For the fourth Sunday in Advent: we work in joyful hope

Bill McKibben is one of the best of us. Diana Butler Bass asked the Methodist environmental activist for his 2024 Advent reflection.

... Even in 2024, there are some things to be looking forward to. For me, the most important is the real possibility that in the next few years, we could be seeing quick end to human beings making their living by setting things on fire, coal, gas, oil, anything else.

Because all of a sudden, we've really figured out how to capture the power of the sun that the good Lord hung 93 million miles up in the sky. That star that we need to make our North Star in the climate fight.

This year, just to give you one example, so many people just went out in the country of Pakistan and installed solar panels on their roofs, on their farms, everywhere else, that the use of diesel fuel dropped 30% in a year. Those are the kind of numbers that help us deal with climate change

And they're because we're using our God-given wits to make the most of the world around us. It won't be easy. It'll require lots of activism and pushing to make it happen. We'll have lots of opportunities to do that. But there are powerful forces afoot in God's world that give us some real chance.

He's not blowing hot air. Quite separately in his own substack, McKibben has described the progress humankind is making on ending our dependence on fossil fuels which pollute the atmosphere and alter the climate. 

Here’s a contestant for the dumbest headline of all time (and no shade on the writer, because They Do Not Write The Headlines). The normally insightful team at Bloomberg produced an article about the remarkable fact that as the Chinese market breaks decisively for EVs, this is driving down demand for gasoline. Instead of heralding this as a potentially mammoth breakthrough in the climate fight, here’s how they titled it: “China’s EV Boom Threatens to Push Gasoline Demand Off a Cliff.”

The more rapid-than-expected uptake of EVs has shifted views among oil forecasters at energy majors, banks and academics in recent months. Unlike in the US and Europe - where peaks in consumption were followed by long plateaus — the drop in demand in the world’s top crude importer is expected to be more pronounced. Brokerage CITIC Futures Co. sees Chinese gasoline consumption dropping by 4% to 5% a year through 2030.

“The future is coming faster in China,” said Ciaran Healy, an oil analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “What we’re seeing now is the medium-term expectations coming ahead of schedule, and that has implications for the shape of Chinese and global demand growth through the rest of the decade.”

For a global oil market, which has come to rely on China as its main growth driver for most of this century, that will erode a major pillar of consumption. The country accounts for almost a fifth of worldwide oil demand, and gasoline makes up about a quarter of that. The prospect of a sharp drop from transport is also coming on top of tepid industrial consumption due to slowing economic growth.  ...

The U.S. may not be at its best. But though we're often a shortsighted, self-centered species, we humans collectively do have an instinct leaning toward trying to leave something for future generations.

If warming stalls, thank China

 

If David Wallace-Wells is right, in the increasingly possible world in which climate change is halted by a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, we'll all have to thank China. 

In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate. ...

He goes on to survey similar progress in China in wind, batteries and other technologies. 

While American politicians argue about tariffs to try to protect an anemic manufacturing capacity for the green energy transition, Xi Jinping saw Chinese green tech as an economic driver replacing China's collapsing real estate bubble -- and the rest is history.

The full article is at a gift link and well worth reading.

It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

Good news from Calfornia and a surprising competitor

In this season of anxiety and political discontent, we're quietly chugging along out here on the Left Coast in the direction of a sustainable energy mix.

Here's Bill McKibben:

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy. ...

It would be easy to be all doom and gloom -- but citizen activism and applied science are making this happen.

Meanwhile, sheer economic self-preservation is making renewable energy boom in Texas. Yes, Texas!

Traditionally considered to be "oil country," Texas continues to have a heavy fossil fuel presence in the state. Though it may not seem like the likeliest candidate on the surface, the state is a pioneer of clean and renewable energy production. Texas generated roughly 15% of the country's electricity from all-renewable sources in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association.

While it was wind power that helped blow Texas to the top of the clean energy production charts, increased solar capacity in recent decades has helped its standing. Through 2022, Texas was the second-largest producer of solar energy behind California, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association. ...

 We're smarter big apes than we sometimes realize.

Humans might be smarter than we often seem

We have, I think, gotten to where we don't have to be told that the climate is changing -- warming and also becoming more unpredictably wild.

But perhaps more than we recognize, the human species -- subset United State-ians -- is finally doing something about reducing fossil fuel use by adding renewable energy sources.

Click on images to see more

Renewables are taking off -- the curve is escalating fast.

 

Solar and wind, enhanced by batteries, are beating the costs of old-fashioned oil and coal energy. As the graph highlights, we may have unthinkingly unbalanced the climate with older fuels, but human science is coming to our undeserved rescue.

 

That particularly means solar energy installations; the number just goes up and up.

 

The energy transition is hard and disruptive, but we seem capable of achieving it. And the transition in China, which matters even more than we do in the US of A, seems on a strong path.

 

All graphs snagged from the economist/curmudgeon Noah Smith.

Recycling that could become self-sustaining

It's hard to stay enthusiastic about urban recycling when you've seen urban trash haulers just dump your recycling into the same truck with the solid waste.

But industrial recycling may well be an important part of our response to climate change. Instead of proliferating waste, let's hope our eager engineers can figure out how to make money off it.

Such a thing may be underway in north western Nevada, a region fast becoming a tech-industrial hub.  

According to Bloomberg: 

In the scrublands of western Nevada, Tesla co-founder JB Straubel stood on a bluff overlooking several acres of neatly stacked packs of used-up lithium-ion batteries, out of place against the puffs of sagebrush dotting the undulating hills. As if on cue, a giant tumbleweed rolled by. It was the last Friday of March, and Straubel had just struck black gold.

Earlier that day, his battery-recycling company, Redwood Materials, flipped the switch on its first commercial-scale line producing a fine black powder essential to electric vehicle batteries. Known as cathode active material, it’s responsible for a third of the cost of a battery. Redwood plans to manufacture enough of the stuff to build more than 1.3 million EVs a year by 2028, in addition to other battery components that have never been made in the US before.

It’s a turning point for a US battery supply chain that’s currently beholden to China. ... Redwood is attempting to break that stranglehold by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals.

... EVs already have a much smaller environmental footprint than internal combustion cars, even in countries that still get most of their electricity from coal. While the toll of mining the raw materials for batteries is considerable, more than 95% of the key minerals can be profitably recycled.

At Redwood, nothing goes to landfill, and no water leaves the facility except the sanitary waste from sinks and toilets. There are no gas lines; everything is electric. It’s also built for scale, allowing the company to quickly break down a truckload of assorted batteries without manual sorting or tedious disassembly.

Recyclers will eventually need to match the pace of car factories. For example, a Tesla factory just 250 miles away in Fremont, California, produced 560,000 EVs last year — more than one every minute. When it’s time for those cars to be recycled, they will generate almost 10 times as much EV battery material as the entire US market processed last year. If recyclers can handle all of that, they would begin to rival traditional mining operations.

“Once we've changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, and all those minerals are in consumption, we’ll only have to replace a couple percent each year that’s lost in the process,” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer and the former head of powertrain engineering at Tesla. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn't make sense to dig it out of the ground anymore.”

My emphasis. This Bloomberg article goes on to raise the considerable obstacles that battery entrepreneurs could encounter, including reaching necessary scale to supply the new industry, while China may find it in its interest to undercut the costs of their output.  

But it's happening ... and subsidized by the legislation that the Biden Administration squeezed out of Congress to underwrite sustainability. Weird that a government led by a white haired old guy is so forward looking, but there it is.

By way of Bill McKibben.

Sign of the times

click to read the pole

Marin County aims to educate cyclists and joggers about the implications of climate change warming on sea level rise in San Francisco Bay. Even at the lowest, dark blue, base level of 2 more feet, this whole path adjacent to Mill Valley will be long gone. Just saying ...

Where we gonna go?

U.S. law about refugees and a right of asylum is a snarled tangle of temporary branches, feeble novel shoots, and confused and blocked dead ends. Much of this has become semi-permanent by custom and usage. Republicans are straightforward nowadays in wishing to exclude all newcomers (except maybe white Europeans) while Democrats may mean well, but have not had the legislative power and courage to fix this cruel mess.

And unless we are somehow touched personally by the experiences of refugees and immigrants, most of us don't have to know what a shit show this non-system has become. So we don't know, while those ensnared within it fumble and push their way forward, seeking safety in unwelcoming lands.

Erudite Partner has taken a swing in Nowhere to Run at untangling some the elements of refugee law and practice; the history of how we got to this mess; where global refugees and migrants come from; where they end up; and the forces of war and climate degradation that promise to make these human surges even larger in the coming century. She begins:

Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. ...

Didn't happen. But the impulse -- and often the necessity --  to move on is part of our interconnected lives. This article is a solid pre-primer.

Electric vehicle anecdata

 

They are coming; one of these days, sooner than we perhaps imagine, we'll mostly all be driving electric-powered cars. And a predictable climate will be the more sustainable for the change, we hope.

 

We're not there yet in this household and won't be for awhile; the beater "Wowser" -- the lime green 2011 Ford hybrid -- is still too good a vehicle to move on. But the next car will almost certainly be electric.

I've found it interesting to quiz folks about the EV transition:

A relative who made a career of selling high end used cars is a doubter. He's not seeing it. But he's also open, if automakers can build what he considers good cars.

 

Another friend who lives in northern rural New England says the EV transition is clearly coming. All the towns have charging stations. So do many houses. She's convinced, though not yet able to become an EV owner herself.

Around San Francisco, we're in Tesla-land. It seems as if every third car is one. And the driverless vehicles striving to take over the cab and Uber business are also EVs. California aims to cut off sales of new gas cars in 2035. 

Meanwhile the business press is dubious, but don't want to miss something. A sample:

Automakers are tapping the brakes on their ambitious electric vehicle (EV) targets, trying to make sense of consumer appetites amid rising interest rates, stubbornly high prices and anxiety about where to recharge. ...

... Despite the doom and gloom, EV sales are growing faster than any other segment in the U.S. — and are on track to surpass 1 million annually for the first time this year.

Not a model of definitive journalism, but that's where we are.

Where are you in this chart?

Discourses of climate delay

 

Except perhaps for a few beloved environmentalist fanatics, we're all there somewhere. Click to enlarge and contemplate.

For myself, I've leaned of late toward technological optimism, balanced with a smidgen of doomism. 

But as in so many arenas, we have no choice but trudge on, in hope. That's what humans do.

Chart by way of Carbon Brief and Adam Tooze.

Searching for sustainability

 

It is not easy to know what to think. The Washington Post today highlights a scary new government report:

The National Climate Assessment, compiled by numerous federal agencies and published every few years at the direction of Congress, paints a picture of a nation whose economy, environment and public health face deepening threats as the world grows hotter.

... But the report adds that the most dire consequences are not inevitable, and that society has the capacity to shape what lies ahead. “Each increment of warming that the world avoids … reduces the risks and harmful impacts of climate change,” the report states.

Meanwhile, another section of the same newspaper celebrates emerging technologies (gift article) which can make a difference. It predicts rapid adoption on a scale that that mirrors how the internet and cellphones took over our lives in the last 30 years.

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges. ...

Not all new technologies make it big: Segway, Palm personal device, 3D television. But those that start ascending this curve tend to transform societies. 

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Let's hope that's right. The most advanced elements among the technologies discussed here are heat pumps to replace oil and gas furnaces.

... Heat pumps are no longer reliant on early adopters despite being early in the cycle, suggesting Americans are well on track to meet net-zero goals by 2050. As far as clean technologies go, it’s the one most popular among Americans so far.

Friends know that the Erudite Partner and I are on the east coast because we're shepherding a heat pump system installation in a jointly-owned family house. The state of Massachusetts offers a great rebate for this project; that yellow blob on the map proves this policy is moving the needle.

Of course nothing about the project is as simple as the contractors promise, but after a month, we're almost there.

Here's the main unit and its mini-split sidekicks. Doesn't look like much, but we're doing our part to get closer to all electric. Now if Massachusetts can just get the offshore wind farms underway ...

Whatever we make of the muddle, we can only keep doing what we each can to sustain a livable climate.

It's not just weather ... and contraction is happening

Thinking of a friend who lives in Baja, California and of so many others in southern California where a novel hurricane path is being cut as I write, here are some observations from our necessary national Cassandra and conscience, Bill McKibben:

... the number of places humans can safely live is now shrinking. Fast. The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller. ... The story of human civilization has been steady expansion. Out of Africa into the surrounding continents. Out along the river corridors and ocean coasts as trade grew. Into new territory as we cut down forests or filled in swamps. But that steady expansion has now turned into a contraction. There are places it’s getting harder and harder to live, because it burns or floods. Or because the threat of fire and water is enough to drive up the price of insurance past the point where people can afford it.

... For a while we try to fight off this contraction—we have such wonderfully deep roots to the places where we came up. But eventually it’s too hot or too expensive—when you can’t grow food any more, for instance, you have to leave.

So far we’re mostly failing the tests of solidarity or generosity or justice that these migrations produce. The EU, for instance, has this year paid huge sums to the government of Tunisia in exchange for ‘border security,’ i.e., for warehousing Africans fleeing drought

... But the size of this tide will eventually overwhelm any such effort, on that border or ours, or pretty much any other. Job one, of course, is to limit the rise in temperature so that fewer people have to flee: remember, at this point each extra tenth of a degree takes another 140 million humans out of what scientists call prime human habitat.

... along with new solar panels and new batteries, we need new/old ethics of solidarity. We’re going to have to settle the places that still work with creativity and grace; the idea that we can sprawl suburbs across our best remaining land is sillier all the time. Infill, densification, community—these are going to need to be our watchwords. Housing is, by this standard, a key environmental solution. Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.

As usual, it comes down to solidarity -- among humankind and with all life we share the planet with.

So amazing ...

 By way of Bill McKibben, here's a rousing way to begin the day.

Images via Windows on Earth: see the Earth through the Astronauts' Lens. Best viewed at full screen size.

Let's offer this as a tribute to Montana activists:

HELENA, Mont. — Young environmental activists scored what may be a groundbreaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development.

The ruling in the first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.

... Law professor David Dana at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law said the ruling was a “remarkable win” for the young climate activists and predicted it will be used as a guidepost for attorneys bringing similar suits in other states.

... State officials tried to derail the case and prevent it from going to trial through numerous motions to dismiss the lawsuit. [District Court Judge Kathy] Seeley rejected those attempts.

Julia Olson, an attorney representing the youths, released a statement calling the ruling a win “for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate.”

They aren't going to fry quietly. Oil barons, mine owners, and their bought-and-paid-for state legislators will do their best to suppress their movement, but don't count them out!

A little law abiding would be a good thing ...

Erudite Partner is at it again, under this delicious headline:

Can an old lady be an outlaw? Interesting question. Does an old lady want to be an outlaw? That's my question.

Here's a tidbit of the story with which she opens this essay on unconstrained weaponry and climate destruction.

In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she’d met, but that’s another story.)

In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother’s commentary on what she considered their boorishness and insensitivity. In my 11-year-old mind, I tended to agree. ...

Read all about it.

All is not lost ...

Hard as it is to believe in a season of fire and flood, heat waves and torrential rain, human-made magic is afoot.

Let's start with the paint man. I've been on a lot of roofs. I love this guy.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

Renewables are coming. Via Kevin Drum:

The Rocky Mountain Institute released a report today forecasting that solar and wind are growing so fast and getting so cheap that they're now on track to produce 30% of all electricity by 2030 and upwards of 70-85% by 2050

You don't have to take it from Drum, a semi-retired, former Mother Jones econ-pundit. Here's how our financial overlords at Goldman Sachs view the energy future.

And if you want more hope, read this long, deep future vision from the forgotten continent:

The Future of Human Civilisation is African
... the real story of Africa is about its vast future potential as a high-technology centre of sustainable civilisation. Africa holds the key not only to solving our biggest climate challenges, but to unprecedented clean energy abundance and economic prosperity. Moreover, this is a future that we are racing toward thanks to the economic dynamics of disruption. Of course, we aren’t racing fast enough – and if we don’t accelerate, we could lock in dangerous climate change with devastating consequences.

Now that's forward looking, just what we must learn to be in a season of unprecedented natural change, threat, and promise.

Earth Day 2023 -- doing our bit for sustainability

Somehow I missed noticing the original Earth Day in 1970. Perhaps I was distracted by Richard Nixon's monstrous escalations of our immoral and futile war on Vietnam. Sure, I got it that Rachel Carson was onto something, but my young mind and heart were elsewhere.

I am immensely grateful for the masses who did notice Senator Gaylord Nelson's call to action for the environment. And I'm thrilled Joe Biden has chosen to speak for environmental justice, an essential cause which my friends in the old Center for Third World Organizing helped raise up in the early 1990s.

And so today we face human-induced climate instability and there is much good news to keep front of mind there -- though still so much to do.

Click to enlarge

Slowly at first, and now accelerating, with an assist from the rebates in the Democrats' recent aid legislation, we're moving away from fossil fuels and toward electrifying from clean sources. We still use a lot of energy to run this civilization and will continue to use more, but the sources are changing. Goodbye coal and oil.

Via Robert Wright: 

Earthlings may have reached a major climate threshold—and, for once, it’s the good kind! A report from the environmental think tank Ember says greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector may have peaked in 2022. Thanks to the growing use of such renewable energy sources as solar and wind, these emissions are leveling off despite increased power generation overall. Solar and wind together accounted for 12 percent of the power generated in the 78 nations studied (which generate 93 percent of the world’s power). That’s up from 10 percent in 2021. If the renewables trend line continues, that can more than counteract growing total power consumption, the Ember report says.

Part of the reason the Erudite Partner and I are in Massachusetts is that we've been arranging to replace the old oil furnace in the family house here. It took 7 weeks to bring it together, but we've signed a contract for a heat pump system to go in next fall, using the rebate.

We need a "can do" frame of mind

When I first read about the United Nations Millennium Goals (MDG), I was mighty skeptical. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger everywhere in the world by 2015? -- not likely.

But in fact, a vast international effort, about which most of us here in the rich world have been oblivious, has accomplished an enormous amount, improving the lives of people all over the planet, even in Africa.

Click to enlarge.

That's one heck of a trajectory and a lot of people are living better than their parents even imagined.

Matt Yglesias explores the paradox of rising global living standards in the context of climate change.

One thing that’s important to understand about this is that the huge drop in global extreme poverty is a leading cause of climate change.

What first started me on my current climate trajectory was talking to book publishing people about “One Billion Americans.” I got pushback from some folks who said it would be bad to have more immigration to the United States because it would raise emissions. I said it’s true emissions would go up, but emissions would be rising because living standards would be rising, and from an adaptation perspective, it’s clearly better to have more people in the U.S. (much of which is relatively cold) than fewer.

But then it turned out lots of people believe we are facing an absolute decline in global living standards such that keeping people poor as an anti-emissions strategy has net benefits. That’s just not true.

Having been overly skeptical about the MDGs, I try to appreciate that, just maybe, we can hope that hard work and human ingenuity will enable us to come to terms with the mess we've made of the planet's carbon balance. 

Erudite Partner and I are temporarily at a family residence in Massachusetts, working toward installation of a hump pump system to replace an oil burner -- that is, the house is going all electric. That seems to be a thing that relatively affluent individuals can do. The Biden administration's climate legislation provides a big rebate that makes it less costly.

On climate, every little bit helps.

An exposé

Make My Money Matter campaign in the UK

Is the therapist onto them? Are we? 

H/t Bill McKibben.

Erudite Partner muses on California, fire, and flood

This common San Francisco configuration with a garage below street level hasn't served well this winter.

She writes:

California has been “lucky” this fall and winter. We’ve seen a (probably temporary) break in the endless drought. A series of atmospheric rivers have brought desperately needed rain to our valleys and an abundance of snow to the mountains. But not everyone has been celebrating, as floods have swept away homes, cars, and people up and down the state. They’ve shut down highways and rail lines, while forcing thousands to evacuate. After years of thirst, for a few weeks the state has been drowning; and, as is so often the case with natural disasters, the poorest people have been among those hardest hit. ...

Yes, it's climate change. And how we decide to live with what we've wrought is still up to us.

On beyond atmospheric rivers ...

The Los Angeles Times reported today on a study whose import is captured in this headline: New Bay Area maps show hidden flood risk from sea level rise and groundwater.

Much of the Bay Area is built on flood plains, natural and human-built, often only inches above the groundwater level. I've long been aware of this from building concrete foundations under existing houses in the Berkeley flatlands in my past life as an earthquake retrofit contractor. 

Sea level rise as a consequence of global warming means more ocean is actually pushing up from underneath current freshwater levels.

I hadn't realized how common this condition was all around the Bay -- the article is illustrated with photos of flooding in Mill Valley.

 

This snippet of map shows particularly vulnerable areas in my part of the city; darker red areas show where the current water table is closest to ground level, but even the yellow areas are only 6-9 feet above current sea levels. As the sea rises, we can expect the low-lying red areas to grow larger and groundwater to break through more often as flooding.

“People still tend to think of these things as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.” -- Chris Choo - planning manager for Marin County