Sustain What?

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.

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:

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

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!

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”:

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.

Sustain my Sustain What project by becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 company Vow, which this spring gained approval from regulators to sell its Forged 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:

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

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.

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

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:

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

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.

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

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.

Given how Trumpism seems deadset on squeezing the dizzying diversity out of the United States, it seemed a great time to reach out to Peter 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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