Damages

…smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess. 

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire. 

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies…

Bill McKibben

https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/smoke-gets-in-yourhole-where-your?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“Climate fiction” search results on audible

…

Climate and Punishment

Vigil

by George Saunders.

Random House, 174 pp., $28.00

Climate change is a strange kind of crime. In some sense we are all guilty of it, and all still in the process of committing it. Our car rides and plane trips, coffees and burgers, heating and cooling and clothing and everything else are paid for in blood—contributing, every moment, to the suffering and destruction global warming brings. “The onus,” as the New York Times editorial board admonished its readers a few years ago, “is on society as a whole.”

In another sense, though, a few of us are far, far guiltier than the rest. Most of us, for instance, are not the oil company executives who were told about the effects of CO₂emissions back in the 1970s and decided that the threat to their business outweighed the threat to the planet. Most of us are not the politicians they funded to vote against emissions regulations, or the scientists who helped them by toning down the conclusions of federal climate commissions, or the PR consultants they hired to sow doubt about the subject. (As the climate litigation scholar Benjamin Franta has written, a central part of their strategy has been “shifting the blame” for pollution “onto consumers and society as a whole.”¹)

Most of us are not, say, Lee Raymond, the chairman and CEO of Exxon from 1993 to 2005, who called manmade climate change an “unproved theory” years after the company’s own research had confirmed it, who declared—in what Bill McKibben has called “the single most audacious speech of the era”—that trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “defies common sense and lacks foundation in our current understanding of the climate system,” and who oversaw an elaborate campaign of misinformation and denial to prevent action from being taken. Most of us are not Duane LeVine, who in the late 1980s, as Exxon’s manager of strategy and science development, helped develop the “Exxon Position,” a plan to emphasize uncertainty and the “socio-political realities” around climate change in order to prevent a “crisis mentality” from taking hold. Most of us are not James Inhofe, the longest-serving senator in the history of Oklahoma (1994–2023), who chaired the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, received millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry, and called global warming a “hoax” and a “conspiracy” in speeches and books throughout his career.

In this sense, the destruction of our climate is an increasingly familiar sort of crime: one that has gone unpunished. The only people who have been sent to prison are those who have protested against it… NYRB

Earth Is Done For. ‘Earth 7’ Is About What’s Next.

… Unferth writes with haunting beauty about our reckless destruction. During a deep-sea field trip with other children, Dylan sees an underwater graveyard composed of “a thousand creatures the size of elephants, sea animals previously unknown, skeletons under spotlights.” “A new beginning was not on the way,” Dylan realizes. “She was part of the rubble.”

But “Earth 7” is a celebration as much as a lamentation. We’re part of this world, “a place where terrible and wonderful beauties are coming to pieces at every moment and others are constructing themselves out of the remains.” Unferth reminds us that while we may be facing microchip uploads and Martian colonies, our human and planetary heritage endures. Love, wonder, horror and all of life — it’s here in “Earth 7” and here on actual Earth. It’s our home, while we can keep it.

https://www.nytimes.com/shared/v1/cl-single.html?smid=url-share&rsrc=cl-share&uri=nyt%253A%252F%252Farticle%252Fdac547f0-de18-51f2-8d69-748520fb4a96&ca=602c188aef3355858d101b7b4d7b4eab&smid=nytcore-ios-share&rsrc=cl-share

Bikes are DEI?

…Last week Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, (whose qualification for office was appearing on the RV-based “reality” show “Road Rules,” and who has just completed a similar gas-guzzling trip with his family sponsored by Toyota and Shell) declared that he was ending federal funding for bike paths because they were “DEI.” As Edith Olmsted reported, federal grants under Biden in 2021 2021 grants funding bike lanes noted that they would serve to “improve infrastructure, strengthen supply chains, make us safer, advance equity, and combat climate change.” … Bill McKibben https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/tour-de-planet?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate

Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.

This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.

But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought...

Ezra Klein, Bill McKibben

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000011018052/the-very-good-and-very-bad-news-on-climate.html?smid=url-share&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Not the End of the World:

How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

 It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. Did you know that: 

• Carbon emissions per capita are actually down 
• Deforestation peaked back in the 1980s 
• The air we breathe now is vastly improved from centuries ago 
• And more people died from natural disasters a hundred years ago? 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance, and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you’ve been told about the environment. Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn’t, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.      

https://a.co/d/0481wIZ3