Sustain What?: Recent Episodes

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Think of how Anthony Fauci has become kind of a tainted totem, tussled over by starkly opposed factions in fights that omit almost all of the complexity that attended the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then watch my pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the 11 authors of an important recent Nature commentary: "Six ways to put the public at the heart of science and policy."

A key passage:

At a time when trust in governments is falling across many democracies6 and populists are casting scientists and academic institutions as untrustworthy ‘elites’7, it’s crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy. This would foster trust and make academic research and government policies seem more legitimate. People are more likely to support — and champion — science advice that they helped to generate8. Democratizing research and science-policy processes will mean rethinking how scientists, citizens and policymakers interact.

My guests were:

• K. L. Akerlof, an associate professor at George Mason University who, among other things, leads the university’s “Communication for Environmental Science, Policy, and Human Behavior” concentration within the master's degree program.

• Musa al-Gharbi, an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who writes Symbolic Capital(ism) on Substack and is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

• Chris Tyler, an anthropologist and associate professor in the University College London’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy. Among other previous work he spent five years as director of the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Here’s how al-Gharbi described the paper’s genesis on LinkedIn:

Trust in experts and scientific findings has grown increasingly polarized. Populists across the political spectrum and around the world insist that mainstream institutions do not represent or serve the public to the extent that they should. Their message resonates, in part, because there actually have been significant shifts in how scientific knowledge is produced and put to use. Technological and scientific changes have significantly transformed how people work and communicate with one another. The benefits and costs of these shifts have been unevenly distributed. Many of these changes were implemented top-down, with little consultation with or buy-in from those facing the highest levels of risk, cost, or disruption. In short, the growing social distance between experts, policymakers, and the public is not imagined, it’s real. It’s also highly consequential.Leaders on every continent have exploited growing public suspicion of experts and institutions to justify circumventing checks and balances, streamlining decision-making processes, and consolidating power into their own hands. Scientific institutions across the globe are facing budget cuts, increased government scrutiny, and censorship attempts.However, times of crisis and disruption can also be moments of opportunity. Scholars, practitioners, and institutions around the world are responding to these challenges by piloting long-overdue reforms. There is a growing consensus that it may be possible to increase the quality, impact, and long-term viability of science and policy by more rigorously integrating the public at every stage.To explore the challenges and opportunities of communicating science for policy in a populist world, Chris Tyler and K. L. Akerlof convened a working group that included 23 other researchers and practitioners from across fields and around the globe…

The working group gathered together in-person for the first time on September 8th in Arlington, VA to exchange ideas and foster collaborations. Drawing from these conversations, their diverse scholarship and experience, and successful documented initiatives from around the world, they produced evidence-based recommendations for constructively responding to the challenges of growing mistrust, alienation, and social distance. These suggestions were then vetted and refined by external peer-reviewers….

I don’t have sufficient income from my Sustain What project to have a staff so, yes, I’m judiciously using Google’s AI to summarize the discussion from the YouTube stream. If you can afford to, do feel free to chip in:

Consider becoming a paying supporter of this Sustain What work.

This discussion, hosted by Andrew Revkin, features researchers K. L. Akerlof, Chris Tyler, and Musa al-Gharbi exploring a Nature commentary on how to improve public trust and engagement in science and policy amidst a global rise in populism (0:04, 0:58, 2:36).

Key Takeaways:

• Rethinking Science Advice: Chris Tyler emphasizes that the scientific community needs to stop acting like part of the problem and start becoming part of the solution by modernizing how science advice is delivered (5:16).

• Embracing Humility and Uncertainty: K. L. Akerlof and Musa al-Gharbi note that researchers often naively hide uncertainty to maintain authority. Evidence shows that being candid about disagreements and limitations actually increases public trust (9:45, 12:44).

• Moving Beyond ‘Elite’ Circles: Musa al-Gharbi argues that institutions often fail to engage beyond their narrow, affluent, liberal bubbles. He advocates for meaningful engagement with diverse stakeholders, including right-leaning or rural audiences, using local media and community venues (53:23).

• The Three-Legged Stool: Chris Tyler proposes that universities should integrate research expertise, public policy expertise, and public participation expertise to maximize societal impact (19:51).

• Avoiding Extractive Research: K. L. Akerlof warns against ‘extractive’ engagement, where researchers parachute into traumatized or marginalized communities to collect data without providing genuine support or respecting the community’s time and infrastructure (57:05).

Key Perspectives:

• Andrew Revkin observes that despite the logical nature of calls for interdisciplinary, community-based science, these changes remain difficult to implement due to path-dependent institutional structures (43:00).

This 2021 webcast explores this issue: How Universities Can Support Interdisciplinary Careers for Climate and Sustainability Progress

• Chris Tyler notes that the goal is for researchers to act as ‘honest brokers’ rather than lobbyists, empowering decision-makers by providing transparent evidence (48:38).

• Musa al-Gharbi highlights that when mainstream experts position themselves solely in opposition to populist movements, they lose the ability to influence policy, leaving a vacuum often filled by less reliable sources (29:22).

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I encourage you to click back to these previous webcasts on related themes:

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Updated below July 25 - My new song, "For Those Who Put to Sea," honors men and women who harvest the ocean's bounty and is sung in memory of those who sometimes don't come back. I just posted this fresh video version on YouTube and TikTok (and will post elsewhere soon). Please share this song with anyone who enjoys seafood or lives in a coastal community.

I shot most of the footage at the Maine Commercial Fishing Remebrance Day ceremony at the Lost Fishermen's Memorial in Lubec. There were 10 ceremonies up and down the 3,478-mile coast. At the event in Boothbay Harbor, Pat Shepard, the co-founder of Redde Marine Safety, narrated as a boat and crewman just off the dock demonstrated a valuable set of safety systems (video from Facebook).

Insert, July 25 - After the ceremony in Lubec, I interviewed Clarissa West, a lobster fisher operating out of Steuben whose father, Thomas West, died after evidently falling from his boat on April 21. He was one of two casualties, along with Stephen Johnson Jr., honored with the sounding of a hand bell at the ceremony as the chairwoman of the Lubec memorial, Annie Sokoloski, read their names.

Clarissa West said her children have started lobstering using her dad’s boat, the Aces and Eights:

Clarissa - I’m here in honor of my father. He just passed away in April 21st. He had fallen over. And we found him the 22nd, that morning. Actually, it was my brother that found him. We were up all night trying to search for him. The Marine Patrol was out in their boats. I was even in there with them to help. And we didn’t see him. There were fishermen that went out and helped look for him in his boats and shined the shores and the waters for us. And like the next day at three o’clock in the morning, my brother had found him. He was actually wrapped up in a crate. So I would say he tried to save himself. He got on a crate and then we don’t know if it rolled over. When it hit a rock or with the tide turn, and his hand was actually wrapped in it, and that’s what kept him afloat to bring him to shore.

He was 63. He just turned 63 on the 2nd of April. His boat was the Aces and Eights. He was doing his bait and fuel and was bringing it to his mooring, and we don’t know... If he fell off putting it on the mooring. We have no idea what happened.

Andy - People think of this as like a storm strikes a boat and it capsizes. But there’s all the other ways. All it takes is a little...

Clarissa - Just a little slip or mishap, I guess, so you never know what happens, really.

Andy - So what do you think of the idea of a Memorial Day, a Remembrance Day?

Clarissa - It’s good for everyone to gather, everyone that’s mourning, …and for our loved ones to be recognized together. And, well, it just brings us all together to know that nobody is alone. On the hard days, or on the day of... Because you never get over it. You really don’t. It’s just one day at a time, and you... Like I tell my kids, I said, we have the memories, we have the stories, and that’s what keeps him alive.

Andy - And what’s it like going out fishing, do you think about it when you’re out there?

Clarissa - Yeah, it’s hard… So we used to sail by each other all the time. And you don’t have that anymore. My kids actually took over his boat. I guess that gives a sense of peace for them to take over the tradition.

I’m using the song to raise funds for the Maine-based organization Green and White Hope, launched after the tragic loss of 18-year-old Tylar Michaud in 2023 and now working to boost safety for commercial fshing crews and shore-side responsiveness when the worst happens. My conversation with Liz Michaud, the organization’s founder (and Tylar’s aunt) is here:

Have a safe weekend, whatever you do. And if you enjoy some seafood, as I sing, “raise a glass and say a prayer for those who put to sea.”

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My new song about maritime dangers, “For Those Who Put to Sea,” is out on all platforms (YouTube, Spotify, etc.). Here’s my post from Maine’s Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day:

Growing up in Rhode Island, I got out on the water any way I could, ranging from skin diving to sailing to fishing to clamming. In summers during high school and college, pondering a career in marine biology, I got a job helping state fisheries biologists, including spending weeks on lobster boats tracking the sex and size of the catch. I loved getting to know the lobstermen, one of whom was old enough to remember when a German U-boat surfaced near him off the coast and siphoned off his fuel.

At The New York Times, I wrote quite a bit about fisheries issues, including Maine-focused stories like one in 1996 on the dangerous boom-and-bust harvest of sea urchins and, in 2001, on the lobster-boat races in my wife’s ancestral home town, Winter Harbor.

But it’s only in recent years, since we settled in Downeast Maine, that I’ve come to appreciate fully not only the allure of harvesting the bounty of the sea, but also the profound dangers. One after the other, fishers young and old have perished or been maimed in sudden storms, accidents or other mishaps in an ocean environment that leaves almost no room for error. A rope snaps like a shotgun blast. A rogue wave strikes. A boot slips. A scallop dragger flips.

The dangers spread far beyond Maine of course. As I wrote last year, nationally, commercial fishing is second only to logging on the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of deadliest jobs.

Just up the coast from us in Steuben, a particularly wrenching story unfolded in the summer of 2023 as Tylar Michaud, a high school graduate bound for the Maine Maritime Academy in the fall, took his boat out solo one day and didn’t return. The boat was found empty. Weeks of searching ended in heartbreak.

Amid the prolonged grief enveloping the family and community, Tylar’s aunt, Liz Michaud, was moved to found Green and White Hope, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing safety at sea and named for the colors on Tylar’s buoys. The group, working with growing array of partners, has taken a systemic approach to cutting risk in commercial fishing in Maine (and beyond) - working on safety education, boosting access to safety gear and building the capacity of communities to launch search and rescue operations swiftly when the worst happens. Every minute matters here, with sea temperatures even in summer rapidly sapping strength.

I’m making a substantial donation and hope you can help as well.

I just had a sobering and inspiring Sustain What conversation with Michaud and key partners one week ahead of Maine’s second, and now annual, Maine Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day — a memorial day that she helped create. I’ll be attending the event at the Lubec memorial and may get down to the one in BoothBay Harbor, as well.

My other guests were:

Ann Marie Sokoloski, the founder of Voices of the Fleet, an initiative dedicated to strengthening communication between fishermen, regulators, scientists, and coastal communities. She’s also the chair of the committee managing the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec, Maine, and a yoga instructor working with traumatized veterans, many of whom experience “ambiguous loss” — a condition also afflicting fishers and their communities when someone is lost at sea with no trace. She wrote a powerful post about this last year for the blog of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. Here’s an excerpt but do read the rest:

The sea can be generous—feeding, sustaining, and binding a town together—but it can also take without giving back. When it does, there is no gravesite to visit. The memorial becomes the shoreline, the harbor, the tide itself.

This absence echoes far beyond the family. In a small town, everyone knows the lost crew, their children, the boat’s paint color, the sound of its engine when it headed out before dawn. The loss ripples through the wharf, the coffee shop, the bait shed—felt in ways that are spoken and unspoken. [READ ON]

The pain of ambiguous loss

INSERT 07/15 - In the discussion, Sokoloski explained that the work to boost success in search, rescue and, yes, recovery of a body can also help avoid haunting ambiguity:

I’m certified in post-traumatic stress disorder.

So we deal with ambiguous loss and grief within the veteran population for veterans, of course, in combat. So this is something that happens within the fishing community as well, when we have fishermen that are lost at sea. And, you know, when there’s somebody that hasn’t been returned there is this continuous craving that occurs.

And that’s what ambiguous loss or grief is. So there’s no closure…. So this is what keeps occurring when there’s no body recovered and when these communities have to keep searching. And this is kind of where we tie into the search and rescue and the devices.

It’s for people to have have that recovery. Recovery of the body so that they can have that closure. - END INSERT

In the conversation you’ll also meet Josh Duym and Pat Shepard, the founders of the startup Redde Marine Safety, which operates along Maine’s 3,400-mile corrugated coast filling demand for up-to-date safety equipment, regulatory compliance and training.

Shepard noted that the realities of fishing hazards go way beyond postcard views of maritime life in Maine:

When people think about the fishing community in Maine, they think about big lobster boats with life rafts up on the roof and EPIRBs [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons] that can tell your position and life jackets and survival suits and all of that stuff. Clammers go out in a 16-foot aluminum skiff to some of those outer islands and clam for the entire day — in the middle of the winter. And we just saw how dangerous that can be this last winter when we lost two clammers down in Jonesport.

And I think organizations like Green and White Hope and companies like Redde Marine are really well poised to make a difference in some of those sectors of the industry that you don’t necessarily think about when it comes to safety gear.

Here’s what clamming looks like in winter here (Marlboro Beach, about five minutes from our home):

I capped off the show by playing the video of “For Those Who Put To Sea,” the updated version of my song about the under-appreciated dangers facing those working these waters. My fiddling friend Gus La Casse added haunting lines. Let me know what you think:

The song releases everywhere music is found on July 19 and I’ve set the video up as a fundraiser for Green & White Hope. The lyrics (with links to relevant background) are here as a pdf:

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I found myself having a quiet moment (I’m hoping you find them) at home and thought I’d share a bit of a musical ramble as a “Sunday Sanity” offering. You can find a short playlist of previous episodes of this track of Sustain What shows here.

I’m playing my first guitar, which I bought in pieces for $35 (Canadian) in Halifax at age 17 in 1977 and then fixed up in my dad’s basement workshop back home in Rhode Island — under threat that he’d throw it away if I didn’t make it playable by the end of the summer. How could I buy a broken guitar for that much money!?

I wrote a song about the guitar (a 1949 Gibson Southern Jumbo) and my dad a couple of years ago and you can hear it here:

I’m playing in open-C tuning — which I love because it’s full of octaves that give the feel of a 12-sstring guitar without having to own yet another instrument.

You can download my two albums and some singles on Bandcamp.

Here’s the evening episode in which I introduced my new album, “Wake Me up Martha”:

I started this webcast series back in the pandemic and that multi-year playlist is here.

Here’s a particularly fun episode with Alex de Grassi and Joachim Cooder and other friends:

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Insert, July 16 - Listen to or read this conversation between Rob Verchick and Dan Farber, two legal eagles on the muzzling of the Sloop Clearwater:

Insert, 3:15 p.m. - Months of planning and permits amounted to nothing as the Coast Guard, apparently on orders “from above” (see below), ordered the captain of the Sloop Clearwater, launched in 1969 by Pete Seeger and friends to clean the Hudson, to “turn your vessel around” instead of taking its place escorting a Portuguese square rigger up the Hudson in the big Fourth of July Sail 250 event (video by Tom LaBarr of the Beacon Sloop Club on Facebook).

Original post - I just had a conversation witth Dave Toman, executive director of the fabled Hudson River environmental and education organization Clearwater from the deck of the Sloop Clearwater after Coast Guard, Navy and New York Police Department vessels diverted the fabled sloop from its long-approved participation in the Sail250 Parade in New York Harbor and up the Hudson River.

The reason was reportedly that the vessel was displaying banners supporting inidigenous rights, climate action and preserving the Clean Water Act. I’ve reached out to Sail250 to get their input on why this happened and will update the post then.

Insert 3pm - Just posted by Clearwater:

BREAKING NEWS: Clearwater was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Sail by the USCG and escorted out of the Exclusion Zone by the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and NYPD.

Captain Rory Kane inquired why, and was informed the removal was due to the presence of banners reading: ‘Save the Clean Water Act and Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’”.

A representative from Sail4th 250 informed the Captain the decision was ‘above them.’

The sloop has a long and storied history of using the mains’l to share messages of hope and advocacy.

The Clearwater will continue sailing south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge until 3pm and has 29 passengers and 19 crew aboard. Follow our stories to see how we’re building solidarity from Gravesend Bay, waiting out the expiration of the security zone.

In the meantime, support Clearwater’s education and conservation work at clearwater.org.

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These days, many of us tend to think of coders, algorithms and AI as a predatory threat stalking our online communication environment, and all too often that is true. But here is an inspiring example of an effort to put these skills and technologies to vital use in an unfolding catastrophe.

Jorge Bastidas normally spends his days in Buenos Aires as CTO of The Empire, a small Florida-registered company building the online impact of a variety of clients around the world — from a natural-dog-food company to EmpathyAI. When Venezuela was shattered by double-barreled earthquakes one week ago, with some people he worked with among the tens of thousands affected, Bastidas abruptly shifted gears in a powerful way.

This Sustain What episode is part of the six-years-and-running track on Sustain What called Thriving Online. Explore the YouTube playlist here.

Facing communication blackouts and a desperate need to connect survivors with families, he and a fast-expanding team launched a portal for exchanging information among families and friends of those missing and hospitals and rescue teams handling an influx of survivors. Go explore desaparecidosterremotovenezuela.com and then come back to listen to how the project came to be, what it is achieving and what the emerging toolkit can do in the next disaster (or war zone). If you don’t have time to click, here’s a sample of what you see. Each image is someone missing or someone found but not connected to a family.

Bastidas tells me they making everything open source for use in future calamities. You can contact him to help at contacto@theempire.tech.

“This is our tragedy, this is our earthquake,” he told me. “But in all over the world, things like this happens every day. So we want to share this with the community so they can apply this same technology on every disaster or another emergency situation when people need it.”

Here’s one powerful moment for starters. As we spoke and I scrolled the list of images of the missing, I noted that there were 2,920 pages to click through. He grew emotional, raising his palms to his face and agreeing, “That is a lot of pages.”

Adaptive networks in a crisis

What’s most interesting to me is how Bastidas and hundreds of dispersed volunteers now working with him quickly diverted from their normal lives, taking their skills and applying them in a new way in a crisis. They are demonstrating that #AIForGood is not just a hashtag and programmers for good exist.

That pattern reminds me of a show I did early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as India locked down and its poorest citizens faced starvation even in big cities. A small nonprofit group focused on reducing plastic waste in Bhopal became a food distribution network. Listen to them and you’ll recognize the pattern.

Here’s Gemini’s summary of my conversation on the reconnection website (from the YouTube stream):

• Rapid Response: Within an hour of the disaster, Bastidas and his team began building a database-driven platform from scratch to help people report missing relatives and allow others to update their location (4:36 - 5:31).

• Tech Stack: The team utilized TypeScript for the front and back end, and AWS for hosting, implementing security measures like reCAPTCHA and firewalls to manage the massive influx of traffic (7:16 - 8:58).

• Collective Impact: The initiative has expanded significantly, involving hundreds of volunteers, auditors, and integration partners who use the platform’s API to share data with organizations like the UN (13:33 - 14:58).

• Facial Recognition: Collaborating with the company Lab Co, they integrated an AI-based facial recognition tool. This allows hospitals to upload photos of patients, which can then be matched against reports submitted by families (9:53 - 12:28).

I note that the facial recognition effort reminded me of “Trace the Face,” a longstanding project of the International Committee of the Red Cross that works this way: “If you have lost contact with someone while moving from one country to another or if you have a relative who has gone missing during migration, you can search our photo gallery or contact us to publish a photo of yourself for someone else to find.”

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live. Subscribe to be sure you get alerts when I do this kind of pop-up segment.

Rather than encouraging those who can afford it to chip in for Sustain What, I urge you to make a donation to Give Directly’s dedicated fund for Venezuelans facing the extraordinary challenge of rebuilding lives in a country beset by troubles well before this seismic nightmare. I just did.

As I’ve written before, this nonprofit tries to get direct benefits to those in need as a way to cut through bureaucracy. I’ve become convinced of the value of this strategy in large part through Matthew Yglesias’s writing and Slow Boring ’s support for them. Their “Emergency Cash team is entering Venezuela today,” the group just reported on its website.

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Here’s the post-show post and audio podcast for my conversation with the Capital Weather team, who’ve just returned to independence after 18 years of weather communication and community building affiliated with the Washington Post.

Details are in the curtain-raiser post:

We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder Jason Samenow was at the Environmental Protection Agency working on the possible carbon dioxide endangerment finding while experimenting in his spare time with weather blogging. Boy, it’s wild to look back:

We talked about the potential impact of Trump-driven federal budget and staffing cuts on the basic data that private forecasters rely on — a question their colleague Matthew Cappucci has been closely tracking:

We explored how the implosion of local TV budgets is spawning a nationwide array of independent meteorologists building their own audiences and businesses. Samenow mentioned that the American Meteorological Society has launched a Certified Digital Meteorologist (CDM) training and certification program to offer communities some assurance of the skills of the forecasters they depend on.

There’s lots more, so please watch and please share this post! If you don’t, someone who could benefit from these insights won’t see them.

And do consider chipping in to sustain my Sustain What work.

Consider becoming a financial contributor.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

Parting weather shot: Net hats are an essential spring fashion accessory on muggy hot days here in Downeast Maine.

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I just hosted a pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the dozens of climate and weather scientists who are running a 50-Hour livestream to boost public appreciation of the observational and analytical science that bolsters societal resilience and boosts understanding of our amazing, and changing, planet. A goal is to sustain federal support for weather & climate science even as the current administration seems deadset on demolishing it.

My guests were Clare Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Nadir Jeevanjee, a research physical scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; and Rob Socolow, an emeritus professor focused on interdisciplinary environmental science and engineering at Princeton.

Socolow made an important point here about the Trump era appearing to be the end of an arc of American appreciation of science that began with Sputnik and is having its “anti-Sputnik moment”:

Please watch above and share this post now with fellow citizens - and your elected representatives in Congress. Our conversation is also on YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and my X account.

The scientists’ webcast is under way through June 3:

Make sure to visit the Weather & Climate Livestream home page, where you can find a host of short videos excerpted from last year’s 100-hour stream.

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Thank you Matt Burgess, Mary Powers, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

The only way to build our Sustain What community is to share this post now with others.

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Program note: Today at 11 a.m. Eastern, join me live with several of the dozens of scientists participating in a 50-Hour livestream to sustain federal support for weather & climate science: YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and X. The webcast is under way through June 3:

My conversation with Chris Mooney

Here’s the post-webcast post of my conversation with Chris Mooney. In 20 years, Mooney has gone from progressive blogger and author of the prescient bestselling 2005 book The Republican War on Science (yes, 2005, yes, prescient) to Pulitzer-winning Washington Post climate reporter to the new holder of an endowed chair at the Univeristy of Tennessee, Knoxville, created to “advance public understanding of complex scientific, technological, environmental, and medical issues by fostering excellence in teaching, research, and outreach.”

The curtain-raiser post has lots of background:

Here’s one nugget in which Mooney examines the early roots of the divide that has grown between Republicans and science:

I can say for sure that the rift that I was detecting between scientists and one side of the political spectrum has worsened since that time. I think that’s pretty objectively true. And you can actually look at the polling data, for instance. Something happens during COVID that really politicizes science in the minds of the electorate in a way that it wasn’t before.

You can see the trust divide widen between Democrats and Republicans much more than it was caused by something like climate change…. And one thing about the climate issue is that not everyone is really that engaged with it. It’s always seen as something in the future or what have you. But COVID was not. It was in the present. You had to have a view about it.

There is much, much more. Here’s Gemini’s answer when I asked it to summarize key ideas that emerged (using the YouTube video; if more subscribers chip in I might be able to hire an intern to do this work, but that’s up to you):

This conversation explores the evolving landscape of climate journalism, the role of data in storytelling, and the impact of new technologies on the media industry.

• Data-Driven Narrative Structure: Mooney discusses his experimental approach to writing, which involves treating stories as data sets to better understand and map narrative structures. He argues that applying data-driven thinking to journalism can help writers craft more cohesive stories. (4:24 - 9:09)

• The Evolution of Science Communication: The speakers reflect on the importance of “framing” in science communication—choosing which aspects of a complex topic to emphasize based on the intended audience and context. (21:04 - 23:48)

• The Challenge of ‘Single Study Syndrome’: A major concern highlighted is the tendency for media outlets to treat individual scientific studies as sensational “Eureka” moments, which can lead to reader disengagement and a lack of context. They advocate for a broader, trend-based approach to science reporting. (38:09 - 42:01)

• The Future of Journalism and AI: The conversation touches upon the integration of AI in newsrooms and the potential risks of automated, traffic-driven reporting models versus human-produced, verified journalism. (34:33 - 35:12)

• Climate Journalism in Practice: Mooney recounts his work on a Pulitzer-winning project at The Washington Post, which utilized data visualization to identify regional climate trends that were previously overlooked. (57:29 - 1:03:24)

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I’m continuing to write songs along with my Sustain What webcasting and blogging here — in part to keep sane and in part because this has always been one of my ways of connecting people with ideas. (Buy my new album here.)

In this post, you’re getting the first look and listen to the first rough recording of “Nothing is Quiet.” The lyrics — also still a work in progress — are below. Everyone can listen but I’d love it if a few more of you might chip in financially to help me sustain my output.

The path from idea to song

The songwriter Amy Love was one of the songcrafting workshop leaders this spring at Bagaduce Music, Downeast Maine’s prime hub for musical education and a world-class library of printed music. In one session she offered this prompt: Write a song about an object.

I immediately focused on the red wool caps my wife started weaving from a pattern sold by a Minneapolis-area shop to raise money for local nonprofits helping immigrants facing the brutal ICE invasion. You may remember this from my post on “craftivism”:

The back story is quite remarkable, with a Minneapolis knitting-shop employee recalling a Norwegian red wool cap design dating from World War II.

I began scribbling.

Knitting is quiet, even serene.

Small talk and tea cups and needles weaving….

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

Cooking is quiet, but not these days

I could have written the full song about the Minneapolis saga, but wanted to widen the picture. What else is normally quiet, but not these days? I’d also recently listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with José Andrés, the superstar chef and restaurant impresario who founded World Central Kitchen after the calamitous earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

I encourage you to listen to the full show, which has fascinating details on how Andrés learned on the run, grew a network of hundreds of collaborating restaurants and related busineses and nonprofits and has built an agile and gutsy operation that has served 600 million meals in dozens of disaster and conflict zones.

Fourteen WCK workers have been killed in the field — seven in an Israeli attack on a convoy in Gaza, six more in Ukraine. (Today’s recording of the song says seven… updates to come!)

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Seven died in Gaza, six more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

At the end of the song I widen out the view once more, noting other quiet, but essential actions — from meeting to healing to voting.

This section may evolve, along with other elements of the song. Feedback is welcome!

I composed the tune on my Maine-made bouzouki because I find that breaking away from guitar — my instrument of choice for more than 50 years — helps free me from mental ruts.

Nothing is Quiet These Days

Here are the lyrics at the moment:

Knitting is quiet, even serene -

Small talk and tea cups and needles weaving.

Counting up stitches, unballing yarn.

Wool becomes sweaters to keep loved ones warm.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

In cold Minnesota, a knitting brigade

Made red wool a shield

To keep immigrants safe.

Red capped resistance

When ICE agents swarmed.

Hats made to a pattern passed down from a war.

Those caps got their start back in snowy Norway.

A symbol of freedom from Nazis and hate,

I said nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

Cooking is quiet as stirring a pot,

peeling potatoes, keeping soup hot.

Turning meat into stew, wheat into bread,

Dish it all out to keep everyone fed.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Seven died in Gaza, six more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

Silence is deadly in this day and age.

Raise up your voices with heart and not rage.

But singing alone will not fix what is wrong.

Get knitting and cooking,

Meeting and voting,

Healing and marching

To get the job done.

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Here’s a related post from Drop Site News:

Here’s an Atlantic Council video on World Central Kitchen’s work in Ukraine: “‘In Focus: Voices from Ukraine:’ World Central Kitchen on humanitarian needs in Ukraine”:

And Here’s Jorunn Hernes 🇳🇴 — the Nordic Knitter — on the history of the red wool hats:

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I just wrapped a super-sobering and, at the same time, fun and hopeful conversation on the urgent issues surrounding the plaid-speed evolution of AI. With my guests Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard at Arizona State University, the prime focus was the Vatican rollout of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter and the Pope’s admonition today that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”

Please listen and weigh in with your thoughts - and SHARE this post so we can widen our Sustain What community.

Allenby’s research has focused in part on how nations’ fears about the existential threat posed by NOT embracing AI in security arenas. He basically wished the pope luck in trying to hold back that tide. He pointed out how Russia is actively working with transnational criminal networks to exert power. That’s not something that will bend to papal desires any time soon — let alone the United Nations or the like.

Maynard, who tends to focus these days on practical ways to make the most of AI, said something vitally important that is one reason I have diverted a lot in recent years from my focus on environmental sustainability:

I actually think we make a mistake when we try and equate AI to human intelligence. This is absolutely an alien form of intelligence. And as soon as we try and equate it to humans,

we make categorical errors because it means we can either be wowed because we say

it’s better than human intelligence or we can be dismayed or dismissive because we say it’s not as clever as me. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve got something completely alien that is increasingly in charge of the things that our lives depend on.

Brad Allenby jumped in to hammer the point home:

Let me reinforce that Andrew has made probably, I think, the most important point that people need to grasp. We are not talking about artificial intelligence. That language itself takes us back to thinking that somehow human intelligence is the sine qua non of cognition, which we know it’s not.

We are dealing with a truly alien intelligence that we’re building and distributing with very little idea of what it’s going to do.

I mean, this is an extraordinary roll of the dice by all of humanity. And I think you’ve got to be careful not to trivialize it. Andrew’s absolutely dead on.

Here’s their double-barreled warning. Listen and pass it around!

Share this post with others please!

Who’s responsible?

I asked Gemini to draw a cartoon illustrating the disconnect between those of us affected by AI’s high-speed spread and those “in the bus.” Andrew Maynard said it’s important to understsand that those in the bus are not just AI developers:

[The cartoon] reminded me of something which I think often gets missed. So we’re often looking at the developers of AI saying all the responsibility lies on them and they’re not doing this right.

But I would actually add another category there. It’’s the first-mover implementers. It’’s the companies that are rushing to incorporate AI into everything. It’s the governments that are trying to AI-ize everything.

It is the universities that have decided that they have got to go fast and throw caution to the wind to put AI in everything. They are all people in this bus that are pushing AI progress so it’s not just the tech bros it is every company that is saying we do not have time to ask about care and responsibility and ethics because we just got to go fast. And that is propagating the challenges I think that we’re seeing beginning to emerge.

There is much, much in the full webcast above. See my curtain-raiser post for some unnerving comments made at the Vatican today by Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic:

In today’s discussion, I mused on whether humanity’s techno-surge at the moment is replaying a script that all technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe have followed — and that perhaps this explains why it’s so damn quiet out there (Google for “great filter” or “Fermi’s Paradox”). Do all possible civilizations burn themselves out this way?

Maynard made me feel a lot better by bringing the focus back to what each of us — and our institutions, and popes — can do today no matter what lies ahead:

I think there’s a very real chance that as a civilization, we will burn out, that we will discover that human exceptionalism means nothing to the universe and to the march of entropy. But I don’t care.

I think what is important, and again, this is just my philosophy, is what it means to be human here and now, what it means to be human in terms of the value we create for ourselves, how we identify worth, how we create value with relationships with others.

That’s not being exceptional. It’s just, to me, being human.

And if you focus on that and the near term, it really doesn’t matter too much what the future of humanity is. Maybe our candle will burn bright and burn out. But the here and now then becomes important. And that, in a sense, is what is reflected in the encyclical.

Not all of it, because the encyclical is wrapped up in a religious sort of bubble that says actually sort of human’s relationship with God and by extension with the universe has primacy here.

I would disagree with that, but I would agree 100% with the fact that you find meaning and value in those relationships in the here and now. And so that actually gives me hope and it gives me excitement when I see what happens with AI, because wherever it goes, if we keep hold of what it means to be human within that, we can continue to create value on our own terms.

That felt like the key takeaway, to me.

What about you?

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I hope you’ll watch and share this illuminating and constructive face-to-face discussion with four key analysts of the scenarios for emissions of planet-heating gases that indirectly have shaped, and sometimes misshaped, climate policy discourse and decisions (and media coverage).

My guests were Richard Tol, Zeke Hausfather, Matt Burgess, and Roger Pielke Jr.

As I discussed here recently, the worst-case emissions track, a k a RCP8.5, is being dropped from the basket of plausible futures used in modeling studies that underpin core conclusions in the periodic reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Read the April paper describing the revisions to scenarios, which the authors explain came about because “underlying projections…were somewhat outdated by the time climate model output became available… Also, over time, critiques emerged about the plausibility of the most extreme scenarios.”)

My guests, like most researchers dug in on this area of climate research, largely agree that the highest emissions scenario is deeply implausible. The debate is mostly on whether that is a new development — the result of the enormous progress in cutting the cost of renewable energy — or because the scenario was never plausible. (I favor the second camp.)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s curtain raiser post, a key 2017 paper led by Justin Ritchie of the University of British Columbia laid out the near impossibility of mining and burning the amount of coal required to get such high emissions. Click back for that paper and other background:

Here’s Hausfather, who works at the company Stripe and at the research lab Berkeley Earth (and of course co-writes The Climate Brink):

Even though Roger and I like to spar online a lot, there’s a couple of things that I think we’d all agree are true today. One is that RCP 8.5 was never a particularly plausible baseline scenario. And there was a mistake by the community to refer to it as business as usual.

I like to call it a mistaken game of telephone. No, I don’t think there was a bad intent there.

I think that a lot of climate scientists didn’t necessarily read the energy modeling literature, which made it pretty clear back in 2011 when RCP 8.5 was formally published that it was intended to represent the 90th percentile of baseline outcomes in the literature at the time,not a particular likely outcome….

I think there’s sort of two separate questions that we’ve been debating a lot here. One is, how plausible was the scenario ever? And I think we all agree it was pretty implausible. And the second is, has the world actually moved away from higher emissions scenarios?

And that latter question, I think the answer is probably yes.

Driven in part by, as Richard pointed out, the falling cost of clean energy, which is mediated obviously by some policy actions taken by various countries, including the US, China and others. Exactly where we might have been headed, I think is a really tough question to answer.

Roger Pielke acknowledged that clean energy tech has advanced tremendously but said his key metric is the overall rate of decarbonization of the economy, and — wheteher you look at the United States or the planet as a whole — that rate has remained a straight declining line decade after decade. I showed that decarbonization curve from one of his Substack posts and he said:

My hypothesis is a lot of the wonderful things that have happened, and it’s true. Technologies have advanced, costs have gone down. But they are basically maintaining a trend that’s been in place long before Paris, long before Kyoto, long before the Rio Conference.

So we’re calling climate policy the sort of things that we used to call other names. There are some differences around the world. If we want to have deep decarbonization at a rate faster than this linear decline, this curve is going to have to have an inflection point. It’s that simple.

When RCP8.5 “escaped the courtyard of science”

Roger Pielke explained (and no one disagreed) that one of the biggest harms from the exreme warming scenario came as it became used outside of the world of climate simulation - something he and Justin Ritchie explored in depth in Issues in Science and Technology in 2021 (as well as in this paper: “Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios.”) Here’s the main point:

At some point, Justin and I in our paper, our incredibly long, boring paper on the history of all this, we quote a researcher who says, we didn’t realize that RCPs could take on a life of their own. these scenarios escaped from the courtyard of science and went out in the real world.

And it turns out they’re used in policy, they’re used in regulation, they’re used in global banking, they’re used in insurance, rate setting and risk assessment. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everyone in the planet is in some way touched by these scenarios. And so the institutions of science really didn’t keep up with the growing importance of climate change as a topic and climate institutions. And so here we are in 2026. And like Richard said, better late than never, but it would have been better if it happened 10 or 15 years ago.

There’s much, much more from Hausfather, Pielke and Matt Burgess and Richard Tol.

We also discussed how research conclusions centered on the extreme warming scenario long provided just the kind of dramatic fodder that climate-focused journalists need. I brought up the pull of “narrative capture” — my shorthand for the dynamic where internal or external dynamics cause people to cling to validating visions of a problem (the climate crisis) even when data shift.

I’m on the run all week and this is where AI tools are incredibly useful. Here’s the Gemini summary of some other points (you can ask the AI on YouTube to do this kind of task). I asked: “Distill the key observations and assertions made by the guests in this discussion of the value and limits of developing scenarios for human activities that could worsen or lessen global warming. Pick out half a dozen key moments and create time stamps.”

Here’s Gemini:

This discussion examines the history, misuse, and eventual retirement of the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario, which was widely but erroneously labeled as “business as usual.” The panelists — Richard Tol, Zeke Hausfather, Matt Burgess, and Roger Pielke Jr. — argue that while scenarios are useful for scientific modeling, they have often been misinterpreted by the media and policymakers, leading to flawed risk assessments.

Key Moments and Insights:

• The “Business as Usual” Misconception: (16:07-17:20) Zeke Hausfather explains that the climate community made a mistake in referring to RCP 8.5 as “business as usual,” noting it was originally intended to represent a 90th-percentile baseline, not a likely outcome.

• Institutional Lags in Science: (13:10-14:50) Richard Tol discusses the necessity of updating scenarios more frequently than the current decadal cycle, pointing out that scientific modeling cycles often struggle to keep pace with the urgent needs of policy and global risk assessment.

• Policy Evaluation vs. Scenario Reliance: (46:51-47:20) Roger Pielke Jr. asserts that evaluating actual policy—whether it accelerates or reverses emission curves—is significantly more important than relying on static, hypothetical emissions scenarios.

• The “Franken-Scenario” Problem: (51:06-51:44) Matt Burgess criticizes the practice of combining extreme high-emission scenarios with slow-growth economic assumptions, which creates “Franken-scenarios” that produce misleading results about climate vulnerability and adaptation.

• The Media’s Role in Alarmism: (59:00-1:00:43) The panel discusses how sensationalist headlines are often incentivized by journals and media outlets, making it easier to publish studies that claim climate change is “worse than we thought” compared to more nuanced assessments.

• From Scenarios to Warming Levels: (1:13:30-1:14:43) Zeke Hausfather suggests the community should pivot away from specific emission scenarios entirely, instead focusing on impacts associated with specific global warming levels (e.g., 2°C or 3°C worlds) to better communicate risk and uncertainty.

Please listen and offer your thoughts below. Also share this post or go to LinkedIn or Facebook or X/Twitter to share the webcast on those platforms.

And do consider chipping in here (I know the overlaod) if you can afford to help keep Sustain What open for all and help me justify the time I take away from my songwriting and family and the rest.

Thank you Martha Morningsong, Bruce Maslack, Zach Keeshin, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Postscript

Dan Miller and Leon Simons had an informative conversation with Detlef van Vuuren, the lead author of the April paper laying the groundwork for the changes in emissions scenarios.

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I just hosted a great discussion of the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy.

As I wrote in the curtain raiser post on Thursday, what drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this section of my mind-blowing 2017 ProPublica conversation with Will Happer, who was a top candidate for science advisor in Trump’s first term and who is in/famous for his assertion that more carbon dioxide is great.

He said this:

One of our problems in climate is that you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’

…I’m all for climate science, you know. If I were King, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things.

President Trump has done grievous damage to such capacities in his second term (see links at the bottom), although thankfully Congress has blunted the spending cuts.

The discussion centered on the work of the Keeling Curve Foundation, which is trying to build momentum for philanthropic, governmental and private-sector investment in Earth observation capacity.

One indicator of trouble is the declining budget for maintaining the flow of data behind the iconic “Keeling Curve” of carbon dioxide concentrations, generated through decades of work by Charles David Keeling and now his son Ralph,

Here’s the introuctory post with more info on my guests: Ralph Keeling, the climate-focused Stanford ecologist Chris Field and Betsy Weatherhead, a leading researcher focused on earth observation science and technology.

Here are a couple of highlights. But do watch (and share!) the conversation!

Ralph Keeling explains how sustained atmospheric monitoring revealed both the problem posed by ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, the decline of the synthetic compounds under the Montreal Protocoal - AND a suspicious resurgence of CFC-11 that led to the discovery that Chinese companies were cheating:

I asked Betsy Weatherhead what would signal a revival of commitments to keep this planet closely observed and she said it’s already happening - to a significant extent overseas:

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Relevant coverage and context

• From satellites to services: Financing Earth observation for public value (ECDPM think tank)

https://ecdpm.org/work/satellites-services-financing-earth-observation-public-value

• NOAA Defends Cuts to Research and Climate Monitoring at Budget Hearing

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042026/noaa-defends-trump-cuts/

• ‘It’s just madness’: Trump administration to close three-quarters of Forest Service research stations (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/its-just-madness-trump-administration-to-close-three-quarters-of-forest-service-research-stations/

• How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A. (The New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/climate/epa-science-trump-cuts.html

• Designing the Climate Observing System of the Future (Earth’s Future; research paper led by Betsy Weatherhead)

https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000627

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Snag “Wake Me up Martha,” a sonic survival guide for these crazy times, on Bandcamp today - Bandcamp Friday - when the company doesn’t take its percentage: revkin.bandcamp.com. You can listen on every conceivable platform and they’re all here: andyrevkin.hearnow.com.

Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show:

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J.A. Ginsburg, a k a Janet Ginsburg, is a business analyst and writer (and many other things) who is scouring the world for scientists and startups pursuing substitutes for the materials societies have long depended on — but that are in short supply because of bottlenecks like the one created by President Trump’s war on Iran.

I urge you to sign up for her Substack project, which is the learning journey leading to an eventual book.

But I also urge you to give yourself a dose of optimism and excitement by listening to our conversation above!

Here are links to the work of just a few of the companies or sectors she mentioned (I’m adding a paywall break as a reminder that Sustain What takes work; I’m going to take it down after publication):

• Maxwell Labs - cooling with light https://mxllabs.com Here’s her description:

• Simplyfiber - fabric without spinning, weaving, sewing…

https://www.simplifyber.com

• Strongbyform - wood as technology

https://www.strongbyform.com

• Hertha Metals - getting around the China issue for steel and high-quality iron https://herthametals.com

• Enso - making better tires for EVs (which have a tire problem) https://www.ensotyres.com/en-US

• Plantd Materials - board and other products made from grasses

https://www.plantdmaterials.com

• Shellworks - plastic-free materials that behave like plastic https://shellworks.com

• On - running shoes and clothing https://www.on.com

• Colorifix https://www.colorifix.com

• Five Startups Reducing Data Center Water Consumption - “Startups are rethinking data center cooling with liquid, immersion, and closed-loop systems to reduce water consumption while supporting rising AI-driven compute demand.”

• TOCCO - you have to explore to understand this “agency” for materials sourcing and tracking. “First-hand intelligence from the materials frontier.”

https://tocco.earth

Ginsburg also mention that Trump, in essence, has created a carbon tax that is spurring all kinds of action to cut fossil fuel use. With that in mind, also read Larry Kotlikoff:

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Peter Raven, 1936 - 2026

Rhett Ayers Butler, the founder of the biodiversity-focused online news network Mongabay, has posted a marvelous tribute laying out the extraordinary life and legacy of Peter Raven, a groundbreaking botanist and fierce defender of Earth’s biological diversity who died over the weekend at age 89.

I was lucky to get to know Raven over a couple of decades as an expert source in my environmental reporting and then work with him when I joined the Executive Committee for Resaearch and Exploration at National Geographic Society, which he led at the time I joined. (Watch this video about Raven’s Hubbard Medal.) Here’s the opening to Butler’s piece:

Life on Earth is often described as a web, but for much of modern science it was catalogued as a ledger: names, specimens, distributions, relationships drawn in careful lines. Over the course of the 20th century, that ledger gave way to a more connected view. Plants and animals were no longer just entries in a system; they were participants in it, shaping one another across deep time. The implications of that shift were not merely scientific. They pointed, more directly than before, to the role of a single species—our own—in altering the terms of that participation.

Few scientists did more to define that transition, or to explain its consequences, than Peter Raven.

Peter Hamilton Raven, who died this weekend, aged 89, was among the most influential botanists of the past century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he combined taxonomy, evolutionary biology and conservation into a coherent body of work: to understand the diversity of life, and to argue for its preservation with a clarity that was unusual among scientists of his generation. PLEASE READ THE REST:

So many greats from the early generation of conservation leaders are gone, including Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy.

But so many more leaders are emerging. To understand that, and to feel Raven’s mix of deep knowledge, puckish humor and trenchant analysis, I encourage you to watch the Sustain What conversation above, which was recorded in May 2021 but is eternally relevant. I introduced Raven to two younger generations of botanist: Angelica Patterson, who calls herself the “shotgun scientist” because that’s the tool she uses to collect the flowering and fruiting treetop branches that help identify a tree species; and Hilary Callahan of Barnard College.

This 2022 short documentary is also well worth your time.

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There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich, a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute.

His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether plant based or built in the lab) and his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future.

Please watch or listen above and share this post or the archived videos on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or YouTube.

The mission statement of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization tightly meshes with my view of how to feed 9 billion or so people with the fewest regrets:

Billions of people around the world love meat and want to keep eating more of it. Simply ramping up business-as-usual ways of producing that meat, however, is not a viable path if we want to achieve the world’s climate, biodiversity, public health, and food security goals within the next two critical decades.

While multiple interventions will be needed, a transition toward alternative proteins—made from plants, cultivated from animal cells, or produced via fermentation—is the only one that can scale to address the demand for meat. Such a transition can dramatically reduce emissions, feed more people with fewer resources, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food system, and enable the conservation of lands and waters.

His book masterfully untangles the issues and options - technical, financial and political - that could give people the protein they need without ravaging more forest, overheating climate, threatening health or adding to the nonstop, vast and growing slaughter of our animal kin.

He describes his learning and work journeys, which started in the 1980s with reading books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and work focused on poverty alleviation and food sufficiency.

He walks through the stutter-step start of the field in the last decade or so and the emerging reality that large-scale alternative-meat production is absolutely doable. It’s easy to get fooled by the slow start, he told me, adding:

“Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University, said in 1906 that automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. because they were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly and they were really expensive. In 1908, Henry Ford solves those first two problems and puts us on the trajectory of solving the third. And 20 years later, the automobile industry was the largest industry in America. So the question is, how do we get to that 1908 moment?

Listen for the answers.

We also talked about my reporting journey on lab-grown meat, as well, which started in 2008 when I proposed that cultured foie gras would seem an ideal starting point. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned but Australian and French companies are there!

Of course the holy grail isn’t exotica like fatty liver. It’s mass production. Watch our conversation to get the latest from Friedrich on what’s needed from science, investors and nations to boost protein security and cut environmental damage for the long haul. As in so many areas, China appears to be leading the way.

Read Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins- a report by Zane Swanson, Caitlin Welsh, and Joseph Majkut for the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and Friedrich’s Foreign Policy article on how China is poised to do for alternative meats what it has already done for electric vehicles.

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Related Sustain What posts

Other voices

My vegan “solutionary” educator friend (and neighbor) Zoe Weil had Friedrich on her Solutionary Voices podcast:

David Roberts did a great climate- and energy-focused Volts chat on the future of meat with Friedrich:

Also watch Alex Crisp’s interview with Friedrich:

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On a road trip from Maine to Nashville and back, visiting our sons and other kin, my wife and I spent a couple of days back in the Hudson Valley, where I popped into the studios of Radio Kingston to speak with my old environmental-media compadre Jon Bowermaster for his Green Radio Hour show.

Bowermaster, a couple of years older than I am, has amassed an extraordinary globe-spanning body of great journalism — most of that in documentary films. His latest, “The Keeper,” is an intimate portrait of Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb’s quarter-century effort to curtail pollution and revive the ecosystem along “the river that flows both ways.” (Lipscomb retired in 2024.) See a clip and more on Bowermaster’s other films below.

Radio Kingston has grown substantially since my last visit and now includes 2/47 Spanish language programming for the large immigrant community in the region.

I’d been on Bowermaster’s show many times, but this was the first time in more than a decade that I’d gotten to sit face to face with my old friend in the studio — and also the first time I was there with my guitar and bouzouki and a new album of original songs. My album, Wake Me up Martha, is launching April 30th and this was my first radio interview supporting the record. Let your favorite stations know about the album! Here’s a promotional flyer you can share.

We ranged widely in the hour, talking about how some environmental challenges (climate, ecological degradation) seem immune to even the best efforts of journalists, about the importance of truly engaging audiences, about his fine films. And we talked about my growing focus on my music.

I’m pasting some highlights below, but I hope you’ll listen to, and share, the full conversation! I’m grateful to Bowermaster and the station for allowing me to post the segment on Sustain What.

How I fell in love with blogging at The New York Times — as a way to build a conversation on complex questions; how the name of Sustain What derives from the main tool of journalists — the quetion mark — and why asking questions isn’t always a delay-seeking form of “whataboutism”:

How my journalistic and musical journeys intersected off and on — here when I wrote “Liberated Carbon” to describe the long human love affair with fossil fuels:

Why sustaining democracy has become a vital focus of my sustainability quest, and why the plasticity of the Constitution is its greatest strength, and now greatest weakness — one being exploited almost hourly by President Trump:

Bowermaster asked me for my thoughts on what Lee Zeldin has been doing at the Environmental Protection Agency. I responded with the point I made in a meme and column here awhile back:

Watch the conversation for some of my songs. And please SHARE this post. That’s really the only way we can grow the Sustain What community.

Here’s more on Bowermaster’s films, starting with “The Keeper”:

I loved “Sink or Swim - Learning to Crawl in the Maldives” because it gets at a critical issue for safety and sustainability I’ve explored before: making sure people in coastal communities can appreciate the ocean environment that surrounds them.

I love his short intimate film about The Wonder of the Bobolink, a threatened field-nesting bird with an intercontinental migratory cycle that we’ve come to love in our part of downeast Maine because they nest in hayfields near us (and are beginning to return as conservationists work with farmers to time mowing safely).

There’s so much more from Bowermaster and his team.

Thanks, Jon, for helping elevate my music side!

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This is the post-webcast post of my invigorating and unnerving conversation withAndrew Maynardand Jeffrey Abbott, the authors of a “practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process.”

The curtain raiser post is here with more background:

The more I dive into the free downloadable (and AI-uploadable) version of AI and the Art of Being Human, the more I appreciate what they’re trying to do.

But the more we talked, the more, also, I became convinced that the ungovernability of the technology, and the norms of those shaping it, poses the most existential challenge of all. Here’s a key point from Maynard:

I think there’s another challenge here as well. And that is that so much of what we’re seeing is being driven by ideology. So it’s not just making money. If you look at the big tech companies, they’re driven by people who have a very, very specific vision of the future.

And I would say in many cases, it’s a very naive vision, a very flawed vision. But it’s this vision that drives them. This is what they’re trying to build. You look at someone like Dario Amodei or Elon Musk or others; it’s not the money. It’s creating the future that somehow has got locked in their heads.

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It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will take many years, so oil and gas are still vital.)

Without functioning democracies, forget about climate policy

That’s why I focus periodically here on the vital need to maintain the kind of political systems and norms that are vital for any progress on deeper themes. In February, 2025, I hosted a conversation with scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden who, for a decade, have been charting nations’ vital signs in ways that reveal drift either toward or away from autocracy.

Their 2025 report was gloomy but focused on analysis showing that, in recent decades, countries that had moved to control by a single individual or cabal could experience u-turns back toward democracy. My first Sustain What conversation with them is here: Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century, Here’s How U-Turns Toward Democracy Can Happen.

No bright spots this time in Trump’s America

In our discussion of the V-Dem Project’s 2026 report, I kept pressing Staffan Lindberg and Marina Nord for good signals, but we came up empty. The section on the United States — no surprise — is very grim. Read these nuggets, but don’t weep; get busy! Sustained civil resistance across society is an essential precursor for restoration of good governance.

Their new report, like last year’s, noted that the autocratization trend remains strong around the world and is measurably worse than in the 1930s. We discussed a range of situations, from efforts to influence the upcoming election in Hungary to questions around what comes next after the youth-driven uprising in Nepal.

I hope you’ll take time to listen, and SHARE, and let me know what you’re doing to defend humane democratic government from the local to global scale.

Here’s Lindberg describing the evidence that the current global situation is worse than the 1930s:

Thanks to those who tuned in live.

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Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more.

Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What community.

Here are a couple of highlights if you’re in a hurry. We started out talking about threats from space given the dramatic meteor explosion over the U.S. Midwest. Frank pointed to his recent Everyman’s Universe post positing that if dinosaurs, way back when, had had the planetary defense technology we are developing now, we wouldn’t be here now:

Here Frank described the vital challenge of reintegrating the human journey within the biosphere’s constraints.

Here Frank describes how he tries to use practices he learned in Buddhism and meditation to pull back from the zone-flooding dread around us: “You’re only given so many hours on this planet. So spending every moment of it in terror, you’re not helping anybody. You’re not helping the future by being freaked out 99.9 percent of the time.”

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Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too prismatic for one approach to be “right.”

My guests:

• Chase Cain, who recently left NBC News after a decade focused on climate change reporting there, has launched a YouTube channel aiming to bridge cultural gaps by highlighting stories forging closer, and more relisient, relationships between people and nature.

• Betsy Rosenberg, a former CBS radio journalist who has spent decades trying to engage audiences on the vital need to stem global warming and conserve the natural world. Her current platform, also on YouTube, is Code Green:

In our conversation, a listener on Facebook, Courtney A. Kaaz, posted this great question:

Make more desalination, hydroelectric dams, that chemically filter water, make breakwater piers that also clean the water, explain how you can use solar in a way that is actually economical in real time. All of Texas could get on board if you can give us economical, safe water and solve our toxic summer oceans, ponds and lakes.

Cain offered an answer that completely syncs with my view that often the best way to gain traction on energy and resilience choices that can improve climate outcomes doesn’t involve focusing on that grand, and divisive, thing called climate change:

I think what i think part of what [Courtney] is saying is she didn’t also say the word climate, and in a place like Texas that’s probably what’s going to reach people.

If you say climate you’ve lost the Fox News audience but we need and want the Fox News audience. I’m not saying that everything I’m going to do is devoted toward that. But I do want to create content that is accessible and as an invitation to those people.

…The Fox News audience probably spends more time in the outdoors, probably spends more time in nature than an MSNBC audience or an MSNBC audience, whatever it’s called. So they love the outdoors. They love nature. I just don’t know that they’ve connected the dots to how some of these policies are impacting the things and the places that they love. And so if we bridge that divide, then gosh, you’ve just won a huge segment of the American population, which would, I think, almost overnight flip our politics.

That closing assertion about a quick flip is pretty questionable (and Rosenberg expressed a very different view and strategy) but Cain’s core point is important.

Please watch and share the full show and weigh in.

There’s more background in the curtain raiser post that preceded the show:

And here’s my related conversation with Sammy Roth, the former Los Angeles Times climate columnist who’s moved to Substack:

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There’s a lot going on.

For me, at least, one vital counterpoint is music — writing it, performing it, and convening with musician friends to talk about it. (If you happen to be in Downeast Maine this Thursday, March 5, come hear my first effort at an event in which I talk and sing about my interrelated life tracks in journalism and songwriting.)

Today, I want to introduce you to a dear old musical friend, Vince Bell. I hope you’ll listen to our conversation and his music above (recorded a few days ago), and on his vincebell.com website. He’s just dropped a wonderful song from his second spoken-word album (words spoken over marvelous music from a spectacular ensemble he convened in 2024 in Brooklyn, N.Y.). The song and album are “Break My Heart”:

Vince’s roots are well worth understanding. Here he was singing his song “The Sun, Moon and Stars” back in 1977, having emerged from Houston to join a remarkable cohort of Texas bards including Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Here’s Griffith’s interpretation of the song.

In December 1982, just as he was getting into high gear and recording his first album, his life and musical journey were derailed by a near-death encounter with a drunk driver in Austin.

He suffered brain damage and the near amputation of one arm. It took him a decade of grinding effort to rebuild his ability to sing and pick guitar. In 2009, he wrote “One Man’s Music,” a touching and sometimes-amusing memoir of his journey back to health and creativity.

I can’t recall my first meetup with Vince, but it was in New York City in the mid 1990s when he was beginning to tour in support of his 1994 album “Phoenix.” The name of this collection of spellbinding songs reflected his physical and professional ressurection. I consider it one of my “desert island” records. Here’s “Mirror, Mirror”:

We became friends and I’ve had the utter pleasure of backing him up on mandolin or guitar in some shows in the New York Region.

“Is it hot enough for you, yet?”

I’ve also visited him a couple of times in his Santa Fe home and got a chance to play slide guitar in this take on his great song about pollution - “Local Charm”:

For a Dot Earth post way back in my New York Times days, he explained its origins:

Vince says: “Local Charm was a joint in the old Harrisburg part of Houston down by the ship channel. I lived there for a few years among the railroad tracks and the rust. The imageries in this piece were my backyard.” An excerpt:

Miles and miles of twisted trash,railroad tracks in all directions.Whining ‘dozers climb like antsin holes they can’t get out of.Above the filth so wide and deeppyrites spire before the sun.Where water taps as clear as glassbefore it gets to here.Is it hot enough for ya, yet?

Beyond his music and wordsmithing, Vince is an absolute paragon not just of resilience, but of dogged determination to squeeze the joy and creativity out of whatever life brings his way.

I sense that’s a pretty rare quality.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live Sustain What show on Team Trump’s effort to demolish a foundational finding by the Environmental Protection Agency - that heat-trapping greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.

My guests were:

• Jonathan Adler, a William and Mary Law School professor and commentator with a libertarian orientation who’s deeply dug in at the intersection of law and federal climate policy. Read his analysis of Trump’s endangerment strategy:

• The Dangers of Pursuing the Endangerment Finding

• Why Trying to Undo the Endangerment Finding Is A High-Risk (and Low-Reward) Deregulatory Strategy

• Jean Chemnick, a longtime climate journalist at E&E News/ Politico. Read her excellent coverage.

• Sean H. Donahue, a longtime environmental lawyer representing the Environmental Defense Fund in the litigation that has begun over the endangerment action.

Donahue and Adler differ on some points but strongly agreed that the Trump administration, perhaps in trying to rush to put the question swiftly to the Supreme Court, may be its own undoing - chasing what Adler calls the “white whale” for zealots opposing climate action. Beware what you seek. I made a piece of art to illustrate the point:

Here’s a nugget from Adler in which he explains the flaw in a strategy trying to undercut EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases by saying the science points to less severe risks:

I used Google’s AI to generate this summary of key points:

Jonathan Adler highlights the legal difficulties and potential strategic missteps of the Trump administration’s approach to revoking the endangerment finding (7:10-7:46). Adler also emphasizes that the motivation behind this strategy appears to be political rather than based on sound climate policy or scientific arguments (7:52-8:19). He points out that the auto industry, a key regulated sector, hasn’t expressed significant concerns about the endangerment finding itself (10:08-10:17).

Jean Chemnik discusses the origins of the push to overturn the endangerment finding, tracing it back to individuals within the Bush administration and later at organizations like the Heritage Foundation (11:19-13:58). Chemnik also notes the symbolic importance of the endangerment finding for those who deny climate change as a serious problem (9:05-9:15).

Sean Donahue asserts that the administration’s strategy is ill-advised from a legal standpoint, lacking sound justification in law or the existing record (15:16-15:26). Donahue points out the strong legal precedents, including Supreme Court decisions, that uphold the endangerment finding and greenhouse gas regulation (18:47-19:58). He also touches on the political implications, suggesting that if this repeal holds up, it could lead to significant demand for new climate policies at state, local, and federal levels (1:00:14-1:00:58).

Thanks for watching the show and sharing it!

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Boy this conversation with End of Science author John Horgan and transhumanism fan Steve Fuller was fun, given how dark some of our conclusions were. Read the pre-show post to get a lot of relevant links and background:

Precautionary versus “proactionary” strategies for managing the present with the future in mind

Fuller said it’s important to let go of many of our worries about how present actions related to science and technology might affect future generations. “We get very hyped up about future generations,” he said. He added:

I think we need to imagine when we think about future generations that their baseline about what counts as a good life will be whatever they’re born into. So in other words, they will not be thinking like us, just like we’re not thinking like Aristotle….

But there is an issue here about how you face the uncertainty of the future. And this gets to the business of the precautionary principle versus what I’ve proposed — the proactionary principle.

These are two different attitudes toward risk, right? And the precautionary principle, you could trace it back to the Hippocratic Oath. Above all, cause no harm, right?

So it’s a harm avoidance approach to risk because you treat uncertainty under those conditions as potential threat. So you set very high standards with regard to regulation for new technologies, stuff like that.

The European Union actually has a version of the precautionary principle built into its environmental regulations.

The other is the thing that is associated with transhumanism, and that is the proactionary principle. And the pro-actionary principle treats risk as an opportunity.

So in other words, you treat it as like a fair throw of the dice almost. You adopt the attitude kind of the way entrepreneurs do.

When they see a sort of uncertain situation, they’re going to make something out of it. And this idea then leads to a much more open sense of what the future can be.

I mused on the reality that there’s little sign among the current world’s great powers — big tech firms, the oligarch class, superpowers — that regulation can be meaningfully applied.

Horgan, long largely a techno-optimist, wrapped up our chat with this uplifting thought:

And I’ve just concluded over the last five years, and it’s just been growing on me lately, that humanity doesn’t really give a s**t about understanding, illumination. It is always all been about power with the quest for truth as kind of marketing and window dressing. My view of the future of science and even of civilization is quite dark right now.

There is much, much more. Please listen to the full show if you can and post reactions. I’ll drop the paywall, although I would love it if a few more of you decide to chip in to help me keep this Sustain What project going.

Please consider becoming a financial supporter of Sustain What:

Insert, Feb. 19 - Via Googl AI, here’s a summary:

• Introduction to the Guests and Discussion Themes (0:44-2:25)

• Andrew Revkin introduces his long-time friends and intellectual sparring partners, John Horgan and Steve Fuller.

• The core topics of discussion are set: artificial intelligence (or synthetic/simulated intelligence), the “end of truth,” and the current state of our information environment.

• Steve Fuller’s Background and Approach to Knowledge (2:38-5:04)

• Steve Fuller explains his academic background in the history and philosophy of science.

• He describes his focus on the social and political dimensions of science, particularly how technology and changing political economies influence the production and evaluation of knowledge.

• The Impact of Social Media on Knowledge and Power (5:09-7:00)

• The discussion shifts to how social media has drastically altered the dissemination of knowledge and the dynamics of power, especially in politics.

• Steve Fuller highlights Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon as pioneers in using social media to channel information for ideological purposes, leading to a fragmented epistemic landscape.

• John Horgan’s “End of Science” Revisited (10:56-12:05)

• John Horgan reflects on his book The End of Science, suggesting that major scientific breakthroughs aimed at understanding the world (like relativity, quantum mechanics, and evolutionary theory) are largely behind us.

• He expresses a dark view of the future of science and civilization, concluding that humanity primarily seeks power rather than truth or illumination.

• AI: Horror vs. Positive Potential (15:13-17:03)

• John Horgan admits his horror at AI, viewing it as bringing out his “Luddite” tendencies, despite his love for other technologies like his MacBook and iPhone.

• He contrasts this with Steve Fuller’s more positive outlook on AI, particularly its potential to utilize vast amounts of scientific material that currently goes unused.

• The “Replication Crisis” and AI’s Role in Science (27:00-27:51)

• Steve Fuller attributes the “replication crisis” in science to narrow and competitive research frontiers, where pressure to be first leads to cutting corners.

• He suggests that a broader distribution of scientific effort would reduce incentives for fraud.

• The Future of Wikipedia in the Age of Generative AI (28:08-29:00)

• Steve Fuller predicts that generative AI will put Wikipedia out of business because AI can provide customized, Wikipedia-style answers more efficiently.

• He views Wikipedia as “old-fashioned crowdsourcing” that is laborious and prone to disputes.

• Science as Faith and the “Conservation of Ignorance” (1:16:14-1:19:00)

• The host plays a clip of Pete Seeger discussing his father’s view that scientists have the “most dangerous religious belief” – the idea that an infinite increase in empirical information is inherently good.

• John Horgan challenges this, noting that science, unlike religious faith, has materially altered the world through technologies like the hydrogen bomb.

• The “Conspiracy Mentality” and Endless Data Seeking (1:19:00-1:20:05)

• Steve Fuller connects Pete Seeger’s critique to the “conspiracy mentality”, where people constantly seek more information, believing something is being hidden.

• He argues that science, when working correctly, engages in “self-limitation” through method and tests, drawing lines rather than seeking data endlessly.

And do share this post with friends concerned about the future and the present state of science.

Thank you Larry Hogue, Jeanne Manion, Karen Malpede, Eleanor Margulis, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I just had a truly helpful - and dare I say hopeful - pop-up conversation with Columbia University’s Gernot Wagner - a top-notch climate policy and economics analyst - on what to think and work on as the Trump Administration carries out its long-pledged plan to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama.

Quick points:

• The litigation over this Trump move (details are still to come later this week) will play out for many years.

• There’ll be lots of CO2 released inside the Beltway as anti-regulation zealots pop Champagne corks, but decarbonization trends will be sustained globally.

• In the meantime, Wagner points to substantial areas of Trump policy that align completely with past Democratic policies - on geothermal, nuclear energy, energy storage (and, yes, carbon capture). Read this post by Wagner and colleagues.

• We discussed how the huge surge in AI infrastructure investment is coming with a surge in solar/battery systems (yes and gas). Read his recent post with colleagues: “The Race to Power Data Centers.”

Endangering “Endangerment”

As the EPA website explains, the Endangerment Finding is the formal scientific determination that greenhouse gases—specifically carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—threaten public health and welfare. The finding established the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The Wall Street Journal was fed the exclusive by the administration in a story with on-record comments from the EPA admnistrator and Secretary of the Interior.

The New York Times published a revealing deep dive focused on four key figures who’ve been working for 15 years or more to get to this moment. One is the lawyer Mandy Gunasekara, who helped Senator James Inhofe toss his snowball in the Senate in 2015 (seated behind him).

One reality of course, as Cardiff University’s Aaron Thierry quipped on Bluesky, is that “You can repeal an endangerment finding. You can’t repeal the endangerment.”

To me, it’s vital to keep a focus - amid all the destruction and backsliding - on what can be sustained or even advanced around clean energy choices even as the fight over regulation rolls on, enriching new generations of environmental lawyers.

Wagner’s Columbia-based Climate Knowledge Initiative is one place to look for insights. Here’s that post I mentioned above: America’s Clean Energy Transition Will Continue Despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Listen to Wagner here if you can’t watch the whole show right now:

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This is the post-show podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with Christopher Mims, the Wall Street Journal tech columnist and author of How to AI, and Melanie Mitchell, the Santa Fe Institute researcher deeply dug in on the thing called artificial intelligence that remains pretty unintelligent.

If you want to understand where this exposively evolving technology is, and isn’t, taking us, you have to subscribe to Mitchell’s Substack blog:

And if you want to make the most of the AI toolkit at work or in the rest of life - from investing to music making to…. - you really need to read Mims’ book.

I loved this moment when Mims introduces the concept of “productivity theater” - when AI produces what looks like work, but the work required to make the output useful can eliminate any true productivity gains:

One thing AI is good at is efficiently summarizing conversations, so here goes, thanks to the Google AI tool embedded in YouTube:

• Introduction of Guests and AI Context (0:48-1:31)

• Andy Revkin introduces Christopher Mims and Melanie Mitchell, setting the stage for a discussion on managing information in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

• Christopher Mims’ new book is highlighted as a user’s guide to AI technologies, emphasizing both their capabilities and limitations.

• Critique of AI Hype and Investment Bubble (4:25-8:18)

• Melanie Mitchell expresses skepticism about the predicted societal transformation by AI, noting the “crazy” amount of money flowing into the sector (4:52).

• Christopher Mims discusses the significant investment bubble in AI, predicting an “ugly” outcome when it inevitably bursts, leading to stranded assets like half-empty data centers (7:44-8:18). He introduces the term “productivity theater” to describe AI’s ability to generate “products that look like work” (6:42-6:56).

The limits of simulated intelligence

• Understanding AI: Simulation vs. True Intelligence (9:22-12:21)

• The conversation delves into the nature of AI, explaining that these systems are “incredibly good at simulating intelligence” but lack abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and world models (9:36-10:17).

• Melanie Mitchell elaborates on the ambiguous definition of “intelligence,” suggesting that AI should perhaps be viewed as “complex information processing” rather than “artificial intelligence” (10:48-12:09).

• AI’s Role in the Workplace and “Jagged Frontier” (13:31-22:20)

• Christopher Mims describes AI’s “jagged frontier,” where it excels at retrieving and remixing information (e.g., coding) but struggles with tasks outside its training data or in novel environments (13:31-14:57).

• Melanie Mitchell discusses the misunderstanding of how AI impacts jobs, noting that AI systems often fail in real-world scenarios despite performing well on benchmarks (18:00-19:44). She emphasizes that a “job is not equal to a set of tasks” (18:37).

• Christopher Mims adds that AI’s high failure rates can lead to a decrease in human productivity, as time is spent correcting AI-generated “messes” (20:29-21:20).

• Regulation and Ethical Concerns (28:57-32:17)

• The discussion touches on the need for AI regulation, especially in critical areas like healthcare, where AI is being considered for Medicare benefit applications (29:10-29:23).

• Christopher Mims highlights intense lobbying efforts against state-level AI regulations and uses the example of Grok on X (formerly Twitter) to illustrate the “horrific ways” AI can be abused without proper oversight (29:48-31:22).

AI’s energy demands will shrink

Melanie Mitchell made a fascinating and important point responding to a viewer’s question about energy and water demands. What she says parallels the shift from “baseload” power generation to distributed renewable and solar energy (not to mention from mainframe computers to your phones):

• Environmental Impact and Future of AI Architecture (32:26-35:54)

• The energy and water consumption of AI data centers is discussed, with Melanie Mitchell noting the push for more efficient and smaller AI models, a trend she believes will continue in the long term (33:07-35:02).

• Christopher Mims agrees that efficiency drives will lead to more localized AI models, eventually running on devices like phones (35:07-35:28).

• AI as a Tool vs. Superintelligence and Scientific Inquiry (37:33-46:51)

• The guests discuss whether AI’s simulated intelligence is “good enough” for certain applications, like companionship, but caution about the potential for catastrophic failures and detachment from reality (38:08-40:11).

• They debate the scientific and commercial pressures within the AI field, with Melanie Mitchell arguing that the focus on “making products” (43:04) hurts fundamental scientific inquiry by de-incentivizing “slower science” (44:56-45:12).

• Christopher Mims contrasts AI development with other technologies (like energy), noting that AI breakthroughs have often been “kind of an accident” rather than the result of patient, long-term research (46:12-46:51).

AI and the arts - music case study

I closed things out by demonstrating how Suno took my barebones guitar-and-vocal version of my song “Save Dreams for Sleeping” and generated a rousing anthem. As I explained, the downside is a lot of SLOP on Spotify etc, but also demoncratization of music making. What do you think?

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This was a deeply illuminating conversation with top-flight researchers aiming to get beyond the back-and-forth edge-driven volleys on global warming’s role in shaping severe winter weather in the United States.

Watch above or watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and X/Twitter.

Here’s one key point from Jacob Chalif, the lead author of a 2025 study that found the recent upswing in waviness in the jet stream was matched or outmatched by earlier periods several times in previous decades back through the 20th century.

This doesn’t mean global warming isn’t changing such atmospheric and weather patterns. It does mean that natural variability in the system is capable of such dynamics as well.

The details and background are in the pre-show post here:

Here are some of the papers we discussed:

• July, 2025 - The intensification of the strongest nor’easters https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2510029122

• July, 2025 - The Mid-20th Century Winter Cooling in the Eastern U.S. Explained https://eos.org/editor-highlights/the-mid-20th-century-winter-cooling-in-the-eastern-u-s-explained

• May 2025 - Attributing climate and weather extremes to Northern Hemisphere sea ice and terrestrial snow: progress, challenges and ways forward https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-025-01012-0

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We also talked about a keystone need - vulnerability reduction - and something Trump could do (that he won’t do of course):

Thank you Michael Ludgate, Vivian Henry, Graham Chant, Peter van Soest, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I have deeply mixed feelings about AI in music, which I’ll elaborate on soon.

But as a songwriter in act three of my life, and facing the reality that it takes a lot of time and money to build full productions of songs, I’ve started using Suno to envision what my barebones guitar-and-vocal tunes can sound like on a bigger scale.

I am going to pull together some of the wonderful musicians around our Downeast Maine home to record an album later this winter and spring. But given the latest atrocity in Minneapolis, and the even more atrocious spin by scum like Stephen Miller, I had to put this Suno take on my song “Save Dreams for Sleeping” out for you to hear, sing along on, and hopefully share.

Here’s the rough bedroom recording of the basic song as posted here and on CD Baby last year, followed by the lyrics.

Save Dreams for Sleeping

© 2025, Andy Revkin, Written Feb. 4, 2025, updated August 3, 2025

We all hold a dream somewhere deep in our minds,

Where everything’s fair and everyone’s kind.

Flowers all blooming, no smoke in the skies.

No wars in the headlines, no tears in your eyes.

But save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crimes.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray.

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Our country needs mending, but how to begin?

With problems so tangled, no start and no end?

Begin by protecting those facing the fire.

Reach out by connecting through common desires.

One day at a time, the trust you create

Will carry us further than fighting and hate.

One stitch at a time the fabric you weave,

Will grow ever stronger than you can believe.

So save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crime.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray

A more perfect union is coming our way.

~ ~ ~

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There were many notable moments in my Sustain What discussion of Russian and American political propaganda, so I encourage you to watch the whole show. But here are a couple of highlights:

Andrew Ryvkin, who created propaganda for the Kremlin for many years and now writes about information wars (now living in the United States), described a talk show he produced more than a decade ago, called “Honest Monday” (seriously), which would explore an issue each week (chosen by Kremlin officials) through several vantage points.

It’s an illusion of a debate. People, the guests, this really is their opinion, what they’re saying. They’re not lying. Some are left, some are right, some are centrist. But the point is to align what they’re saying into a structure that would lead the viewer to realize,to realize, well, the more centrist, Kremlin, point of view is actually best.

I immediately noted how that structure was echoed by Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes, back in the “fair and balanced” days at the Murdoch-owned network.

Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy at the University of Rhode Island, stressed how visual information like the flood of White House-generated memes in the past year bypasses critical thinking and spurs strong emotions.

I urged viewers, and urge you, to read the Fox News op-ed posted last summer by Billy McLaughlin, who ran White House social media from inauguration through August before heading to the private sector.

Here’s an excerpt:

We did not build a cautious, government-style account. We built a fast, culturally fluent content machine designed to cut through the noise and win online. And it worked.

In just six months, the administration’s platforms added over 16 million new followers, with the fastest growth among Americans aged 18–34. We generated billions of video views and gained more than half a million new YouTube subscribers – nearly triple the previous administration’s total growth over four years.

But it was never just about numbers. Our success came from echoing the humor, passion and identity of a movement that was already alive. We did not invent the culture. We gave it a megaphone.

This was not entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Our meme-heavy, content-first strategy was aligned with the president’s priorities. Digital was not a sideshow. It was a frontline tool for shaping narratives, building momentum, and applying pressure.

One of the big takeaways was to try hard to avoid taking the “rage bait” he and others are creating for you. A fresh example emerged even as I was running the show, as a Trump line about cold weather and global warming prompted heaps of replies from climate-focused liberals, many of whom overstated the science on their end. That is NOT productive, I warned:

The curtain raiser post has lots of relevant links and a related Sustain What chat with Hobbs:

Thank you Andrei Codrescu, Michael Ludgate, Jeremy Zilar, Marshall Mermell, Tim Buxton, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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First, I hope you can find time to listen to this evergreen conversation I had with Renee Hobbs, a leading authority and educator (at the University of Rhode Island) aiming to spread propaganda literacy. Her mission, in essence, is to help us all cut through the ever-evolving superstorm of online material and widgets designed to alarm, disarm, distract, confuse or entice - in other words, to enshittify what could otherwise be a miraculous set of tools for connecting and informing society. We spoke at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

But make sure to watch below as well. On Sustain What I just introduced Hobbs live to Andrew Ryvkin, a Russian-born writer and analyst focused on propaganda, authoritarian rule and international relations with a special level of expertise: he spent many years producing propaganda inside the Kremlin’s multi-layered media system.

Watch and weigh in (and share) on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube.

As Ryvkin has been explaining in a series of “Pop Propaganda” talks (and will lay out in a forthcoming book), “Modern Russian propaganda is much more than angry talk-show hosts waving missiles on TV or troll farms flooding social media. It’s influencers, streaming platforms, and marketing campaigns that promote the Kremlin’s agenda, just as Nike advertises its sneakers….”

Make sure to subscrribe to Andrew Ryvkin’s Substack letter of course. Start with his origin story: I used to work for the Kremlin…

And read his articles in The Atlantic.

Just for the record, despite our super similar names, we don’t seem to be related. He says his roots go back to Odessa. Mine go back to Ripky, a village in Ukraine my paternal grandfather fled around 1905 amid a peasant revolt and pogroms.

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Just in case missed, here’s ANOTHER evergreen conversation I did with Hobbs in year one of the pandemic:

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I’ll be doing another conversation about Trump’s threats to take Greenland soon - with Greenlanders. But I had to elevate the important statement made on January 9 in defense of the 57,000 citizens who inhabit Greenland’s coastal communities - signed by more than 200 American scientists who have worked on that giant ice-sheathed island.

The curtain raiser post for this webcast with Greenland-focused researchers Yarrow Axford and Paul Bierman has all the relevant links:

Please watch (and share!) the full show, which addresses lots of question, including why scientists feel the need to weigh in. We also explore relevant coverage and commentary, including a Wall Street Journal editorial board piece criticizing Trump’s bellicose approach.

As for geopolitics, the longtime Greenland-focused scientist Paul Bierman says the national security debates so far have missed the strategic threat posed by the 20 feet of sea level rise banked in the island’s two-mile-high ice sheet. Here’s that clip and statement:

Protecting Greenland’s ice is the most important piece of national security you could imagine and global security you can imagine. It’s not critical minerals. It’s not military strategy. It’s keeping that ice frozen.

Bierman’s reflection resonates with Bill McKibben’s post on Trump’s aggression last week:

Below I’m adding input from two of the statement signatories who couldn’t join us last night - Eric Rignot and Raymond Bradley.

I do greatly appreciate the financial contributions of a small, but growing, portion of subscribers chipping in a bit of cash to help me justify the time to write and organize these Sustain What shows.

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Longtime polar scientist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, a signatory, sent this note:

I have worked in Greenland for the past 33 years (first campaign was in 1993) funded by NASA and NSF on aircrafts, helicopters, ships, and on foot; I have flown all four corners during PARCA (1993-2008) and OIB (2009-2019), visited many fjords to map the bathymetry (2010-2019), and have been several times on Petermann glacier (2002, 2023), Jakovshavn glacier (2016-2017) and Zachariae Isstrom (2024).

The Greenlanders have always been supportive of our work. We often hired them on boats, or we hired their boats and crew, they gave us permits to operate and collect data, and we interacted with them, although not as often as I wish. They are good people who survived 2 centuries of colonisation. They have been brave enough to form a semi autonomous government for the past 26 years, which is an amazing achievement.

I am proud to say that fishermen use our bathymetry in a phone app. While they know their own fjords very well, they do not know every corner of them; our maps helped them find new fishing ground. For us scientists, to see that our work is directly useful to them, is very rewarding because we are very thankful they let us conduct science in their country.

The US military in Greenland, esp. Pittufik, have been instrumental on many levels to facilitate work in Greenland as well. I would not throw a stone at them. They have been keen over the years to entertain a good relationship with Greenlanders and Danish people. I wish that this “collaboration” would continue and be encouraged and facilitated. Similarly, the Danish military has collaborated with us over the years.

The threat of mining companies in Greenland is real. They will destroy the environment, pollute the fjords forever, ask fishermen to go away, and they won’t clean up. Clean mining does not exist. Greenlanders are opposed to mining because environmental regulations are weak.

I won’t comment on the attempts of the US government to overtake Greenland. They already have military presence, bilateral agreements with Denmark, they do not need more than that. They are already a unique partner.

A takeover by the USA could put an end to many international scientific studies in Greenland, which would be dramatic. We need to leave Greenland to the greenlanders. We need to respect them and work with them. We need to find a way to cooperate with them on the terms of their choosing. They have all the reasons in the world to be scared by the USA. The USA has not taken care of its own indigenous people, the condition of American indians is absolutely terrible. Until we show the world that we can take care of our own people, we should not pretend that we can take care of greenlanders.

Greenlanders will protect the environment in Greenland, they care about it deeply, they have done so for many generations. No other nation will do that job better than them. This is their home. Leaving Greenland to greenlanders is the best way to protect Greenland and the best way to show greenlanders the respect that they so much deserve.

Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a signatory and longtime analyst of long-term Arctic climate variability and change, sent this statement:

I’ve worked in different parts of Greenland and currently lead an NSF-funded project in northern Greenland (north of the ice sheet) investigating environmental conditions (don’t say CLIMATE!) when the earliest people arrived on the island ~4500 years ago. The project is a collaboration with archeologists from the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk.

The whole idea of the US ‘Invading” or “occupying” Greenland is ridiculous and I’m afraid it has been hyped up by the media and egged on by Trump & his henchman Miller to distract from their other domestic problems. The media falls for it every time.

Let’s just consider what an invasion or occupation means. There are only about 5 or 6 airstrips in all of Greenland where you could land a C-130. The most “strategic” location of those airstrips is at Station Nord in NE Greenland, and that dirt runway is a mud bath in the Spring and so often inaccessible. The base itself would be hard-pressed to house 100 people and the canteen can handle about 40 people at a time. So...good luck “occupying” that key location.

Other sites include Kangerlussuaq, Nuuk (the capital) and Thule (now called Pittufik) on the West coast & Narsarssuaq in the south (a new runway is being prepared at nearby Qaqortoq, I believe). Minor airfields in Kulusuk & Mittarfik Nerlerit (Constable Point) on the east coast provide access to commercial flights from Iceland on Dash 8 aircraft--probably limited to other STOL aircraft. There are no hangars to repair large aircraft and very limited fuel supplies.

60% of Greenland’s population live in Nuuk-the rest are scattered in small villages up and down the coast, often only accessible by helicopter (Air Greenland) or boat.

There may be Russian (or Chinese) submarines operating around Greenland, just as they do around the US but I don’t think there are surface ship operation in the area--something the media has not investigated, yet it’s Trump’s main argument for taking over Greenland. I am quite sure that there are more Chinese ships approaching the West coast of the US every day than have been to Greenland in the last decade.

If Trump was really concerned about N. Atlantic security, he’d pay attention to Iceland (where they do have airfields and docks for ships) or even Svalbard (where they also have coal!) and the Russians operate there already (in Barentsberg). (Not that I would encourage anybody to show the guy a map).

He is obsessed with rare earth minerals, of which Greenland has an abundance. But often rare earth minerals are found along with uranium. That concerns the local people who have already rejected plans to mine in S. Greenland for fear of contamination of their land. The costs of extraction in some areas are enormous. The 2nd largest known zinc deposits (designated by the USGS as a strategic mineral--the biggest deposit is in Russia) is in NE Greenland (north of Station Nord at Citronen. An Australian mining company has explored and mapped the deposit & received full blessing of the Greenland Govt to extract the ore. The US EXIM bank put up over $600M to support the operation, but the company was unable to raise the required additional private equity and after several years of trying, they just abandoned the license. The reality is, extraction requires ships, which need to know the offshore bathymetry (rarely mapped in detail) and a reliable dock (generally missing). And then...did I mention sea-ice? How many icebreakers does the US currently have? Just a fraction of what the Russians (& even the Scandinavians) have...

We’ve just seen how reluctant oil companies are to venture back into Venezuela, so I don’t think there are too many mining companies that will be ready to put up huge amounts of money to extract ore in Greenland versus other locales.

Thank you Aviva Rahmani, Keith Kloor, Vivian Henry, Tracy Frisch, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Here’s the audio/video podcast post of my live conversation with a determined duo of longtime broadcast journalists spending two months with intrepid scientists aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon seeking fresh data that could show how fast Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice mass, the Thwaites Glacier, could raise sea levels.

Miles O'Brien and Kate Tobin are an independent team working together through three decades at CNN and now independently, with their output seen on CNN, PBS and now Substack through O’Brien’s Miles Ahead newsletter.

This map from the latest report of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration shows vividly why this region is so important.

Here’s a relevant portion of the research collaborative’s 2025 report:

Following some key studies beginning two decades ago, it was widely recognised that Thwaites Glacier posed a potential threat of rapid contributions to sea level. Prior to our research, little was known about the mechanisms controlling the retreat of this enormous glacier - one of the largest and fastest-changing glaciers in the world. If it collapsed entirely, sea level would rise by 65 cm. Thwaites Glacier spans an area equal to the island of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and in places is almost 4000 m (13,000 ft) thick. The amount of ice flowing into the sea from Thwaites Glacier and its neighbouring glaciers more than doubled from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the Amundsen Sea region now accounts for 8% of the current rate of global sea-level rise of 4.5 mm a year.

Here, O’Brien describes why this particular ice mass matters so much:

From ice sheets to Main Street

We also explored the challenge of linking Antarctic ice sheet dynamics with decisions in coastal communities around the world faced with the reality that sea levels of the past - relatively stable for centuries - are history. I noted my earlier Sustain What show on the importance of driving “managed retreat” or other policy shifts, as articulated in a great paper by Lizz Ultree et al, “From ice sheets to main streets: Intermediaries connect climate scientists to coastal adaptation.”

A viewer asked about ways to stop the ice escape and warming and O’Brien mentioned that David Holland of New York University is on the research team aboard the ship. He’s part of a collection of researchers eager to test whether a “seabed curtain” - a small-scale geoengineering intervention - could hinder the melting influence of warm waters getting beneath the ice sheet.

Learn more at the seabedcurtain.org website.

Conveying a momentous story without hype

And we got into the challenges of doing accurate but effective journalism in a world fixated by, but also paralyzed by, overstatements. O’Brien makes vital points here about the challenge of balancing compelling narrative and the real complexity and time scales revealed by the science:

For more on that issue, make sure to explore my post and Sustain What #Watchwords webcast on asking “by when” when you see the word COLLAPSE in the context of glacier science:

Thanks for watching, weighing in AND sharing this post. I guarantee you know at least a few people who don’t know about Sustain What but could benefit from the information and ideas here.

And of course chip in to help me justify the time it takes to do this work in my 69th year. :-)

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I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth. His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.

Here’s his foundational post explaining how he focuses his work and why culture and the industries around it - including Disneyland - matter as much as energy systems and the industries around them:

We explored a heap of issues, including why he moved from the Times to Substack (freedom!):

He talked about his Times coverage of the 2022 “Glaring Absence” study by the The Media Impact Project at USC’s Norman Lear Center of climate and related references in Hollywood productions:

They analyzed 37,000 scripts of TV shows and films for the second half of the twenty tens, which was quite ambitious. And they found that only 2.8 percent of scripts included any mention of climate change, and they didn’t just look at climate change. They had a list of, I think, three dozen different climate keywords. They had greenhouse gas, sea level, clean energy, fossil fuel…

The moral of the story, even with three dozen different keywords, only 2.8 percent said anything about climate change or anything related. They said that they found the mention of the word dog 13 times as often as all 35 climate keywords put together.

There is much more, so dive in and please share this post.

And do subscribe to Climate Colored Goggles and consider chipping in.

At my stage of life, Sustain What is more a labor of love than a monetary project. Sammy Roth’s newsletter is his foundational source of income and young journalists need all the support they can get. I created a subscribe button for him here:

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Here’s the webcast/podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Jennifer D. Sciubba, the new president of the near-century-old Population Reference Bureau, a longtime source of unspun demographic data and analysis.

The focal point was her new book (with two veteran expert coauthors), Toxic Demography - Ideology and the Politics of Population.

Learn more in my “curtain raiser” post:

But here are some quick takeaways and links to material we explored. We discussed long cycles of politics and fear mongering, as I noted how Elon Musk’s December 11 tweet about New Zealand losing its whiteness (so much to think about there) echoes the anti-immigrant U.S. political art of 1903.

Sciubba stressed that while a core goal of the book is creating more reality-based discourse around population data, some critical sources of such data are threatened under Trump and the current Congress.

I pointed to George Monbiot’s column - “The facts are stark: Europe must open the door to migrants, or face its own extinction” - and Sciubba spoke about the limits to what governments can do - even in China - to reverse fertility trends (read this related Mercator Institute article)

I pointed to the latest piece by longtime demographer Joseph Chamie on fertility declines, in which he echoes Sciubba et al’s conclusions about the limits of what countries can do to change fertility trends:

There’s lots more in the conversation of course. Please watch above and offer some thoughts in the comments. Or watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, YouTube.

And of course consider supporting my work if you can afford to:

I hope you’ll consider becoming a free or paid subscriber or you can send a one-time donation below.

Thank you Susan Spencer, Rachel of Sunchoke Falls, Bart Ziegler, Patricia Watts, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop, a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires.

Here’s the curtain raiser post with lots of relevant links:

Here are some relevant papers and posts we alluded to:

2021 PNAS paper: Stewardship of global collective behavior https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118

The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

2023 paper (article summarizing): Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/

Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study is the first to offer estimates of the number of youth users on these platforms and how much annual ad revenue is attributable to them. The study was published on December 27, 2023, in PLOS ONE.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier’s manifesto:

https://www.jaronlanier.com/tenarguments.html

Reversing “enshittification” of everything - my chat with Cory Doctorow

Bluesky’s for-profit model

https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

The Conversation - a global op-ed page, in essence, largely facilitated and populated by universities.

https://theconversation.com/us/partners

The website for the philanthropy efforts of YouTube’s titan, “Mr. Beast”:

https://www.beastphilanthropy.org/our-work

When Expertise Becomes a Requirement: Lessons from China’s New Influencer Regulation https://www.ssbm.ch/when-expertise-becomes-a-requirement-lessons-from-chinas-new-influencer-regulation/

Center for Humane Technology - social media in society

https://www.humanetech.com/social-media-society

How to Fix the Internet podcast, Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/how-to-fix-the-internet-podcast

A sobering moment from my conversation with Tristan Harris (a founder of the Center for Humane Technology) after the release of the Netlix documentary Social Dilemma

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I think you’ll love this Sustain What conversation I just had with Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, the brilliant young playwrights behind Kyoto, the tragicomic play describing the titanic diplomatic and political tussle as climate change science threatened to bring an early end to the fossil fuel age.

My “curtain raiser” post has a heap of details and related links:

But much more emerged in the discussion, which also included Ben Santer, a veteran climate scientist who’s a character in the play (he writes about that here), Jean Chemnick, an E&E News/Politico reporter who wrote in depth on petrostate and industry efforts to derail climate talks, and Jenny Shalant, a Natural Resources Defense Council writer who wrote a great essay after seeing the play.

If you appreciate what I’m doing curating these webcasts, please consider pausing on Giving Tuesday to chip in so I can keep at it in 2026.

Here are a couple of highlights, starting with Joe and Joe’s origin story as public-minded playwrights, which involved building a performance dome in a Calais, France, migrant community.

Here’s Ben Santer, who was consulted in the writing of the play and has seen it three times, describing a crucial turning point in the play and in history - the fingerprint analysis he and others did showing the human effect on climate that undercut the industry’s argument for delay:

Attacks and dead rats

Santer also discussed the discomfort of watching the play describe the attacks he faced, and the fear his son faced, when a rat was left on his doorstep:

The Joes described how they are working on two more plays in what they see as a series - on the Copenhagen round of climate talks in 2009 and the journey to and beyond the Paris Agreement in 2015.

I’m looking forward to the next steps in their theatrical journey.

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I needed an intervention today and reached out to my old friend from the anti-consumption wars, the Rev Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping, and to Lloyd Alter, one of the great longtime guides to low-impact and low-carbon building, transportation and the rest.

I hope the resulting conversation above offers a tonic during this crazy “Black Friday” week. You can also watch and share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube:

I needed help after reading a great piece by Alter calling out CNBC for this insanely ridiculous piece warning that people and businesses were holding onto their technology too long: “Americans are holding onto their devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy.”

Alter quotes the piece’s core warning:

“While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.”

He goes on:

Author Kevin Williams argues that we need the latest, fastest stuff. “Lost productivity and inefficiency are the unintended consequences of people and businesses clinging to aging technology.” The dean of a business school says, “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness.”

He concludes that all of this is, in essence, a call for more combustion:

Basically, our economy is built on the conversion of fossil fuels into heat and carbon dioxide, with a helping of plastics on the side. There is a reason why COPs always fail, why Donald Trump kills wind and solar, and why even Mark Carney pushes pipelines; they know that fossil fuels ARE the economy.

Alter kicks into higher gear:

It is all about turning energy into stuff and selling as much of it as possible. And when we buy, we are contributing directly to that conversion of energy, a byproduct of which is carbon dioxide. It’s why we have been inculcated in this culture of convenience, to go through all this effort, to keep the fossil fuels flowing and the economy pumping out wealth.

Please read the full piece!

In our conversation, Alter goes deeper, saying:

This is what we do. We extract oil, we refine it, we turn it into plastic, we make it into a spoon, we truck it to a store, we use it once.

And the story doesn’t even stop there. Then we put it into piles and we have someone take it away and we go through all the pretend recycling when we really know it’s just going into a dump. And the whole process is completely insane. And all it does is mean that someone somewhere is pumping more oil.

And that’s what we have to break in this economy. It all goes back to the fossil fuels. And as I said in it, that’s why, of course, Trump does what he does to promote the fossil fuel industry. It’s why COP just failed because none of the fossil fuel producing countries want to do anything.

We’re all gray-haired old curmudgeons, of course, which is why I was excited to hear Talen’s “church” was going to co-host a Buy Nothing Day event in New York City’s East Village with the Lamp Club, one of a dispersed array of latter-day Luddite groups popping up around the country.

Talen pointed me to a big New York Times feature on this percolating movement: They’re Trying to Ditch Their Phones. Their Methods Are Unorthodox.

Here’s a snippet:

The Lamp Club is part of a growing ecosystem of “neo-Luddite” groups across the country that encourage people to transform their relationship to technology. Other groups include the Luddite Club, APPstinence and Breaking the (G)Loom — organizations that, for the most part, were started not by parents wishing their teens would get off their devices but by the teens themselves, who fault phones for fraying human connections as well as accelerating inequality and climate change. There are now more than two dozen Luddite Clubs in North America, from Ithaca, N.Y., to Irvine, Calif.

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I’ve been enthusiastically tracking the Buy Nothing effort since 2007.

And for more on Luddites, old and new, please subscribe to Brian Merchant’s vital Blood in the Machine Substack:

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I hope you can watch and weigh in on this conversation I had on the final official day of COP30, the thirtieth round of climate treaty talks, which are wrapping up in Belém, the gateway city to Brazil’s vast portion of the Amazon River basin.

First we had a pop-up update from my friend Cristiane Prizibisczki, a veteran Brazilian environmental journalist covering the meeting for the great online publication ((o))eco. A big focus of their coverage was the call for a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty (a tough sell in the formal sessions even without the Trump administration on hand given the suffocating role of Saudi Arabia in these talks (and the entire three decade process).

Around 80 countries have signed on, as Prizibisczki reported, “through the launch of a coalition – or “collective effort”, as the COP presidency has used the term – for the abandonment of the use of fossil fuels at a global level. Among the countries present were Germany, Colombia, the United Kingdom and Kenya.” A crucial qualifier is that such a process would need to be “just” - offering different paths for low-emission poor countries than wealthy fossil-fueled powers. (A related concept that I explored in a previous Sustain What show is a “takeback obligation” for fossil fuel companies to capture their CO2.)

She also gave a vivid description of the dramatic evacuation triggered by a contained but smoky fire in the negotiators’ “Blue Zone.”

My feature guest was Kim Stanley Robinson, the longtime climate-focused science fiction author who’s just returned to his home in Davis, Callifornia, after speaking at the COP30 climate treaty conference in Brazil.

He left before the fire erupted in the Blue Zone complex Thursday, causing a mass evacuation just as countries’ delegations were in the final press of negotiations over next steps 10 years after the Paris Agreement.

Here’s my curtain raiser post for the webcast, which includes info on the fire:

Here’s Robinson’s description of the indigenous protests at COP30:

We also talked about the importance of fiction, from Robinson’s sprawling 2020 novel to the play “Kyoto,” which had its first run in London a year ago and is currently Off Broadway at Lincoln Center Theatre in New York City through November. I played a scene from the London production that deeply resonated with my decades reporting on Saudi Arabia’s sustained role trying to prevent substantive agreements - and my personal experience with the protagonist, a lawyer and lobbist for fossil interests, Don Pearlman.

Please watch and weigh in with your reactions in the comments.

And do consider supporting what I’m doing here on Sustain What by sharing this post with friends and contributing financially.

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James Fahn founded the Earth Journalism Network 20 years ago. The organization has helped foster the reporting capacity of journalists around the world and helped build innovative colllaborative news networks like InfoNile and InfoAmazonia.

Here I caught him in the middle of the 30th session of negotiations under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that is the foundation for the Paris Agreement a decade ago.

Share this post or do so on X, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.

Fahn lays out the key points being negotiated - in the absence of United States participation under President Trump’s second term.

We also discussed the enormous indigenous presence at this COP - not unxpected given that Belem sits at the mouth of the Amazon River.

You can explore the stories being generated by journalists affiliated with the Earth Journalism Network here:

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I hope you’ll take time to watch and share this Sustain What conversation withCory Doctorow, a tireless champion of the best that digital technology can give society and foe of those who are enshitifying this public good for profit or power.

Also please pass it around on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter. And do subscribe to Sustain What and consider chipping in if you like what I’m doing:

Doctorow has done grueling work through innumerable Pluralistic posts and his many books, including Enshittification, the main focus of this chat, and another coming soon on the impending implosion of the AI bubble. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post he wrote that captures that part of what we discussed:

[T]he AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (“humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations…. [Read the rest, please]

He has also long worked for or advised the Electronic Frontier Foundation, devoted to digital privacy and oline free speech. He suggested you might get involved by finding and joining one of the branches of the related Electronic Frontier Alliance, “a grassroots network made up of independent community organizations…across the United States work to support digital rights and empower their local communities.”

Click here for the curtain raiser post that has more context:

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If you missed my advance post on my Sustain What conversation with Laura Grego, a longtime analyst of nuclear war risks, strategies and technologies, here’s your chance to watch and weigh in over the weekend.

There’s little here that is reassuring. Grego, drawing on two decades of deep diving, says:

I would argue that I think things are about as dangerous as they’ve ever been – at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The risks of war are higher. There’s a war in Europe that threatens to pull nuclear armed adversaries into direct conflict. All of the nuclear weapons possessing countries are either rebuilding, modernizing, or expanding their arsenals. We have very fraught relationships between the three major nuclear powers – the U.S., Russia and China – and the relationships to manage crises are always really important when things can move as fast as nuclear war…. There is nuclear brinksmanship all over… There’s this idea that nuclear threats are permissible, nuclear threats are a way to achieve political goals.

Here are two more key moments.

Grego described the monumental size of the problem, but stresses there are paths to defusing the “house of dynamite”:

Josh Baran, who led a grassroots-focused campaign around the 1983 ABC movie The Day After, laid out how the network wanted the movie to come and go, but the campaign generated widespread focus:

We discussed how that strategy might be applied to “A House of Dynamite” - brainstorming on how to build a social media campaign encouraging people around the country to fill in the blank (spoiler alert: the film ends as a cliffhanger) by creating short videos positing how it ends up. More on that soon!

So please watch and offer some input.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with heaps of links to background:

This Sustain What project exists in large part because of a small subset of readers and watchers who chip in financially so I can keep things open for the rest of you.

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I just had such a great Sunday Sanity conversation with the activist folk dynamos Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. Just watch and enjoy. And share!

If you want to learn “No Kings Here,” the song Fink co-wrote with Tom Paxton, here’s their breakdown of the chords:

The back story is in yesterday’s post here:

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Insert, June 4, 2026: Here’s the guitar-vocal version of “Life is a Band” from my new album, Wake Me up Martha.

Here’s my somg about the power of community - musical or otherwise.

Most folks here know I’ve been a performing songwriter in the background behind my journalism for decades. Music is a fine counterpoint to reporting - giving me the ability to tackle issues, observations and questions that simply don’t fit into a “story.”

Three years ago, I scribbled the line “life is a band” on a scrap of paper in a songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music, a great hub for music making here in Downeast Maine. [Disclosure: I just joined the board.] That line has finally grown into a song, which is still being refined but is close enough to post. The lyrics and a YouTube video are below.

Here’s what it’s about:

I used to sing and strum up on the stage all by myself...

I’d been a solo performer most of my musical life and only co-created a band for the first time around 2003 - a quartet and then quintet called Uncle Wade, centered on making “simple music for complicated times.” We avoided ego trips by each mainly playing the instruments we were least good at. For me that was fiddle and mandolin. This 2013 WFDU radio show appearance gives the story:

In that band and others later, I began to appreciate the musical value of mixing personalities, instrumentation and voices, particularly when there were differences! (Lennon and McCartney were the ultimate expression of this phenomenon.)

But “Life is a Band” didn’t solidify until recently. A few months back, I started frequenting a Monday evening “kitchen junket” - a potluck supper and singalong - at the Conscious Cafe in Ellsworth.

This cozy eatery is tucked into a yoga center in an old house on a side road. Under chef Jesse Steiger, the mission is “to build community and connection through conscious food and living.” The regular crew ranges from octagenarians to youngsters, from tuba players to a saz player from Turkey.

The junket began last January, with the music side cheered on and semi-organized by the marvelous fiddler, dancer and music educator Molly Gawler. Listen above or scan my lyrics below to see how the song relates to these sessions.

And I hope you’ll consider starting a junket of your own in a living room or accommodating cafe.

Here are the lyrics (which I’ve updated slightly since I made the recording!):

LIFE IS A BAND - Andy Revkin, Oct 2, 2025A D E AI used to sing and strum up on the stage all by myself.EA Bm7 ESome Dylan and John Prine, Mixed with some songs of mine.A D E ABut something was not there. Licks and lyrics were too spare. Bm7 ECustomers drinking and scrolling and yapping, once in awhile some scattered clapping.D E A AThen walking home from a sleepy gig a fellow called my name..Bm7 E AHe said I love the way you play, but there is a better game.chorus D A ELife is a band, no more singing on your own. D A ELife is a band, grab a uke or saxophone. D A ELife is a band, alto, bass or baritone.D E A Come add your voice. Let’s make it grand. Life is a band. (twice)A D E AHe said right down the block there is a place you have to see,A A Bm7 EWe gather every weekend for a potluck jamboree. A D A EBring some wings or a casserole, a flute or mandolin. Bm7 E AChoose folk or blues or an Irish tune and then we start to sing. chorus bridge E ELike a town needs a mayor and a baker and a plumberA A A band has a singer and a picker and a drummerBm7 Each, on its own, is monotone. EPut ‘em all together for something better…. Put ‘em all together for something better…. Put ‘em all together for something……better… chorus

Is there anything like this where you live?

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This is the podcast post for my special September 28th Sunday Sanity conversation with my friend Dar Williams. Here’s the updated “curtain raiser’ post with all the background on our chat and Williams’ first album on Righteous Babe Records, Hummingbird Highway:

Thank you Dave Finnigan, Bart Ziegler, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Boy this was a bracing, high-velocity and fun discussion with longtime renewable-energy analyst and evangelist Joe Romm. If you missed it live, now’s your chance to listen or skim the transcript and post questions or reactions.

We explored a heap of issues related to climate, energy and online communication. We went back in time to our Dot Earth and Climate Progress tussles and moments of agreement but mostly focused on current and future events.

One thing we absolutely agreed on was that our disputes back in the Bush and Obama days over the mix of clean-energy policies aimed at mass deployment or research and development were microscopic in the context of the reversals engineered by the Heritage Foundation and industry and initiated under Trump 2.0.

We went through Romm’s recent mythbusting aroun carbon offsets and “green” hydrogen. I recommnd that you follow him on LinkedIn, where he does a good job highlighting relevant output from others as well as his own (the mark of a good blogger). Here’s an example - pointing to Stephen Lacey’s Open Circuit podcast:

Here’s a highlight from our Sustain What conversation in which Romm explains what’s behind rising electricity bills and offers a suggested message to anyone wanting to return the U.S. to rational climate and energy policy:

People’s electricity bills are going up and they are pissed and they don’t understand their bills….

First of all, we haven’t invested in the grid for 10, 20 years, and we’re blocking transmission lines, and we’re making it hard to actually deploy renewables as fast as we could. And Trump has come in and has gutted the credits for renewables. And we’re still going to build renewables and batteries because they’re still going to be the cheapest and fastest to deploy.

They’re just going to be more expensive. So we have [also been] exporting our cheap natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas - a bad idea that Biden at least put a pause on.

The fossil fuel industry loves it.

But guess why? This is arbitrage. Natural gas is expensive in places like Europe. It’s cheap here. What they want to do and what they are doing is taking our cheap gas, liquefying it, shipping it overseas, making a lot of money and therefore reducing our amount of gas, setting our gas prices up. It is very basic supply and demand.

I do not know why our side does not message on [this].

We’re exporting our cheap gas to other nations and it’s costing us problems.

There is much much more, so dig in and weigh in with questions (I’ll forward to Romm) and do SHARE this post with others.

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I hope you’ll watch and share this fresh and fascinating discussion of a project hosted at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at fostering “adversarial collaboration” when researchers - as just one example - clash in the literature over data that could reveal why humans tend to hold fast to certain beliefs and when and how they update them.

I can’t imagine a more important question these days.

My guests were project co-director Cory J. Clark and Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell who is involved with several such efforts. You can explore some of the resulting papers and other background below.

Here’s a description (full story in Penn Today):

Led by Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist and visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology, and in partnership with Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Philip Tetlock, the Adversarial Collaboration Project encourages scientists with competing perspectives to work together to design research that can adjudicate their dispute and test where the truth lies. Clark’s team is currently running 10 projects with several dozen researchers from some 30 institutions worldwide and recently published on this work in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

You can also watch the conversation and share this Sustain What episode on Facebook, LinkedIn, my X account, Substack Live or on YouTube.

We talked about a wide array of insights and issues, including when I asserted that the news media and social media tend to cut against any effort at adversarial collaboration. I used the example of content in The Atlantic on the research camps warring over the impact of mobile phones on children and teens (an issue I’ve tweeted about).

The processes used by the project team, in some cases, have included a mediator (Clark has filled that role sometimes). I noted how much time and effort is involved in what is a very bespoke effort and asked whether artificial intelligence could help mediate between clashing teams’ views of relevant date.

Can AI mediate research disputes?

That hasn’t been explored much, Clark and Pennycook said, but there has been work showing that AI can durably nudge the beliefs of study participants.

Here’s the editor’s summary of one such study (Pennycook is a co-author): Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI(Science Magazine, 2024):

Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to, and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society.

Clark and Pennycook noted that research tends to show this is NOT about the AI bot, but about getting appropriate evidence to people in ways they can ingest

Here’s some related research to explore:

Is Overconfidence a Trait? An Adversarial Collaboration (pre-print) - Jabin Binnendyk, Sophia Li, Thomas Costello, Randall Hale, Don A. Moore, and Gordon Pennycook

An Adversarial Collaboration on the Rigidity-of-the-Right, Rigidity-of-Extremes, or Symmetry: The Answer Depends on the Question(pre-print) - Shauna Marie Bowes, Cory J Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas H. Costello, Danny Osborne, Phil Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van Prooijen

On the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompts Across Partisan Lines: An Adversarial Collaboration - Cameron Martel, Steve Rathje, Cory J. Clark, Gordon Pennycook, Jay J. Van Bavel, David G. Rand, and Sander van der Linden

Crisis counseling for scientists clashing over big questions

I noted there’s a lot of synchronicity with a longstanding effort in Earth science - the U.S. Geological Survey’s John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis - essentially a crisis counseling center for intradisciplinary disputes. I held a conversation long ago about a mediation related to earthquake hazard analysis with two seismologists and the project director Jill Baron.

The center is in the Rockies and one method for overcoming rancor is taking hikes that make everyone so short of breath it’s harder to argue. Read this EOS commentary to learn more:

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The death of John Prine early in the early weeks of the pandemic was a wrenching blow for his many fans among both audiences and fellow musicians.

As I wrote in the weekend curtain raiser, among songwriters I deeply admire, no one is on a higher plane than Prine. Around 1975, just a few years after I began learning guitar and singing, a college roommate, Aron Wolf, introduced me to Prine’s mix of touching, hilarious, folksy, bittersweet compositions. (I sorely miss Aron, who went on to a fantastic NASA career designing interplanetary spacecraft missions and was taken far too soon by cancer.)

Aron and I began playing at Brown University’s coffeehouse and other Providence hangouts. A big chunk of our set list was Prine:

“Please don’t bury me down in that cold, cold ground; I’d rather have you cut me up and pass me all around….”

“Sam Stone was alone, when he popped his last balloon, climbing walls while sitting in a chair….”

“Then the coal company came with the world’s biggest shovel, and they tortured the timber and tore up the land….”

We hit the road to Williams College (some time around 1977) and performed at some coffeehouse there with my brother Jim and a talented guy playing a melodica named Tom Piazza.

There was no way to know then that Piazza would go on to become a much-lauded writer of novels, television (Treme) and nonfiction, and would in 2018 meet, befriend and travel with Prine. One result was a beautiful on-the-road profile for Oxford American Magazine.

Another is Living in the Present with John Prine, a book that originally was going to be a co-authored Prine memoir. But the musician, like so many people with pre-existing health challenges (he had many), was taken from this world by COVID-19 in April 2020. The book shape-shifted into a captivating, deeply-observed chronicle of the folk singer’s last few years. Piazza beautifully captures what he describes as Prine’s mix of “a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster.”

This nugget from Prine’s older (and now also departed) brother David gives a taste:

We talked about Prine’s subtle kind of political messaging, including this line from The Great Compromise:

I used to sleep at the foot of Old GloryAnd awake in the dawn's early lightBut much to my surpriseWhen I opened my eyesI was a victim of the great compromise

And of course Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore:

We were joined by my old Breakneck Ridge Revue co-conspirator David Ross (best known as the former director of the Whitney Museum).

Here’s one of our Breakneck Ridge Revue performances of Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” (Breakneck Ridge and the Trouble Sisters):

I hope you enjoy this brief break from Trump’s zone-flooding horror show.

If you can afford to chip in, I hope you might consider becoming a financial supporter of Sustain What.

Also consider contributing to The Hello in There Foundation, run by Prine’s family and supporting a heap of fine causes. I chipped in over the weekend.

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I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. (You can explore a rough transcript here.)

You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers who you may have gotten to know through my post on climate tipping points; and Pam McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers who’s also been a past guest on Sustain What talking about biodiversity loss and indigenous land management.

Also on hand was Matt Burgess, a University of Wyoming professor focused on the environmental and social implications of various economic pathways. He’s written a lot about the Trump climate report.

Insert, 9 am ET Sept. 3 - Burgess has a Guided Civic Revival post up on the Dessler et al review and our conversation. He makes a vital point here:

I think the Trump administration shoulders the blame for the rushed timelines, though, because they could have just commissioned a National Climate Assessment (as required by law), and none of this would have happened. They still can. We can still have a National Climate Assessment! (I know. I’m a broken record on this.)

Also read the latest post by Judith Curry, one of the authors of the Trump administration’s climate science critique. Here’s her self-described bottom line:

Bottom line: interesting report, laudable effort. We will be going through this report in much more detail. But in my initial assessment, the Dessler et al. report didn’t land any strong punches on the DOE Report, and I wouldn’t change any of the conclusions in the DOE Report in response. The combination of the DOE and Dessler report highlight areas of disagreement among climate scientists, and illustrates how weighting of different classes of evidence, addressing different topics, and different logical frameworks for linking evidence can lead to different conclusions. The existence of this kind of disagreement is essential information for policy makers, which hitherto has been hidden under the banner of “consensus” enforcement. - end insert

To me the most valuable aspect of this 85-plus-author review is clarifying that the report Secretary of Energy Chris Wright commissioned from his “Climate Working Group” is anything but a formal assessment.

The downside is that the review renews a boxing-match model of thinking about climate science as teams vying for a win/lose decision. Back in 2013, I wroried about this in the context of debates over attributing aspects of particular local extreme weather events to human-driven global climate change. Those trying to highlight uncertainty and build doubt, I wrote, were like Muhammad Ali leaning against the ropes, drawing an opponent into wasting energy - rope-a-dope. They tend to win.

At the same time, I completely understand why these hard-working researchers had to break away from summer vacations to respond. Listen and weigh in.

Unfortunately this is a long ugly slog of a fight.

Dessler’s post on the report is here:

My “curtain raiser” post here has links to both the Trump-commissioned report and the response:

Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime political scientist focused on the interface between climate science and policy (now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute), has posted an initial review of this review of the Trump-commissioned review:

Do read Burgess’s full post, which includes many valuable reflections and references:

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Bill McKibben and I differ on some issues (the decarbonizing role of nuclear energy is one; big theories of change are another) but we agree on a lot and vive la différence given the inevitability of “response diversity” facing wicked stresses.

And he’s right that the accelerating surge of solar electricity generation, from Pakistan rooftops to African villages to the California and Texas grids, is a powerful and hopeful force amid so many dire signals.

Here’s what he said about Texas, renewable energy and natural gas:

Texas is completely fascinating. First thing is, Texas is now putting up more clean energy than California. That's true. California has done a better job with all of this, in part because they have things like building codes. So they're not using as much energy. Texas is use as much as you can, generate as much as you can. But they are at least true to their free market principles in that they've pretty much opened their grid to all comers. And it's so clear that the cheapest way to produce power for a growing Texas is to turn to the sun and the wind and batteries, that that's where it's gone.

What was really interesting was what happened this spring in the legislature. The fossil fuel industry basically tried to do the same thing that they did in Washington with success, put the kibosh on sun and wind. And the bills that they proposed in Texas, everyone thought they would pass, even though they were sort of nuts. I mean, the most prominent one was described by many people as DEI for natural gas. If you wanted to put up five megawatts of solar, you had to put up five megawatts of gas too. And they didn't pass because lots of people appeared out of the hinterlands of Texas to say, boys, this is how we fund our school system now in rural Texas.

So I hope you’ll listen to and share our full Sustain What conversation, which occurred pretty late in the east-coast evening. Let me know what you embrace or reject, and why. Ted Nordhaus posted a pretty biting The Breakthrough Journal critique of McKibben’s new book, and I hope you’ll read it, too. As I said above, response diversity guarantees smart folks will have different perceptions and messages facing the same data and situations; the key is finding cooperation amid those difference more than presuming one or the other will win a narrative battle.

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Here’s the “curtain raiser” post with lots of links:

Thank you Gavin Lamb, Kim M., Dann, Tracy Frisch, Carter Brooks, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Ted Nordhaus of Breakthrough Institute from March 18, 2024:

Explore the Overheated Social Climate with Ted Nordhaus

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This is the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation eploring how cities, counties and perhaps your community can use data mapping and visualization tools to get ahead of climate risks as people and property increasingly sprawl into flood, fire, heat and storm danger zones - and as human-amped climate change intensifies some of those hazards.

Watch above and share this post, or do the same on LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter or YouTube:

My guests were Alan Clinton, planning officer for the County of Kauai, Hawaii, and Taisha Fabricius, a technology leader at ESRI’s R&D Center in Zurich working to facilitate the capacity of risk managers, emergency preparedness personnel and planners to use “digital twins” of facilities or communities to identify and mitigate threats.

Clinton described a particularly interesting case study in Kauai in which data on coastal erosion isn’t just clarifying decisionmaking; it has been directly integrated into regulations governing seaside building.

We've been trying to find ways that we can really thread the needle on balancing community impacts and private property rights. And so the little viewer on the left actually indicates data that we integrated into something called a shoreline setback ordinance. And so this is another Esri application that we brought our data into.

And this is my favorite snapshot of this area because there is a small boat harbor smack dab in the middle of that beach. You can see just based off the coloring on the left, it is leading to a disruption of the movement of sand, of wave energy, and so those properties on the left are dramatically facing chronic erosion at a rate of about, I believe, that transect is 3.5 feet per year. And so that is substantial. And on the right of that, it's a growing beach that is gaining sand. And so we've been very mindful of trying to limit shoreline hardening because we realize these are dynamic natural ecosystems that require some fluctuations. Our shoreline setback ordinance was a really great stepping stone for how we integrate science and satellite imagery to evaluate the march of the beach inland or as it grows and bring it into a regulatory policy.

Taisha Fabricius from Esri took us on a tour of various applications of the company’s suite of urban and community planning platforms. Here’s a snippet of video showing how Zurich can anticipate flood impacts.

I noted how valuable such a tool would be in Juneau, Alaska, where glacial lake outburst floods have become a chronic threat, as I just explored the day before:

More resources

Geo Week News - How Kaua'i County uses GIS to future-proof development

Data Smart City Solutions (Harvard Kennedy School) - Future Tides: How Kaua'i Fights Sea Level Rise with Data

Thank you Lucy Gray, Sean Higgins, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Help sutain Sustain What if you can afford it. I hate paywalls.

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I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event today zooming out from the latest dramatic glacial lake outburst flood generated in Suicide Basin up in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska. That’s pretty far from most of us, but the challenge posed when glaciers block rivers and suddenly disgorge vast volumes of water extends to the Himalalyas, where millions of people live downstream of such deadly dynamics.

This webcast starts with my overview of current events, I include this video snapshot I made from the many great National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey and university resources (juneauflood.com) focused on GLOF monitoring and warning along the Mendenhall River and glacier basin.

I then segue to a rebroadcast of Deadly Himalayan Glacial Outburst Flood Foretold, With More Coming - my 2023 Sustain What conversation on a far more devastating outburst flood in Sikkim India with South Asian scientists and journalists (and US water-focused journalist Keith Schneider), including a researcher who predicted one such catastrophic flood two years before it unfolded.

Here’s that 2021 paper led by Ashim Sattar: Future Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) hazard of the South Lhonak Lake, Sikkim Himalaya.

Even more presciently, the Himalaya-based journalist Ramesh Bhushal wrote thie 2020 feature:

Glacial lakes become more deadly as Himalayan ice melts

Researchers map the most dangerous lakes and call on China and Nepal to work together to reduce the threat of catastrophic flooding

I follow journalists and scientists who tend to get ahead of threats and hope you do, too.

Here’s more on Juneau’s chronic summer flood threat situation. There’s a fantastic Story Map on the threat here:

Alan Gerard posted a great piece on Balanced Weather explaining how much federally funded science goes in to identifying, tracking and warning of such hazards:

To keep track of the situation in Juneau go to KTOO public media’s livestream:

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I hope you’ll listen to, and share, this conversation on climate policy in the age of Trump (and lots more) with the wide-ranging Harvard economist Cass Sunstein. Sunstein worked under two presidents - Barack Obama (social cost of carbon) and Joe Biden (Homeland Security) - and has a new book out encapsulating his argument for a morals-based global accounting system for carbon: Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World—and the Future.

Sunstein actually has several books in the pipeline, including one on artificial intelligence and one on manipulation. Climate Justice is largely an update and defense of his conception of a social cost of carbon that integrates impacts across geography and into the future. Here’s the synopsis, which well captures my read of the book:

If you're injuring someone, you should stop—and pay for the damage you've caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking on the ethics of climate change, renowned author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what's at stake and lays out the moral imperative: When it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when they live or where they live—which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor nations that are particularly vulnerable.Invoking principles of corrective justice and distributive justice, Sunstein argues that rich countries should pay for the harms they have caused and that all of us are obliged to take steps to protect future generations from serious climate-related damage. He shows how “choice engines,” informed by artificial intelligence, can enable people to save money and to reduce the harms they produce. The book casts new light on the “social cost of carbon,”—the most important number in climate change debates—and explains how intergenerational neutrality and international neutrality can help all nations, crucially the United States and China, do what must be done.

We talked about critiques of the social cost of carbon, including the argument of Noah Kaufman of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, who recently posited that Trump’s order eliminating application of this metric in U.S. policy had more merit than one might at first expect and next steps when someone reasonable takes office need not include reviving it:

Were a future US administration to decide not to reconstitute the SCC estimate, it would hardly be an exception. The European Union justifies stringent regulations based on climate threats, without assigning them monetary values. In 2009, the United Kingdom abandoned SCC-based appraisals and adopted an approach to valuing the benefits of emissions reductions that aligns the nation’s policies with its ambitious climate goals. The shift, officials explained, was motivated in part by “the considerable uncertainty that exists surrounding estimates of the SCC.” [5]

I may have them both on a future webcast to go deeper.

One chapter centers on adaptation to climate change and I brought up my argument against the use of this term (sure, I know it’s deeply embedded in the treaty etc…) given how so much of the loss being tallied these days is from vulnerability to today’s climate, let alone what’s coming. Here’s how I made that point:

Sunstein’s book stresses that indvidual choices matter along with big-picture policy architecture. He explores the concept of the “choice engine” (Energy Star labels, which Trump has been trying to kill, are one; Zillow’s climate risk data is another):

Please find time to listen to the full conversation and weigh in with a comment, or do the same (and share the webcast) on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or my X account.

LIVE Thursday, 12 pm Eastern: How technology can boost community resilience

Facing shifting risk landscapes amid rapid social and environmental change, how can cities large or small best plan and design with the future in mind?

Join me to explore how the Hawaiian island Kauai and mapping giant ESRI are working together on this challenge. My guests are Alan Clinton, planning officer for the County of Kauai, Hawaii, and Taisha Fabricius, a technology leader at ESRI’s R&D Center in Zurich working on ArcGIS CityEngine, the company’s 3D modeling and visualization software tailored for urban planning and design.

Join us on Substack Live (on the app), Facebook, YouTube, or Linkedin.

Resources: County of Kauai Open Data Hub

Read: How Kaua'i County uses GIS to future-proof development

Read Taisha Fabricius's blog posts.

And of course revisit my coverage of the horrifice Lahaina Fire on Maui:

Sustain What is mostly labor of love but financial contributions from those who can afford it do make a big difference.

Thank you Lucy Gray, Gina Biekman, Robert M. Howard, Corinne Campney, Ellen Maidman-Tanner, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Public Domain is a valuable Substack project founded by journalists focused on U.S. public lands and the agencies responsible for managing those assets for all Americans.

Here’s the podcast post of my conversation with two co-founders, Chris D'Angelo and Jimmy Tobias. You can watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube.

Here’s one excerpt. I asked Jimmy Tobias how it feels to cover agencies starkly up-ended from their traditional role (I allude to the “fire dpeartment” in the sci-fi story and film Fahrenheit 451, which burns books and homes instead of fighting fire). He says:

Yeah, I mean, it is surreal. It's always kind of shocking what's going on behind the scenes… We just published a story about a guy who had worked as an offshore lobbyist for the offshore industry for years. And then he just got the offshore industry regulatory agency at the Interior Department. It's called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. And, you know, we got a bunch of his emails and his calendar entries. And lo and behold, he's working on the exact same issues now that he's in government that he was working on as a lobbyist, which strikes me as like a major conflict of interest.

The curtain raiser post with more background is here:

Today’s Public Domain post is here:

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Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What episode looking at:

• The recent sabotage attack on a TV station’s weather radar in Oklahoma

• The spread of unfounded extreme-weather conspiracies by Republican lawmakers and attention-hijacking online figures

• How opacity around government and industry tests of weather modification methods has provided an enduring hook for conspiracy mongers to build on

(Read James Rodger Fleming’s paper “The pathological history of weather and climate modification: Three cycles of promise and hype.”)

• The 60-year history of scientists jumping to geoengineering climate solutions facing greenhouse-gas heating

• The roles of different social media platforms in either fueling (Instagram) or fighting (TikTok) the flow of falsehoods

My guests were:

• James Rodger Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology and Society, Emeritus, at Colby College, and author of Fixing the Sky - The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.

• Matt Cappucci, the fantastic young meteorologist and weather communicator from MyRadar and the Washington Post who is also the author of Looking Up - The True Adventures of a Storm-Chasing Weather Nerd

The introductory post has more background:

I’m thrilled that Sustain What now has more than 10,000 subscribers. I keep content open for all but appreciate financial contributions from those who can afford it!

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This evergreen Sustain What conversation on trust and mistrust in climate science and scientists is - sadly - more relevant than ever. It was organized early in the pandemic by Gil Eyal, a sociologist at Columbia University focused on attitudes toward expertise (he literally wrote the book on this - The Crisis of Expertise).

Instead of running this Sustain What show, I was one of three discussants, along with the Cambridge climate-policy researcher Mike Hulme (author of Why We Disagree on Climate Change) and the Harvard historian of science and climate campaigner Naomi Oreskes, who had recently authored Why Trust Science?

It’s also on YouTube here.

Now we’re in an era when a government agency with life-or-death responsibilities is led by a figure who’s built a big following by actively attacking expertise. I was blown away by this tweet by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - someone I used to go camping with (pre brain worm). What times these are….

This was the brief for our discussion:

Over the last three decades, the debate about climate change has involved challenges to the very evidence of change, disagreements about status of models and simulations as scientific evidence, calls for “sound science,” disputes about the contribution of anthropogenic causes, attempts to cast doubt on the integrity and plausibility of forecasts and assessments, and various forms of “solution aversion.”

What are the sources of skepticism about climate change and/or mistrust of climate science? What processes, mechanisms and dynamics are implicated in provoking and prolonging the debate about climate change? To what extent are these specific to the climate debate, and to what extent they are representative of a broader mistrust in experts?

What can be done to increase trust in climate science or consensus around appropriate measures or interventions?

The many flavors of “misinformation”

A big part of the trust tussle over consequential issues is to see who gets to define what is “misinformation.”

I was reminded of my old conversation when I listened to a fascinating and worthwhile discussion of related issues by Yascha Mounk, editor of Persuasion, and Dan Williams, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex who writes the Conspicuous Cognition newsletter, in which he explores the intersection of culture and politics with philosophical insights and scientific research and expertise.

Here’s one section (from Mounk’s transcript) that shows the relevance to our climate-trust discussion above and also to another conversation I had with Mike Hulme about his most recent book on what he calls “climatism” (putting climate change in the foreground in discussing almost any pressing issue, even when other factors are the dominant drivers of the problem):

Mounk: What about this idea of elite misinformation? I think it’s a very nice phrase that I believe Matt Yglesias first came up with. At least he wrote one of the first big articles about that. How common is that? Again, obviously you’re skeptical about how useful term misinformation is in general, but if we take this broader definition of misinformation that perhaps is not very coherent, but which has sort of entered the political lexicon, do you think it’s obvious that political elites, social elites more broadly, are systematically better at avoiding that kind of misinformation than others? Or is this problem of elite misinformation, which Matt posited, a very serious one?

Williams: Just to say one thing on that terminological issue. I mean, I don’t have any issue with ordinary democratic citizens or journalists or pundits in their capacity as democratic citizens applying a term like misinformation with a kind of expansive meaning like Yglesias does in that article. My issue is when it comes to misinformation experts and policymakers who are applying this classification either to establish objective scientific findings about it or to enforce certain kinds of anti-misinformation policies. That’s where I think it’s very important to have a strict clear-cut definition. But on that point of elite misinformation, it’s just obviously true that within our mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, whether it’s science, whether it’s academia more broadly, whether it’s elite legacy media outlets, there is a lot of false and misleading communication. If you take a topic like climate change, for example, almost all of the focus on climate misinformation has focused on, in the broadest possible sense, climate denial. That’s almost exclusively associated with the political right, where people have called into question the existence of human-driven climate change or the risks that it poses. I completely agree that that phenomenon exists and I think it is dangerous and I think it’s important that people think carefully about why that exists and ways to address it.

But there’s also a lot of what you might call elite progressive misinformation. So the philosopher Joseph Heath had a really fantastic article on his Substack recently about what he calls “highbrow climate misinformation,” looking at the ways in which there’s lots of what you might call alarmist climate viewpoints on the sort of mainstream progressive side of the aisle which are simply not well-supported by empirical evidence, or they involve forms of communication that are not supported by empirical evidence, and which almost never get called out as misinformation.

If you’ve followed me through the years, you already know that I’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to bat down what Mounk, Williams and Heath describe as “elite” or “highbrow” climate misinformation even as I’ve fought to expose professional purveyors of climate and energy falsehood in service of maintaining the fossil-fueled status quo. Here’s just one of dozens of relevant Dot Earth posts from back in the day

Coincidentally, Derek Thompson’s Sunday post has this related line about science being the process of nibbling away at what “experts” have concluded to be the state of things:

In his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman writes that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I used to hate this quote for its entreaty to conspiratorial thinking. After all, if scientists automatically distrusted every expert opinion, how would truths coalesce? How would knowledge accumulate over time? Wouldn’t we all just claim our own private reality in the face of expertise? But it’s the following lines from Feynman that make his point clear. “When someone says 'science teaches such and such', he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach it; experience teaches it.” In other words, science is the opposite of blind faith. It is a reflexive skepticism toward received wisdoms or arguments from authority. It is the conviction that our own experiments, if carefully constructed, can reveal once-obscured truths. Science is a special kind of faith—a belief before evidence that the previous generation’s “truths” are, at best, half-truths, with half-lives, which will one day pass away and make room for the next generation of even more useful half-truths.

Two papers published last year are worth highlighting here:

Investigating the trust gap between scientists and climate scientists in 68 countries

The abstract:

Across 68 countries (N = 69,534), individuals expressed less trust in climate scientists than scientists in general. In most countries and overall, conservative political orientation was more strongly associated with lower trust in climate scientists than with trust in scientists in general.

Cathleen O’Grady, writing in Science Magazine, summarized the implications:

Climate scientists, on average, are less trusted around the world than scientists in general, according to a preprint posted to the Open Science Framework last month. That lack of trust could weaken support for government actions to avert catastrophic global warming, researchers say.

Trust in climate science and climate scientists: A narrative review

Naomi Oreskes was an author. Here’s the conclusion:

[A] large share of national publics perceive climate scientists and climate science as trustworthy. However, trust in climate science is politically polarized, particularly in the U.S., where conservatives have lower levels of trust than liberals. Distrust in climate science can be politically consequential and should be taken seriously, even if exhibited by only a minority of the public. We identify several reasons that lead some audiences to be distrustful or skeptical about the competence, integrity, benevolence, and openness of climate scientists–four key dimensions of trustworthiness. Given the narrative style of this review and the continuously developing research on trust in climate science, we invite more systematic reviews on the topic which could help to identify potentially overlooked correlates of (dis)trust in climate science. We find no clear evidence that respectful advocacy by climate scientists negatively affects trustworthiness perceptions. However, the effect of advocacy on perceived trustworthiness seems to be dependent on the policy in question. We provide several recommendations that can help climate change communicators become more trustworthy.

We all face a web full of paywalls. There isn’t one here, but only because some Sustain What supporters chip in as paid subscribers. Consider doing so if you can afford it.

Nine years ago, in a lecture to a geochemstry society, I described the challenge facing scientists who want to help society change direction on climate by juxtaposing a scene from the 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause” with the release of one of the IPCC’s reports (full video here):

The ideal soundtrack when exploring these issues is T Bone Burnett’s 1980 album Truth Decay, particularly his song “Madison Avenue”:

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This is the podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with top experts on the role - and limits - of technology as a means of cutting losses when people live in harm’s way.

The issues raised in the Texas tragedy (and travesty) resonate well beyond that state’s Flash Flood Alley.

My guests were Jim Moffitt, a pre-Musk Twitter engineer focused on social media as a path to flood safety; Nashin Mahtani, director of Yayasan Peta Bencana, a realtime disaster mapping platform in Indonesia; and flood-warning analyst Andrew Kruczkiewicz of the Columbia Climate School. Among many efforts, he led a four-year international project called Towards A Global Flood & Flash Flood Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observatory.

We all agreed that one path to safer living in hazardous areas - something humans will continue doing given our habit of living in places that are “impossible and inevitable” - is simply better awareness of the hazard landscape under your feet.

Here’s Mahtani’s way of making the point:

And this awareness doesn’t come just by abandoning your devices and looking up. They can help and you can use your devices to help others.

We explored Peta Bencana’s success in using community-generated data, most from Twitter, to map unfolding floods and other natural hazards in the sprawling megacity Jakarta. When free access to that data was shut down with almost no warning thanks to Elon Musk, it dangerously jolted the system, Mahtani said:

“We had written agreements in place. And the way we found out that the service was being cut was not through any communication from their side…. It was through I was just checking our Twitter account because we were experiencing extremely heavy rainfall.

And I happened to see there was a tweet from the Twitter developer account saying that in seven days time, we're going to turn off the service.

I immediately recalled my post from that period: Why a Twitter Implosion Could be a Disaster in Disasters.

Here’s more on that moment:

Mahtani said their app is now using data from Whatsapp and and other social media. (I need to do a webcast on the many uses of Whatsapp, which those of us in the U.S. still see mainly as a way to make an international call!)

We looked at other issues. Just as is the case with Trump’s budget and staff demolitions at FEMA and NOAA, Indonesia is dealing with flooding in a time of budget cuts, as Global Press just reported.

And during our discussion I asked Mahtani whether the Trump demolition of USAID has had an impact. It’s similar to the abrupt Twitter data cutoff, she said. Her organization had been receiving USAID funding since 2017

How could you take funding that you've already committed to, that's already signed off on? We knew that we should expect changes in the future, but we had no idea that they could take back funding that was committed.

So that was also a moment where the ground really shook under our feet, and we're still trying to figure out and navigate our way through that.

Here’s the curtain raiser for the show, which has more links and background:

Postscript

Former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who was a guest on a couple of Sustain What episodes, wrote a vital opinion piece for Newsweek with this core line:

Today, we mourn the lives lost in Kerrville, Texas. But tomorrow, it could be any community—your community or mine. The threats we face are increasing, not diminishing. We can't afford to strip away the resources or experience needed to respond.

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Here’s the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Michael Grunwald, the prize-winning environmental journalist and author whose latest book,We Are Eating The Earth, explores the destructive connections between people’s plates and forces wrecking ecosystems and overheating the climate. The book also charts sustainable paths forward with no sugar coating.

Also on hand was Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel, who’s most recent book is To Boldly Grow. Read her columns here. They were podcasting partners for awhile on Climavores and the episodes are still fun and illuminating.

There were big differences on some issues but there was profound agreement on the reality that the status quo for agriculture and forests is making a ruin of many of Earth’s most habitable and biodiverse areas, and contributing substantially to global warming - without a suitably scaled investment in solutions or food policy.

And beef still (sorry) takes the cake as a destructive force and a source of enduringly appealing mythologies around “solutions” like regenerative cattle rearing, Grunwald says. He did note that, at the same time, intensifying production (more cattle from less land) is increasingly helping spare rain forest the Amazon River basin.

When food scale and ethics collide

We talked about climate and land harms from food but also the complex tradeoffs related to intensification of production. Ethical issues abound, as was pointed out in a question posed by my friend and past guest Zoe Weil, a vegan. Grunwald’s answer is spot on. (The picture in the background is an aerial shot of sheep by my friend and co-author George Steinmetz, whose photography book Feed the Planet, which we discussed here, is a great adjunct to this post.)

Other hurdles include:

• The brutual politics of meat in America, including Florida’s ban on lab-made meat.

• Polling showing the extreme resistance to raising the cost of meat for the sake of climate or other risks.

Solutions include lab-made meat - a focus of mine since 2008 or so, when I made the case for pricey lab-made foie gras as a perfect starting point.

Here’s what I proposed way back when:

[S]uppose there are alternatives to producing a delicacy like this that don’t entail penning thousands of birds in dark sheds and sticking a pipe down their throats three times a day for the last 2 or 3 weeks of their 12-week lives until their livers swell about tenfold. Remember, this isn’t just about a few rich people in Chicago. China is just getting into high gear (both on producing such food products and, with its swelling ruling class, consuming them).

I have a proposal: Keep the liver; free the ducks. This will take awhile, of course. After all, it involves the frontiers of food technology — making meat in a lab instead of a feed lot. There’s a growing international push to do this, at least for nuggets and ground meat — for both environmental and ethical reasons. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even offered a $1 million reward for affordable cultivated meat.

I think foie gras could be the perfect test case, all you cultured-meat entrepreneurs. First, as I learned in college, liver is one of the most proliferative tissues on the planet (that’s one reason it’s a relatively easy organ to transplant). So presumably it’s a lot easier to culture in a vat than, say, brisket. Second, there’s none of that structure or texture issue. In fact, among the gustatory attributes of foie gras, according to leading chefs and gourmands, is the buttery lack of structure or texture. Third, it’s a high-priced delicacy, so any manufacturer need not worry about trying to bring the cost of making a meat product competitive with, say, McNuggets.

I can’t think of a better way to cut through the impassioned arguments on both sides of the foie gras trade…

Grunwald and Haspel updated me by pointing to the remarkable success, so far, of the Australian companyVow, which this spring gained approval from regulators to sell itsForged Gras, a Japanese-quail foie gras variant, which it can produce at the impressive scale of more than half a ton a week, according to The Spoon. I hope to host Peppou and other lab-food innovators on Sustain What soon.

The same technology can create meats that don’t exist in nature. To learn more, I recommend this interview with Vow’s George Peppou by Michael Wolf of The Spoon:

I hope you can take time to watch and share the full conversation with Grunwald and Haspel, which is also on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or X at my @revkin account).

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live, including on Substack Live. Join me for my next live video in the app.

Here’s my highly relevant webcast with photographer George Steinmetz:

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File this post in the “sustainability of democracy” track.

I just had an unplanned pop-up Sustain What conversation with the wide-ranging author Paul Greenberg about his bitingly satirical novella, A Third Term, and hope you take time for a listen. (I’ve known Paul for decades through his invaluable writing on fish and conservation.)

His new work of fiction, in which George Washington is resurrected to confront a current-day president, “The Tyrant,” is a wild ride that is just the sort of prod we all need at the moment. Here’s a summary from Paul that doesn’t give away the great twists and turns:

It is 2028 and a certain president wants a third term. The Constitution shouldn’t allow it but the Supreme Court has found a workaround. The electoral system has been mangled. The media is a joke. Voters can barely be troubled to vote. A Third Term is a speculative fiction in which George Washington is snatched from his deathbed and transported to the present era. Riddled with pneumonia, possessing dentures fashioned from slave’s teeth, and saddled with an aristocratic sensibility tempered by war and religious faith, Washington will require considerable rehabilitation to pose a challenge to the man he refers to as “The Tyrant.”

But a wily campaign manager and a sympathetic personal trainer are up for the job. In spite of his name and reputation, Washington’s pathway to the presidency is far from clear. Curveballs from the left and right come at him from every angle. Meanwhile, The Tyrant and his circle are oddly prepared to do battle with America’s first commander-in-chief. Slavery, sexual indiscretion, and even another visitor from the past all combine to make Candidate Washington far less than a shoo-in.

It’s a great week to get the book. Paul has made the Kindle version free ahead of Fourth of July. There’s also now an Audible Audiobook.

Here’s a great moment in our chat in which Paul describes a conversation he had about the novel with a podcaster who’s a veteran not sharing Paul’s political orientation (Coffee with Bearded Dad; video below):

[It] actually turned out we had been in Bosnia together because I used to work for nonprofits in Eastern Europe. And he goes, I feel politically homeless. And that's why your book spoke to me because, you know, what Washington is meant to represent in this novella is just some sanity. You know what I mean? Not the crazy basket of fringe ideas that we see on the right and the left… Most Americans…want somebody who's decent, somebody who's honest, and most of all, somebody who actually thinks about the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

I mean, that's like military leadership actually incarnate. The guy, a vet from all those three wars, was saying he has sort of done a little bit of a research around presidents who served in the army and presidents who didn't. And the ones who did serve, because they had that trial by fire, I'm not saying that every president has to have been a military veteran, but think about it. As a leader, particularly in the leader during combat, literally lives are at stake. And for somebody who's not had to lead people into combat, I think the idea of loss of life, sacrificing suffering can be abstract. So to me, Washington was the ultimate that and the ultimate person who thought about the greatest good for the greatest

Toward the end I noted that my only dabble in speculative fiction around Trumpian politics is in my song “Good News from 2044?” I gave it a strum but - in case you missted it a couple months ago - here’s the tune.

Here’s a book trailer of sorts:

Thank you Alan H McGowan, Bill Diskin, and others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app:

Here’s Paul on the Coffee with Bearded Bad Dad podcast:

It’s worth highlighting narrative analyst Randy Olson’s recent ABT Agenda post on the importance of sticking with the #NoKings message:

And if you have the resources and like what I’m doing, do consider joining the small core of Sustain What supporters who chip in financially. It helps me justify the time it takes to organize and run the webcasts and write my posts.

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Today is #ShowYourStripesDay, aiming to sustain the push initiated years ago by UK climate scientist Ed Hawkins to use cool and warm colors to depict long-term climate change in ways that might grab attention and ultimately change choices and behavior.

I’ve explored this innovation and related ones for a long time, most notably in a Sustain What webcast on Show Your Stripes Day in 2021. I’ve reposted that episode in Substack’s player above.

As you will learn (or already know if you watched it way back when), there’s still scant behavioral science showing that this data visualization “movement” has mattered. But I see it as part of a vital wider effort to use visualizations or other forms of creative output (music, below) to bring deeper meaning to data.

I’ve done quite a few shows on this theme including these:

Visualizing Energy for Social and Climate Impact

Here’s some of the musical experimentation, in this case from Julio Friedmann, who’s been a frequent source of mine for carbon science and policy questions and is also into musical experimentation using climate data:

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Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Kate Marvel, a prominent climate scientist and communicator whose first book, Human Nature - Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now.

Thank you, Matt Burgess and cliff Krolick, for being among subscribers who watched live on Substack. Please subscribe to catch future episodes and share this post.

Marvel and I explored the book’s nine chapters, and feelings. You can see three highlights below but please do watch and share the conversation here or on n Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

I love how she emphasizes the importance for scientists (and I’d argue for all of us) to recognize your emotional reactions to grand challenges like human-driven climate change as well as the facts and enduring questions:

I think we should be as honest about observing and documenting our emotions as we are about measuring rainfall or soil moisture. Pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.

Here are three highlights:

What really scares Marvel isn’t the physics:

So there's all this stuff that physics gives us to be afraid of, right? These big monsters that are coming for us in the future.

But the thing that scares me the most is that climate change happens in the world that we've built for it. And it happens in this sort of deeply unequal world that is not governed in an optimal way.

And so there's this notion that, oh, we'll just adapt. And there's no just about adaptation.

But the notion that all decisions will be made in an equitable manner by looking soberly at the best available science, I just don't think that that is supported by either current events or the historical record.

And so, you know, the thing that I am the most frightened about when it comes to climate change is what it's going to make us do to each other.

I couldn’t agree more. I wrote about “the scariest science” and the climate justice gap awhile back:

Here’s Marvel on avoiding misconceptions about public attitudes on climate change:

The vast majority of people are either totally freaked out or at least concerned. Another aspect of the polling is that most people wildly underestimate how much other people care about climate change.

So most people say, I am very, very worried, but nobody else is. And then if you start talking about it, you realize that, oh, everybody feels the same way as me. And the hardcore deniers, that's like a tiny single digit fraction of the population.

Marvel says use your own reactions to being badgered to gauge how to talk to others about climate or other fraught issues:

I haven't studied climate communication, but I know what doesn't work on me personally. I don't like being scolded. I don't like being shamed. And I don't like being told that there's nothing I can do.

And just for me personally, I tend to shut down.

But if I'm if I'm engaged with, like, did you know that the water on Earth is older than the sun? You know, that's a great in to people because everybody is amazed by some aspect of the planet that we live on.

And if you talk about, hey, did you know that there's a way to keep your house hot and cold that is way cheaper and better than burning fuel oil? You know, maybe that's an entry as well….

I think there can be a tendency, and I feel it in myself, to demand that people have the right views on absolutely everything. And that's never going to happen. That's not how people work.

I hope you’ll buy and read the book and please do share this post widely.

And I hope, if you can afford it, that you might consider financially supporting my Sustain What effort.

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Here’s Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s post with lots more on Marvel and the book (I’m way overdue to have Johnson on Sustain What to talk about her books and work fostering the capacity for action on climate change, ocean restoration and other key challenges.

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Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out toPeter Guttman, a world-roaming photographer who’s spent decades portraying the full prismatic wonder and weirdness of us.

Please watch and/or share this conversation here or on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (at my handle @revkin) or YouTube.

Here’s a snippet focused on one of the grassroots voices pushing for Juneteenth as a national holiday - LaVerne Ross of the Calvary Baptist Church in Santa Monica, California.

As Guttman writes:

Though enslaved labor in southern states ended that Juneteenth, slavery further north continued until a ratification of the Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment many months later. A beloved fixture at the gospel-infused Calvary Baptist Church, LaVerne Ross, community activist and organizer, approached the city of Santa Monica three decades ago to commemorate this holiday that her family had first celebrated in Texas. After 64 years as a master cosmetologist, Ross helped revive fading strands of history when she founded a committee that swept the holiday’s prominence over to the west coast. Her efforts contributed to forging the country’s eleventh national holiday, which was signed into law by President Joseph Biden in 2021.

You can listen to and read Laverne Ross’s oral history here.

And don’t forget Friday’s show:

Friday, June 20, 10 a.m. Eastern, Explore Climate Facts, Feelings and Fates with Scientist Kate Marvel

Join us live on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (at my handle @revkin) or YouTube.

Kate Marvel is a cutting-edge climate scientist and communicator who describes her first book, Human Nature, as a “biography of the Earth in nine emotions.” The book is a bracing and deeply personal tour of climate science, planetary history and the array of hopeful and/or heartbreaking environmental futures ahead, depending on choices made or avoided now. Learn about Marvel and the book at marvelclimate.com.

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When I was building my sustainability communication project at Columbia University, I was recruited to be an author of a chapter on “communicating risk for decision-making” in what would become the 2022 Global Assessment Report from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. I couldn’t participate fully in the end (boring reasons) but gained a valuable view of the depth and breadth of expertise brought together by these periodic reports. Explore some of the results here:

The pandemic, which exploded as the writing process played out, vividly illustrated how all the communication advice in the world comes to naught if no one heeds it. But the world is still better with these efforts than it would be without them.

The 2025 report is being launched today. I hope you can spare at least a little time to listen to my conversation with Kamal Kishore, who leads that office and was previously the head of India’s National Disaster Management Authority of India. Back then he led the G20 Working Group on Disaster Risk Reduction and contributed to the development of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure.

Here’s the report description:

The Global Assessment Report (GAR) 2025: Resilience Pays: Financing and Investing for our Future highlights how smarter investment can reset the destructive cycle of disasters, debt, uninsurability and humanitarian need that threatens a climate-changed world.

Disaster risk is increasing as more frequent and intense hazard events, unsafe urbanisation, and ineffective development put more people and assets in harm's way. Disasters have profound macroeconomic impacts, with direct losses estimated at $202 billion. When cascading and ecosystem costs are taken into account, escalating disaster costs now surpass $2.3 trillion annually.

There is an urgent need to transform how disaster risk is addressed amid a rapidly changing climate. Risk is no longer a peripheral issue but a systemic challenge that affects financial stability, sustainability, and equity. By embedding risk reduction into core policy and investment decisions, it is possible to break the recurring cycle of shocks, losses and debt. With the right choices, resilience can become a foundation for long-term prosperity, enabling societies not only to withstand disasters but to thrive despite them.

I recorded the conversation above ahead of time because my wife and I (if travel chaos didn’t interfere) are currently in Athens on a rare international trip that doesn’t have my work at its core.

The United Nations is as flawed as any bureaucracy, but my experience made me ever more convinced it has a vital role to play as the world’s nations and communities grapple with grand challenges.

This 2022 Sustain What conversation on how to get news media to focus more on the conditions that turn a hard knock into a disaster couldn’t be more relevant:

When Avoiding Disaster is the Story

By their nature, news media focus on events, victims and villains more than the social systems that, through neglect or sometimes malice, lead to the calamitous losses we call disasters.

Is there a way to make preparedness and risk reduction the story? And is there a way to have that story read, and acted on?

In this special Sustain What webcast, veteran journalist Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School explores challenges and innovations with journalists and experts, several of them in Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction.The theme is "From Risk to Resilience: Towards Sustainable Development for All in a COVID-19 Transformed World." Here's the Global Platform site: https://globalplatform.undrr.orgMy guests were:Mavic Conde, an independent environmental journalist in the Philippines focused on solutions reporting.https://twitter.com/condemavicJoshua L. DeVincenzo, researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP)https://twitter.com/j_devincenzoNatalia Ilieva, Head of the office of the Secretary Genera of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Unionhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/natalia-ilieva-360a7324Roger Pulwarty, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory Senior Scientist and a Global Assessment Report author https://psl.noaa.gov/people/roger.pulwarty/

And here’s “disasterologist” Samantha Montano explaining why vulnerability imbalances created by corporate power, marginalization, racism and other social dynamics need to be recognized and acted on:

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Whenever you need a break from the dueling pundits, have a listen to one of my Sunday Sanity shows.

For those who missed us live on Sunday, here’s an audio and video antidote for Trump’s lock on our brains - a conversation, poetry reading and picking party with a couple of remarkably creative humans - the provocateur poet Andrei Codrescu, who you may have heard as a frequent NPR commentator in decades past, and masterful bluegrass and trad musicianJohn McEuen, best known for his 50 years in the legendary Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and for helping fellow high schooler Steve Martin learn banjo. There’s more context and content on each guest here.

Codrescu did discuss the happy news from his home country, Romania, summarized well in this Reuters report:

Romania's centrist Bucharest mayor, Nicusor Dan, won the country's presidential election on Sunday in a shock upset over a hard-right, nationalist rival who had pledged to put Romania on a path inspired by U.S. President Donald Trump's politics.

More here from Bluesky:

But we mainly explored each man’s life journey - with the 1960s a keystone moment for both - and fit in a few songs from McEuen and yours truly. I love McEuen’s version of “Old Rivers” (a person), from his latest album, The Newsman:

The full fidelity album version is on YouTube here.

I tossed in one of my recent songs, “Nibbling Ducks” - about how “those pesky chores, piling up, make my brain explode” (YouTube version).

Three flavors of autocracy

Codrescu reflected on living in three different times and flavors of authoritarian government, from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in 1967 to the National Guard crackdown on Detroit riots as he arrived there after fleeing Romania to Trump 2.0. Here’s a snippet but do enjoy and SHARE, the full episode.

Please consider chipping in to support my Sustain What project if you can afford it amid all the paywalls.

I get the paywall pain issue and even wrote about it here a few years ago.

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Update June 3 | In another demonstration of the Trump administration’s reckless and damaging whiplash approach to funding of vital programs, the initial freeze on this vital conduit for weather data has been reversed. But note that the Unidata blog post below includes this line about sustained threats to funding:

This positive development allows us to end the current furlough of our staff and resume our operations. While we are grateful to receive our next increment of funding, we are mindful of the challenges that lie ahead with our continued funding given the administration’s proposed FY26 budget that cuts NSF’s budget by over fifty percent.

Original May 9 post | The effect of Trump’s initial blitzkrieg assault on science is like a multi-armed monster eating away at budgets, agency staff, technical systems and the spirits of thousands of scientists and other staff who support them - and citizens who rely on the innovations that flow from research, and students pondering careers in everything from meteorology to medicine.

And Trump loves it when concerned people like me or you get fixated on the potency of his impact. But I have to set aside my personal frustration with the troll of all trolls and convey what’s going on nonetheless.

This post is focused on just one of today’s mini disasters - the suspension of Unidata, a portal and network for realtime data sharing that you’ve likely never heard about but that matters enormously.

Amid the paywalls, it’s hard to chip in one more time, but for those who like what I’m doing and can afford it, please consider a donation.

For instance, Unidata efforts underpin the capacity for you to track live weather radar on your smartphone. That’s just one of the insights I gleaned from a brief pop-up conversation I just had with Jim Steenburgh, a University of Utah atmospheric sciences professor who’s been a user of such data for decades:

He also gave me permission to repost a piece he just published on the Wasatch Weather Weenies blog on the significance of this development:

NSF Cuts Shutter NSF Unidata

There's an organization you may have never heard of, but if you are a user of weather data and graphics on the web, they have almost certainly contributed to the cyberinfrastructure that made it possible.

Their name is NSF Unidata, or just "Unidata" for short.

Unidata developed organically in the 1980s when Universities has a pressing need to access weather data in real time, but couldn't. The Internet at the time was nascent and there was essentially no hardware and software systems capable of delivering, processing, and analyzing weather data. In 1983, a workshop at the University of Wisconsin involving about 80 US atmospheric sciences programs coined the name "unidata" and recommended that it be developed to provide:

• Access to current and archived weather data, including satellite imagery and forecasts.

• Support interactive computer capabilities at universities.

• Communications capabilities between universities, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and NASA.

These are things that we take for granted today, but would not have happened without Unidata. Amongst the products they developed are the Local Data Manager (LDM) which acquires and shares data between providers and users like the National Weather Service, NASA, and universities; netCDF (Network Common Data Form) which is a file format for storing self-described, multidimensional scientific data; and metpy which is a collection of python tools for reading and processing weather data. They have been transformative for the atmospheric and related sciences, with benefits not only for universities, but also the private and academic sectors and across the world.

I have benefited and been actively involved with Unidata throughout my career, including volunteer service on their Users and Strategic Advisory (formerly Policy) Committees. Last year I gave a short virtual talk on Unidata's history that provides some examples of the various ways that Unidata has benefited my career and the atmospheric and related sciences as a whole (apologies that the initial part of the talk is cutoff in the video below).

On 30 April, the National Science Foundation (NSF) froze funding for Unidata, with instructions to stop all funded actions until further notice. Due to this freeze, most staff in the Unidata program center are being furloughed effective today. The impacts on are fully summarized below.

This is yet another example of the damage being done to the US scientific enterprise by the Trump Administration. Unidata is an example of an organization that has widespread support from the University community because it develops and provides essential scientific services for research and education in the atmospheric and related sciences. The radar feeds that you take for granted today on your smart phone were first developed by the Unidata CRAFT product. The distribution of model forecasts that you can access today was first developed by the Unidata CONDUIT project. And a lot of the graphics that you see on the web rely on Unidata MetPy and visualization software.

These disruptions of the scientific enterprise are pure insanity. The halting of funding to Unidata will stymie scientific advancement, slow educational innovation, and limit classroom experiences.

Here’s Alan Gerard’s Balanced Weather post:

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Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post:

We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar, a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course with Jeff Sachs on the Ages of Globalization.

There were wonderful comment contributions and questions from viewers around the Web, particularly this one from John Eppler on Facebook:

Thank you Paul von Zielbauer, Eric David Bosne, Anita Prentice, Mike Carroll, and many others for tuning into the live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

And please consider joining the small, but wonderful, cohort of Sustain What subscribers who contribute financially.

I know the meshwork of paywalls on the Web is becoming a big headache for most of us - something I wrote about long ago here:

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Here’s the curtain raiser post with all the relevant links related to Jon Allsop’s new book, What is Journalism For?, and Karen Bordeleau’s New Bedford Light newsroom, which made national waves with its vivid coverage of an atrocious abuse of force by immigration officers in New Bedford several days ago.

Here are two illuminating moments:

Jon Allsop on how an “emergency mode” for journalism facing the autocratic attacks from President Trump is out of date now that he’s settled into the White House:

A look at the New Bedford Light coverage of the intentionally terrifying immigration policies and practices under Trump:

Amid all the paywalls, it’d be great if a few more of you can consider becoming apaid supporter of Sustain What.

Thank you, Eric David Bosne, Anita Prentice, Mike Carroll, Paul von Zielbauer, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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This is my first stab at a Substack Live video - done by adding Substack to my Streamyard livestream tool. Here’s the curtain-raiser post with lots of context:

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Here’s the podcast post of my virtual Sustain What meetup with a batch of folks out in the Hands Off protests against the Trump and Musk approach to “governing.” I was also joined by a longtime reader, Josette, from New Hampshire, who used to work in telecommunications at Perkins Coie, one of the law firms that Trump has attacked. We discussed this bit of good news from Friday (here from Reuters):

More than 500 law firms have signed a court brief denouncing Donald Trump's targeting of Perkins Coie and other firms, expressing alarm over the Republican president's intensifying crackdown on the legal profession.

As I noted in my curtain raiser yesterday, protest is vital, but so is wider resistance to such a power grab - in corporate, legal and other arenas. Read that piece here for more:

Josette also made an important point about keeping such rallies peaceful but, at the same time, predicting that Trump, sooner or later, will find an excuse to declare yet another national emergency to clamp down on dissent:

I'm just hoping today stays completely peaceful and there's no excuse. But at some point, I fully expect him to try to turn this into a military state, a police state, you know.

Have a listen and let me know your experiences if you went to a protest, or your thoughts on next steps if you didn’t.

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My wife, Lisa Mechaley, took this photo at the Bangor demonstration.

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“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows

Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows, David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are in the “curtain raiser”:

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Fallows weighed in on just how extraordinarily safe U.S. commercial aviation has become because of a constant iterative push - particularly after crashes or close calls - to assess and improve. And how Trump and Musk’s blunt-instrument approach to policy and agency capacities will inevitably lead to tragedy.

As he explained, “Elon Musk can declare properly every starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.”

This wasn’t all a thrashing. Clearly the Federal Aviation Administration needs modernization, including examinations of the role of artificial intelligence and other technologies Elon Musk, in particular, has pushed. Kerley and Fallows both talked about the need to jump start the lagging NextGen project (Next Generation Air Transportation System).

Here’s the FAA NextGen site and a video explainer:

Here’s Kerley on this stalled program:

If you have more questions, post them in the comment thread and I’ll forward them to Fallows, Kerley and/or Motavalli.

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I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science.

The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2 reduction in the foreground no matter what the issue is. I’ve loaded it above and here we are on YouTube:

The “noble lie” in science-based policy campaigns

One fascinating issue he explores in the book is the age-old notion of the “noble lie.” Here’s that segment on its own:

If you really want to dive in, explore my New York Times articles drawing on his insights as far back as 2007.

But I also hope you’ll read this recent reflective essay he posted on his website - reposted here with permission. Hulme describes lessons that emerged through 40 years of climate scholarship and the evolution, and sometimes devolution, of public debate and related policies.

I agree wholeheartedly with much of his reasoning. Maybe it’s because we’ve both been at this long enough to see patterns others miss in the rush to the new, and long enough to recognize when our initial internal narratives around climate change and energy transitions no longer match the evidence.

Geopolitics, History and Climate Change: A Personal View

by Mike Hulme

“To think that we can draw some useful analogies from history dramatically underestimates the novelty and scale of the climate challenge.”[2]

“In the contest between geopolitics and sustainable climate policies, the former takes precedence.”[3]

Starting in the early 1980s, I have spent my entire professional life studying climate change, as well as teaching, writing and speaking about it in universities, conferences, and public forums around the world—in 43 countries at the latest count. With such a professional and personal investment in the idea of climate change, it is not surprising that for a long period I uncritically absorbed the notion that climate change represented the pre-eminent challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century.

Since first immersing myself in the topic in the 1980s, and subsequently being part of the scientific and public story of climate change in the 1990s and 2000s[4], I was easily convinced that the growing human influence on the world’s climate would be a reality that all nations would increasingly need to confront, a reality to which their interests would necessarily be subservient and that would be decisive for shaping their development pathways. For more than half of these 40 or so years, it seemed to me self-evident that relations between nations would forcibly be re-shaped by the exigencies of a changing climate.

But now, in the mid-2020s, I can see that I got this the wrong way round. And I can also see why this was so. Rather than geopolitics having to bend to the realities of a changing climate, the opposite has happened. The unyielding force of political realism—the pursuit of the changing and unpredictable interests of nations and great powers—means that the framing, significance, and responses to climate change need continually to adapt to shifting geopolitical realities. Except that too often they haven’t. Whilst the world’s climate has undoubtedly changed over these 40 years, the geopolitics, demography, and culture of the world has changed even more.[5] Too often the language, rhetoric, and campaigning around climate change remains wedded to a world that no longer exists.

The crucial period which shaped my own (mis-)reading of the prospective power and salience of climate change in the twenty-first century—and many other people’s mis-reading; I was not alone in this—was the ten years between 1985 and 1995, now more than a third of a century ago. This period marked the apogee of optimistic thinking about “a new world order”—in the words of George Bush senior—and about “the end of history”—in the words of Francis Fukuyama. It was marked by the rise of market globalization, the triumph of liberal democracy over state-sponsored communism, and the blithe promise of a world energy transition. In short, this optimism was fueled by the rise of globalism; thinking strategically about climate change was caught-up in this zeitgeist.

It was during these ten years that the dominant public narrative of climate change took shape, what Dan Sarewitz later called “the plan”.[6] “The plan”, according to Sarewitz, had two components: one, that scientific knowledge about climate change would lead to action by compelling a convergence of people’s worldviews around the need to take action; and, two, that this convergence of understanding would translate into a consequent convergence around what needs to be done. “The plan” appealed and gained pre-eminence among those who, like me, accepted Fukuyama’s unidirectional progressive view of history. In his famous 1989 essay, Fukuyama proposed that the post-Cold War era would see the replacement of “worldwide ideological struggle” with “the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”[7] Climate change seemed to be ripe for such technological solutionism; and many believed it. I did too.

During those ten years, and leaking (just) into the twenty-first century, western values were casually presumed to be universal. And it was (just about) possible to imagine that the new harmony of nations might unite behind the primacy of America’s ‘benign’ world leadership. Forty years of Cold War had ended, 80 years of ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism were over. It was, according to Fukuyama, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”[8] In similar vein, Beck’s “cosmopolitan manifesto” was published in 1998, inserting ideas about world citizenship and ethical globalization firmly into the western mind.[9]

Yet this mood of optimistic globalism was dangerous. Writing retrospectively in 2023 about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the political historian Timothy Garton-Ash explains the danger: “…deep down we somehow thought – or more accurately, felt – that we knew which way history was going. This is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.”[10]

Around this time, the primacy of western science was reflected in the forging of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created by the UN in 1988, and first reporting in 1990, the IPCC gave the imprimatur of governmental backing to universal climate scientific knowledge as an authoritative guide to climate policy. The UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated in 1992, and ratified in 1995. Subsequent annual Conferences of the Parties to the Convention would hammer out the new institutions, policies and measures around which the world would unite to tame the climate change threat. It was an echo of how scientists had discovered the ozone hole in 1985 and how negotiators had crafted the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and its subsequent amendments, to repair the damage. Climate science’s ascendant power was eventually to lead to the IPCC receiving a joint share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The new global science of climate change seemed to reign supreme.

Yet by 2007, the illusion under which I had been working—that geopolitics would bend to the force of concern over climate change—was already ending. The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, ratified in 2004, had yielded next to nothing in terms of emissions reductions. Also running out of steam was Tony Blair’s campaign of international climate diplomacy conducted during the years 2003-2005, a self-conscious attempt to harness the moral high ground following the geopolitical disaster of the British Government’s support for the 2003 Iraq war. More significantly, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was the prelude to this disillusionment, and the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade Bill to pass in the US Senate in the summer of 2009 the main act. And the denouement came in December 2009 at COP15, billed as ‘the most important meeting in human history’. During a few days in a wintery Copenhagen, China’s growing political and economic muscle was firmly exercised, the impotence of the EU’s climate diplomacy revealed, and the limits of late twentieth century internationalism exposed.

The curtain finally came down on Sarewitz’s so-called “plan” during the (northern) 2009/10 winter of climate discontent. In November 2009, the western world was blind-sided by the Climategate controversy over leaked emails between corresponding scientists, and in the early months of 2010 its confidence in climate science further undermined by several challenges to the IPCC’s trust and credibility.

Meanwhile, the important geopolitical action was taking place elsewhere.

While we weren’t watching, something else was afoot at the turn of this decade. The forces of deglobalization were gathering, coinciding with climate’s ‘cultural turn’—the belated recognition that science is not enough to drive change, that science is never enough[11]—and the beginning of the west’s cultural solipsism and fragmentation. The (short-lived) Arab Spring of 2011 culminated in the decade-long Syrian Civil War and fractious ethnic nationalisms gathered pace, first in Russia and then in the USA, Brazil and parts of eastern Europe. And all the while, China’s belt-and-road initiative was beginning to tighten.

So how did the framing and campaigning around climate change respond in the early-mid-2010s to these compounding geopolitical trends? By doubling down on what had worked before. In other words, it responded by offering new science, more science, more scary science. Science was used to reframe what climate change seemed to demand of the world. Carbon budgets replaced emissions scenarios and the idea of ‘net-zero’ emissions was born[12]; theoretical world decarbonisation pathways to achieve net-zero were modelled to keep alive the illusion that a rapid global energy transition was possible[13]; weather attribution science was created as a new tool to drive home the imminence of climate change to a sceptical public; and the language of ‘loss and damage’ emerged to appease the concerns of the developing world. And, finally, in 2015, under the rhetorical weight of this new science, the old policy target of limiting warming to 2°C was reinvented in Paris as “1.5°C”, without a flicker of realization of the impossibility of what was implied by such a number.

It was believed—hoped?—that the world could, and the world would, bend to this demand. If climate change was ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity in the twenty-first century’ then it needed to live up to this billing. Deadlines were set—“we have 12 years to limit climate catastrophe”[14]; language was re-set—from climate change to climate crisis[15], from global warming to global weirding; doomist narratives foregrounded[16], emergencies declared, extinction envisaged, and street protests unleashed. Each new realization of just how far away the world was from placing “stopping climate change” at the centre of today’s politics provoked a reaction: science was enrolled—through the IPCC’s 1.5°C Report in 2018; the rhetoric of tipping points was ramped-up; the young (through Greta Thunberg) and then the old (through female Swiss pensioners[17]) were used as cat’s paws to deliver chimerical feel-good victories; environmental lawyers co-opted Indigenous peoples to use the west’s legal system to try to deliver what the world’s nations stubbornly refused to deliver.

And all along, Putin laughed, China’s soft power—and not-so-soft power—grew, India dissented, the Emerging and Middle Income Countries arrived, African nations kept adding people to the planet. And the worldwide demand for energy continued to rise.

In Europe, too, the climate project began to sour. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK ‘brexited’ the EU collective, Russian gas flooded the continent before the Ukraine war in 2022 revealed the EU’s vulnerability to imperialist aggression, everywhere nativism seemed to flex new political muscles, and climate scepticism found new expressions: among farmers, motorists, and France’s gilet jaunes. Even then, some still held on to the old certainties that the fossil fuel industry represented the evil “eye of Sauron”, calling upon all well-meaning people in the world to join forces in a “final battle” to defeat the rapacious enemy.[18]

There was a brief flicker of hope in 2020/21 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. But Pielke’s iron law of climate policy—’when environmental and economic objectives are placed into opposition with one another in public or political forums, the economic goals win out’—could not be broken.[19] Even a global pandemic could not subvert the inertia of the world’s energy pathway and the unyielding self-interest of world powers.

Climate campaigners and youth activists once again failed to grasp the nature of the problem. A fringe group of scientists—Scientists’ Rebellion—joined ever more extreme public protests, Just Stop Oil adopted ever more bizarre tactics, the UN Secretary-General offered ever more heated rhetoric about the world a-boiling[20], and the liberal media headed by The Guardian and New York Times amplified climate alarmism, eco-anxiety, chest-beating, and flight, meat and birth shaming. Taking their cue from David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, Netflix tried a new line in releasing the film‘Don’t Look Up’ in December 2021. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio this apocalyptic satire compares climate change to an asteroid locked in on destring planet Earth.

But climate change is not an asteroid heading for Earth. If it were, then maybe the megalomanic technology of solar geoengineering—currently being talked up in Washington, Tokyo and Singapore[21]—might, just might, be worth taking a punt. Neither is climate change the result of capitalism.[22] Thinking so, suggests Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, offers only “an apparently radical but ultimately reassuring story [which] underestimates the immensity of the climate challenge. Getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism.”[23] Climate change is locked into state-sponsored oil extraction, Indian coal, Africa’s demography, China’s unwavering self-interest packaged in warm climate-sounding words, and the legitimate aspirations of half of the world’s population for the benefits of high-energy modernism. Eradicate capitalism and all these things would remain.

So this has been my 40-year journey with climate change, initially from idealist to pragmatist, and now from pragmatist to realist. It is not a particularly hopeful story-arc, but then why should I, or anyone else, ever think that climate change was going to offer one? There is no hidden hand—least of all the benign hand of science—guiding the world to a safe climate-landing. There is no happy ending; we stumble from one thing to the next. Again, why did I or anyone else think there would be? Francis Fukuyama was profoundly wrong in 1989: not only was history not ending in the 1990s, it had barely got started.

One has to go where one believes the truth lies. For me, initially this was the scientific truth of a warming world, to which much of my early research contributed, and the derivative belief that the world would fall into line, guided by the science of the IPCC and the enlightened diplomacy of the UNFCCC. This belief rested on a naïve rationalism, the sort recently expressed in a Nature editorial when claiming that “Science-based decision-making is what will ultimately help the world to resolve the crises it faces”.[24]

Now, 30 years later, it is the geopolitical truth that power and interests win out. Climate is not the only thing that is changing through our lifetimes, and perhaps not the most important thing. Technology, cultural values, the centres of political, economic and military power have all changed remarkably since I first started studying climate change 40 years ago; and the rules, cohesion and effectiveness of the international order that I assumed were eternal are being seriously called into question. I now see the need for a deeper reading of political realism and power, that goes beyond seeing science as a coercive force that trumps geopolitics, beyond appeals to a superficial cosmopolitanism. To use the language of Jason Maloy at Louisiana University, climate change is neither an emergency or a crisis; it is a political epic, “a process of collective human effort that features gradual progression through time, obscure problem origins, and anticlimactic outcomes.”[25]

The best that we can say is that the world will continue slowly to decarbonize its energy system and, at the same time, the Earth will continue slowly to warm. And societies will continue to adapt to evolving climate hazards in new ways, as they have always done, with winners and losers along the way.

© Mike Hulme, January 2025

This essay was inspired by Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic Books, 2009) and Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Allen Lane, 2024).

[2] p.13 in: Fressoz,J-B. (2024) More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. London: Allen Lane.

[3] Advertising blurb for Toal,G. (2024) Oceans Rise, Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[4] Summarised, for example, in my 2013 book: Hulme,M. (2013) Exploring Climate Change Through Science and in Society: An Anthology of Mike Hulme’s Essays, Interviews and Speeches. Abingdon: Routledge.

[5] See Reich,R. (2022) Putin and Trump have convinced me: I was wrong about the 21st century. The Guardian, 13 March.

[6] Sarewitz,D. (2011) Does climate change knowledge really matter? WIREs Climate Change. 2(4): 475-481.

[7] p.18 in: Fukuyama,F. (1989) The End of History? The National Interest. 16(Summer): 3-18.

[8] Ibid. p.4

[9] Beck,U. (1998) The Cosmopolitan Manifesto. New Statesman. 20(4377): 28-30.

[10] pp.240-241in: Garton-Ash,T. (2023) Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. Vintage Books.

[11] Hulme,M. (2011) Meet the humanities. Nature Climate Change. 1(4): 177-179; also, Hulme,M. (2015) Editor’s introduction: the cultures of climate. pp.xxiii-xlviii in: Climates and Cultures: SAGE Library of the Environment. Hulme,M. (ed.), London: SAGE.

[12] Lahn,B. (2020) A history of the global carbon budget. WIREs Climate Change. 11(3): e636.

[13] Fressoz 2024, op. cit.

[14] Watts,J. (2018) We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. The Guardian. 8 October.

[15] Zeldin-O’Neill,S. (2019) ‘It’s a crisis, not a change’: the six Guardian language changes on climate matters. The Guardian. 16 October.

[16] Wallace-Wells,D. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. London: Allen Lane.

[17] BBC (2024) European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction. 9 April.

[18] p.254 in: Mann,M. (2021) The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet. New York: Public Affairs.

[19] Pielke,R.jr. (2010) The Climate Fix: Why Decades of Magical Thinking Have Not Solved Global Warming – and What To Do About It. New York: Basic Books.

[20] Gutierres,A. (2023) Hottest July ever signals ‘era of global boiling has arrived’ says UN chief. UN Global News. July 27.

[21] McLaren,D. and Corry,O. (2025) Solar geoengineering research faces geopolitical deadlock. Science. 387(2 January): 28-30.

[22] Klein,N. (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[23] p.8 in: Fressoz, 2024, op cit.

[24] Anon (2024) UN summits: one step forward, two steps back. Nature. 19/26 December. 636:521.

[25] Maloy,J.S. (2024) Beyond crisis and emergency: Climate change as a political epic. Ethics & International Affairs. 38(1): 103-125.

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Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for some audio echo but you can scan the rough transcript as well.)

The editor-in-chief, Krista Karch, and Nakisanze Segawa, reporter-in-residence in Kampala, Uganda, offered disturbing descriptions of specific perils created by the Trump administration’s aggressive moves.

“People are dying”

As Karch says, “The big thing is that people are dying. People are dying. You cannot emphasize that any more.”

And of course please read Global Press’s reporting. Here are some of the latest dispatches:

• Zimbabwe Braces for HIV Resurgence as US Aid Evaporates - Sex workers are the first to feel the effects, as mobile health clinics that offered condoms and preventative treatments disappear.

• The Trump Administration Is Gutting USAID. Nepali Infants Will Starve, Officials Warn - The US government's abrupt stop-work order halts a 72-million-dollar project designed to end malnutrition. It’s worth noting that much of the Global Press output is published in local languages as well, as here in नेपाली.

• Without USAID Support, Refugees in Uganda Lose Food, Job Training -

Uganda hosts 1.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, the largest number of any African country. But without US funding, basic services like food distribution are likely to end.

• Ebola Breaks Out in Uganda as US Halts Foreign Aid - At least one person has died in the country's latest outbreak. US aid has been key to containing previous outbreaks. How will Uganda fare without it?

Some critical comments and questions came in during the live show complaining that African nations should be more self sufficient and wean themselves from colonial support systems. Karch and Segawa said Global Press has stories in the works on that issue, which can also be seen percolating on social media in Uganada.

Finally we discussed the unique training and support system Global Press provides to empower and protect female journalists amid challenges that are intense even in the world’s wealthiest countries.

Segawa said:

Knowing Global Press has my back…gives me the courage to go to places that would rather be deemed dangerous for a female journalist to go to and talk to people and see what's happening and witness events and report about that.

Here’s yesterday’s “curtain raiser” post with more links and details:

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Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here. The paper is here:

The hopeful part of the open-access study is this:

The analysis presents a systematic empirical overview of patterns and developments of U-Turns [from autocracy toward democracy between 1900 and 2023]. A key finding is that 52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy.

But that has to be set against the trends tracked in the sobering annual reports of the V-Dem Institute (V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy), where four of the five study authors work. In our conversation, Staffan Lindberg, the Institute’s founding director, put it this way. Listen to him or read the statement below:

This is worse than in the 1930s moving into World War II. The number of countries, 42, at the same time moving back on democracy is higher than ever before. The share of the number of countries in the world is also higher than before. The share of the world population living in countries moving back on democracy is greater than ever before. It's unprecedented the strength of this wave of autocratization.

Insert 2/11/2025 - I’ve uploaded V-Dem’s brief summarizing the new study here:

Here are the core conclusions:

• Contemporary democracies are fairly resilient to the onset of autocratization: Since 1994, 54% have not experienced backsliding. Yet, democracies rarely survive if autocratization sets in [for more than a decade].• Breakdown does not prevent a return of democracy: Roughly 50% recover shortly after a democratic breakdown in a U-turn episode.• [Early], active, stiff, and coordinated resistance against autocratization from pro-democracy actors and institutions is key to making a U-turn.

Please explore V-Dem Institute’s annual reports and its graphing tool, which provides a dynamic view of country-by-country scoring on a variety of democracy “vital signs.” Here’s the United States, and you can see the effect of Trump’s first term on the indicators:

We discuss the underlying data, the analysis on u-turns toward democracy following autocratic surges, and - most important - the societal and governmental capacities that seem essential to foster such reversals.

Breaking norms

Lindberg explains how the simplicity and vagueness of the United States Constitution is both the source of the adaptability and resilience of American democracy but also a source of deep vulnerability facing extreme disruption. The country runs on norms as much as hard-edged rules, he says. And when a figure like Trump comes in, deadset on pushing norms to the breaking point, that spells trouble:

It's very easy to tear down democracy in the U .S. if the elites want to do it. There's a famous political scientist, Giovanni Sartori, who was at Columbia University for many, many years. He said once that the American democracy works not thanks to, but despite, the American Constitution. That's almost swearing in church in the U .S., right? And he said it works only as long as the Americans wanted to work. So that in these times, I think, that’s a critical aspect of democracy in the U .S. that one needs to keep thinking about.

Fabio Angiolillo, another author, explains how public resistance, including by people in key professional sectors like journalism, is essential, as is overcoming naive discounting of the risks of autocracy in countries that haven’t experienced it:

There’s much, much more and I hope you take time to listen. And do share this post.

There are more links and other resources in the “curtain raiser” post I published on Sunday:

Independent insights

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote an excellent three-part brief on the erosion of American democracy in 2023. Part 3 was Democratic erosion: The role of executive aggrandizement.

Key points:

• Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy if they consolidate power or use government resources to debilitate their political opposition.

• Election integrity is threatened if incumbents can weaponize the provision of government services or government jobs for partisan ends.

• Given the dysfunction in Congress and the current ideological makeup of the courts, there are reasons to worry about executive aggrandizement in the United States.

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Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month (FAWM.org). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN!) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles, a machine learning researcher focused on language learning at DuoLingo and, of course, on music. I hope to interview him soon.

My new song, Save Dreams for Sleeping, is still in beta mode. I’ve been trying various chord and melody approaches and instruments. But given what’s going on in the early weeks of the Trump Vance Musk administration I don’t want to hold off.

Below you can listen to another topical song by me and find links to some other off-the-news songs from #FAWM2025 and my favorite #fastfolk musician, Jesse Welles.

Insert - 1/29/26 - I used Suno to envision what this song can sound like with a bigger ensemble. I’m okay with AI-generated music for this purpose for those of us who don’t have budgets, time or other resources to pull together a band in a studio - although I WILL be recording with an ensemble later this winter.

Insert - 8/3/ 25 - Here’s the final version (chords, melody) but definitely not the final recording!

End insert

Save Dreams for Sleeping

© 2025, Andy Revkin, Written Feb. 4, 2025, updated August 3, 2025

We all hold a dream somewhere deep in our minds,

Where everything’s fair and everyone’s kind.

Flowers all blooming, no smoke in the skies.

No wars in the headlines, no tears in your eyes.

But save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crimes.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray.

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Our country needs mending, but how to begin?

With problems so tangled, no start and no end?

Begin by protecting those facing the fire.

Reach out by connecting through common desires.

One day at a time, the trust you create

Will carry us further than fighting and hate.

One stitch at a time the fabric you weave,

'Will grow ever stronger than you can believe.

So save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crime.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Let me know what you think! Here’s the initial rough take from February 4.

Good news from 2044?

Here’s the other new tune from me, spurred by a FAWM prompt to write a song about a time macine. I travel to the presidential election year of 2044 and muse on what it might be like of Sasha Obama and, yes, Barron Trump, were the candidates. (I doubt either will run but 2044 is the first year Barron Trump would be eligible.)

It’s called “Good News from 2044?” and is also still a work in progress, as you can clearly hear! The lyrics etc. are here. This is a 60-second snippet. The full song is on YouTube.

The world needs more “Fast Folk”

Most of my songs are not straight off the news. I am not remotely like the amazing songwriting machine Jesse Welles, who seems to pump out several topical tunes a week and has hand built a significant following.

But songwriting, for me, is an extension of my wider philosophy of using all possible skills and media when pursuing some goal. Given the state of the world, it’s been gratifying to get into this mode, which I call “fast folk,” drawing on a movement that began in and around New York City (and a couple other cities) from the early 1980s into the early 2000s. I see Welles as reviving this form, as I noted around the election.

In 1999, I wrote a New York Times feature about the Fast Folk movement centered on a core leader, Jack Hardy. Here’s my gift paywall-free link. ''The whole idea was to do it fast,'' Hardy explained to me. ''You could hear a song at an open mic or songwriters' meeting and two weeks later it was being played on the radio in Philadelphia or Chicago. It was urgent, exciting. It was in your face.''

Writers met each week in Hardy’s Greenwich Village walkup to test drive their latest compositions for peers. It was far more an acid bath than a soothing circle. Some heralded alumni include Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin. Steve Forbert, John Gorka, Lucy Kaplansky, and Christine Lavin.

The effort resulted in Fast Folk Musical Magazine and a series of recordings that ended up released by Smithsonian Folkways.

I hung out at Hardy’s sessions off and on, tossing in a song or two on occasion in the late 90s. But my tunes were a bit too literal and conventional to get big thumbs-up responses.

The more of this the better, and that’s why the annual FAWM monthlong songwriting slam is so great. There are thousands of participants, and the songs range across every possible genre and theme. Explore away!

Here’s Burr Settles describing this year’s FAWM push:

Given that I don’t have a day job now, financial support is appreciated if you can afford to help keep Sustain What going and open to all.

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I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “Don’t Believe Him” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency.

If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial statement about Bannon’s strategy.

In his piece, Klein notes Trump is already getting caught up in his own flood tides, with initial overreaching steps already facing legal setbacks and more resistance likely.

That may add up and stall Trump out in the long run, but in the short run substantial human harm is unfolding. Read Nicholas Kristof today for the impacts at the US Agency for International Development: The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children.

After watching Klein, I wondered what my old friend Randy Olson - a brutally honest communication strategist - would think about how the wide-field “flooding the zone” strategy relates to Trump’s superskill - holding to an almost primally simplistic story line.

Listen to our pop-up Sustain What chat above and/or please share this post or share the webcast on X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Olson began his professional life as a marine biologist, shifted to filmmaking and now mainly works with science-based organizations to improve their impact through refining their narrative strategies. He’s produced a batch of books that amount to workouts at what he calls The Narrative Gym.

Here are just a few of the books and other references Olson cited or recommended in our conversation:

• I brought up a new study showing a pattern of u-turns toward healthier democracy after autocrats take and then lose power (I’m planning a chat with the authors); Randy countered with a sobering December 2016 New York Times column by Eduardo Porter referencing The Great Leveler, a book by Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, who found:

From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

• He noted the relationship of the zone flooding strategy to the “Gish Gallop,” which emerged from the creationism arguments of Duane Gish.

• Read The Economics of Attention - Style and Substance in the Age of Information, by Richard A. Lanham.

• Read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In the short run, you might read the 2017 Guardian op-ed by Postman’s son Andrew Postman: “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World.”

• Read Gary Keller’s bestseller The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results, or watch the scene in the 1991 film “City Slickers” when the crusty cowboy played by Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal’s character about the importance of pursuing “one thing.”

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Here’s one of my earlier Sustain What chats with Randy:

Is science communication really worse than it was 100 years ago? Can simplicity help?

Click here for my Randy Olson coverage in The New York Times.

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Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy, a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability.

We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second Trump presidential term gets into gear.

Here’s the curtain raiser with lots of relevant links:

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This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich. Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions revive wider grid reliability and clean-energy sourcing; and the possibility of having constructive conversations on sustainable energy abundance with the soon-to-be Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Here’s the curtain-raiser post with all the background!

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Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below.

Here are some additional sources we touched on in the conversation that weren’t in my initial post:

• Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions(Global Carbon Project, R B Jackson et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 101002)

The distribution of emission changes from 2000 to 2020 by latitude emphasizes the tropics, which contribute an estimated ∼60%–70% of the total global change over the last two decades for both approaches (BU: 45 [29–68] Tg CH4 yr−1; TD: 36 [6–47] Tg CH4 yr−1) (table 2). Mid-latitudes are responsible for the additional 30%–40% increase in global emissions; in contrast, emissions from higher latitudes (60–90°N) are estimated to be stable or to have decreased slightly, attributable to slightly decreasing anthropogenic emissions (table 2).

• Microbes, not fossil fuels, are behind recent methane surge- Climate.gov staff, Oct. 29, 2024

• Maine Farmers Receptive to Seaweed Feed - Survey highlights receptiveness of organic dairy farmers to feeding methane-reducing feeds

• Atmospheric methane removal may reduce climate risks(Sam Abernethy and Robert B Jackson, Environmental Research Letters, April 12, 2024)

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This talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy.

My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with “Sustain what?”

Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:

I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a historic estate once owned by John Jay, one of America’s Founding Fathers and its first Supreme Court Chief Justice. The estate is a refuge for people and wildlife tucked between the busy 1-95 corridor through Westchester County, N.Y., and Long Island Sound. The center is working to make the park into what it calls an “educational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American history, historic preservation, social justice, and environmental stewardship.”

In a story for the Rye Record, reporter Jacqui Wilmot nicely summarized my core point:

While early climate reporting focused on the science and data, he said, he came to recognize the need to go beyond the numbers and engage communities in dialogue. He seeks out conversations that transcend political divides, looking to find common ground and practical ways forward on climate change….

“How do you manage a complexity monster like climate change?” Revkin asked. “You break it into parts. Shouting ‘climate emergency’ is vague for most people, unless you can break it down into actionable steps. Moving beyond traditional storytelling means encouraging productive conversations and empowering communities to act, adapt, and build resilience together.”

Please watch and weigh in - and share this post of course to grow our community and help others learn how to tame, if not defeat, the climate “complexity monster.”

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Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead?

For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.)

This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fellow student Kathy O'Rourke during our current songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music in Blue Hill, Maine. (We were each tasked by the teacher, George Emlen, to create a couple of simple melodies and then were asked the following week to write lyrics to a melody other than our own.)

The lyrics are below.

Life’s a very fine line right now

I’m planning to pull together this tune and a batch of my recent original songs into my first album since my debut recording in 2013, “A Very Fine Line.” That tune, I realize, is also highly relevant given that one line is as follows:

It’s a very fine line between loony and sane.A very fine line between a loss and a gain.A very fine line between pleasure and pain.Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line.People you think are a genius are this far from bent.President blows an election by half a percent.We all know love hurts but we try it again and again.We know that the line between love and despair is so thin.

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Here’s “After the Roaming.” Snag an audio download at Revkin.Bandcamp.com or share the video version on YouTube below.

After the Roaming

© 2024, Andrew Revkin

I’ve fished the ocean, and I’ve plowed the ground.

I’ve toppled timber and rambled around.

But in all my roaming, two things I can’t find:

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

A loving companion and true peace of mind.

When a lad leaves his home to go out on his own

His work and his friends are his life.

But the job and the beer in the end bring no cheer

Compared to the arms of a wife.

So I’ll sell my boat, drop the plow and the axe.

I’ll woo a sweet woman and finally relax.

After all of that roaming, two things will be mine:

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

A loving companion and true piece of mind.

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UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.”

As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.

I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called “A Night at the Garden” built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the venue organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler organization that was inflaming passions here in the years before the United States entered World War II.

It turned out Curry was in line outside the Garden amid thousands of MAGA-hatted Trump fans.

Curry was there shooting a documentary following the work of a major magazine that had two journalists in the hall (details can’t be released yet). Once he was in the building, in between hate-filled speeches from the podium, we were able to connect by phone. I’ve posted the conversation above and you can also watch and share it on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

I got to know Curry starting in 2011, when I wrote for The New York Times about his “brutally neutral” film (my description) centered on the life of an Earth Liberation Front arsonist environmentalist and the federal prosecutor who pursued the group for years.

In our conversation Curry stresses that he doesn’t see Trump as a Nazi, but did find the level of vitriol in the hall deeply chilling - and at a level far beyond what he’s seen in even the most passionately anti-Trump Democrats.

As he expalined:

I still don’t think Trump is a Nazi but I do think he’s a demagogue and I do think he uses a lot of these same tactics demagogues have used for thousands of years – to kind of stir people up against each other and grab power in the process.

Please do listen and weigh in with your thoughts.

I watched the first hour or so of warmup acts and was appalled at several points, particularly by Rudolph W. Giuliani’s vile diatribe lumping all Palestinians - including the “good people” - in one unwelcome boat.

I hope that any voters in swing states whose prime concern is the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people drop any plans to skip voting for Kamala Harris.

In the meantime, Fox News had a very different impression of the “historic rally.”

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This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s outdone himself with a big new analysis of the insights and issues around the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s much-covered tally of “billion dollar weather and climate disasters” from extreme climate events. Gift link: http://wapo.st/3YiJgaz. The key takeaways are:

• The tracking project is valuable but there are lots of important questions about how the disasters are measured and compiled.

• Frequent efforts by elected officials, activists and climate-centric journalists to use the surge in billion-dollar disasters as evidence of human-driven climate change have no solid basis in data.

We were joined by Jessica Weinkle, a researcher at the interface of climate and society at the University of North Carolina, Wilmigton. She’s writing up a storm on Substack on her Conflicted dispatch and on Breakthrough Journal. In a recent Breakthrough Institute post on the expanding bull’s eye of vulnerable development in coastal North Carolina, she included just one of countless visuals demonstrating that humans are worsening climate risk far faster on the ground than they are through the heat-trapping influence of greenhouse gases on the global climate:

Please watch or listen here and share our discussion on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or the recorded stream on X at @revkin.

Here’s the “curtain raiser” post from this morning:

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Here’s the podcast version of my “Watchwords” conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify.

We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission “building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environmental justice and sustainability goals.”

My curtain-raiser post has other ways to watch and share it:

Julio Friedmann, a friend and past colleague (at Columbia), has also written a fine post on this study and his own analysis. As he writes, there’s “a reluctance by many to confront the realities of The Hard Stuff: the parts of The Work that are costly, challenging, poorly framed, and utterly necessary.”

Here’s the Scale Monster image I deploy on social media off and on. Free free to share it!

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First, here’s my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones:

Second, here’s a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far. The North Carolina National Guard has been working nonstop.

Finally, please watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation seeking lessons from the catastrophic inland flooding triggered when Hurricane Helene's remnants collided with the Appalachian Mountains. My guest is David McConville, a data visualizer and risk communicator (his company is Spherical Studio) who grew up in the regions hammered by Helene and lived and worked in Asheville for many years trying to use technology, including a visualization dome, to convey the flood threat in the steep hills and deep hollows there. I got to know McConville after meeting him in Asheville when I spoke at wonderful Warren Wilson College there. We bumped into each other off and on in our separte, but related, journeys trying to figure out how to use media to foster sustainable human journeys.

As the catastrophic scope of the historic flooding in the region emerged last weekend, McConville said this on Facebook:

My heart is breaking today for many close friends in Asheville and western North Carolina, where I lived for over 20 years.

I’m also feeling an eerie sense of déjà vu. The catastrophic flooding of Hurricane Frances in 2004 got me interested in visualizing the dynamics of watersheds, impervious surfaces, and property development within bioregions.

I created the visualization below 15 years ago with The Elumenati and collaborators to help policymakers better grasp these dynamics and their consequences. Eerily, it features simulations of flooding in Biltmore Village, the real-world versions of which are currently all over the news.

He continued:

“Spherical is continuing this work in Los Angeles with Andy Lipkis, whose work on urban resilience was similarly catalyzed by his experience with flash floods in LA. As Daniel Swain notes, the looming threat of California's next ARKStorm bears striking parallels to what southern Appalachia is currently facing:

If you’ve been following me for awhile you already know about the history and future of extreme atmospheric rivers, with a repeat of the 1861-2 event that created an inland sea inevitable, if its timing remains uncertain. But here’s an excerpt from, and link to, climate and weather scientist Swain’s great thread and here’s a post of his from 2022 on this threat, amplified by human-caused global warming.

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The wider picture of disaster amnesia

In the webcast McConville and I talk about the challenges in trying to get communities like Asheville to act on data showing profound, but rare, hazards. It’s not easy.

In our chat he notes such warnings can end up just as ignored as Japan’s ancient, moss-encrusted “tsunami stones” were as generations forgot the warnings of ancestors who carved phrases like this into large tablets set on hillsides above the reach of great rare waves:

High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants…. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.

This is something I wrote about back in 2011:

I did a highly relevant Sustain What conversation some months back with Daniel Starosta, who studies the art, music, and history produced in the wake of disasters to better understand the social dynamics that can either impede or boost preparedness facing future threats.

Starosta’s research has spanned the landscape of disaster from hurricanes in Florida to tsunamis in Japan. He also works in climate adaptation and disaster resilience planning, with experience from Puerto Rico to Hawai'i to Bhutan. Here’s that conversation:

Exploring Disasters, Culture, Forgetfulness and Preparedness

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If you like what I’m trying to do with Sustain What, hit the ♡ button.

Even as Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the state’s Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” - stoking sufficient fear and hatred in pursuit of the White House that bomb threats continue and racist Proud Boys have reportedly showed up in Springfield. And Haitian residents are living in fear.

With all of this in mind, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020, as then-President Trump pushed his “stop the steal” election lies and laid the foundation for the January 6 insurrection. My guest was University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy, is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, and has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share. Here’s a book excerpt!

She provides a fantastic overview of the range of propaganda strategies, tactics and tools, noting the word should be seen as neutral. There is “good” propaganda. But, boy, there is dangerous propaganda, as well.

Emergency mode

A key section of our conversation dealt with the kind of dangerous political propaganda that is in overdrive right now.

I told Hobbs about a conversation I had earlier in 2020 with New York University journalism professort Jay Rosen, when he was warning newsrooms that democracy was in danger in the face of Trump’s nonstop lies and this required new approaches to reporting and presenting the news. Here’s that snippet from Jay, in which he said, “I think we’re facing the biggest propaganda moment in modern U.S. history.”

Keeping in mind what transpired amid the pandemic, and even more so the following January, he was surely right. And here we are again.

In December 2020, Hobbs wholeheartedly concurred with his perspective:

I have a sure sense of urgency. The fire hose of falsehood…actually goes way, way back. That's not a new technique either…. Actually throughout the 20th century, we have faced crises where propagandists had ascendency, where their ideas gained traction, and where only with a relentless pursuit of truth, only with the public activation of moral indignation, only over time can can truly dangerous propaganda be be countered. So we're in that place right now. And we're very vulnerable.

And, yes, here we are yet again. So please listen up and share this converastion.

There’s a (very) rough searchable transcript here. Transcripts can be smoothed out if more of my subscribers chip in financially.

I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help sustain my work and keep this content open for those who can’t afford to pay.

And please explore Hobbs’s fantastic array of open learning resources! There’s a whole section on “meme politics.” There’s a crowd-sourced “rate this propaganda” gallery.

Here’s my full April 2020 conversation with Jay Rosen:

The Press, the Pandemic and Presidential Propaganda

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Update, 6:30 pm Brazil time, Aug. 31 - X flickered to life just a few minutes after I posted this, at least from my Rio hotel - just long enough for me to tweet afresh. But now it’s spinning and frozen again. So back to Threads and Bluesky for the moment.

On the final morning of a hectic three-city visit to Brazil to brainstorm with journalists, students and scientists on next steps for climate communication, Twitter ground to a halt as an order by a Supreme Court judge here took effect.

The imposed hiatus was refreshing in some ways. You may have heard my recent song about the merits of tossing your phone in a drawer once in awhile.

And it is kind of fun to see someone get under the skin of a megalomaniac. It’s no secret that I really hate much of Elon Musk’s impact on the communication practice I still call Twitter, which takes place on the platform he now calls X.

As you almost surely know, I still find Twitter uniquely valuable in navigating a host of wicked issues related to human sustainability - from climate change to disaster risk reduction to war and peace and taming information superstorms. Thanks to Musk, though, one has to don a protective suit and diver’s rebreathing system to plunge beneath the polluted surface of X and collaborate with other solution seekers.

A dangerous move in a democracy

At the same time, the move to shut down access to X in Brazil, made by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, feels like dangerous overreach.

In 2022 Moraes was given sole and extreme power to remove online content after a wave of fakery around recent elections helped trigger extremist actions by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro. That tsunami of disinformation has subsided. But in recent months Moraes has been in a running battle with Musk and X, and Musk’s decision to ignore court orders led to the shutdown.

I totally get the frustration, and if the company has violated the law, a significant response is needed. As Moraes wrote in a decision on Friday, “Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country.”

My concerns echo those of David Nemer, as described in a New York Times story on the showdown by Jack Nicas and Kate Conger:

“I was someone who was very on [Moraese’s] side,” said David Nemer, a Brazilian-born media professor who has studied his nation’s approach to disinformation at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

“But when we saw the X decision, we were like: ‘What the hell? This is too much,’” he said, using an expletive…. Justice Moraes has “set up a state of exception,” Mr. Nemer said. “But it’s a permanent state of exception, and that’s not good for any sort of democracy.”

If you read me regularly you’ll know that “state of exception” is the language used in declaring a national emergency. This came up in my reporting on efforts by some climate campaigners to get President Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency.” A permanent state of exception can be a pathway to authoritarianism, whether initiated because of extreme storms in the information climate or the geophysical one.

As Nicas and Conger write, this is tough terrain for any democracy:

Brazil’s yearslong fight against the internet’s destructive effect on politics, culminating in the current blackout of X, shows the pitfalls of a nation deciding what can be said online. Do too little and allow online chatter to undermine democracy; do too much and restrict citizens’ legitimate speech.

Other governments worldwide are likely to be watching as they debate whether to wade into the messy work of policing speech or leave it to increasingly powerful tech companies that rarely share a country’s political interests.

As the Associated Press reported, this is not the first such move by Brazilian judge and hardly restricted to Brazil, with a host of other countries and companies doing battle over information flows:

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company’s refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.

Beware “digital authoritarianism”

Waking up to frozen X took me back to a Sustain What conversation I had in January 2022 with a leading analyst of internet disruptions, Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis for Kentik, where he works on internet infrastructure analysis with a focus on disruptions, whether the cause is undersea cable damage in disasters like the 2022 Tonga volcanic eruption or political decisions. I’ve posted our chat at the top of this dispatch and hope you’ll give a listen. No one knows the issues better. A decade ago, Madory was described by the Washington Post as “The Man Who Can See the Internet.”

Also read Suppressing Dissent: The Rise of the Internet Curfew, a 2022 post by Madory and Peter Micek, which walks through the history of intentional throttling of social media by nations worried about dissent. Here’s what one such shutdown looked like in Cuba in 2022:

Also read this Conversation post:Internet shutdowns: here’s how governments do it, by Lisa Garbe, a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Of course in all of this, it’s worth noting that Musk, while yelling about free speech, has been using his total control of X to distort the landscape of converations there. No easy balance indeed.

Brazil discovers Bluesky

In the meantime, communication must continue and Diario Carioca and other news outlets reported that 500,000 Brazilians launched Bluesky accounts in 48 hours.

Thanks for reading Sustain What! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Here’s a parting shot from Rio de Janeiro:

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My Sustain What webcast project started early in the pandemic and quickly evolved into having several tracks - one being regular Monday sessions I centered on pathways to Thriving Online. Here’s one of my favorites - a chat with two very different artists using drawing to communicate consequential environmental science and policy choices (also on YouTube):

Karen Romano Young (@doodlebugKRY), a seasoned science illustrator, has spent months at sea (follow her #AntarcticLog) with a focus on Antarctic science. She's also a childrens' book illustrator and author. Explore her work here.

Pat Bagley, a prize-winning political cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune (@patbagley), is the longest continually employed newspaper cartoonist in the United States, with a career stretching back to 1979. In 2020, the year he was on my webcast, the National Cartoonists Society named him editorial cartoonist of the year.

Thriving online? Really?

I ended up running dozens of Thriving Online webcasts. Episodes are compiled in a YouTube playlist here: http://j.mp/thrivingonlineplaylist.

I was inspired to share this conversation after Nicole Kelner’s latest post showed up in my inbox. Kelner is a climate-focused illustrator whose Substack dispatch, Arts and Climate Change with Nicole Kelner, is a valuable mix of inspiring examples and tips for using art to propel change.

Her latest post is the first in what she says will be a weekly series highlighting examples of art that educates, inspires and offers creative outlets to deal with climate anxiety (or any other flavor):

Here’s a bit of Kelner’s own portfolio from her About page:

As you know if you’ve been tracking my output for awhile, there’s still very little data pointing to behavioral impacts of climate visualizations - even for compelling efforts like Ed Hawkins’ “warming stripes”. But there are hints, as the behavioral scientist Sabine Pahl discussed in this show:

So let the wild artistic rumpus play out.

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There are paths to cooperation and respect amid deep difference, and - in person or online - there are strategies that can move conversations either in a constructive or destructive direction. Elected and community leaders have a rhetorical choice to make every day facing that reality. That’s true even for bullet-grazed Trump.

As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead to “either a tipping point toward true unraveling or a pinch point that can be navigated if Trump's team chooses moderacy over feeding its already-committed base.”

Is this a tipping point or navigable pinch point?

Trump’s base is going nowhere. Given that the party conventions mark the start of the general election campaign, it’s standard practice for candidates to pivot to moderatioin to harvest votes of doubtful or distracted voters who are less passionate.

In an interview with Salina Zeto of the conservative Washington Examiner, Trump said this:

“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger… Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”

At the same time, of course, a legion of Republicans jumped on the shooting to intensify “us/them” attacks on Democrats, so we’ll see how that goes…

But there’s a role here for everyone, at every level, to choose how to frame conversations and messages. With that in mind I’m reposting several Sustain What conversations that took place in the turbulent months when the pandemic, George Floyd protests and January 6th insurrection created a chaotic crescendo.

The show above, Pathways to Impact in Perilously Polarized Times, featured a marvelous array of minds and voices:

• Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, will discuss lessons from his new book, “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”

Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of “Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement” (2014) and “The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” (2011), among other books.

He says “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization,” is “about why we are stuck in our current cultural riptide and what we can do to find our way out. It will explain how patterns of intractable polarization can and do change, and offer a set of principles and practices for navigating and healing the more difficult divides in your home, workplace and community.”

• Reggie Harris, a longtime folk singer and songwriter, storyteller and educator who has worked and sung for racial understanding, human rights and justice for decades. He’ll speak about his experiences at the interface of love and hate, Black and White and maybe sing a song or two.

He describes his album from that time, “On Solid Ground,” as a “call for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.” Please also check out Harris’s new memoir, “Searching for Solid Ground.”

Here’s a particularly apt excerpt - Harris talking about a heated confrontation he had when Black Lives Matter and MAGA protests coincided on a town green in conservative Cobleskill in upstate New York:

Other guests were:

• Andy Norman, who teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He says his focus is studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding and developing tools that help people reason together in more fruitful ways.

Norman will describe insights offered in his new book, “Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

• Amanda Ripley, a solutions-focused journalist and bestselling author who has become a champion of a new style of journalism sifting less for sound bites and more for pathways to insight amid complexity.

Her latest book is “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.” Here’s Ripley’s summary of this concept: “When we are baffled by the insanity of the ‘other side’—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what ‘high conflict’ does. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.”

• Isaac Grosof, who at the time was a Carnegie Mellon grad student running the Humanist League and is now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

More Sustain What conversations on finding common ground and traction

Just before the 2020 election I ran a related conversation with Peter Coleman, Amanda Ripley and folk singer Reggie Harris, but that show also remarkably included Wallis Wickham Raemer, an educator who is a distant, and white relative of Harris’s. His lineage goes back to a slave holder, Williams Carter Wickham, who was among those whose statues were being removed across the South. (There’s a fantastic New York Times story about the Wickhams.)

Finally, here’s a magical Sustain What 2022 conversation on “peace speech,” centering on the experience and skills built through Pádraig Ó Tuama’s many years as a mediator, gay rights voice, theologian and poet on the front lines during Ireland’s “troubles.”

Pádraig Ó Tuama & Friends on Language as a Conflict Trap or Peace Pathway

My other guests were Reggie Harris (yes, Reggie again; he is a dear friend and musical compadre from my Hudson River Valley days) and Irene O’Garden – a poet, educator and author, most recently, of the book of essays “Glad to Be Human” (and a friend).

At the time, Ó Tuama was in residence at Columbia University working with Coleman’s "Peace Speech" project with support from the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR), Teachers College, and the Climate School at Columbia University, Coleman and Ó Tuama teamed up to explore the power of language when it comes to promoting peace, security, and sustainability across the globe.

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Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast:

Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be.

In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., completed widely-covered research showing a substantial shift in the particular meteorological conditions that are most apt to generate tornadoes (and a shift in tornado reports).

Media coverage, then and since, has tended to zoom in on the hot question: what role is played by human-driven climate change? The science around tornadoes in a human-heated climate, however, remains infused with uncertainty.

But that murk can obscure what a new paper makes soberingly clear: that expanding populations and sources of storm vulnerability - particularly flimsy housing - are greatly increasing the risk of big losses even in areas, like Texas, with a downward trend in tornado-generating weather conditions.

The new paper, published in the Nature journal Natural Hazards, is “Changes in tornado risk and societal vulnerability leading to greater tornado impact potential.” The authors are Stephen M. Strader of Villanova University, Victor Gensini, Walker S. Ashley and graduate student Amanda N. Wagner of Villanova.

Here’s the core point from the abstract (the highlights are mine):

Results indicate that escalating vulnerability and exposure have outweighed the effects of spatially changing risk. However, the combination of increasing risk and exposure has led to a threefold increase in Mid-South housing exposure since 1980. Though Southern Plains tornado risk has decreased since 1980, amplifying exposure has led to more than a 50-percent increase in mean annual tornado-housing impact potential across the region.

I reached out to Strader for a pop-up Sustain What chat. He’s been an all-too-frequent presence in my webcasts on the “expanding bull’s eye” that far too many communities are creating in meteorological danger zones. He and Walker Ashley have done invaluable work building this method for mapping hazards, exposure and - incresaingly factoring in the vulnerability of the people or property in harm’s way, as in this paper.

I hope you’ll share our conversation here with anyone living in the map areas (lower reight) shown in red, yellow or green, or do the same with the webcast video on X/Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn.

Here are the key takeaways Strader offered in a thread on X today (which we explore in more depth and detail in the webcast):

Despite tornado environments becoming less frequent across the Southern Plains, growing exposure [more people and more stuff] has more than made up for this dearth. There has still been a 50-percent increase in Southern Plains expected tornado-society impacts due to rapidly growing exposure.

Societal vulnerability has also played a substantial role in the severity of these impacts. Most notably growing manufactured home prevalence [and] those aged 65+, non-white populations, and single-female head of households have all increased in the Southern Plains and Mid-South.

To reiterate, exposure changes are by far driving impacts, not spatial changes in environments. Unfortunately, changes in both mean bad news for the most tornado-fatality-prone region, the Mid-South.

In our discussion, we focused on a prime fixation for Strader (and me) - the boom in manufactured homes across the South.

Here’s an earlier Sustain What discussion on this point:

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I hope you’ll watch and weigh in on this Sustain What episode testing the arguments against climate alarm of Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist at BP and former Obama-era Energy Department science undersecretary who is the author of the best-selling book Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. An updated edition was eleased on June 11th.

You can also watch and share the conversation on YouTube, X/Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Koonin, who’s joining the Hoover Institution this fall as a senior fellow, has a new op-ed out in the Wall Street Journal titled “The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out.” He warns that overreach based on overheated interpretations of climate science is already causing societal pushback.

We agreed on many points but I proposed that his emphasis on “unsettled/settled” as the threshold for shaping decisions can leave societies racing to pursue solutions too late because climate change is more like a one-way ratchet than a knob that can be turned back.

We were joined by Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate policy analyst you’ve seen here before. Read Pielke’s critique of Koonin’s book (which largely tracks my views):

Pielke also debated Koonin last year on the question, “Is Net Zero by 2050 Possible?” We revisited this criticism of the book taken from that debate:

Koonin’s book, which was first published in 2021 and has, according to the publisher, sold some 200,000 copies, grew out of arguments he made in an opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2014. I reached out to him at that time with a couple of questions and posted them and his answers on my Dot Earth blog. Click to my announcement of this webcast for that piece, which laid the foundation for todays discussion:

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War is hell. No headline there.

But imagine war expierenced through the eyes and ears of lions, chimpanzees, camels and other creatures in a wildlife park in northeastern Ukraine, and experienced by their keepers and a ragtag crew of volunteers who rushed to evacuate them as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion played out in 2022.

That is what you’ll experience when the documentary “Checkpoint Zoo” gets into theaters or streaming sites after its premiere at the Tribeca Festival. I hope the film gets wide distribution.

“Checkpoint Zoo” tells the story of Feldman Ecopark, a sprawling zoo and wildlife sanctuary on the outskirts of Ukraine’s second biggest city, Karkhiv, just 30 miles from the Russian border. The facility was created in 2011 by Oleksandr Feldman, one of Ukraine’s richest businessmen. A philanthropist focused on social issues, Feldman made the zoo a hub for therapy for children with disabilities and rehabilitation for drug addicts. If you scan pre-war social media, it’s all heartwarming scenes.

Then came the full-scale invasion on February 22, 2022. Five weeks in, Feldman posted an online plea for help as his staff and a passionate batch of volunteers raced to relocate the animals even as Russian attacks blasted buildings and rockets fell. Here’s Facebook video from the park in early April that year showing a shell next to animal enclosures.

Ultimately six people were killed in the animal evacuation efforts, including a 15-year-old boy, according to the film and other news reports. The park has since reopened but of course faces new threats as Russia has renewed its offensive around Karkhiv.

The film, directed by Joshua Zeman, skilfully weaves video from a trove recorded on the run by zoo staff and powerful interviews and imagery filmed by Zeman and his crew in three trips to the region in late 2022 and 2023 - during which explosions can occasionally be heard and, in one case, filmmakers and other journalists scramble for cover along with their subjects.

The result is an extraordinary portrait of the jarring mix of humanity and inhumanity created in wartime. There is heroism, wrenching loss, boundless love and a key component of any film - transformation. In this case, one of the young volunteers, a veterinarian, goes into military service as a medic.

The presence of non-human animals, as both victims and witnesses to the best and worst our species has to offer, further intensifies the experience and the leaves the viewer full of tough and essential questions.

I hope you’ll take time to watch or listen to my Sustain What conversation with Zeman. (Here’s the super rough Trint transcript.) I got to know know and respect his work through his previous documentary, “The Loneliest Whale.” That 2021 film was inspired by a short news story I wrote for The New York Times back in 2004 about the mystery of an elusive great whale in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean calling out at a frequency distinct from that of any known species.

When there’s a trailer or clip from “Checkpoint Zoo” online I’ll add it here, but in the meantime have a look at this video posted by the folks at Feldman Ecopark:

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June 1 is the official start of hurricane season in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. To stay safe along coasts or in floodable inland areas as the season heats up, you should of course bookmark NOAA’s National Hurricane Center tracking and warning site. Don’t get too used to the storm-free image on the site at the moment:

To stay sane as the media environment around hurricanes and climate change heats up, you should bookmark NOAA’s Global Warming and Hurricanes page, curated for many years by senior scientist Tom Knutson.

Knutson is one of the most level-headed and objective scientists I know in a research arena full of competitive groups, data gaps and intense debates. It’s also an arena being flooded with money as the insurance industry and businesses needing to demonstrate or measure environmental responsibility (e.g. S&P Global) hire climate scientists and invest in modeling.

I’ve been interviewing and citing Knutson for more than 20 years and thought this week was a good time to catch up with him to go over what’s well established about the influence of warming from rising carbon dioxide concentrations on tropical storm behavior and what remains obscured by natural variability and the rarity of the biggest storms. Watch or listen above or on the audio podcast or watch and share our chat on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn.

We talk about the “Category 6” question, the continued disagreement among researchers over the relative influences on Atlantic tropical storms of hazy air pollution and slowly shifting ocean currents and more.

There’s a super-rough Trint transcript here (they tend to be better than the one that Substack generates, at least for now). If more subscribers find it possible to chip in financially, I can get these cleaned up (and make lots of other improvements).

You may also want to click back to an evergreen interview I did around the 30th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew’s devastating hit on South Florida with the University of Miami hurricane scientist Brian McNoldy - whose Tropical Atlantic Update blog and @BMcNoldy X/Twitter feed are invaluable.

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I just had a solutions-focused waste-cutting Sustain What chat with two marvelous guides - Edward Humes, the Pulitzer-winning author ofTotal Garbage - How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World(following up on his 2012 book Garbology - Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash); and Sarah K. Nichols, who’s driven some of the most significant innovations in state policy around waste reduction and now works for an innovative beverage container recycling company called Clynk. There’s more about Clynk below.

Watch and share on YouTube, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and Facebook.

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Nichols, who’s featured in Humes’ book, was a prime force shaping the successful 2021 effort to expand Maine’s “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR) laws to cover packaging - making it the first state in the nation to do so, shifting the financial burden for recycling to corporations from local communities.

As the trade publication Packaging World has reported, the final regulations are emerging this year and are sorely needed, given the straining recycling budgets of many Maine municipalities (including our budget-strapped town):

Many Maine communities have suspended or cut back their recycling programs because of limited options and rising costs for managing these materials, sending them to landfills instead. With landfills throughout the state nearing capacity, this temporary solution creates another expensive problem: expanding existing landfills.

In our conversation, Nichols explained that corporations aren’t always the enemy, pointing to the leadership of one of Maine’s largest craft beer producers, Allagash Brewing Company. Read Allagash’s page extolling the virtues of EPR.

Every town needs a change-making “Marge”

I love how this section of Humes’ book on Nichols echoes what Jigar Shah, who leads the Biden administration’s loan program for clean energy, has called for - an army of local doers and changemakers willing to put in time to be sure their communities can access billions in federal assets:

Nichols worked on this for eight years, explaining that her idea wasn't a tax on businesses, as they would surely claim, but a long-overdue bill for picking up after their mess. She made her pitch, with plenty of data to back it up, at town council after town council, business by business, and during an endless number of rubber-chicken lunches and dinners with volunteer groups and civic organizations. Nichols's environmental organization is respected but small, so she recruited a statewide army of community volunteers to build support and spread the word about her recycling makeover at the local level. She calls this force her "Marges"- named for her first volunteer in an earlier environmental campaign. She defines a Marge as someone who's already an environmental advocate, but who needs some help on how to take action effectively. The Marges have become a force to be reckoned with in Maine, Nichols's not-so-secret weapon.

Similar laws are in the works in many other states and Nichols’ former employer, the Natural Resources Council of Maine, has a 10-tips sheet available for anyone elsewhere hoping to smooth the path to a more rational and effective system for reducing and recycling package.

Humes book is filled with remarkable examples of communities - with no red or blue divide - and companies finding ways to cut waste of all kinds - from trash to energy to greenhouse gas emissions. Here are a few examples from his website, edwardhumes.com:

Here’s a video primer on Clynk’s innovative approach to beverage container redemption:

Related Sustain What posts and episodes:

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I’ve spent a lot of time assessing ways to defeat what I call the “complexity monster” impeding climate and energy solutions. Here’s a Sustain What webcast on a fresh approach, including building a big welcome table instead of walls. Also watch and share on Facebook, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. (Here’s a rough Trint transcript.)

I was intrigued to learn about an upcoming set of live seminars offering ways to stay cool, connected and effective amid the nonstop turbulence around and within our fossil-fuel-heated climate system. The workshop, called “Embracing our Emergency,” is being led later this spring by the progressive Emmy-winning filmmaker Josh Fox, best known for his HBO documentary “Gasland,” and the wide-ranging author and convener .

As Fox and Pinchbeck explain in our chat, they’re convening an array of guests, from to Jane Fonda and Xiye Bastida, to help build a community that can better understand and navigate today’s polycrisis. There are 10 live sessions between April 28 and May 29. You can learn more and register here. There’s a fee but they say there are discounts if needed.

A key focus, Fox says, is to encourage progressives to focus urgently on building resilience now for populations most at risk (a core theme of my writing here of course) even as they work to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Another, he says, is reinforcing the reality this is a marathon, not a sprint (echoing a core theme of my Dot Earth blog):

Activism in general is like being an attention deficit disorder marathon runner. You know, you constantly think the race is going to be over the next 20 seconds. And yet it's going to go on for your whole life. So you have to constantly be re re-energizing and re-engaging.

Pinchbeck posted about the project on his Substack newsletter and there’s an excerpt below, along with a link to a free guide to “Seven Essential Tools For Surviving - and Thriving - in a Time of Climate Crisis.”👇

Some of the resulting funds from the seminars will go to helping Fox finish his latest film, “The Welcome Table,” which explores the surging flows of human dislocation and migration being propelled by hot spots of political and climatic turmoil and profound imbalances in economic opportunity.

He began reporting and filming for this project six years ago and has built a vivid worldwide picture of the lives of dislocated populations around the world and within the United States. As he explains in our conversation, the film centers on a keystone idea - that building a bigger “welcome table” is far more likely to foster thriving in the United States and elsewhere than building walls.

I reached Fox in New Orleans, where he’s preparing for the film’s grand finale - chronicling the construction of a 1,000-foot-long table on a levee threatened by rising seas and a celebratory gathering around that welcome table featuring many of the people featured in the film. You can attend on April 10.

We talked about the cyclic nature of immigration surges and reactionary surges of nationalism and hatred. He mentioned a century-old cartoon that he found for the film, “The Unrestrictied Dumping-Ground,” which depicts Uncle Sam overwhelmed by waves of ratlike Italian immigrants. Here’s that excerpt from our discussion.

Fox said:

Can you imagine New York City without pizza? Can you imagine America without pizza, without bagels?

What is the pizza in 100 years going to be? We do know these people are going to be a benefit to us. It’s our benefit to celebrate culture rather than ostracize and criminalize. And if we haven’t learned this lesson by now we don’t know what America is.

I couldn’t agree more.

From the great clips I’ve seen, the film is coming together in Fox’s inimitable and creative style, meshing music, events and other arts with gripping footage and his wry wit. I’ll do more on the film later this year. Here’s the trailer:

One of the remarkable people in the film is the Nigeria-born singer songwriter Chris Obehi, who fled his hometown in the Niger delta in 2015 as a minor and made a harrowing journey to Palermo in Sicily including a kidnapping and imprisonment in Libya and - no surprise - a perilous Mediterranean crossing.

A profile of Obehi by Emma Wallis for the collaborative InfoMigrant news project picks up the story:

[H]e managed to make it onto an inflatable boat, and he was a couple of days into the voyage when a rescue ship arrived.

"I was crying you know. The boat was shaking and water was getting in. There were babies inside crying. We were 105 people." Again, Chris is not sure anymore which boat picked them up but he remembers the fear he felt: "It was night and this very big boat came towards us very slowly."

People were fighting, he remembers, and the boat was taking on water. Some were crying, some praying. "There were some casualties," he says with a tone of sadness in his voice. When the 'big boat' arrived, Chris saw a little boy who appeared to have become separated from his family. He says his survival instinct kicked in, and he picked him up from the boat to stop him from being crushed.

"I went close to the little boy, I touched him and he was so cold. I put him very close to me. I couldn’t just leave him alone." By taking responsibility for the infant, Chris got lifted off the ship as one of the first. In saving him, Chris was saved too. Many of the others on the boat ended up in the water.

His song Non Siamo Pesci (We are Not Fish) is simply wonderful.

Here’s Daniel Pinchbeck’s theory behind the course (from his Substack post) and the companion guide to seven tools for thriving while embracing this moment:

I feel that many people remain inactive because they toggle between two extreme positions: One common belief is that we are utterly doomed and everyone will die soon as a result of the biospheric catastrophe, hence there is nothing we can do and we might as well go on with “business as usual” until the last second. The polar opposite belief, held by many, is that new technologies will somehow save the situation without us having to massively change our lifestyles or alter our consumption habits. (The most common strategy, by far, is to ignore the situation entirely, surrender to social inertia, and wait until change is forced upon you.)

Let’s consider another option: Temperatures will rise several degrees in the next decades leading to intensifying catastrophes. Even so, the world won’t end all of a sudden. Most will survive. We will find ourselves trying to build decent lives and new communities in unfamiliar circumstances.

If we accept this as a plausible or perhaps even the most likely option, then it would be incredibly smart to start retooling, re-skilling, rethinking and even redirecting our lives, now, in resonance with the changes that are already happening and will increasingly intensify.

The seven tools and traits they describe are critical thinking, resilience, flexibility, simplicity, collaboration, openness, participation. Here’s the download:

So please share and listen to this webcast and let me know your thoughts. And please subscribe to Sustain What, and chip in financially if you can so I can justify the time required to plan and run these conversations and digest them here!

I’m also reminded of the work of the futurist and climate resilience guide . When you have time, listen to our chat two years ago - and of course subscribe to his Snap Forward column:

Sick of ‘Predatory Delay’ on Climate? Snap Forward with Alex Steffen

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📺 🎧 This is the podcast episode for the post below on a consequential scoop by a Brazilian environmental journalist revealing how the confessed murderer of an environmental hero in the western corner of the Amazon River basin 35 years ago quietly rose to regional influence under a religious nickname 1,500 miles to the east. My guests are:

• Cristiane Prizibisczki, the O Eco journalist who broke the story

• Angélica Mendes, Chico Mendes’s granddaughter, who has a biology Ph.D. and is president of Comitê Chico Mendes

Why should anyone outside of the region pay attention to the reemergence of Darci Alves Pereira as “Pastor Daniel” in Medicilândia, a remote Amazonian town of only 30,000 people? This incident is a tiny window on a big and worrisome reality in Brazil.

There’s been enormous progress stanching fires and forest clearing since the election of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, but the rural right-wing and evangelical movements supporting former Presiden Jair Bolsonaro still have substantial power and Lula’s victory was by a very thin margin. And Bolsonaro and allies face an ongoing investigation of allegations of a coup attempt.

So please listen, subscribe if you don’t already and share this post with others.

Read the companion post for lots more:

Here’s some of my election coverage and here’s my post on the slain Amazon defender, Chico Mendes, and my 1990 radio interview about my book on Chico with the famed broadcaster and writer Studs Terkel.)

Here’s Medicilândia.

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I hope you'll watch, share and weigh in on this invaluable Sustain What conversation I just had with , the lead researcher at Our World in Data and author of the Not the End of the World, an invaluable book offering a data-based foundation for discussion and action on the full span of sustainability challenges and choices, from stemming warming to spurring human advancement where the need is deepest.

She’s getting an enormous amount of justified attention, including a TED Talk and a podcast session with Bill Gates (who also is a big financial supporter of Our World in Data). She’s also caught between edge-pushing data distorters or disbelievers proclaiming either doom or scam. It’s not a fun position to occupy.

I hope you’ll subscribe to, or share, Ritchie’s fine Substack dispatch! Here’s a particularly fine post:

In the second half of the chat, I asked Ritchie how she and the folks at Our World in Data deal with “qualitative data” - the meat and potatoes of social science (think of studies done by interviewing hundreds of people in a field or in a plight).

They don’t, really. I proposed that this body of science is easily as important to anyone trying to chart sustainable human pathways as the quantitative data and also proposed we plan a future webcast with scientists across disciplinary divides.

I mentioned a Sustain What webcast I did with two social scientists, Lisa Schipper and Dana Fisher, and a couple of journalists about this issue and hope you’ll check it out when you have time. Here’s a core moment with Schipper, a researcher long focused on societal factors that boost or reduce climate vulnerability.

Here’s the rest (viewing links and background): “Covering Climate Where Data are Scant and Beliefs Run Hot.”

Program note: On Tuesday, March 5th, at 2 p.m. ET, join me to explore what’s known about climate activists’ impacts on climate policy, from fossil-fueled backlash to the role of a “radical flank” in building mainstream attention.

My guest is Dana Fisher, a movement-focused sociologist who directs the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University and is the author, most recently, of Saving Ourselves – From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

Also read Fisher’s recent Nature commentary (with two coauthors): “How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?”

Join us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube (paste your preferred link in your calendar now):

Thank you for reading Sustain What. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Through most of my journalism career, I presumed that more information leads to better choices. As media moved online, I experimented ever more with conveying what I was reporting or learning using far more than the written word.

When I went to the North Pole in 2003, I brought back video that captured the unnerving dynamics and sounds of floating, drifting sea ice far better than words could. At climate negotiations in 2005 in Montreal, I tried out podcasting, recording the passionate voices of youth activists as a way to get beyond the gray-suited wonkiness of these sessions. I cobbled graphics on my Dot Earth blog and highlighted other brilliant work there and on my Sustain What webcast, like the carbon visualizations of Adam Nieman.

But what works?

From 2006 on I spent ever more time talking to behavioral scientists about paths from communicating environmental risk to susatainable societal change - and the answers were uniformly disquieting, ranging from “we don’t know” downward to sobering realities like “cultural cognition” (our hunan habit of seeing the same data through divergent cultural filters).

Here’s one such conversation, with Sabine Pahl of the University of Vienna. Pahl has focused for many years on whether and how visual information changes behavior related to environmental challenges and choices. Her work shows that visuals can matter. The results of one early study that caught my attention are here, showing that when infrared images revealing heat leaking from homes are included in flyers on weatherization, homeowners are more apt to invest in improvements.

The study is "Making Heat Visible: Promoting Energy Conservation Behaviors Through Thermal Imaging." Here's a related report: "Exploring the Use of Thermal Imagery for the Promotion of Residential Energy Efficiency.”

I recorded this conversation a couple of years ago, but never aired it. Pahl’s insights and ideas remain as fresh as ever.

Please share this post with others. I’ve set it up to stream on the Sustain What webcast as well, so you can share it with friends or colleagues on Facebook or LinkedIn.

I also encourage you to click back to watch a Sustain What episode from one year ago on a Boston University project visualizing energy trends and dynamics for climate and sustainability impact. I spoke with Cutler Cleveland, project founder and director, and Heather Clifford, the chief data scientist. That show included James Henry, a representative from MyHEAT.ca, a Canadian firm using visual information to drive energy savings and solar adoption.

Also watch and share my 2021 webcast on the “warming stripes” of British climlate scientist Ed Hawkins: “Exploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Day”

The stripes have gotten heaps of attention (I’ve discussed some of this before), but Ph.D. candidate Ulrike Hahn, who participated in the webcast, wrote a paper showing how little is known about whether such artwork matters.

It’s important not to be swept away by the coolness factor with communication innovation. But it’s also vital to keep pushing communication frontiers.

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Here’s a parting shot from our my journey as a lecturer on a Lindblad/National Geographic cruise to Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands (see my recent post):

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I recently ran a fascinating Sustain What webcast on one of those tangled questions that are all too common in this globalizing world of consumption and extraction: how to manage growing harvests of massive blooms of the crustaceans called krill that are also fodder for reviving populations of great whales (among other wildlife).

Listen above and share this post or do the same on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter to engage wider audiences. Also explore the rough transcript above if you can’t listen.

Krill, extraordinarily abundant in waters around Antarctica, are rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are the basis for a booming and heavily-hyped diet-supplement business and are also increasingly ending up in the manufactured meal fed to farm-raided salmon in place of ocean-caught fish.

Big ships that amount to floating factories began seining krill around that frozen continent many decades ago, led in the early days by the Soviet Union and now by Norway, with China a rising force of course. The latest report from the international Commission for the Conservation of Living Antarctic Marine Resources shows the Soviet boom and bust and the current growth:

My guests come at this issue from varied vantage points:

Joshua Goodman is a talented Miami-based Associated Press reporter who, with colleague David Keyton, led a powerful globe-spanning reporting effort on Antarctic krill, including two weeks at sea last March on a vessel operated by Sea Shepherd Global - essentially the only way to get out on the remote waters where the netting is taking place. Please explore their multimedia package. Here’s a video component:

Conor Ryan is a zoologist who splits his time between academia, conservation, education and wildlife guiding. He was on a small Lindblad cruise ship in January 2021 that came across an astonishing aggregation of fin whales - the second largest whale species - and krill seining vessels. The moment vividly illustrated the problem we discussed. He was a lead author on a paper summarizing the observations:

Commercial krill fishing within a foraging supergroup of fin whales in the Southern Ocean Ecology 104 (4), e4002

Here’s some of the video recorded that day, showing the spouting breaths of the whales with the ships in the distance - all drawn by the same krill abundance:

Nicole Bransome works on Pew’s Protecting Antarctica’s Southern Ocean project, which focuses on conserving an area that encompasses 10% of the world’s ocean through the creation of a network of large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) around Antarctica. She wrote a recent report that is a fantastic summary of international efforts to manage this resurgent industry. Here’s a Pew video on the role of krill in the Antarctic “carbon conveyer belt”:

Aker BioMarine, the Norwegian company leading the growth in krill netting, was uanble to provide a guest for the live show (it was my fault; I’d changed the recording date and didn’t leave enough time to get them on). But they sent these talking points, several of which we address in the conversation:

• The Antarctic krill fishery is recognized globally as one of the best managed in the world. It consists of a small number of vessels that catch less than 1% of the total biomass of krill.

• The fishery is closely managed, monitored, and regulated by CCAMLR and the krill industry works closely with stakeholders to provide and share monitoring data to CCAMLR in support of the organization’s work to strengthen krill management.

• CCAMLR has had a committee of scientists working on krill for more than 40 years. It is by now well documented that krill is among the largest unexploited marine resource in the world, that the current krill fishery is one of the most precautionary in catches relative to stock size and that whale populations currently are increasing by up to 150%, none of which indicates that fishery poses a threat to the Antarctic ecosystem.

• This fishery is not experiencing a “ boom” as catches are capped at 620 000 MT until CCAMLR based on scientific information decides otherwise. “Krill fishery increasing back towards the level of the mid 1980’s” is the more accurate description of the situation, and the developments over the last 10-12 years means that exploitation rate of the krill biomass in the fishery area has moved discretely from ca 0,3% to 0,8%. In 2023 the catches were roughly 420 000 MT, hence 200 000 MT short of the upper precautionary catch limit.

• The krill fishery is a transparent fishery with on-board observer present 100% of time during fishing operations. The fishery is also one of the worlds’ cleanest fisheries as the bycatch record is second to none ref. science paper published in Fisheries Management and Ecology in 2022

• The incidents of incidental mortality of humpback whale, in total, 4 cases over 17 years occurring in 2021 and 2022, however unfortunate, are by evidence not systemic patterns but a consequence of malfunctioning mammal exclusion device that have since been improved. No new cases have occurred for two years and we intend to keep it that way.

• The mammal exclusion device as designed by Aker BioMarine is now set as best practice in industry and part of requirements when notifying for the fishery in CCAMLR

• All of the above and more are elements that contribute to the continuous MSC Certification of Aker BioMarine since 2011

The whale mortalities they describe were documented in the Associated Press report, which included photographs taken by observers from the Commission, CCAMLR.

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Please share this post - more than you might share others.

INSERT - Join me with a batch of wonderful guests in a special pop-up live musical gathering Monday, January 1, New Year’s Day, at noon US Eastern time! Join on YouTube here:

Also streaming on Facebook, LinkedIn and X/Twitter (no advance link in X; just join us at @revkin at showtime).

~ ~

Another year down, full of extreme heat and turmoil, success and peril - both climatic and societal. And the year ahead could make this year seem boring.

I could do a “top 10” list of insights or events in 2023 or predictions for 2024, but won’t. Instead I’ll offer the song abov, which I began writing during the last great recession but that feels like a good fit on lots of days in this unfolding century. In it I suggest we all “start each day with a prayer and end each day with a toast.” You can listen or download an mp3 on Bandcamp here. The lyrics are at the bottom of this post.

For blow-by-blow posting, there are amazing aggregators out there like with the or on , prolific deep divers like on and climate-campaigning media innovators like and prolific data-centered analysts like , (A World of 8 Billion) and . The self-described disasterologist can keep you apprised of losses and efforts to stem them.

I do chase the news and sometimes still try to get ahead of it both here and on X/Twitter. I’ve decided to keep X as my main outlet for daily reality-seeking. I’ve laid out my reasons quite a few times here. (I am still testing out Threads and Bluesky but sense they are deeply constrained both technologically and in terms of who’s there and why. Please follow me on X for that kind of output.

Why Sustain What

So what is this Sustain What project for? Why should you subscribe and, for those who can afford it, chip in?

Here I’m trying to identify, utilize and convey modes of thought and action that can help you not only navigate the polluted fast-forward media and social media environment, but contribute to improving it.

In 2024, I’lm going to try to center on this goal even more, and pull back from realtime news dissection. At age 67, with book and documentary projects in the works, I don’t see an adequate return on my time investment - or yours - in simply supplying more news. I’ll be posting more of my video webcasts as podcast posts here.

You can be Thriving Online - really

My Sustain What series called Thriving Online has dozens of conversations holding insights and ideas from fantastic guides. Here’s the playlist. Please suggest future guests and subjects!

Watch words before you use them

My #Watchwords series, which I’ll be organizing better in 2024, is my effort to identify words and phrases that get tossed around far too freely in climate and sustainability communication and - like the word sustainability - only have meaning when you pause to examine your definition and those of others. Sustain What? For whom?

I wrote a post on a particularly overused word - WE. This little video snippet captures why that word fails when someone proclaims what “we” need in the context of energy.

So I hope you’ll help support me financially if able. This is particularly important now that I’m unaffiliated with an institution.

I’m deeply commited to keeping almost all of my content open to all who need it instead of only those who can afford it.

Have a productive, creative and safe year!

As promised, here are the lyrics to Prayer and a Toast.

Prayer and a Toast © 2023 Andrew RevkinFluky doesn’t even begin to describe the way life feels these days.Crisis a minute has become the norm.Worries just won’t go away.Bills are piled high, windows are barred, tread on my tires worn thin.Got such an assortment of problems,I don’t know where to begin.So I take my old dog for a seven-mile walk. Stare at the clouds in the sky.Sit on a rock on the top of a hilland just simply wonder why.Why am I here? Where am I headed? Is there an end to these woes?Then the sun peeks out and a rainbow appears,and my dog licks me on my nose.That’s when I realize things aren’t half as bad as they seem to be.I’ve got two good legs. It’s a beautiful day,and at least my dog loves me.I’ve decided to take it all a day at a time. Made myself a little oath.I’m going to start each day with a prayerand end each day with a toast.I’m going to start each day with a prayer and end each day with a toast.I get back to my house, pay one of my bills. Write a new resume.Call an old friend I haven’t seen for years.He says I made his day.He’s behind on his rent. His roof has a leak. He’s fighting with his wife.I say it sounds like you could use a little doseof my new approach to life.You see I realize things aren’t half as bad as they seem to be.I’ve got two good legs. It’s a beautiful day,and at least my dog loves me.I’ve decided to take it all a day at a time. Made myself a little oath.I’m going to start each day with a prayerAnd end each day with a toast.More on my music:

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I hope you’ll watch or listen to this wonderful Sustain What conversation on ways to navigate, and improve, this moment on Earth increasingly called the Anthropocene - the Earth as shaped by human activities, for worse or better.

Some here will recall I played a role in the evolution of this concept thanks to a line in my 1992 book on global warming. See my essay about that at the bottom of this post.

My guests are the longtime actor and environmmental activist Ed Begley, Jr.; , the writer of the refreshing Substack newsletter ; and Yvonne Reddick, an environment-focused poet and scholar who is Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Central Lancashire.

Reddick’s new poetry collection is Burning Season, which won the 2023 Laurel Prize for best UK first poetry collection. She has also just written Anthropocene Poetry – Place, Environment and Planet.

Ed Begley’s life has been a whirlwind of acting success, personal challenges and endless enthusiasm for improving lives and life on Earth through activism. He has written a funny, sad and valuable new book on his journey: To the Temple of Tranquility...And Step On It!: A Memoir.

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I got to know Ed Begley starting in 2005 and first covered his decades of environment-focused communication in a quirky video I did for The New York Times with my former colleague Pat Farrell in 2008. Begley and I conversed in a pedicab on a frigid Manhattan winter day about his “Living with Ed” show on HG TV and much more. It’s worth a look as a fun artifact from my first year of Dot Earth blogging. The video isn’t on YouTube or the like but you can watch it on nytimes.com here:

Sam Matey, who graduated college at 18, when most of us are just starting that part of our life journeys, is an early-career environmental scientist, climate journalist and geospatial data analyst who is devoted to balancing all the dire headlines you’re flooded with with big regular doses of environmental and social progress. Join me in subscribing to The Weekly Anthropocene.

Here’s his 2023 Year in Review post:

Here’s my Anthropocene journey:

Watch Yvonne Reddick’s short fillm on Britain’s snow hares:

And here’s an amazing vista we were graced with here on our shoreline in Downeast Maine last week - when a cold snap built mist over the warmer seawater and cloaked the salt marsh with hoarfrost. For more clips, including the scene after a thaw, click over to @revkin on X.

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My latest Sustain What conversation is a bit off the typical themes I’ve focused on since the early days of the pandemic. Our topic was innovations and lessons surrounding a giant-squid hunt. Watch and you’ll meet Nathan Robinson, a marine biologist and science communicator I got to know at a Global Exploration Summit we both spoke at last summer and his research collaborator and mentor Edie Widder, whose research focus has long been on bioluminescence.

Widder has built a lauded science and conservation career blending neuroscience, technology and keen observational skills. See her three TED talks and visit her Florida conservation organization Team Orca for more.

Robinson became something of a viral sensation some years back when he pulled a plastic straw from the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle - in an excruciating effort for both reptile and humans. This still image is from Christine Figgener’s video, which has 85 million views on the Leatherback Trust channel on YouTube.

We talk about how they came together - Robinson from sea turtle science and Widder from studying things that glow in the deep - to stalk and film one of the ocean’s great reclusive leviathans - the giant squid (Architeuthis dux).

Now that I’m fully independent, I hope more of you will consider financially supporting my Sustain What project.

Widder had played a core role in the international expedition that in 2012 for the first time filmed a living giant squid in its deep ocean lair. I wrote about that discovery in The Times. Since the 1990’s she’d been refining submersible lighting and camera systems, with names including “Eye in the Sea” and “Medusa,” designed to lure and record deep-sea life without scaring elusive creatures away. Byrd Pinkerton wrote a really nice Vox feature about this quest. Also read Widder’s description of her Medusa system and a glowing lure imitating a jellyfish.

On June 19, 2019, during an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico spearheaded by Widder and Robinson, the Medusa camera system caught a giant squid stealthily emerging from the darkness to examine the glowing lure. Listen to my guests describe this mesmerizing moment.

In our chat, Robinson also describes a recent effort to film an even larger cephalopod - the (yes!) colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). He did so on one of the giant commercial fishing vessels frequenting Antarctic waters in search of the latest species targeted there, the toothfish. An injury to a crewman and other developments ended that colossal quest.

An Antarctic krill competition

In the webcast we talk about how those remote southern seas are becoming the latest exploitation zone for vessels not only seeking finfish like toothfish but also krill - a harvest that ironically is pitting human fishers against slowly recovering populations of great whales that we nearly wiped out in decades past. We discussed a paper published early in 2023 describing how scientists and tourists on a Lindblad ship in Antarctic waters witnessed a disturbing competition, in essence, between an enormous gathering of fin whales and a fleet of commercial krill ships: “Commercial krill fishing within a foraging supergroup of fin whales in the Southern Ocean.” Here’s a snippet of video posted with the Stanford University news release on that research.

I’m happy to see that Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has made this massive krill quest a new target. I’ll try to do a followup show on that issue.

More

Here’s Nathan Robinson’s Global Exploration Summit talk:

Watch Widder’s trio of TED talks:

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For half a century, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, an extraordinary husband-and-wife science team at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, have been documenting both the decline of mountain glaciers in and around the tropics and the climate history locked in cylinders of ice they’ve extracted from such frozen libraries before they vanish.

Now two filmmakers, Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest, have produced an enthralling documentary, Canary, that chronicles this couple’s edge-pushing and literally death-defying efforts. O’Malley is best known for his work on the long-running Chef’s Table series on Netflix and Rivest recently moved from neuroscience research into science storytelling. Despite, or maybe because of, those unlikely backgrounds, they’ve produced a deeply human account of two indefatigable human beings whose planetary heroism emerged through a mix of curiosity, serendipity and passionate perspicacity.

September 20th theater screenings

The film has a special one-night screening at more than 140 theaters around the United States on September 20th and I strongly encourage you to go if you can find a screen close by at the Oscilloscope Films website.

Here’s the Canary trailer:

I watched the film in an online press preview and loved every minute, but I’m biased. I’ve known the Thompsons since 1994, when I interviewed Lonnie for a 1995 feature on the global retreat in alpine glaciers I wrote for Conde Nast Traveler. I encourage you to click and give it a read (I reposted it here on Substack with some new artwork).

I continued to cover his work, including in a 2001 front-page New York Times story on the retreat, and inevitable vanishing of the tenuous ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro.

This snippet from Canary, posted with permission, shows Lonnie at work in that bizarre Kilimanjaro ice field back then:

By 2004, I was writing about how that mountain’s meldown was becoming a two-sided icon in the debate over what to do, or not do, facing human-caused global warming.

And please read the extraordinary 2012 profile of Lonnie written by my former Times colleauge Justin Gillis, who began the reporting when he learned that this high-climbing scientist was poised to have a heart transplant: “A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality.”

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I hope you’ll give a listen to this dose of grounded climate and development optimism from three wonderful contributors to the new essay collection and online project called Not Too Late - Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possiblity.

I’m still trying to gauge who among you wants audio podcasts. Please let me know through my feedback form!

My guests are:

• the best-selling author and activist Rebecca Solnit

• the University of Maine paleoecologist and masterful communicator Jacquelyn Gill

• the Clark University climate geographer and IPCC report lead author Edward Carr

• (Thelma Young Lutunatabua, who is book co-editor with Solnit and a digital storyteller and activist, couldn’t join from Fiji because of family duties but I’ll have her on soon!)

I really like seeing the faces in these conversations and if that’s your preference, too, you can watch (and please share!) this Sustain What show on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube…

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As thousands of propaganda-inflamed supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro violently invaded the top offices of government in Brasilia today, I couldn’t help thinking back to the four months I spent in Brazil in 1989, the year the nation was in the midst of its first direct presidential elections since 1960.

It was heartening to track reports tonight that this insurrectionist tide had been turned back by police. But no one who cares about democracy, Indigenous rights or environmental protection should rest easy.

Most of my time in Brazil 34 years ago was spent roaming the Amazon rain forest, researching the life, assassination and legacy of Chico Mendes for my first book, The Burning Season. Mendes, raised in the forest, was a rubber-tree tapper and union organizer who became an international figure leading efforts to stem a rising tide of deforestation and violence driven by largely-lawless cattle ranching and developers. He was killed on December 22, 1988, by a shotgun blast fired by the son of a rancher enraged by the success of the rubber tapers’ nonviolent blockades of chainsaw crews and court victories.

Mendes, like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,, was a socialist and the campaign to save the forest, then as now, was seen by patriotic “ruralistas” as an assault on the national imperative to develop roadless, resource-rich frontiers.

The Mendes case led to changes in Brazilian law and rain forest governance that cut the murder rate on the country’s farflung resource frontiers and reduced what had been a far more dramatic surge in forest destruction that anything in recent years.

Conflicting visions of the Amazon frontier

But Brazilians still have two starkly different visions of what the vast Amazon region should be — with forest dwellers and environmentally-attuned urbanites siding with international conservationists, but many others seeing an undeveloped territory needing taming and exploitation. Bolsonaro’s “beef, Bible, bullet” appeal to rural Brazilians largely played on the latter sentiment.

In my book, I propsed that the Amazon is to most Brazilians what Alaska is to lower-48 Americans — a distant abstraction tuned to fit one’s personal politics.

Among his first acts in his new term in office, Lula issued decrees aimed at curbing mining in Indigenous reserves and deforestation in Amazonia and the Cerrado region. As Mongabay reported, he also created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as one step to fulfill a campaign plege “to combat 500 years of inequality.”

But gains won long ago through peaceful resistance and blood, and now through Lula’s acts, remain fragile.

As André Schröder reported for Mongabay in November, “Bolsonaro won in the majority of the 256 municipalities in the Arc of Deforestation, which accounts for about 75 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon, as well as in Novo Progresso, in Pará, where ranchers, loggers and land-grabbers orchestrated a significant burning of deforested areas in 2019.”

Economic realities in the Amazon still favor ranching over rubber, as a recent Associated Press story datelined in Mendes’s home town attests. The story charts the allure of livestock even within the protected reserve named for Mendes. That widespread appeal of cattle as a cash reserve was conveyed to me by one rancher this way during my reporting in 1989: “Scratch the skin of a rubber tapper and you’ll find a rancher.”

When The Burning Season was published in 1990, I made the rounds of TV and radio shows. Here was my interview with Today Show host Deborah Norville. I brought along one of the rubber shoes tappers made from the latex they harvested. (Some residents of Acre, the state where Mendes lived and died, have built businesses making and selling modern lines of latex shoes.)

But one interview stood out – my hourlong conversation with the legendary historian, labor champion and radio host Studs Terkel. I won’t add a transcript of our chat becuase you really can’t appreciate these conversations without hearing Terkel’s melliflluous voice and feeling the intensity of his focus.

Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network and the Chicago History Museum have posted an archive of hundreds of Terkel’s four and a half decades of interviews. (The Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities supported the effort.)

The full archive is at studsterkel.org. Sift by theme. For the environment, you’ll find conservation leaders like Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough and the writers Barry Lopez and Alexander Cockburn (also on the Amazon). But you’ll also hear from workers unprotected by a union describing woeful conditions at a Hanes shirt factory.

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did halfway back through my 66 years.

I also encourage you to listen to the magical converastion on life, faith and death that took place in 2004 when On Being host Krista Tippett turned the tables and interviewed Terkel near the end of his extraordinary life.

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For audio podcast fans

This is the audio of a webinar I just held for Columbia Climate School colleagues eager to sift for strategies making the most of online connectivity amid epic shifts, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. My internal work here at Columbia is focused on building science and policy communication pathways that are about more than clicks. The slides are posted here.

My earlier post has the rough transcript (also on Trint here), with links to relevant info added:

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Yesterday I hosted a Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation exploring what Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter means for the platform’s capacity to save lives in emergencies like extreme storms, floods, wildfires and other environmental emergencies.

My featured guest was Jim Moffitt (@snowman), who worked in developer relations at Twitter for eight years building the capacity for the platform’s vast trove of real-time data - generated through the flow of thousands of tweets a second around the world - to be harnessed by companies, journalists, researchers or government agencies through its APIs - application programming interfaces.

His prime focus, before and during his time at the company, was improving monitoring and response to extreme weather events. (He was at a smaller firm, Gnip, in Boulder, Corado, that was acquired by Twitter in 2014.)

In a tweet on November 21, Daniel K. Pearson, who runs efforts to modernize U.S. Geological Survey water management services, described just one of myriad applications of Twitter data that protect the public:

We run two real-time flood and rain accounts for @USGS on Twitter. @USGS_TexasFlood and @USGS_TexasRain are both at risk. They have been providing updates to the public since the devastating Memorial Day floods in 2015, and thru Harvey… a testament to this tech. #TwitterForGood

Moffitt quit Twitter on November 18th amid the upheaval and deep cuts initiated by Musk, but has not remotely given up on the platform’s potential to build resilience in communities around the world. In our conversation, Moffitt said he does not see any alternatives emerging any time soon.

Joining the discussion was Andrea Thompson (@AndreaTWeather), the sustainability editor at Scientific American. Andrea has been covering implications of the Twitter upheaval for emergency management. Read her latest story here: Twitter Chaos Endangers Public Safety, Emergency Managers Warn.

Moffitt hopes one point registers with Musk before he does any more damage: The capacity of Twitter’s open APIs to integrate the platform’s massive realtime data flows with apps or analysis that can save lives also makes the company money:

It's public information, as being a formerly public company, that these end points drive, through partnerships we have with all kinds of different companies, of all different sizes nearly $400 million a year in revenue.

It's not ad revenue and it's only 10 to 15 percent of Twitter's revenue at the time. But it's very stable. It's driven by multi-year contracts. In a recession, it's not going to be affected by advertising spending going down. Our job was to go out and and work with other developers of all kinds, from academics to engineering teams at some of the biggest partners we have. But again, without that engineering engine, it was unclear to me if I would have new things to talk about.

Twitter’s heart is its people

The “engineering engine” Moffitt described is people - a companywide network of coders and information architects and others that has been deeply damaged by Musk’s abrupt staff cuts.

[Insert - Joe Bak-Coleman, an associate research scientist at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia School of Journalism, wrote an excellent Scientific American article explaining how Musk’s creditable approach to building a rocket business is a bad fit for an information business.]

Moffitt said his team (most, like him, based in Boulder) had been working hard to advance an ever-widening array of ways for companies, scholars and scientists, and government agencies, to exploit the data Twitter use generates second by second in unfolding events like floods or storms. With Musk’s arrival, there was the prospect for some positive outcomes, he said:

Part of me was excited about, okay, we have a new management, new ownership. They seem to have a science bent. Maybe there is going to be a room here for building more things into Twitter that would make the public's use of Twitter during emergencies even easier.

But the drastic staff cuts excised the capacity to sustain this flow of new relationships and businesses. When I asked why he quit, Moffitt gave this answer:

I hope it doesn't sound cheesy, but my eight-year tenure at Twitter was really all about my colleagues and the team we have here in Boulder…. You know, I learned that of all the engineering teams that drive the features, the products, the API, the endpoints that my team supports, about 85 percent were let go in that first round. And so it's just sort of writing on the wall that without those teams building the things that I go out and talk about, that I sit down and document, that I wasn't sure of the future I would have or my team would have in that type of environment. That's really the main reason.

Nothing like Twitter

Andrea Thompson said that people working in a wide range of positions in emergency preparedness and response had a uniform sense of concern:

Every every one I talked to said, you know, there is nothing like Twitter. It is it has become, for better or worse, integrated into the way we communicate with the public in these situations.

Moffitt added that there’s still enormous potential for this capacity of Twitter to be employed at every level of government [I’ve streamlined the language here a bit]:

A small emergency management office in some county somewhere could work with partners that made their software platforms available at nonprofit-type pricing. I always kind of joke, if you hired a computer science intern for a summer, at the end of that summer, they could have built you a really useful tool for not only listening for local tweets of interest, but for automating whatever software you're using for your monitoring system.

I was planning on setting up a sort of hands-on coding workshop where you bring the computer language of your choice. And we'll sit down and and show the basics of these two things, the listening side and the publishing side. So maybe there's opportunities to still do that down the road. I do think the Twitter API was very accessible. It was free to academics. It was free as long as you're not pulling in more than a half a million tweets a month, which for a local area would be an extremely amount of tweets around any flooding or hurricanes. So we had a lot of unique characteristics that really is a low barrier to entry

I said I’d be happy to explore how my communication initiative at Columbia might help.

A key to Twitter’s unique value and growth, he said, remains the open interfaces that allow users to seek patterns in the flow and put them to use.

I can't believe the APIs themselves would be let go. Again, they drive some significant revenue and they really help expand the reach of Twitter. With this toolkit, you can build all kinds of amazing things…. The use cases are endless, and these APIs just represent the basic building blocks of building these types of things. What I love about Twitter is, whatever interest you have or community you want to build, you know, it can be a really useful tool. Mine was flood warning. I jumped in and was like, oh, of course Twitter is a tool for this.

We explored whether any tool might emerge that has this global-to-local sensory-system capacity and is insulated from the whims of a billionaire owner. Having written about the metaphor of cathedral building in pondering sustainability, I offered a quirky thought, noting that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame has poked into the social media arena with WT Social (Wiki Tribune Social). Listen here and tell me what you think:

You listen as a podcast or watch this Columbia Climate School Sustain What conversation here: Can the Public Value of Twitter be Sustained There or Replicated Elsewhere?

There’s a rough Trint transcription of our conversation here. If more folks choose a paid subscription to Sustain What, I can ponder hiring someone to turn around smooth transcripts!

To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

There’s lots more background, including links Moffitt assembled to an amazing set of posts on Twitter’s use in emergencies, in my previous post here:

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This is the audio version of my Columbia Climate School Sustain What discussion of the world beyond 8 billion - focused on what factors in play today will determine the quality and quantity of human lives and the environment in the decades to come.

Read the text post here: As the Human Population Tops 8 Billion, a Look Beyond Bomb📈 and Crash 📉 Panic Proclamations.

Sift a rough transcript on Trint. If you become a financial supporter, you can help me hire an assistant to help with some of the production work.

The conversation centers on issues and options related to humanity topping the 8 billion mark in its developmental journey, as calculated by the United Nations. My guests dig in on the vital need to improve the prospects for girls, young women and migrants to shape more sustainable environmental and societal outcomes later in the century.

Guests:

Joe Chamie, a consulting demographer who is a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, "Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters." Read his Inter Press columns here, including his look at the 8 billion threshold and unsubstantiated forecasts of calamitous population implosion.

Céline Delacroix, director of the FPEarth.org project of the Population Institute and adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences.Charles Kabiswa, executive director of Regenerate Africa, a nonprofit organization working to rebuild deteriorated social, ecological, health and economic systems to benefit people, nature and the climate across Africa.Terry McGovern, professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and the director of the Program on Global Health Justice and Governance at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.Kathleen Mogelgaard, President and CEO of the Population Institute, an international non-profit organization that seeks to promote universal access to family planning information, education, and services. Read her recent opinion piece with William Ryerson in The Hill.

I’m posting some related thoughts in a separate dispatch and will add the link here.

I’m still eager to gauge how many of you prefer audio content to written output - and how best to integrate all of that in Sustain What. Please let me know what you do, and don’t want.

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As the latest wave of food-tossing, media-seeking climate emergency protests began, I pulled together a spirited Sustain What discussion featuring the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which is pouring millions of dollars into edge-pushing protest networks, a longtime performance activist and two sociologists deeply researching when activism does and doesn’t matter.

My guests were the activism-focused sociologist Dana Fisher (@fisher_danar) of the University of Maryland along with the sociologist Robb Willer (@robbwiller) of Stanford University (an author of an important paper on the “activist’s dilemma”) and Margaret Klein Salamon (@climatepsych), executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, a top bankroller of soup tossers. We were also joined by longtime performance activist “Reverend” Billy Talen.

Sparks flew but civility ultimately ruled, and some important insights emerged. Here’s a rough transcript via Trint. If more folks choose a paying subscription, I can hire someone to help produce clean ones quickly.

To learn more and weigh in on the value and downsides of in-your-face activism, read my Sustain What post with details on this discussion.

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Original Air Date: October 27, 2021

Drawing on insights from his book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, our featured guest, Professor Noam Chomsky, will explore paths to climate progress on an overheating and starkly unequal planet with fresh assessments from Columbia Climate School's Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and Dr. Belinda Archibong, a Barnard College economist focused on African development and perspectives on climate and energy policy. The session will be hosted by longtime climate journalist Andy Revkin, the founding director of the Initiative on Communication & Sustainability of the Columbia Climate School. Student nominated representatives from Teachers College will have an opportunity to engage the panel with their questions on climate action and learning.

Links to bios and more information are here:

https://j.mp/chomskyclimate

This special Sustain What segment is organized by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School and the Teachers College Program in Adult Learning and Leadership.

It is hosted by Andy Revkin, founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia Climate School.

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Original Air Date: November 11, 2020

DESCRIPTION: Too often, politicians and the rest of us choose to wait for clarity before tackling tough, consequential, challenges. News media cover disastrous events far better than underlying drivers of risk - or resilience.

To seek solutions, join Andy Revkin’s Earth Institute Sustain What brainstorm with participants in this year’s annual conference of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty – a community focused on making the most out of inconveniently murky reality.

We’ll examine how to assess and communicate effective policies and practices in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s turbulent political landscape, development economics and climate change.

The discussion features David G. Groves of the Rand Corporation; Alejandro Poiré, dean of the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City and a former secretary of governance in the administration of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Julie Rozenberg, an economist with the World Bank Sustainable Development Group.

As always your host is Andy Revkin, a journalist with 35 years on the climate and calamity beat who now heads the Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University.

Learn more about the Initiative here: http://sustcomm.ei.columbia.edu

Send show feedback and ideas: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback

Learn more about the 2020 meeting of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty: http://deepuncertainty.org

Follow our guests

David G. Groves: https://www.rand.org/about/people/g/groves_david_g.html

Alejandro Poiré: https://twitter.com/AlejandroPoire

Julia Rozenberg: https://twitter.com/julierozenberg

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Original Air Date: December 11, 2020

DESCRIPTION: With COVID-19 vaccines beginning to flow, many global-risk experts worry nations may lose track of the grander challenge: acting systemically, and systematically, to curb pandemic risk on a hyper-connected planet.

Join Sustain What host Andy Revkin in a solution-focused brainstorm with psychiatrist and sustainability scholar Jonathan Salk, who co-wrote “A New Reality - Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future” with his father, the famed vaccine pioneer and humanitarian Jonas Salk; Tara O’Toole, an epidemiologist, biomedical and intelligence technologist at the intelligence-focused venture firm In-Q-Tel; and Roman Krznaric, a philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change the world, most recently in “The Good Ancestor.”

Jonathan Salk's book: https://www.anewrealitybook.com/

A relevant essay in The Hill: https://bit.ly/salkcovid19

Roman Krznaric: https://www.romankrznaric.com/

Learn more from Tara O’Toole in this pandemic briefing for the Council on Foreign Relations:

The COVID-19 Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness in the United States

https://j.mp/CFRcovid

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What decisions can we make today as individuals and societies to create a better tomorrow?

Join Columbia Climate School's Andrew Revkin, economist Kate Raworth, and philosopher Roman Krznaric for a conversation on how reinventing economics and incorporating long-term thinking into our current policies can help us meet the challenges of climate breakdown and global inequality, and transform our world for future generations.

Speakers:

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World. His previous international bestsellers, including Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st-century realities. She is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Her internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences, from the UN General Assembly to Pope Francis to Extinction Rebellion.

Andrew Revkin has written on climate change and other environmental challenges for nearly 40 years, mostly for The New York Times and now at revkin.bulletin.com. He founded the Columbia Climate School's Initiative on Communication and Sustainability in 2019 and runs a popular webcast series, Sustain What, clarifying paths to progress on urgent challenges where complexity and consequence collide. He has won most of the top awards in science journalism as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This conversation is part of the Entre Nous series organized in partnership with the The American Library in Paris and Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

This conversation was held as a Zoom video conference on Mon, September 20, 2021 | 1:30 pm (New York) | 7:30 pm (Paris) | 6:30 pm (London)

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October 7, 2020

On Fridays, the Sustain What webcast of Columbia University's Earth Institute dives behind headlines and hashtags with leading journalists and experts to offer insights on what's really afoot.

A great panel is coming together to discuss this week's truly extraordinary developments, in which a president infected with the novel virus driving the COVID-19 pandemic checked out of a military hospital tweeting, "Don't be afraid of Covid. Don't let it dominate your life."

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October 2, 2020

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the bestselling author of The Upside of Down and other books exploring pathways through complexity, joins Sustain What host Andy Revkin and two special guests in a bracing discussion of the themes of his latest work: "Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril." (https://commandinghope.com/)

The guests are:

• Susan Cox-Smith, a partner and futurist at Changeist, a consultancy and training organization that curates and creates "experiences that stretch strategic thinking, materialize the new, and connect with people about what comes next." She's a contributing editor of the new book "How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange." Learn more at http://changeist.com

• Michael Garfield, a philosopher, musician, painter and writer who blogs for Long Now Foundation and hosts the Future Fossil podcast.

His Long Now posts: https://blog.longnow.org/0author/michaelgarfield/

Future Fossils: https://shows.acast.com/futurefossils/episodes

Homer-DIxon sees three paths to bending humanity's curve away from a long descent after the last century of zooming progress. As he writes"

"At this crucial moment in humanity’s history, I argue, three changes are essential to keep us from descending into intractable, savage violence.

First, we need individually to better understand how and why we see the world the way we do and what makes other people’s views sometimes so different from ours. Second, instead of passively accepting a dystopian image of what will come tomorrow, we need to actively create together from our diverse perspectives a shared story of a positive future — including a shared identity as “we” — that will help us address our common problems and thrive. And, finally, we need to fully mobilize our extraordinary human agency to produce that future."

More on the book and his research and other output:

http://homerdixon.com

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A pandemic and attendant economic crisis rock the world along with political and social turmoil intensified by an overheating information environment and overheating climate. What's a solution-oriented human being to do?

Slow down and stretch your time scales, according to three experienced analysts of this extraordinary moment in human history.

Join the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin, the philosopher Roman Krznaric, the journalist and resilience expert Bina Venkataraman and the filmmaker John D. Sutter in a discussion of ways to find meaning by stepping back from the urgency of now.

Krznaric's new book is "The Good Ancestor - How to Think Long Term in a Short Term World."

Learn more about him and the book here:

https://www.romankrznaric.com/good-ancestor

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. She previously taught in MIT’s program on science, technology and society, directed policy initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT and served as senior advisor for climate change innovation in the Obama White House.

She is the author of "The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age," named one of Amazon’s best books on business and leadership of 2019.

Learn more here: http://writerbina.com/

John D. Sutter, formerly a climate-focused CNN video journalist, has embarked on an epic “slow journalism” project, a film looking at climate change by visiting four dispersed communities every five years through 2050. He is working on the first installment, “Baseline: part 1." The name draws on the “shifting baselines” concept that each generation can miss momentous environmental change unfolding over long time scales.

https://www.baselinefilm.com/

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In this webcast, former senior intelligence and national security officers explore headlines noting that intelligence reports provided to the Trump White House had laid out the likelihood of a pandemic with unnerving clarity - and one even noted worrisome signs of a rapidly spreading virus in Wuhan in November (ABC: https://bit.ly/covid19wuhanintell)

But the challenge for this or any administration is not awareness as much as prioritization, as former National Intelligence Council analyst Rod Schoonover put it in a previous Sustain What conversation:

“In my world in the intelligence community, I was often very proud to be in one of the only parts of the government that either had the platform or the freedom to clearly state some of the risks. In the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, it lays out language that’s very, very, eerily prescient of this moment. But it also landed on, I think, page 21. So, yes, it’s a risk, but we clearly don’t have it calibrated quite right.”

http://j.mp/coronaschoonover

In a fresh chat with Schoonover and Alice Hill - a former National Security Council official and biodefense expert now at the Council on Foreign Relations - we explore what will be needed for an administration with any political orientation to do better.

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Air Date: August 6, 2021

DESCRIPTION: In this special live Sustain What webcast, join host Andy Revkin of the Columbia Climate School and http://revkin.bulletin.com in a brisk solution-focused discussion with top experts of pathways to risk reduction in the world’s hundreds of crowding deluge danger zones.

Humans are profoundly heating the climate and changing storm patterns through a surge in emissions of heat-trapping gases and other pollution. But there’s also been a simultaneous surge of settlement in zones prone to flooding -- producing what some geographers call an “expanding bull’s eye” of exposure to climate-related threats like floods. And of course the poorest and most marginalized populations are always hurt most.

A pioneering study, published in Nature on Wednesday, has greatly raised estimates of population growth in flood-affected regions and offers sobering projections of much more flood exposure through 2030 without big changes in policy at every scale. Luckily the work, sifting millions of high-resolution satellite images, has also produced a new open-access tool, the Global Flood Database (http://global-flood-database.cloudtostreet.ai), that offers officials at all levels, the financial world and communities a clearer view of the exposure they’ve created and a chance to shape safer development paths in the critical years ahead.

Read Andy Revkin's story about the paper: http://j.mp/bulletinflood

GUESTS:

Beth Tellman, Cloud to Street Chief Science Officer and lead author of the Nature paper

Jean-Martin Bauer, Senior Digital Advisor for the UN World Food Programme and former WFP Country Director of Republic of the Congo

Saleemul Huq, Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development

Simon Young, senior director for climate and resilience at the global advisory company Willis Towers Watson (he has been building new types of insurance to respond to floods and other extreme events around the world including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands)

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Aired: June 2, 2021

A special Sustain What episode with two scientists, a journalist and a songwriter offering ways to navigate turbulence, polarization and disinformation with the fewest regrets.

Join Andy Revkin of Columbia’s Climate School with Carnegie Mellon philosopher Andy Norman; solution-focused journalist Amanda Ripley; Columbia University psychologist and conflict dissector Peter Coleman, and songwriter and storyteller Reggie Harris.

Send feedback and ideas for future shows:

http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback

Here's more on our guests:

• Peter T. Coleman, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, will discuss lessons from his new book, “The Way Out - How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.”

Coleman holds a joint appointment at Teachers College and the Earth Institute and directs two research centers. He is also the author of “Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement” (2014) and “The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts” (2011), among other books.

He says “The Way Out” is “about why we are stuck in our current cultural riptide and what we can do to find our way out. It will explain how patterns of intractable polarization can and do change, and offer a set of principles and practices for navigating and healing the more difficult divides in your home, workplace and community.”

Learn more: https://thewayoutofpolarization.com/

• Reggie Harris is a longtime folk singer and songwriter, storyteller and educator who has worked and sung for racial understanding, human rights and justice for decades. He’ll speak about his experiences at the interface of love and hate, Black and White and maybe sing a song or two.

He describes his new album, “On Solid Ground,” as a “call for personal and national grounding in the explosion of racial and civil unrest and the growing worldwide death spiral that was 2020.”

Explore Harris’s music, writing and activities: https://reggieharrismusic.com/

• Andy Norman teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He says his focus is studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding and developing tools that help people reason together in more fruitful ways.

Norman will describe insights offered in his new book, “Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

Learn more: https://andynorman.org/

• Amanda Ripley is a solutions-focused journalist and bestselling author who has become a champion of a new style of journalism sifting less for sound bites and more for pathways to insight amid complexity.

Her new book is “High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.”

Here’s Ripley’s summary of this concept: “When we are baffled by the insanity of the ‘other side’—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over. That’s what ‘high conflict’ does. People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.”

Explore: https://amandaripley.com/high-conflict

Sustain What, produced and hosted by Andy Revkin, is a series of conversations seeking progress where complexity and consequence collide.

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Air Date: December 23, 2020

Earlier this year, the famed climate-focused novelist Kim Stanley Robinson told Columbia students: “I’ve been pushing myself to write utopian narratives; that gets weirder as we continue on the course that we’re on."

In this special intergenerational Sustain What conversation, Robinson returns to Columbia (virtually this time) to explore the themes in his sweltering, jarring new novel “Ministry for the Future” with the Earth Institute’s Andy Revkin and several advocates for the future – including the 15-year-old climate change campaigner Alexandria Villaseñor and Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer who was an early leader of calls for "a legal guardian for the future."

Information on the book is here: http://j.mp/2WnLeXy

Unlike Robinson's previous novels set after profound climate change have set in over generations or centuries , this one begins a mere 30 years in the future. As Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone recently summarized, "It’s a trip through the carbon-fueled chaos of the coming decades, with engineers working desperately to stop melting glaciers from sliding into the sea, avenging eco-terrorists downing so many airliners that people are afraid to fly, and bankers re-inventing the economy in real time in a desperate attempt to avert extinction."

Several other students will join to ask questions, final exams and papers allowing. Students and faculty are encouraged to submit questions or comments in advance.

Email revkin+ksr@gmail.com

More on our guests:

Alexandria Villaseñor, who turned 15 last spring, was one of the first, and youngest, American students to build on Greta Thunberg's climate strikes and has gone on to co-found the youth-run group Earth Uprising. https://earthuprising.org/

Carolyn Raffensperger is an environmental lawyer pursuing fundamental changes in law and policy she and other experts see necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. She is the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network.

http://sehn.org

In 2007, Andrew Revkin interviewed Raffensperger for his New York Times blog in a post asking a question she answers with a resounding yes: "Does the Future Need a Legal Guardian?" https://j.mp/futurelegalguardian

(Try the link a couple of times, like opening an old stuck door.)

More resources:

The Columbia student podcast with Robinson from February: https://j.mp/ksrgreennewdeal.

Read Goodell's captivating interview with Robinson: https://j.mp/rollingstoneKSR

To offer feedback and suggestions for Sustain What, or to find out how to support us, click here: http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback

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March 31, 2020

Join our special Earth Institute conversation with leading sustainability analysts from two generations rethinking how human progress should be pursued and measured.

Herman E. Daly, a founding force behind “steady-state economics,” will examine possible paths to less fragile global systems with Kate Raworth, whose “doughnut economics” model aims to build economic policies and metrics that put thriving ahead of growing.

SUSTAIN WHAT is a global conversation identifying solutions to the complicated, shape-shifting and epic challenges of humanity’s Anthropocene moment. A prime focus is making sense of, and getting the most out of, the planet's fast-forward information environment -- the one Earth System changing faster than the actual environment.