEvans11/status/1406151595965005825?s=02)
(https://twitter.com/JulesEvans11/status/1406151595965005825?s=02)
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Let’s Celebrate a Lower Birthrate, Not Lament It
Readers criticize two Times pieces that raised concerns about slow population growth, instead viewing the trend as a positive for the planet.
To the Editor:
“World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population” (front page, May 23) misses the big picture. World population is still growing by 80 million people annually, and it won’t stop for several more decades.
Most of that growth is happening in the poorest places on earth — many in sub-Saharan Africa. If the Italian towns of Capracotta and Agnone want to boost their populations of working-age residents, there’s a steady stream of people willing to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean to get there.
The article refers to a paradigm shift necessary to address the “strain of longer lives and low fertility” that “threatens to upend how societies are organized.” As the status quo changes, people adapt to the new normal.
If public health campaigns can get billions of people to wear masks and stay six feet apart for over a year, surely economists and politicians can figure out how to restructure economies away from a strict dependency on infinite population growth. Perhaps the cleaner air and water that will result from our slower growth will even be inspirational...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/opinion/letters/population-birthrate.html?smid=em-share
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Be inconvenient
Al Gore (@algore) tweeted...
Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. I'm inspired by those who've worked for decades to solve the climate crisis. We're finally crossing the political tipping point. So let's persist, #BeInconvenient & secure a sustainable future.
(https://twitter.com/algore/status/1396996483203932163?s=02)
Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth. I'm inspired by those who've worked for decades to solve the climate crisis. We're finally crossing the political tipping point. So let's persist, #BeInconvenient & secure a sustainable future.
(https://twitter.com/algore/status/1396996483203932163?s=02)
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Good intentions not enough
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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, April 26, 2021
Icelandic gutpunch
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“Most humans dead...”
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Biden’s climate moonshot
On Thursday and Friday of last week, April 22 and 23, President Biden convened a virtual meeting of 40 world leaders to discuss addressing climate change. It is no longer possible to ignore changes in the world's climate: the last decade was the hottest in recorded history, and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached record levels. Arctic ice is melting; last summer's fires in Australia, California, and Colorado were catastrophic...
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-25-2021?r=iqpjt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email
Saturday, April 24, 2021
Why Bitcoin Is Bad for the Environment
...According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, bitcoin-mining operations worldwide now use energy at the rate of nearly a hundred and twenty terawatt-hours per year. This is about the annual domestic electricity consumption of the entire nation of Sweden. According to the Web site Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month, and is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction. At a time when the world desperately needs to cut carbon emissions, does it make sense to be devoting a Sweden’s worth of electricity to a virtual currency? The answer would seem, pretty clearly, to be no. And, yet, here we are...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-bitcoin-is-bad-for-the-environment?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Earth from space
Without the first photographs of the earth from space, there would be no #EarthDay.
https://t.co/x1maRCNjCA
(https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1385378135324119043?s=02)
https://t.co/x1maRCNjCA
(https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1385378135324119043?s=02)
How long? Not long
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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Monday, April 19, 2021
Earth Day
We Were Born To Be Wild
Earth Day is a reminder that we are living creatures all the same.
...Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We've come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away. We don't even know the names of the trees in our own yards.
Nature is all around us anyway, and I'm not talking about just the songbirds and the cottontail rabbits in any suburban neighborhood. I'm talking about the coyote holed up in a bathroom at Nashville's downtown convention center; the red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan; the raccoon climbing a skyscraper in St. Paul, Minn.; the black bear lounging in a Gatlinburg, Tenn., hot tub; the eastern box turtle knocking on my friend Mary Laura Philpott's front door.
These encounters remind us that we are surrounded by creatures as unique in their own ways as we are in ours. And our delight in their antics tells us something about ourselves, too. We may believe we are insulated from the natural world by our structures and our vehicles and our poisons, but we are animals all the same.
Thursday is Earth Day, and even if you can't observe it by planting trees or pulling trash out of nearby streams, this week is a good time to remember that it's never too late to become a naturalist. And the first step is simply waking up to our own need for the very world we have tried to shut out so completely.
For we belong to one another — to the house finches and the climbing raccoons and the door-knocking turtles and the bathing bears. Recognizing that kinship will do more than keep our fellow creatures safer. It will also keep us safer, and make us happier, too.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/opinion/earth-day-nature-environment.html?smid=em-share
Earth Day is a reminder that we are living creatures all the same.
...Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We've come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away. We don't even know the names of the trees in our own yards.
Nature is all around us anyway, and I'm not talking about just the songbirds and the cottontail rabbits in any suburban neighborhood. I'm talking about the coyote holed up in a bathroom at Nashville's downtown convention center; the red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan; the raccoon climbing a skyscraper in St. Paul, Minn.; the black bear lounging in a Gatlinburg, Tenn., hot tub; the eastern box turtle knocking on my friend Mary Laura Philpott's front door.
These encounters remind us that we are surrounded by creatures as unique in their own ways as we are in ours. And our delight in their antics tells us something about ourselves, too. We may believe we are insulated from the natural world by our structures and our vehicles and our poisons, but we are animals all the same.
Thursday is Earth Day, and even if you can't observe it by planting trees or pulling trash out of nearby streams, this week is a good time to remember that it's never too late to become a naturalist. And the first step is simply waking up to our own need for the very world we have tried to shut out so completely.
For we belong to one another — to the house finches and the climbing raccoons and the door-knocking turtles and the bathing bears. Recognizing that kinship will do more than keep our fellow creatures safer. It will also keep us safer, and make us happier, too.
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/opinion/earth-day-nature-environment.html?smid=em-share
Saturday, April 17, 2021
"Climate is everything "
For TIME's cover, artist Red Hong Yi and her team constructed a 7.5 x 10-foot world map out of 50,000 matchsticks.
"She then set the artwork on fire—representing how the global climate crisis touches all of us, no matter where we live," writes @dwpine https://t.co/KUTa93aMki
(https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1383405269959405571?s=02)
"She then set the artwork on fire—representing how the global climate crisis touches all of us, no matter where we live," writes @dwpine https://t.co/KUTa93aMki
(https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1383405269959405571?s=02)
Sunday, April 11, 2021
Living in a World in Which Nature Has Already Lost
Second Nature, by Nathaniel Rich
On average, an American man puts 85 man-made chemicals into his body every day, while an American woman takes in nearly twice that amount.
Rich tourists pay top dollar for disaster tours to gawk at New Orleans's Katrina-devastated Lower Ninth Ward, where the people who have remained struggle to survive.
In Aspen, Colo., dogs fly in private jets to "Billionaire Mountain" to join their owners in multimillion-dollar homes for two weeks of the year.
Cattle exposed to DuPont's toxic chemicals drool uncontrollably and birth stillborn calves. Their teeth turn black, and blood gushes from their noses, mouths and rectums. When they are cut open, they are found to be filled with giant tumors, collapsed veins and green muscles...
Thursday, April 1, 2021
Shared from BBC:How mammoths could fight climate change
https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p09cdh9z/how-mammoths-could-be-our-surprising-climate-saviours?ocid=ww.social.link.twitter&ocid=ww.social.link.email
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
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