Icelandic gutpunch

	Robin Young ⁦‪@hereandnowrobin‬⁩ #Iceland s ⁦‪@AndriMagnason‬⁩ is one of my fav guests ever, and now his new book #TimeAndWater is out in english! "to get kids to take #ClimateAction, ask, when will your grandchildren, who you will love more than anyone, live until?"gutpunch. wbur.fm/3eMDEyD via ⁦‪@hereandnow‬⁩   4/26/21, 5:42 PM

“Most humans dead...”

	Ben See ⁦‪@ClimateBen‬⁩ Remember: 1. Global crop failures by 2°C. 2. Most humans dead by 4°C. 3. Earth uninhabitable by 6°C. 4. We risk 2°C by 2035. 5. We risk 4°C by 2065. 6. We risk 6°C by 2095. One tweet is worth a million newspaper front pages.   4/24/21, 2:41 PM

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

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

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)

How long? Not long

	Bill McKibben ⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩ Not surprisingly, ⁦‪@GretaThunberg‬⁩ was great speaking to Congress today. She and ⁦‪@xiyebastida‬⁩ have had the most serious remarks of Earth Day; time for some elders to match their fire.   4/22/21, 12:49 PM

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

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

"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)

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...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/books/review/nathaniel-rich-second-nature.html?referringSource=articleShare

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

The problem with invasive plants

Margaret Renkl:
What You May Not Know About Those April Flowers

Americans have cultivated nonnative plants and flowers for so long it has skewed our experience of spring.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/opinion/immigrant-plants-ecosystem.html?smid=em-share

Fossil finance

"Despite the economic recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic, more money went into the industry in 2020 than in 2016"

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement the world's 60 largest banks have invested 3.8 trillion USD in the fossil fuel industry.
https://t.co/QXjwWiOWxu
(https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1374790863390453760?s=02)

Green ideas

Grateful to Penguin for publishing parts of The End of Nature in their intriguing new #penguingreenideas series. Good fun to be alongside so many remarkable writers, from Rachel Carson all the way up to @TempestWilliams @NaomiAKlein and @GretaThunberg https://t.co/N69KGvTLJV
(https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1371806486167437313?s=02)

(Some) hope

Margaret Renkl, NYT

NASHVILLE — I’ve been keeping a collection of links to good news about the environment as a hedge against despair when so much of the news from nature is devastating. Rolling pandemics. The near annihilation of birds and insects. Even the end of sharks. In short, a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals,” according to a recent report in Frontiers in Conservation Science.

It’s so bad that I’ve begun to mutter darkly about the end of humanity. So bad that sometimes I wonder if the end of humanity would be such a bad thing. Once we’re out of the way, the earth might have a chance to recover before everything is gone.

Y’all know it is bad when pondering the death of humanity cheers up a person who is really hoping to have grandchildren someday.

In honor of the spring solstice, which falls this coming weekend and brings with it the return of longer days, I offer some news that might bring you, too, a glimmer of light in all this darkness. I share these stories with the usual caveat attached to any kind of climate optimism: Hope is not a license to relax. Hope is only a reminder not to give up. As bad as things are, it is far too early to give up... (continues)

Humans have rapidly remade the Earth — and imperiled its future

How dramatically do humans dominate the Earth? As late as 1800, the total weight of wild mammals was greater than that of all domesticated species. By 1900, with the bison gone and cattle herds roaming the plains of the Americas, cows alone bulked twice as heavy as all remaining wild mammals. A century later, domesticated animals outweighed wildlife by a factor of 20. In less than the life span of the U.S. Constitution, the Earth has gone from half-wild to a global farm...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/humans-have-rapidly-remade-the-earth--and-imperiled-its-future/2021/03/11/d72163c2-75fb-11eb-948d-19472e683521_story.html

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)