Sustain What?

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:

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

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, 2025

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.

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.

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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Thank you Dr. Ryan Maue, Dirty Moderate, Scott Killops, Leonard S Rodberglenrod, Lee, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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

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.

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I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event [August 13, 2025] 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.

A predicted glacial outburst threat in India

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 Ramesh wrote this 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! [Update August 26, 2026: Bhushal is now on Substack.]

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:

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