Micah: the climate story right now is in a very weird state of flux a) the warming we've priced in is bad and really starting to show itself b) the renewable story is astoundingly good and getting better we are left with "warming is going to get worse but almost certainly not as much as it could have"

the climate story right now is in a very weird state of flux a) the warming we've priced in is bad and really starting to show itself b) the renewable story is astoundingly good and getting better we are left with "warming is going to get worse but almost certainly not as much as it could have"

it's always important to demand better, but part of the reason that the story of climate policy isn't sticking is partly because bad news feels more plausible and partly because the people most invested in this policy understand its limits. www.notus.org/biden-2024/v... hard to sell "mixed-positive"

Biden’s Record Is Full of Climate Wins — So Why Don’t Voters Know It?www.notus.org Environmental groups are making a concerted effort to educate voters about President Joe Biden’s climate policies ahead of the election.

I think a lot of folks steeped in climate doomerism have internalized "we break 1.5/2C and we're Totally Doomed" but every tenth of a degree we can prevent, warming-wise, is very important! 1.6C > 1.7C > 1.8C, etc it is important to take the good news as evidence that we can limit the damage

absolutely it's a weird balance to strike, because we absolutely have not done enough and there's endless work to do here - both in mitigation and repair the message that I hope we can take is "it's worth doing that work, because the work we've already done is making a difference"

I also think that there’s people who are saying “we’re not done, there’s a lot to do, I don’t want to imply this is enough” because news nuance is hard.

not only does it limit maximum damage, but time and severity (the integral on the suffering graph) like, let's be real, the best cases were never on the table no matter what anybody yelled about, but it's sure as shit shaping up to be pretty far away from The Worst Case

the fact that the best cases weren't on the table is what pisses so many people off. the reason that they weren't on the table is because of a lack of obstruction by the GOP and resistance from the fossil fuel industry. Neither of which act in good faith.

Seeing incremental progress is so important, even if there is more left to do. It's evidence that the work *can* be done, *is* being done, an *should* be further supported moving forward. It's how we got childhood cancer from a death sentence to a 90% all comers survival rate. But not overnight.

It also makes money, which is why it has come so far lately. Oil and gas companies have been forced to make their industry as viable as they can going forward, even if that means capturing natural gas from farms and waste dumps. The investment in innovation was the main bottleneck 10-15 years back.

In this, as in many things, we as a society constantly undervalue the invaluable phrase "That's great! Let's keep going!"

The precarious partisan balance also makes it hard to trumpet wins, because it risks shifting the political calculus. E.g., in order to achieve Green New Deal goals, AOC abandoned the GND label because the label alone increased opposition.

I also think that there’s people who are saying “we’re not done, there’s a lot to do, I don’t want to imply this is enough” because news nuance is hard.

If we can get prevention down we can actually start work on reversal.

Actual prescriptive terraforming.

Yeah, terraforming is sure not to have large unpredictable non-linear side effects

The “doomers” I’ve been listening to mostly talk about the unknowable cascade effects of breaching 1.5c-2c. A lot of really really depressed scientists out there.

I’ll add to this that I’m an optimist though. What China has been doing the last decade is truly remarkable.

china's shift to renewable energy has been incredible. they're also doing the work of exporting that renewable tech to other countries in the global south.

part of why i'm so optimistic about fighting climate change is because of how far ahead of us China is rn. the US tends to perform better as a country when it has a clear economic rival to compete against. ex: we probably wouldn't have landed on the moon if we weren't trying to outdo the soviets.

I think the cascade effects are where the real worry is which makes it all the more important to limit things by every tenth of a degree we can and make it less likely that any of them trigger a runaway loop

Cascade effects and we need political solutions that give people the capital to make this shift. Too many people expect, based on first-hand experience, to be part of what’s sacrificed on the way.

Ayup!

I think about this article a lot. We might be on a glide path to avoid true armageddon (~>2.5C), which is great! We need to buckle in and mitigate mitigate mitigate nymag.com/intelligence...

After Climate Alarmismnymag.com The war on denial has been won. And that’s not the only good news.

every 0.1C of warming avoided represents hundreds of millions of people that won't have to flee their homes due to them becoming unlivable. It's why I call people out for saying global warming is going to kill us all

yea, there's a lot of "playing yourself" going on from some of the more doomer sides of climate activists if 1.5-2°C is the end of human society (it isn't), then we're pretty much fucked in the short/mid term as the reasonable GHG goals necessary to avoid it passed years ago

Signed up to get solar--in a few months our house should be producing its own energy with our south-facing roof. We're doing our part as much as we can.

my2c: people are really into the end of the world/apocalypse version of climate change, esp the "good guys" who've been paying attention/invested in that narrative it's scary and dramatic and absolute, so it's easier to assimilate than the incremental, complex, bureaucratic nature of change

yeah, we can't stop things getting worse, but we can still greatly impact how worse they will get, which means we SHOULD do everything we can!

bsky.app/profile/coop...

I think a lot of the doom here is cope and that this is going to turn into an important learning moment, but that headspace can so easily turn into “there’s no reason to put the work in, there’s no reason to try” which is not how you build a movement.

Totally get your point and absolutely agree, but I am having a real hard time with smaller numbers being greater than bigger numbers! It does seem very hard for people to comprehend that a tenth of a degree C for an average temp is significant. It’s not intuitive, but it’s true.

Climate has a communications/storytelling problem, for sure. We’re either steeped in doom or shaming individuals for not doing enough. There is a better way that reaches more people where they are.

Thank you, Micah! ❤️

Yup

And even when the temperature difference is constant, the longer it stays there, the more damage it does. Bringing the temp. gap down even 0.1 of a C provides a lot of value over a long time.

Similarly, there are a ton of people out there going 'oh if I couldn't walk/had chronic pain, I would just give up'. Usually, people who have never really experienced certain kinds of hardship. I think most of them are wrong, but they'll learn someday. Death can wait. That's all he has to do.

I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting a reality in which the wicked are not necessarily going to be “punished” as they would in an apocalyptic scenario.

Ok so if allow myself total blue sky hope, here’s where I think we may end up; basically boundless carbon free energy with a marginal cost approaching zero, which would utterly transform basically…everything

the pie in the sky promise on that front has always been fusion but it really seems like we have a chance to get close to it with solar if trends continue it would really be something

We already have a very big fusion reactor churning out literally unfathomable amounts of energy! Just gotta capture some of it

Was just going to say that solar is just fusion energy off-shored and downstream.

It broadly makes sense to me that solar is wildly more practical than fusion.

Scaling is a bitch.

Gonna have to trot this out again. Original context was nuclear. But even solar and wind have impacts. TANSTAAFL. bsky.app/profile/gree...

There are no energy sources that have no downsides/footprint/ecological impacts. None. Including solar/wind/etc. Certainly not nuclear. That’s (one reason) why efficiency and demand management needs to be a primary strategy.

It depends on who owns that energy though. If it is allowed to be monopolised much less will change.

This occurs with fusion, not solar. The answer is not limitless energy, it is energy efficiency. THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY WILL CONTINUE TO LOBBY IT'S STOLEN "PRODUCT" UNTIL WE STOP THE PROFITEERING.

This is not likely in the critical period we're in now -- 1/n A good guide here, from Cambridge University: www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/new-res...

New resource: Tick Zero’s Real Climate Solutionswww.eng.cam.ac.uk By the end of the century, over one billion people living near the equator are at risk of starvation as a result of climate change. We know that the surface temperature of our planet is increasing,

2/n Tom Murphy's class at UC San Diego turned into a textbook on energy. It's readable and clear: escholarship.org/uc/energy_am...

Energy Ambitions Collectionescholarship.org

Yeah I don’t think in the next 10-15, but in the second half of this century

The most downloaded report from Cambridge has a checkmark on it symbolizing that hope -- we curb energy use now (because it's still fossil-driven), then come up with a full replacement in the second half of the century. ukfires.org/impact/publi...

Or maybe by then we've calmed down a bit. (Also, energy is just one constraint.) Here's a free planning game for the century -- the politics may be unrealistic but the energy and biosphere metrics are accurate: play.half.earth

Half-Earth Socialism: The Gameplay.half.earth Play as a planetary planner and decide what we should do about the climate, biodiversity, and human welfare. Can you bring the world safely to a better place?

zero-marginal-cost energy is the kind of thing that would be ruined by crypto-miners and ai spambots.

We may get there—meanwhile, carbon emissions are going gangbusters, and for every renewables leap, there's new tech that hoovers up the extra power. Blue sky is good, but we can't let the very real victories obscure the necessity of RAPIDLY SHUTTING DOWN FOSSIL FUEL USE. Because tipping points.

@debcha.bsky.social talks about this in her recent book on infrastructure - that we can move from a world where materials are cheap and energy is expensive to the reverse

How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra: 9780593086599 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Bookswww.penguinrandomhouse.com NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2023 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Revelatory, superbly written, and pulsing with wisdom and humanity, How Infrastructure Works is a masterpiece.” —Ed Yong,...

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