“I am in love with Kelp.” Let Tiffany Stephens’ words resonate through your Saturday, and calm your climate anxiety.  

“I am in love with kelp.” Let Tiffany Stephens’ words resonate through your Saturday… and calm your climate anxiety.  

Love affairs with kelp aren’t some kind of fringe thing, aren’t only a remote Alaska thing. Down here in Santa Monica Bay — as far away from Seagrove Kelp Farm in Doyle Bay, in some ways, sadly, as you can be — there are also those who love kelp …

Watching the COP26 global climate talks from a rooftop 5,115 miles away, one thing is clear: it’s time to do the work. There’s no more time for doubters or denial on the one hand, or indecision or political traffic jams on the other.

At this point, the climate action stage should be filled with creativity. The

To mark the inauguration taking place right now in a very cold-looking Washington DC, we’re dropping some photos of another mighty capitol city. It’s our way of celebrating the U.S. government’s imminent return to an international accord that bears that city’s name. Imperfect as it may be, the Paris Agreement is the absolute gold standard among existing, signed, and fully notarized international plans for fighting climate change.

Though the outgoing administration meant four years without U.S. climate leadership, it had the unintentional effect of inspiring the rise of powerful new leaders elsewhere. So, Biden’s new bigger, better, and super-brainy Cabinet-level climate team — led by John Kerry and Gina McCarthy — enters a much more dynamic scene than the one we vacated four years ago….

EVs are the stuff of myths. So many myths: 
• They’re too expensive! (Nope.)
• Their batteries hemorrhage range as soon as you drive them off the lot! (Noooooope.)
• Worthless in cold weather! (Nope! And Norway!)
• They’re less green than normal cars! (NOPE.)

Let’s put that last old argument out to pasture once and for all ….

It can be hard to conceive of an issue as big as climate change. Global warming is, after all, global — geographically but also as an idea. Reflecting its sprawling unknowability, some environmentalists like to say “think globally, act globally.” Others use the invented term “glocal” to describe a phenomenon that’s both planetary in scale and also felt and fought locally.

Still others — especially those themselves impacted — address the problem as purely locally as they do the rest of their lives. 

All the days after Thanksgiving have become sanctified shopping days: “Black Friday,” followed by “Small-Business Saturday,” followed by a quiet holy day to get rested and prepared for “Cyber Monday,” which is the day you’re supposed to continue shopping while on the clock at your job. “Giving Tuesday” stands at the end of the line, ringing a bell and giving you the guilty side eye after all this shopobacchanalia.

It’s easy enough to sigh in anguish, Charlie-Brown-like, about the consumerist spectacle, but a little empathy may be in order too. After all, for a stressed-out, disconnected, compromised human organism, shopping is an easy, dopamine-triggering pleasure. Through the 20th century, it became the way comfortable modern people in comfortable modern societies expressed their comfortable modernity… and it was how we children and grandchildren of that century grew up. 

The 21st century added to the recipe plentiful plastics, round-the-clock R&D, disposable LEDs, 24/7 marketing, microchips as cheap as potato chips, and a competitive international labor market. So today, we consume all products as consumables. We consume everything as if it’s disposable. ….

It’s November 2020, and we know we have one decade to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. We can achieve this, but the sheer scale of the problem means it’s all hands on deck.

The question for each of us is — leaving aside reducing our own impact — what can people actually do if they don’t have a Ph.D., an endowment, or an audience of millions to influence?

These days on Zoom, one answer you hear a lot is “organize, organize, organize.” But what does THAT mean? For many of us, organizing means finding an existing organization, cause, or group that really speaks to us …

For the climate, last night’s unresolved elections in the United States couldn’t have higher stakes: this January, one of the world’s biggest energy and environmental policy stakeholders will either be demonstrably hostile to science and climate action, or committed to spending $trillion$ to guide climate adaption and mitigation.

But last night, I was reassured to also know that in the last four years, climate creatives (whether smaller nations, U.S. states, nonprofits and NGOs, or individuals) have innovated in yet another way: learning how to do end-runs around an obstructionist U.S. government ….

Last month we wrote about the importance of optimism as the global community prepares to tackle climate change in one decade.
In that spirit we present this Monday’s article in the Guardian: “‘We’ve had so many wins’: why the green movement can overcome climate crisis.”

It’s a quick reminder of many of the often unheralded successful precedents of the environmental movement. These include the global end of “leaded” fuel, the international rescue of the ozone layer, the end of acid rain almost everywhere ….

As we noted a few years back, this is the century of humanity re-deepening its relationship with its surroundings. The reality is, humanity will either reconnect consciously and deliberately, in the process of extricating ourselves from our climate peril, or it will reconnect inadvertently and reactively as we learn to live on a diminished planet with an unfamiliar and hostile climate.

Certainly for some, the pandemic provided an opportunity to slow down, pay attention to the natural world, and get connected. Today the California pepper trees in our front yard are providing just that kind of opportunity. Though it’s not spring, they are in blossom now ….

Consensus now is that we have a decade to do what needs to be done. Is that a catastrophic problem or a thrilling opportunity?

This consensus formed the backdrop of this week’s Global Philanthropy Forum, whose theme was “Facing the Future — a Changing Climate in a Changing World.” It warmed some cold and callused hearts to see the whole philanthropic community gathered (albeit digitally) to discuss a massive existential crisis which, not too long ago, could escape mention in even the most comprehensive global development meetings.

Even more exciting to this attendee was the sense of optimism that pervaded the proceedings ….

We’re just going to lay our hand on the table right here and right now.

This morning we are reading the World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report 2020: Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss,” which in the WWF’s words: “provides unequivocal and alarming evidence that nature is unravelling and that our planet is flashing red warning signs of vital natural systems failure ….

Fire season arrived early, and northern California is losing graceful vineyards, ancient redwoods, oaks on their golden rolling hills, and other parts of its graceful ecology. Reacting in this month’s Atlantic magazine, Leah Stokes expands upon the melancholy thinking we’ve all been doing about trees around here:

“Many people have been grieving from the news that we may have lost some of the most majestic coastal redwoods to these latest fires. These giants have stood for more than a thousand years. […] For my generation, and the ones coming up behind us, the simple ….

Yes, ok. Global warming. It’s bad. Bad. Got it. I think I’ve got it now.

“But… what can I DO about it?”

That question is what we want to answer here. What more than just recycling, what more than buying less-damaging things, what more than reducing a carbon footprint? Rather than just make ourselves less damaging, what can we do, actively …

We had the pleasure of attending a conference talk by Marc Tarpenning, founder of Tesla and partner at Spero Ventures. While telling his story, he showed the above slide, which we present here as a gem of simplicity.

Climate change is a confoundingly, crippingly complicated thing to talk about, and the many solutions to it are just as convoluted.

Of course they are complicated! It’s all tangled in an inextricable web of complex natural systems — in the soil, it the oceans, in the atmosphere, and (in the case of solutions) in the wildest aspirational bounds of our imaginations. ….

When countless millions put their lives and careers on hold to blunt the exponential fury of Covid-19, they also idled their cars, boats, and planes. Likewise trucks, power plants, factories, container ships, trains — all the engines driving global industry and climate change — fell still, and quiet, and idle, if only for a moment.
People took to social media to celebrate the cleaner, fresher air ….

This has been an intense month of national and global reckoning. This time, we want it to stick. We want the world to scream as one that black lives matter, and, in the silence that follows, we want no more black lives ended violently, no more of this persistent brutal streak of global history that our sophisticated human thought organs should have no problem putting behind us once and for all.

To move forward, we need this.

As climate-change solutions go, tree planting triggers all the dopamine.

It’s got it all. You walk out into an abandoned field, lay down some acorns, and step back and watch the system rebuild itself. The toxins are expelled from the ground as a wasteland becomes a forest; the forest attracts animals; the trees absorb the carbon dioxide; and everything cools back down to when we were all younger, more innocent, and free.

It’s impossible not to love that story. Who doesn’t adore the super-feel-good tale ….

Watching “climate retreat” enter the public lexicon has been a little like watching the sea level rise. It’s gradual and almost theoretical most of the time, and then a king tide comes along to spotlight the new normal.

Sometimes that “king tide” is in the form of an actual king tide (Key West edition), sometimes it’s in the form of a hurricane ….

Bravo Wired for proposing an epidemic, so to speak, that we can all get behind: “Solar Panels Could Be the Best Fad Ever.”

I don’t know about your neighborhood, but in mine I have a hard time finding solar installations to emulate. Still, Clive Thompson reminds us of the potential energy ….

So, a novel coronavirus came along, and just like that every single future thing on our calendars has been cancelled or “postponed.” Our cars sit idle outside; we have simply stopped moving. In the future, assuming that this is a unique event, no one will believe how quickly society went from “normal” — working, going to school, going to movies, embracing an old friend — to abnormal. Or it seems to me, how quickly the word “normal” changed to describe something completely new in the human experience ….

I want to place here some articles that are emblematic of this moment — meditating on what we’re losing, visiting things we won’t be able to visit again in the same way.
Truthout, “Alaska Is Already Irreparably Changed by Climate Disruption,” December 9, 2019. Dahr Jamail visits Alaska and hikes to an old haunt on Chugach Mountains for what may be the last time.

Australia has been burning since September, and as 2019 ends forests on all continents lay in ruin. The world is hot — hot, HOT! — and the things we need to absorb carbon dioxide are becoming things that emit carbon dioxide. The illustrations all around us are louder and shinier by the day, but we still can’t figure out how to write about it to translate people’s anguish about koalas and kangaroo habitat into sustained action to reverse the damage we can reverse, and to adapt to what we can’t ….