Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last surviving coal-burning power station in a country that birthed the Industrial Revolution and fed it with coal.

Britain, the nation that launched a global addiction to coal 150 years ago, is shutting down its last coal-burning power station on Monday.

That makes Britain first among the world's major, industrialized economies to wean itself off coal — all the more symbolic because it was also the first to burn tremendous amounts of it to fuel the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the rest of the world to follow suit.

"The birthplace of coal power is turning its back on coal forever," said Matt Webb, an associate director at the London-based research and advocacy group, E3G.

On Monday, in the middle of England, the end of Britain's coal era will be marked by the closure of the 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility. Uniper, the power company that operated the plant, said the 750-acre site would be converted to a "low-carbon energy hub."

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/climate/britain-last-coal-power-plant.html?smid=em-share

Questions OCT 1

PH -61 Forests. GT 4.1--4.5 (thru Persistence of Fossil Fuels). McK thru Rachel Carson. Midterm report presentations Chelsie Gordon, Aidan Haines... 

Midterm report presentations Chelsie Gordon, Aidan Haines

PH

1. COMMENT?: "...especially in the Deep South..." 37
2. COMMENT? "'Using' land is what people have been doing for centuries... people are connected to place..." 41
   
3. Do you think the public understands the importance of protecting tropical forest ecosystems? 42-3
4. Have you planted any trees lately, or supported tree-planting campaigns? Do you intend to? 44
5. Do you use/consume palm oil, deliberately or not? Will you try harder not to, after reading about Peatlands? 48
6. Though "agroforestry  systems are making a comeback" (53) we still see reports of bad choices regarding forestlands (like cutting down trees for solar farms). Are these random flukes, or might there be a more sinister explanation? 
7. Does the discussion of indigenous fire management/wisdom reinforce Wendell's message about the power and necessity of localism and long-term commitment to communities? 54-5
8. Are you going to look for ways to get more bamboo into your life (as flooring, furniture etc.)? 57
9. Have you read The Overstory?** (If not, I highly recommend it.) What are your thoughts on "the profound ties between trees and people"? What would it mean to really see the world "from the standpoint of trees"? 60-1

GT

1. What gives Greta no pleasure? What does she say we should  ask politicians? 201
2. Do you like Greta's bathtub analogy? Do you agree that all political ideologies have failed sustainability? 202
3. What's the second phase of denialism? Who's the we who fear rocking the boat? What does mitigation mean? 205-8
4. What gap did the WaPo reveal in Glasgow, with what implications for the next 50 years? 212-3
5. What gap does Greta call "almost a joke"? In what wrong direction are we moving? 216-7
6. What's crystal clear to Greta? Agree? 218
7. Why's it so hard to stop burning fossil fuel, according to McKibben? 219-21
8. What would we do if we were smart and kind? 222

McK

1. What might you see, if you could fast-forward the history of our early ancestors over a million years? 346
2. What did Justice Douglas argue, in Sierra Club v. Morton? What famous environmental writer did he invoke to support legal "standing" for the natural world? 348, 358
3. What does sentimentality do to nature, accoding to Jane Jacobs? 363
4. How much DDT were farmers using after WWII, with what result? 365
5. What are some other species (besides birds) that Carson said had been harmed by pesticides like parathion? 375
6. ...post your comments please

**

 




The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. g'r


“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”


“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”


“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”


“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”


“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”


“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes. . . .”
...
― Richard Powers, The Overstory


(And then read Bewilderment... and now Playground...)



Richard Powers is the Pulitzer-prize and National Book Award-winning author of twelve novels, including Orfeo, The Echo Maker, and The Time of Our Singing. The Overstory, Powers most recent novel, is a sweeping, impassioned tale of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of – and paean to – the natural world. The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that explore the essential conflict on our planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans.

Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, activist, and the co-founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world. His 1989 groundbreaking book, The End of Nature – issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic – was the first book to alert us to global warming. He’s gone on to write a dozen more books, most recently Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Prize, the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities.

https://youtu.be/1CVdc_1HaMU

How the World Eats

 @julianbaggini: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAiKccAovql/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

No safe place

Asheville is over 2,000 feet above sea level, and ~300 miles away from the nearest coastline. No place is safe from climate change.

We all suffer the consequences. We must all take action. We are all in this together.

https://www.threads.net/@luckytran/post/DAgoruCgirK/?xmt=AQGz5klLMbevFSEgBCAsiU5xL6helFGrpwGG7vnD6u5EyA

==

Water

If you want to understand the horror still unfolding in Appalachia, and actually if you want to understand the 21st century, you need to remember one thing: warm air holds more water vapor than cold.

As Hurricane Helene swept in across a superheated Gulf of Mexico, its winds rapidly intensified—that part is really easy to understand, since hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the water. And as Jeff Masters points out:

Helene’s landfall gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017-2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.

But Helene also picked up ungodly amounts of water—about 7% more water vapor in saturated air for every 1°C of ocean warming. In this case, that meant the mountaintops along the Blue Ridge above Asheville were—according to Doppler radar measurement—hit with nearly 4 feet of rain. That meant that Asheville—listed recently by the national media as a “climate haven” and bulging with those looking for a climate-safe home—is now largely cut off from the world. The interstates in and out of the town were severed for a while over the weekend; the beautiful downtown is drowned in mud. It’s obviously much worse in the outlying towns up in the surrounding hills. People forget how high these mountains are—Mt. Mitchell, near Asheville, is the highest point east of the Mississippi (and, worth noting, the forests on its summit slopes have been badly damaged by acid rain)... Bill McKibben

An Open Letter to Jimmy Carter, on His 100th Birthday

… Your presidency was doomed by wars and unrest in the Middle East that led to oil and gas shortages here and to a hostage crisis in Iran that broke your heart and ours. But you recognized the looming threat of climate change even then, understanding that reliance on foreign oil was not the real danger we faced. I can't help but wonder where the world would be now if Americans had embraced the environmental policies you initiated nearly 50 years ago.

Much of what you worked to do for the environment during your presidency was nothing less than visionary. Using executive powers, you protected a vast swath of the Alaskan wilderness, in the process doubling the size of the national parks system. You directed federal funds toward the development of renewable energy and installed solar panels on the White House. You began an enormous federal effort to bring the country to energy independence and tried to lead us by calling on our own better angels to make it through the crisis in the meantime.

"I'm asking you, for your good and for your nation's security, to take no unnecessary trips, to use car pools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit and to set your thermostats to save fuel," you said. "Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense. I tell you it is an act of patriotism."

…

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/jimmy-carter-100th-birthday.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Next Generation Approach to Heating and Cooling Buildings

A fifth-generation network at the Bankside Yards project in London offers new possibilities for the pace of decarbonization in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

...Bankside Yards is using a "fifth-generation" combined heating and cooling network that can balance energy within each building and then between buildings by collecting unwanted heat, say from a refrigerator in a restaurant or a piece of office equipment that needs to be cooled, and carrying that heat to somewhere that needs hot water or domestic heating.

Electric-powered heat pumps on building rooftops and in each apartment or commercial space then adjust the temperature of the water by withdrawing or injecting heat into the pipes to provide the heating, cooling and hot water needed in each place...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/climate/fifth-generation-heat-pumps.html?smid=em-share

What if Everyone Did Something to Slow Climate Change?

Researchers are looking at the impact that individuals' actions can have on reducing carbon emissions — and the best ways to get people to adopt them.

...At the same time, there is concern that promoting personal solutions to address global climate change lets corporations and governments off the hook and even plays into their hands. For example, a carbon footprint calculator was created by the oil and gas company BP in 2004 as part of an advertising campaign to help people measure their impact on the environment. Critics said it was simply a way to shift the responsibility from big companies to everyday consumers.

...Genevieve Guenther, the author of "The Language of Climate Politics," emphasized that not all people are equally responsible for climate change. According to a report by the nongovernmental organization Oxfam International, the top 1 percent in income worldwide account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent. In the United States, a study by PLOS Climate found, 10 percent of the richest Americans account for about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Political actions, such as voting and pressuring elected officials, can help, Ms. Guenther said in a video interview.

"Our true responsibility is to use our choices as political agents in the world to try to shift power, take power away from the people who are blocking the transition away from fossil fuels and give it to people who will lead into a livable future," she said.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/climate/carbon-reduction-strategies.html?smid=em-share

Good question

The publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" on this day in 1962 put the world on alert to the dangers of overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides, proving a key motivator in the nationwide ban of DDT, a popular but hazardous insecticide.

Decades later, what is the impact of Carson's work?
https://to.pbs.org/3xTLPmW

Rachel Carson’s inconvenient truth

On this day in 1962, Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring" at great personal risk and against tremendous backlash, as she was dying, catalyzing the modern environmental movement with her bravery of speaking inconvenient truth to power.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/27/rachel-carson-silent-spring-dorothy-freeman/

Anxiety: the bright side

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A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

Down under

Into the blue beyond – William Beebe's breathtaking century-old account of becoming the first human being to see the deep ocean

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/08/19/william-beebe-half-mile-down/

Silicon Valley Renegades Pollute the Sky to Save the Planet

Some restless entrepreneurs are releasing pollutants in the sky to try to cool the planet.

For 50 years, climate scientists have suggested that releasing aerosols into the stratosphere could act as a buffer and reduce the heat from the sun. Volcanic eruptions have temporarily cooled the planet this way in the past, but no one has attempted to intentionally replicate the effect at scale.

As the perils of climate change become more extreme, interest in the idea, known as stratospheric solar geoengineering, is growing. Scientists at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado State and Princeton are studying it and the University of Chicago recently launched an ambitious research program.

But all geoengineering is not created equal. While universities are pouring millions of dollars into research, others, avowing concern about global warming and seeing a business opportunity, are barreling ahead without any scientific study. Mr. Iseman got the idea for Make Sunsets from a sci-fi novel...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/climate/rogue-solar-geoengineering.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NU4.gS-R.jLOAFnNoz6ca&smid=em-share

First He Spoke for the Trees; Now He Speaks for the Sea

The wonders of the ocean and the terrors of A.I. meet in Richard Powers's new novel, which considers the future of an environmentally challenged Polynesian island.

...The ecological novel has become a staple of contemporary fiction, and rightly so. When people aren't really listening to the drumbeat of scientists, it's essential that our best authors take up their sticks as well. Heck, bang a cymbal.

Richard Powers was writing about nuclear radiation and chemical carcinogens when the Young Turks of today were still in their disposable diapers. He's been piled in prizes, most recently the Pulitzer for "The Overstory," a complicated narrative of communicating trees. And yet he himself is sort of a grand old oak of American letters: a towering, sturdy figure often overlooked for flashier species.

Powers's new book, "Playground," is an enchanting entry point to his work that swings open easily with just a few creaks.

The title is, as the best are, multifarious. Nominally, it refers to the Reddit-slash-Facebookish internet platform founded by Todd Keane, a white billionaire who has been diagnosed, at 57, with Lewy body dementia. He is reflecting on the erosion of his intense school friendship with Rafi Young, a principled Black bibliomaniac turned NGO worker.

It also points to the central staging area of childhood, where personalities calcify and futures are forged (once opponents in chess and Go, Todd and Rafi are now battling for higher stakes). And more mind-bendingly, the vast expanse of the earth's oceans, "a rainbow garden painted by Bonnard" where remoras hitch rides on manta rays, octopii chase each other in hide and seek, cuttlefish perform like light shows on the Las Vegas Strip and when conditions are exactly right there are massive, generative orgies: "coral sex parties."

The news about the warming, rising ocean has been so very grim, many people just don't want to hear it. Like a visit to the big blue whale exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, "Playground" reminds, with a spirit of fun and wonder, why the sea — an alien planet within a planet — is so very worth sustained attention. You start to understand the zeal that drove the doomed Titan explorers down to the shipwreck that continues to pulse with animal and bacterial life... nyt
==

UPDATE

Play's the thing

Finished Playground, but I don’t think it’s finished with me. The themes of play, story, evolution, death and life, and this wondrous but under-appreciated oceanic planet where they all play out will resonate. We’d like it to be an infinite game, continuing for the sake of the play itself. But we may be in the process of writing our final chapters.

Powers's final chapter, in this book, gets the game:

But the look the humans share says: What does it look like? Call it what it is. Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation. Everything alive, even we newcomers. . . . What are all creatures—even me—doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?

Our tinkering Lord is natural selection, with or without a pre-meditative tinkerer. Play on, Hamlet. And Richard. Can't wait for the sequel.

(And because the mlb regular season ends today, let's play into the post-season. Then, start counting the days to Spring Training.)

Questions SEP 26

GT 3.15--3.20 (thru True Cost...). WW 226-265. McK thru E.B. White... PH -33 Foreword... Oceans. 

Midterm report presentations continue: 26 - Alex Wiseman; Gray Fogo

From last time Don't worry: if we fall further behind with our questions I'll catch us up with an audio review before the exam.):

• What form of magical thinking for climate could become a new theology? 200-01
• What's the main lesson from the church of technology? 
• Critics of Al Gore are calling attention to what, in the words of Thomas Piketty? 207  Do you agree that policy change is more urgent than personal choices?
• How do Mann and Wainwright re-purpose Thomas Hobbes? 212
• What's the wheat myth, according to Yuval Noah Harari? 219  Are you going to read his new book Nexus?*  Do you agree that our era is a "blip..."? 220
• What kind of time does climate change threaten to impose? 224

McK

1. What did poet Robinson Jeffers identify as the modern disease? 251  What do you think of Tor House?
2. COMMENT?: “The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.”
   ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
   
3. What would Bill McKibben prefer as our national anthem? 258 
4. Prior to the Parkland shooting, what was Marjory Stoneman Douglas most known for? 260
5. How does McKibben characterize Aldo Leopold's "land ethic"? 265
6. Please post your discussion questions

Again, please post your discussion questions (and responses) pertaining to these:

GT

1. What is the Reflorestarmentes platform? On what demographic does it especially rely? 176-7
2. Why does Greta call Democracy our most valuable tool? What do we need, to deploy it effectively in the climate crisis? 180-81
3. Why do poor populations tend to be more harmed by climate change? 183
4. Under what conditions would Taikan Oki consider moving to Stockholm? 186
5. What are some literary illustrations of how climate conditions can exacerbate human behavior? 188-9
6. What was the message of 2008? 193

WW

1. What is NTHE, and what does WW find problematic about it? 227
2. What bias do some technologists and de-extinction advocates say we should discard? 230
3. What did Robinson Jeffers call his philosophy? What did Charles Taylor call it? 231-2
4. Why does Paul Kingsnorth propose to "withdraw"? 234
5. To what "clearheaded calculus" do climate alarmists like WW attribute their alarm? 237
6. At what kind of despair does novelist Richard Powers point? What response does he prefer to withdrawal? 239 (Powers' latest book Playground just came out, btw.)
7. What does WW mean when he says the portrait of suffering he's presented in this book is "elective"? 244
8. How is global warming a "Fermi solution"? 246
9. What's the point of Adam Frank's thought experiment? 248
10. Why does WW think we might be wise to consider ourselves cosmically special? 250-1
11. "You can choose your metaphor." 253 Which do you prefer?
12. What encouraging developments coincided with the UN's "Doomsday" report? 257-260
13. Do you agree with WW's hope for a happier future? 265

McK

1.  How did people used to speak dismissively of smog? 295 (btw: two famous baseball players hailed from Donora PA, can you name one?)
2. What famous naturalist drove his Buick 17,000 miles to follow the seasons? -And said, 

   "Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change." 313

3. What did the Nearings find perverse about "making money" and "getting rich"? 320

4. What experiences gave Sigurd Olson a transcendent feeling of freedom and detachment? 324

5. What was E.B. White's amendment to the strength=freedom doctrine? (And: what do you think of his statement that “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Or his letter to a despondent citizen who'd begun to lose hope in the human future? --"Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.")

PH*

1. Have you visited www.regeneration.org? Impressions?
2. COMMENT on Jane Goodall's foreword? Do you agree that the climate crisis is interconnected with and insoluble apart from issues of poverty, health care, social justice etc.? Do you share her three reasons for hope? 6-7
3. Do you see the proposal to put "the future of life at the heart of everything we do" as consistent with the urgency of addressing "current human needs, not future existential threats" and an "imagined dystopian future"? 9-10
4. Are you confident that we'll be "going in the right direction at the right speed by 2030"? 10 If not, will you nonetheless engage the crisis and assert your agency?
5. COMMENT?: "there is no difference between a climate denier and someone who understands the problem but does nothing." 11
6. Do pessimists and defeatists lack imagination? 12
7. Have you attempted to exert influence "upstream"? Will you? 13 
8. Does anything in the Readers Reference Guide surprise you? 14-15
9. Will we "cease using the ocean as a dump" anytime soon? 17
10. Will we stop using the ocean as a "lawless commons" anytime soon? 19
11. Are too many academics (like Enric Sala, formerly) effectively writing obituaries for life on earth rather than working for solutions? 20
12. Should we be seeding more kelp forests and consuming more seaweed? 23-4
13. Did you realize how rapidly the mangrove forests had declined in just the past forty years? 27
14. Do you think developers realize or care how badly they're compromising the tidal salt marshes and seagrasses? 29-31
15. Why are we not better at learning from and retaining the insights of indigenous peoples and ancient scholars like Jia Si Xue? 32

From #DamonGameau, the author of our Afterword: #2040film. An aspirational journey to discover what the future could look like if we simply embraced the best that exists today.

 

First time I taught Environmental Ethics we read Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. He's still hopeful, though he says he "didn't intend it; optimism discovered me."

"We have agency..."

 Confronting Our New Reality

Solutions to the problem of climate change have never been more clear. But the scale of the problem keeps getting bigger.

...Moving forward may well mean advances in the deployment of clean power. It may mean rapid gains in the efficiency of everything from cars to data centers. It may even mean breakthroughs in new forms of power, such as fusion or small-scale nuclear.

But as the catastrophic effects of climate change continue to mount, human ingenuity will have to do much more than get better at delivering energy. It will also have to help humans adapt to life on a hotter planet.

We will need new technologies to manage an atmosphere dense with long-lasting emissions, new solutions to protect vulnerable populations from rising seas, and new strategies for helping nature flourish and agriculture thrive.

"We should not think that we are passive victims of forecasts," Mr. Dyson said. "We actually have agency, we have the tools, and the tools get better every year." nyt

More In Climate

• When Electrification has Power Beyond Its Climate Benefits

  

  Kamryn Harris/Rewiring America

• A Next Generation Approach to Heating and Cooling Buildings

  

  Andrew Testa for The New York Times

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
• Pontevedra, a Spanish City That Picked Pedestrians Over Cars

  

• As Global Temperatures Rise, Nigeria Faces a Cooling Crisis

  

  Taiwo Aina for The New York Times

• 
  

Oceans: Alive & Well?

Alex W's ppt...

(Y'all can post these directly yourselves. Cut out the middleman (me). jpo)

Climate & health

The climate crisis is a health crisis.

The most effective action to slow and reverse ClimateChange is transitioning to renewable energy and moving away from fossil fuels.

Learn more 🔗bit.ly/3TFVSXs #UNGA79

Questions SEP 24

GT 3.8--3.14 (thru Winter...). WW 189-225 (thru History After Progress). McK thru Aldo Leopold...

Presentation: Christina Guest

Good News: keyshop says I now have access to the building after 4:30 pm. So, we can look forward to going out again...when it's not too hot or too loud.

Also: I've bumped Kathryn Modine's "Interconnected Planet" blog up, to just under the NEXT block in the sidebar on the right. Do please read and comment (and share your comments here as well).

GT (please try to formulate and address discussion questions pertaining to the following): 

1. Greta says 3 billion people in the world use less energy annually than a standard American what? How does that make you feel? 154
2. What should we be celebrating? And what have we been told to celebrate? 155-6 
3. What's Greta's definition of hope? 157
4. Governments have acted ___, not ___. What kind of shift is required, for that to change? What, besides changing our lifestyles, must we do? 159-61
5. What are sacrifice zones? Who populates them? 163
6. What is fast becoming the planet's most significant human threat? 166
7. How many displaced people does the World Bank forecast for sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia by mid-century? 167
8. The fulfillment of what reasonable expectations is the least we owe the next generation? 170
9. What should one consider, before deciding anything important? 172
10. What is "the sun's daughter's" classic hopeful question? 174-5

WW

1. What's the predominant worldview of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley? What's their greatest concern? Why is it a "strange evolutionary stage"? 189-90  Are you more hopeful or fearful of AI?
2. Who is Nick Bostrom and what's on his "big picture risk list"? 191-2  What do you think of transhumanism and posthumanism? Would posthumanity suffer greater social inequities than humanity so far?
3. What, besides geoengineering, have Peter Thiel and Sam Altman invested in? 192-3  Do you want to be uploaded?
4. What (besides the name of the X-man) is Elon Musk? 195 Do you want to live on Mars or is a spaceship?
5. Why hasn't the green revolution happened yet? 196-8  Do you think it will happen soon enough? 
6. According to the IPCC, we have how many years to halve emissions (bearing in mind that this bookj was published in 2019-20)? 198
7. What's the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world? 199  (Hope they're working on that in the new building across the parking lot.)
8. What form of magical thinking for climate could become a new theology? 200-01
9. What's the main lesson from the church of technology? 
10. Critics of Al Gore are calling attention to what, in the words of Thomas Piketty? 207  Do you agree that policy change is more urgent than personal choices?
11. How do Mann and Wainwright re-purpose Thomas Hobbes? 212
12. What's the wheat myth, according to Yuval Noah Harari? 219  Are you going to read his new book Nexus?*  Do you agree that our era is a "blip..."? 220
13. What kind of time does climate change threaten to impose? 224

McK

1. What did poet Robinson Jeffers identify as the modern disease? 251  What do you think of Tor House?
2. COMMENT?: “The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we.”
   ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
   
3. What would Bill McKibben prefer as our national anthem? 258 
4. Prior to the Parkland shooting, what was Marjory Stoneman Douglas most known for? 260
5. How does McKibben characterize Aldo Leopold's "land ethic"? 265
6. Please post your discussion questions

==

Hidden Brain podcast-

Fighting despair. Every morning, you wake up and face the world. What does it look like to you? Do you see a paradise of endless opportunities, where people are friendly and helpful? Or a world filled with injustice, where people cannot be trusted? In the final installment of this year's You 2.0 series, we talk with psychologist Jamil Zaki about how we become disillusioned and distrustful of the world, and how to balance realism with hope.

==

The Big Big Big Big Big Picture

A big new study zeroes in on our dilemma

"...these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.

Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over the next week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work." Bill McKibben

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*NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

In the summer of 2022, a software engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired by Google after an interview with The Washington Post in which he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he had been working on, had achieved sentience.

A few months later, in March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by hundreds of technology leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, called on A.I. labs to pause their research. Artificial intelligence, it claimed, posed “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The following month, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of A.I.,” quit his post at Google, telling this newspaper that he regretted his life’s work. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he warned.

Over the last few years we have become accustomed to hare-eyed messengers returning from A.I.’s frontiers with apocalyptic warnings. And yet, real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. Last year’s executive order on A.I. was, as one commentator put it, “directional and aspirational” — a shrewdly damning piece of faint praise... 

…The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves… (nyt, continues)

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive?

NEXUS considers how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age through the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. NEXUS explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and of rediscovering our shared humanity. g'r

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John Green says we shouldn't surrender to apocalyptic despair. Not yet.