The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome

From The New York Times: The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome As automakers promise to get rid of internal combustion engines, Heidelberg is trying to get rid of autos. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/28/business/heidelberg-cars-environment.html?smid=em-share

15 recommended reads

Confused about what's going on with our climate? Here are 15 reads recommended by scientists and @TEDTalks speakers @DrKWilkinson and @AyanaEliza: https://t.co/66ScR5kcYK
(https://twitter.com/TEDCountdown/status/1365830769281798145?s=02)

Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.

...“The savage people in many places of America,” writes Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan,” responding to the charge that human beings have never lived in a state of nature, “have no government at all, and live in this brutish manner.” Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy. But this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the beast in human form.

Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and, finally, from ourselves. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.

In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality. These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.

I’d like to publicly identify this dualistic view as a disaster, but I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that. And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature. I don’t see how we could cease to be mammals and remain ourselves...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/humans-animals-philosophy.html?smid=em-share

Storm Victims Didn’t Bring It on Themselves

Disasters call for compassion and action, not sniping on social media.

NASHVILLE — Last week's fierce winter storms didn't change all that much at our house. We got mostly snow and sleet here, not freezing rain, so we never lost power. The roads were a catastrophic mess, but our refrigerator and cupboards were full — it's a time-honored Southern tradition to clear store shelves of milk and bread when the forecast calls for even a flake of snow — and we didn't have to risk our lives to get to work because we can do our work from home. We were lucky.

That's all in the world it was: pure dumb luck.

Others were not nearly so fortunate. More than four million people lost power in Texas. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans — mainly in the South, where such weather has historically been an anomaly — soon found themselves in the same boat. Pipes froze. Roadways were lethal. Makeshift attempts to keep warm turned deadly. Vaccine distribution came to a halt.

Weather-related disasters used to be called acts of God: events that are rare, unforeseen and above all nobody's fault. You don't blame people living in trailers for the tornado that turned their homes into twisted wreckage. You don't blame drowning people for the flooded river. An act of God might engender a crisis of faith, but in the old days it didn't cause a crisis of community. If you were untouched by disaster, you felt lucky, and you rolled up your sleeves to help the ones who weren't.

You certainly didn't tell suffering people in the midst of a deadly crisis that they had brought their suffering on themselves.

"Hey, Texas!" the novelist Stephen King wrote in a tweet that has been liked or shared by nearly 100,000 people. "Keep voting for officials who don't believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid!" He failed to mention the 300,000 citizens of hyper-liberal Portland, Ore., who also lost power in the storm.

Liberals, of course, weren't the only ones playing the blame game in the media last week. In Texas, electricity comes primarily from fossil fuels, but that didn't stop the governor, Greg Abbott, from peddling the lie that power outages in Texas were the fault of, get this, renewable energy. Never mind that the frozen wind turbines in his state represent only a small fraction of the energy lost to failures in natural gas production during the freeze. Or that there are ways to keep turbines from freezing in the first place.

This whole conversation was playing out while people were freezing to death in their homes and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning in their cars. While people were burning their belongings to keep warm and frantically trying to find backup power for oxygen-dependent family members. And none of it had anything to do with their voting record.

I'm amazed that I have to keep saying this, but not all Southerners believe the lies about climate change trotted out by Republican politicians enslaved to the fossil-fuel industry. Southern Republicans tell their constituents many, many lies, and plenty of people believe them. But not all of us. Nowhere near all of us. In the 2020 presidential election, 5,259,126 Texans voted for Joe Biden. That's more than 46 percent of voters in the state, and it's a fairly safe bet that those folks believe in climate change.

But does it even matter? Does how someone votes determine his or her worth as a human being? Absolutely not. It doesn't take a degree in ethics to understand that people don't deserve to die just because they made the mistake of trusting greedy, power-mad liars to tell them the truth.

Predictably, the Texas politicians who deny the reality of climate change and the utility executives who mismanaged the Texas power grid weren't the ones who suffered the most in last week's winter storms. And the people who were hardest hit — residents of minority neighborhoods — sure couldn't jet off to Cancún with Ted Cruz to escape the cold. "Let them eat snow," indeed.

There will be investigations into the full array of reasons for the power failures, and Texas officials may even pull themselves together enough to make a plan for mitigating the damage from future extreme weather events. But at this point there is no stopping the weather calamities themselves.

We don't know for a fact that these particular storms were a result of an unstable climate, though there is science to support that theory. What we do know is that extreme weather is no longer remarkable. The once-in-100-years floods of old — like the 100-year hurricanes and the 100-year forest fires and the 100-year winter storms — are happening far more often now, and their frequency will continue to rise.

These are not acts of God. These are acts of human behavior, the erratic weather patterns of a climate we have incinerated. And as they always do, the poor and the disenfranchised will suffer the most from the damage we've done.

In this context, the impulse to take a cheap shot at Southerners on Twitter isn't remotely as dangerous as the impulse to deny climate change itself, but it matters. Every form of prejudice matters, perhaps especially so when the people who keep pointing out the splinter in someone else's eye are trying to see around a plank in their own.

Where climate-related weather disasters are concerned, none of us is innocent. We all created this emergency. With our gasoline engines and our chemically fertilized crops and our factory farms and our addiction to plastic and paper towels, we're all guilty. And if we have so far escaped the worst ravages of that unstable climate, we need to admit that it's not because of how we vote or who we are or what we believe. It's just luck. Just pure dumb luck. And it's time to roll up our sleeves.

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/opinion/texas-storm-politics.html?smid=em-share

Unsustainable

"Unsustainable development is rapidly degrading Earth's capacity to sustain human well-being" (from the latest UN report). That's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
(https://twitter.com/Raymodraco/status/1362753424341745664?s=02)

the forgotten 1948 book that shaped the modern environmental movement

"If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageous, no one is going to do it for us."

Empowering wisdom from the forgotten 1948 book that shaped the ethos of the modern environmental movement https://t.co/jcbXcNJgy3
(https://twitter.com/brainpickings/status/1362594005331107840?s=02)

The living world and us

Thursday Thanks to some of the many books that have taught me to think and think again about humanity's relationship with the rest of the living world. What would you add?... https://t.co/6A9LaAVrqP
(https://twitter.com/KateRaworth/status/1362408654318821377?s=02)

best Climate Change books

Well done @HopeJahren! "The Story of More" has been featured in the list of best Climate Change books of all time! https://t.co/T8Gi6Qaeag
(https://twitter.com/bookauthority/status/1362035179200663552?s=02)

Gates behind the curve

First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultrabillionaires not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonize Mars. His affection for his home planet and the people on it shines through clearly in this new book, as does his proud and usually endearing geekiness. The book's illustrations include photos of him inspecting industrial facilities, like a fertilizer distribution plant in Tanzania; definitely the happiest picture is of him and his son grinning identical grins outside an Icelandic geothermal power station. "Rory and I used to visit power plants for fun," he writes, "just to learn how they worked."

And this new volume could not be more timely — it emerges after a year that saw the costliest slew of weather disasters in history, and that despite a cooling La Niña current in the Pacific managed to set the mark for record global temperature. As everyone can attest who watched the blazes of Australia and California, or the hurricanes with odd Greek names crashing through the gulf, we are in dire need of solutions to the greatest crisis our species has yet faced.

It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. Gates — who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide — is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he's worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma. Since he confesses that he completely missed the climate challenge until 2006, when he met with some scientists almost two decades after the problem emerged (previously "I had assumed there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster"), it's perhaps not surprising that he's still catching up. And yet, his miscalculations are important, because they are widely shared...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/books/review/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster.html?s=02#click=https://t.co/puQ9eH3dHg

Bill Gates, geek-environmentalist

To really help solve the climate crisis, @BillGates needs to be a better geek--interested in nuclear and geothermal power, but also congressional and economic power. It's all linked together, and it can't be solved in isolation. (My review of his new book)
https://t.co/ecUxC5WaUR
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1361316308198055938?s=02)

Why humanity can’t be trusted to repair its own environmental damage

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/11/kolbert-white-sky/

A Happiness of Bluebirds

Margaret Renkl finds her bird:

This year isn't living up to my hopes, so I am learning to hope in a new way.

 

I don't laugh much anymore. I am grieving a mismanaged pandemic that has taken too many of us and driven too many others to despair. I am grieving the assaults on American democracy by my fellow Americans. I am grieving the brutal news of the environment, which worsens with every new study. When a suicide bomber blew up a historic section of this town on Christmas morning, it felt entirely of a piece with a terrible, endless year. Surely, I thought, 2021 would be better.

 

But 2021 has not been better. The U.S. Capitol was invaded by U.S. citizens provoked by a U.S. president. Pandemic deaths are approaching half a million. The Doomsday Clock remains set at 100 seconds from disaster. My dog died. It all adds up to a sorrow that is both unimaginably vast and far too close to home.
I have faith in the promise of spring, but right now spring feels like just another cold concept, like the concept of herd immunity and the concept of reasonable Republicans. I know such things exist, but these days that knowledge feels more like a theory than a conviction...

 

And maybe it's enough in February, in these days that are so close to turning warm and bright and green again, when we are so close to being released from the prison of our homes, to think of happiness as neither distant nor grand. Perhaps it would help to remember that even now happiness is only what it has ever been: something that lights before us, immediate and insistent and always fleeting. Not a promise at all but a temporary gift. It lands, and lifts away, and returns again, ever flashing its wings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/opinion/2021-happiness-bluebirds.html?smid=em-share