Sustain What?

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:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

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:

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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.

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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Thank you Steve Chapple, Victor I. Covaleski, R Hull, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

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.

Please listen to the full conversation and share it with others. I need your help growing our Sustain What network. And do chip in financially if you can afford it.

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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:

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.

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you Meera Subramanian, Keith Kloor, David R. Guenette, Martha Morningsong, Entropy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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:

Sustain What is mostly a labor of love. To support my work, consider becoming a financial supporter.

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:

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you Jeff Jolley, Entropy, Dean Friedman, Vivian Henry, Victor I. Covaleski, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.