In the first `100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
Every action matters. The climate crisis is a call of “all-hands-on-deck” and each of us can make a difference if we decide to. Having self-awareness of our personal gifts and talents, and what lies at the heart of our motivations, is essential to sustain individual actions needed to have an impact. The problem is complex and diverse solutions are required. It is likely you can, if you seek it, discover and take actions that motivate and sustain you.
“All this beautiful diversity of perspective, experience, and passion is needed to address this grand societal and environmental challenge”
Heidi Roop
There are many individuals actions that we will explore in the first 100 days of 2024, and many of them, if they are interesting to you, may motivate you to move beyond acting as an individual and into a broader community. For you, it may be taking on the challenge of effective climate communication and battling disinformation in your local government councils and organizations, or your school, church or other group. In doing so, you may help others move forward in their journey to address climate change on their terms – with a profound, multiplicative effect.
Personal leadership starts with “identifying your strengths, passions, and motivations”, then seeking the knowledge and skills to act, committing to it, and (perhaps) broadening your scope to a larger community in which your actions will have the greatest effect. In this way, you may find the personal satisfaction that will sustain you in your journey.
In the first `100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
A large part of my anxiety about the future of climate change is the magnitude of the problem and helplessness at my ability to make a difference – to have an impact the outcome of what I consider to be an existential threat to humans on this planet. In outlining Climate Action 1, Heidi describes you and me, as an individuals, as “statistically blameless”. You have choices: acting on feelings of hopelessness and doing nothing, or becoming an activist and join with groups like Extinction Rebellion, which advocates and organizes “non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency”, among others.
“Determination and passion, paired with civic engagement and political action, can be a force to turn the tide on climate change”
Heidi Roop
I’m with Heidi – every action matters. Understanding the urgency of the crisis, committing to and learning about what you can do, and taking action as best you can can personally “turn despair into determination”. This is particularly true for those in the US which has historically contributed the most to the emission of greenhouse gases that are the cause of the crisis. You can find details in Project Drawdown, which is a science-based approach with a roadmap that is intensely focused on advancing effective, science-based climate solutions and strategies, fostering bold, new climate leadership, and promoting new narratives and new voices. With data, they highlight that individual and households in the US (and other significant emitting countries) CAN have a profound effect on reducing the emissions needed to head off the most dire predictions of climate science if we stick to business as usual.
In the first `100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
In Climate Action Handbook, Heidi Roop starts off with an overview section briefly covering the why of climate action, including where greenhouse gases come from, the scale of the problem, the source of inequities in a world with a changing climate and a snapshot of the climate impacts in various regions of the US. You can find a great deal of information compiled by Jon Hester in The Frog Blog, for instance see Before Our Eyes: Evidence of the changing Earth we can see.
It is critical to understand the scale of the problem. Based on the most recent IPCC report, there are five key statements about global climate change, as summarized by Kimberly Nicholas:
It’s warming
It’s us
We’re sure
It’s bad
We can fix it
I assume if you are reading this, you accept some or all of this. Hopefully, this includes #5. To address this with urgency requires action through both mitigation and adaptation. If you search adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change you will find numerous Venn diagrams of the overlap of these two separate, but interconnected strategies – climate mitigation to keep the problem from getting worse and adaptation to the changes already underway.
A critical challenge, as Heidi points out, is that because of “historical inequities, systemic racism, colonialism and divestment… historically marginalized communities… are often already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change”. Any and all strategies implemented on the a global scale must proceed through addressing the inequities and if executed well hold the hopeful promise of an “exiting range of opportunities to design and build healthier, stronger, and more equitable communities”.
We need everyone doing what they are capable of with urgency. Heidi offers 100 actions that can be explored by any thoughtful individual who wants to play a part, organized into ten categories:
Starting and Sustaining Your Climate Action Journey
Energy Production and Transportation
Travel and Work
Food and Farming
Shopping and Consumer Choices
Actions Around the Home
Nature-Based and Natural Solutions
Health and Well-Being
Civic and Community Engagement
Education and Climate Information
I intend to work my way from 1 to 100 over the first 100 days of 2024. I am somewhat motivated to become more disciplined in my writing, and in doing this project I hope to organize my thoughts and hopefully discover new actions that make sense for me and family to implement. I encourage you to do the same.
I grew up in Arlington, VA where my memory of Christmas Eves was warm, wet, and foggy – I don’t remember a single white Christmas. Having moved to the Twin Cities over 30 years ago, I am starting to get used to cold and snowy weather, and despite being a transplant, I am enough of a Minnesotan to feel cheated when we do not have a White Christmas.
In the first 100 days of 2024 we will explore 100 climate solutions that may “empower you to evaluate, engage, and act” to address on-going climate change as an individual on your terms.
I accepted the facts of global warming tied to human production of greenhouse gases in 2006, and have worked with increasing anxiety and urgency since then to do my part to address it as an individual living in a complex, interconnected world. I have read widely on all aspects of climate change, both mitigation – strategies focused on reducing and eliminating greenhouse gas accumulation – and adaptation strategies focused on adjusting to the impacts of the changes in the climate already underway.
Until a few weeks ago, however, what I read did not satisfy as a guide to a complex subject that could be made personal. As an individual, I was conflicted by the fact that what I did would not have any real effect on the inevitability of a warming planet, especially knowing that fossil fuel companies and other interests have perpetrated a cynical disinformation campaign to deflect responsibility from “them” to “us”. [See The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael Mann]. “Climate change is your fault, not ours” they say. Recycle. Drive less. Don’t eat beef. Use paper straws. If everyone does more individually, it will add up to enough to solve the problem.
The issue with this is described in systems thinking as the Tragedy of the Commons: a system of individuals that have access to a common resource. In general, individuals pursue actions that are beneficial to themselves, but without controls to regulate the use the resource, it can be (and typically is) overused by individuals which inevitably results in the resource being diminished to the detriment of all – read The Lorax for more a perspective.
For the concerned individual trying to take action in the face of the overuse of a shared critical resource, those actions actually put the individual at a disadvantage compared to those who continue to use the resource. If climate change can only be addressed through concerted, widespread action driven by governments and international entities, you, as a concerned individual, have a decisions to make on actions to take that contribute. It certainly would be helpful to have a resource to guide you on personal actions that will make a difference and be satisfying for you.
I am privileged to work with Heidi on the Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership and have listened to her speak in a variety of venues. Reading the book, it condensed within me a framework for action and a motivation to write about a difficult subject that represents an existential threat for all of us. Starting in January, The Frog will present the 100 climate solutions for everyone as presented by Heidi in her book. I encourage you – in keeping with Action 46: Make More Thoughtful Online Purchases – to incorporate a trip to your local bookseller in your next round of errands and pick up a copy.
Given the fact that there was a huge blizzard that just hit the Midwest, this article could not have been written at a better time. I know at least in Brookings, South Dakota, we are having a lot of issues with clearing out the snow, even from snowstorms that occurred weeks ago. We rely mainly on these snow trucks that would come and clear out the snow with their shovels, but sometimes, I still see people out there in the negative degree temperature and trying to blow snow away from driveways and neighborhood streets! And although the streets do get cleared eventually, in the short run, it can increase workplace disruptions and create hazardous sidewalks for pedestrians.
The good news is that scientists have figured out a way to melt snow and ice apparently on its own, by attempting to build roads that can do that automatically. This idea is not a novel one; there have already been studies on trying to make roads safer by incorporating chemicals like chloride that could increase its snow and ice melting abilities. Therefore, this unfortunately means that there are environmental costs to this solution.
However, these scientists have figured out a method to increase snow melting without the use of chloride. Instead, they used surfactants, which reduce surface tension, silicon dioxide, sodium bicarbonate (an important component of baking soda), and blast furnace slag (waste product from power plants) and grinded it all into a fine powder and coated it all with a solution. They mixed that in with the asphalt to be built into the road.
After testing this, it seemed that if the road was 5 cm thick, it would be effectively melting ice for around 7-8 years, and it was capable of melting snow that was on the side of the roads as well, meaning that expensive machinery would not have to go through and plow it out the edges as well.
Most people may not be familiar with the uses of slag, so it’s probably best to drop a few of these links down here for reference:
Writing is something that I carried with me throughout my life. I spent some parts of my childhood reading books from the library and collecting all that information in a giant notebook. Just like how I was as a kid, my reasoning for doing this was to bring awareness into the world about environmental issues and to help other fields understand that you don’t just have to be in the environmental field to make an impact on issues like climate change. I write because it’s important for the world to understand that ultimately, figuring out this issue will benefit humans the most. The planet is flexible and will be able to adapt to the situation on hand, but if humans are not able to adapt at all, we will perish as a species. So, in essence, we are saving humankind from extinction in a way.
Of course, that’s not to say that something like that will happen; this is probably a worst-case scenario. But it’s still daunting to think about because that brings another thought of why are we doing the things that we’re doing if the world might end? All our societal expectations wouldn’t mean a thing. All our technological advances would be meaningless, and all of the things that we’ve created as a civilization would all be for naught.
Although this would seem like extremely negative thinking or even being a bit melodramatic, if we as a society continue to go down this path, we may end up in this type of situation. Now, the question is, is it better for people to have false hope that we could potentially alter our path, or is it better to have no hope at all and not be severely disappointed when we don’t meet our environmental limits and just accept the harsh reality? That is something that I struggle with quite a bit.
I believe that regardless of which belief we have about this topic, we shouldn’t stop trying. We should not give up. We should continue to improve and grow, even though the times ahead will be tough. It is the very existence of our beings that we are fighting for.
Please welcome Yolanda Sung to the Frog Blog. Yolanda is passionate about anything and all things related to climate change and accepted the invitation to contribute The Frog Blog.
For now, Yolanda’s words will be appear under my name, and as soon as Jon Hester gets around to it, Yolanda will be charting her own course here.
There are any number of guest and/or permanent contributors posts available at the Frog Blog, if you want your voice heard. Please start writing and contributing as you see fit.
A patient shows up at an ER with tremendous head injuries: black eyes, a split lip and missing tooth, a swollen and twisted nose, matted hair. He’s holding a bloody hammer. He’s rushed into a room where a medical team urgently assesses his vitals. “I just can’t stop hitting myself with this hammer!” he keeps repeating. His vitals look okay, though, and he’s in no immediate danger of death; a doctor prescribes oxycodone for the pain, 10mg, and the patient is released.
How did the doctor do? What’s your prognosis for the patient? All good?
Of course, this is absurd. No responsible doctor would treat such a troubled patient with an addictive drug and be done with it. “At least take the hammer away!” you exclaim. “Figure out why he’s hitting himself!”
Absurd though it may be, if the hammer is fossil fuels, we are both the patient and the doctor, and this is precisely our treatment plan. Has been for some time.
The current example of our hammer-induced head trauma is underway in Ukraine. Proximately, we may blame autocracy and Vladimir Putin; we may say he’s insane, a megalomaniac with an unhinged version of history lodged in his aging skull. While all of that is undoubtedly true, make no mistake; the hammer bludgeoning Ukraine is fossil fuels, and Vladimir Putin is just the current most visibly horrible wielder of it. Oil and gas sales, which account for roughly half of Russia’s GDP and surged in 2021, bought Putin the hammer. Indeed, his state-run fossil fuel economy is exactly the type autocrats most love. Unlike the vibrant and chaotic economies that characterize most democratic nations, an economy based largely on mining and distribution of geologic resources is an enormous and often monolithic endeavor, easily controlled by the autocrat in the big palace – easily skimmed off the top of to fund his own wealth, pay powerful buddies to enforce his oppression, and maintain a state-of-the-art military and a deadly and staggeringly expensive nuclear stockpile even as his population is kept in relative poverty and ignorance. Sen. John McCain once said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” and he wasn’t wrong.
Why is Putin swinging the hammer? Who can say for sure what motivates a man who has told lies for a living his entire adult life and has recently revealed himself to believe a decidedly wacky version of history? You don’t have to be an economic strategist or an investigative genius, though, to wonder whether it’s relevant that Russia has to pay Ukraine to move natural gas West. Or that Ukraine controls important shipping ports used for fossil fuel trade, one of which, Mariupol, was shelled to dust as one of the first apparent Russian priorities of the invasion. Coincidence? Unlikely. In Putin’s mind, Mariupol probably doesn’t need to be a place for kindergartens as long as the coal ports are re-built, and Ukraine might cut a more favorable deal on natural gas flatulence directed West after a good beating with the hammer. Certainly, Putin is swinging the hammer, at least in significant part, to buy more hammers.
But we ourselves are swinging the hammer right along with him. Who bought the oil and gas? In a very real sense, all of us in the industrialized world are locked in a common death grip on the filthy, oily handle of the hammer, the current unfortunate victim of which happens to be the innocent people of Ukraine.
As the awful evil in Ukraine unfolds before us – graphic images and descriptions of bombed hospitals and kindergartens, child corpses, bound execution victims guilty of having been outside searching for food for their starving families – we utter a collective scream of unrequited injustice. In this context, Richard Gallant recently noted psychological studies finding even 3-month-old babies with virtually no other useful skills have a built-in sense of rudimentary justice. This shared bit of human machinery drives our communal outrage, but we are profoundly frustrated because we all know we are witnesses to the worst kind of evil, and we are failing to do anything approaching enough. We sanction, and we pass well-crafted resolutions and eject Russia from the chummy club of nations. But history teaches us none of that is likely to save a single Ukranian life.
We argue about whether and how we should do more: no-fly zones; javelin missiles; if Poland gives Ukraine warplanes and we later give Poland warplanes, did they come from us? Western leaders are understandably cautious; a mind like Putin’s is notoriously inscrutable to the non-evil, and he’s got nukes. What measure of justice in Ukraine is worth a major Western city? These deliberations are nigh on impossible, and I would not profess to have a useful opinion on them.
Beyond a doubt, though, I do know this: We are not talking enough about the hammer.
Indeed, when we do talk about it, the conversation is demonstrably insane. Early exceptions to the otherwise increasingly comprehensive economic measures being taken by the West against Russia? Russian fossil fuel sales to Europe – literally, the money funding the hammer! Here in the U.S., the barest hint that gas prices might rise immediately drives breathless headlines that Biden will release oil from the national oil reserve to stabilize them. I don’t pretend this is all easy. We can’t have people freezing in their homes, and many can’t afford shock increases in fuel prices. Some measure of relief and stability for people is required on the part of responsible governments. But the headlines aren’t just about that. They’re also to “calm the markets” – to keep our economy humming along under the continued illusion that everything is somehow still okay. “Don’t worry,” they intend to say, “we still have the hammer and, unlike them, we are swinging it responsibly.” A Wall Street Journalopinion article optimistically proposes the rapid build-up of a trans-Atlantic oil, gas, and hammer trade that simply cuts Russia out. Oxycodone: thanks, Wall Street Journal, that felt like about a 10mg dose.
The thing is, at a deep level, things are not okay, we damn well know it, and the hammer is no longer helpful no matter who has its filthy grip. And as we deliberate over plans to stabilize the economy with short-term releases of oil from the national reserve, it’s not as if we’re also laying any very intentional longer-term plans to put the hammer down.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a new report. Suffice it to say, the IPCC’s reports, which aggregate findings from all the relevant scientific, economic, and political experts studying the climate, haven’t been getting any rosier. In a nutshell, we are currently living in an astoundingly short window of time – a couple decades – during which we will collectively determine the future of humans on Earth. This is not just my opinion; any rational reader of the report will arrive at the same conclusion. We have the opportunity to provide continued wealth and security to future humans, such as our children and grandchildren. Or, we can consign them to a future of decay, poverty, and wars just like the one in Ukraine. If we do nothing, mindless carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere will eventually kill all the people in one or more of at least about nine different ways. It’s all in the report; almost nobody reads it, even though it’s freely available by Google search and the Summary for Policymakers is just a few pages long. If you wish to tweet or post about the IPCC being stupid, corrupt, or wrong, bear in mind the electronic device on which you are tweeting or posting is a wonder of technology brought to you by scientists practicing exactly the same scientific method and using the same peer-reviewed publication infrastructure used in the preparation of the IPCC reports. You should credit them in your speech about their stupidity for giving you the medium.
In reflecting on the unimaginable human suffering in Ukraine (which of us living can fully imagine the suffering of a person tortured mercilessly, knowing they are going to die, then being killed?), I am reminded of a scene in the Russian author Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. His character, Ivan, basically asks his brother, Alyosha, the well-worn question of how a good, omnipotent God can exist when there is suffering in the world. I have always found his treatment of the question particularly effective, however; after extracting from Alyosha an agreement that children are innocent, he restricts his argument to the detailed and graphic consideration of the suffering of one specific child. How could God let that happen? It’s a direct and particular appeal to that justice-seeking machinery that’s apparently operating in all of us before the age of 3 months.
The novel made a life-long impression on me, as I read it while serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, where I learned two main things. First, all people have the same hopes and dreams. You can meet a person with a radically different ancestry than you, who speaks a language you can’t comprehend, who worships unfamiliar Gods and eats foods that make you gag, and, upon getting to know them better, discover they have dreams at night shockingly similar to your own and, just like you, love their families to the point of distraction, would very much like to own something they can’t afford and also want their kids to have that thing, if they can’t, and want their kids to have a better all-around life than they do. The second thing I learned is that success in life depends very much on where you are born and that is profoundly unjust. I was the science teacher of at least one honest-to-God high school genius who was fated for early pregnancy and manual labor in an open-air market because she was born in rural Ghana rather than the U.S. Bay Area, where she would certainly have been a venture capital darling. I met people with life-long disabilities because of the unavailability of polio vaccines that we in the West have the luxury of declining to get if we are so moved by our bizarre, uninformed beliefs. I met people with goiters the size of grapefruits because both the salt and the rest of their diets lacked trace amounts of iodine that we in the North and West take totally for granted.
If we wish to restrict our discussion to the suffering of a single child, there are plenty to choose from in Ukraine today.
Religious friends and loved ones have expressed to me a faith that God has a Plan for us with respect to climate change and our relationship with the hammer. In combination, I cannot ignore the poll-proven fact that our politicians most opposed to individual actions related to the relinquishment of the hammer are often closely allied with organized religious institutions. I think I have a well-founded fear that we are sleepwalking into an extinction-level planetary climate catastrophe for the same reason there wasn’t enough food at the potluck: because too many of us think someone else has a Plan. Thus, with love, I wish to talk you out of a faith in God’s Plan that does not include our own very intentional actions as an essential ingredient.
Because of my observations in a Third World country and, having observed them, my sensitivity to similar injustices right here at home, I confess I am frustrated by accounts of “guardian angels” and the like. I would certainly not wish to denigrate the experience of anyone who has had a brush with death and, perhaps, seen something the rest of us haven’t. But if Jesus Takes the Wheel, I think we can agree He doesn’t take it for everyone, and the capricious and rare interventions of His divine hand appear very well correlated with more mundane forms of privilege, like whiteness and relative wealth. The mothers and daughters being raped and murdered in Ukraine have evidently been left to steer their own wheels. As have the Russian soldiers, who have been placed in a situation in which they have committed atrocities their internal justice machines will revolt against for the rest of their lives. Given the massive scale of the universe, I am persuaded that if God is fine with letting a child suffer and die in Ukraine under the weight of Putin’s hammer, He is probably fine with letting us all go down if we can’t let go of the hammer when we know we should.
I have seen breathtaking expressions of human love, kindness, and generosity; expressions of beauty; and accomplishments of genius that have made me know I was observing God in other people. Indeed, perhaps that infant justice machine psychologists have found is God manifest in us. I think this is a God we can agree on, and the God we need. In fact, I think if you believe God has a plan for us with respect to letting go of the hammer and saving ourselves, you have to believe the most reliable way to make sure God’s plan gets enacted is to enact it. Like, we need to get it done.
So, I’d like to propose a plan to deal with Vladimir Putin. It’s virtually guaranteed to succeed in time, is nonviolent, and has no risks above those to which we are already exposed. It’s the same as the most effective and lowest-risk way of dealing with a drug dealer – stop buying the drugs. Among the recent IPCC report’s high-level findings: “The continued installation of unabated fossil fuel infrastructure will ‘lock-in’ [greenhouse gas] emissions (high confidence).” In the context of the report, the “locked in” emissions are exactly the ones we cannot afford! Well, what do you think Putin is planning to do? Do you think he might have plans to build some more fossil fuel infrastructure?
For decades, the findings of scientists have unequivocally told us that our grip on the hammer is not good for us. That we are wounding ourselves with the hammer, and risk killing ourselves with it, even as there are alternatives. I propose we finally use the wanton, evil atrocities in Ukraine as our motivation to let go with intention. It’s as good a reason as any, and it happens to be going on at the best possible time to quit fossil fuels, which (as it has been for years) is NOW, because we haven’t yet invented a time machine to go backward. There are promising early signs. Germany has frozen the gas pipeline that would have carried it Russian gas, a courageous decision which will entail some sacrifice and must have involved some gritting of teeth on the part of German leaders. When the retreat of Russian forces from Ukrainian suburbs revealed civilian corpses evident of horrible Russian war crimes, a French finance minister admitted EU sanctions on Russian fossil fuel imports “are a possibility.” In the name of relinquishing the hammer and denying Russia its evil swinging of it, perhaps all of us freedom lovers in the West are capable of some short-term sacrifices.
And some hope.
You’ve seen solar panels. Imagine more of them! You’ve seen wind turbines. Imagine more of them! You’ve seen electric cars. Their acceleration is exhilarating! You’ve seen photos of coal miners with black faces (and lungs). Imagine those same people without black faces (and lungs)! Buck up, people! Down with evil tyrants and up with optimists! Stop voting for leaders who don’t have a detailed plan for addressing climate change, in part, to defeat evil tyrants. It’s really that simple.
Let’s this time, for real, let go of the bloody hammer.
We received a dire warning a few weeks back in the form of the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC tends to be dense, fact driven and intense, even in their Headline Statements. As the keeper of the data for on-going climate change, IPCC scientists tend to be cautious and thoughtful even as they scream at the frog to get the hell out of the rapidly heating water.
I had intended to boil it down for Frog Blog readers, but I will rely on climate change communication expert John Cook who previously said it succinctly using ten words:
The Frog Blog did not acknowledge this critical event. The definitive statement from science on the state of the most profound existential crisis in modern human history appears, and two scientists committed to exploring the nuances of climate science say nothing.
I have spoken with Jon, but will not speak for Jon. For myself, even with the usual ADD-related barriers to sitting down and focusing, I have not been able to draft any coherent blog-ready sentences, despite having a fair-sized pile of good ideas. It has been frustrating.
I don’t consider myself a “real” writer, rather I feel I have a voice that can add to Jon’s focus in this “site created by a scientist to seek truth and act on the climate crisis”. I keep waiting for the words to flow, but nothing gets published. Truly a mental block.
But my view has transformed in the past few weeks through a discussion with an accomplished science writer and another with a high school colleague who has recently started blogging in a disciplined and effective way. Both gave me advice that prompted this post – and which I hope will sustain me for many more.
Before addressing “why we write”, let’s explore some of the reasons why I haven’t written recently:
Too busy. Yep, we are all too busy.
Too distracted. Welcome to life in a global pandemic and the unraveling of the representative democracy in the US. A great deal to do, see, and think about. Poor excuse as the world burns and floods.
I write for work. I spend my day sitting and writing proposals and editing the words of others. I am much more at ease standing and talking – writing and editing uses up a substantial portion of my extroversion energy. A barrier to overcome, for sure.
I mostly write like a scientist. I was taught to write about science using a process to that keeps the experimenter out of the write-up of the experiment through the use of the third person passive voice. “This was done”. “That was accomplished”. Not very compelling for a blog and a bit of inertia to overcome sometimes. But with practice…?
I tend to seek perfection and a big impact. I had a colleague at work who was a prolific inventor, but had impossibly high standards for the quality of work that he deemed suitable to file a patent. He only wanted to file the “big one” and many of his “smaller” ideas remained in his notebooks. I think a little of that manifests in me as a desire to only create posts with profound insight.
No one reads what I write anyway. We are all immersed in information and points of view. Add mine to your TBR pile, if I am lucky. Otherwise it is chirping crickets. The question before me is what do I expect. Not sure. Anyway, I haven’t written all that much, so I have no standing to use this as a barrier to future contribution.
It just doesn’t matter. OK here we have a problem. Finding your voice when writing about climate change, especially in light of the new IPCC report, is daunting. Motivation to write about climate change thins once you reach the conclusion that it is unlikely that any one individual can make much of a difference in the unfolding calamity.
It causes me pain. Climate (or ecological) grief is real. It can have a powerful impact on emotions. Grief is painful, and wading through it, overcoming it, or putting it aside to write dispassionately about the science of climate change is a challenge. [Since this is a post written to prompt future posts, I am promising a deeper exploration of climate grief sometime soon].
So I have been struggling. No one is listening and it is too damn hard. But a few weeks back I met someone who just gets up and writes every day: an accomplished science journalist with an impressive collection of published articles, who had just delivered a new manuscript for a book on sewers to an editor a couple of days before she arrived in Minnesota. [I will post a link when the book is published – it is likely to be compelling, what with all the poop and fat blobs].
I talked to her about the personal barriers I have in writing routinely about the climate, and we compared strategies (agreeing that the Pomodoro Technique was effective). She then provided a simple insight that was (for me), profound:
You have to budget time for “hobby writing”
Weirdly, I had never considered writing for this blog as a hobby. Of course it is. Somehow I was thinking about it more in terms of ikigai “a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living”.
I think I was spending too much time on the right side of the ikigai Venn diagram, in the “what the world needs” circle. Looking to provide the big idea or elusive deep insight as I am so inclined.
Upon reflection it appears that what I am seeking is more likely found somewhere around the passion/mission intersection on the ikagai diagram (which overall seeks to define total work/life balance). More “I really like doing it” and “I hope to be good at it” and less “It’s what the world needs” is the needed adjustment to my approach
So… my hobby is writing about climate change. In this context, it has the hallmarks of a satisfying hobby, and as long as I keep the spirit and focus of The Frog Blog as guardrails, I think it will satisfy my desire to contribute a unique point of view. [Maybe occasionally say something profound?]
But the barriers to the actual writing of it remain. Where to get the discipline to practice (and hopefully get better at) this hobby?
This week, in the spirit of chance favoring the prepared mind (à la Pasteur) I struck up a online conversation with a high school colleague who just started a blog that I enjoy reading. I have not seen him for a very long time, I don’t know him that well, and we only exchanged a few posts, but he provided the needed strategy for discipline. It may Bloggers 101, but it made surprisingly good sense to me:
Set yourself a weekly word count (mine is 1500), publish it come hell or high water, whether anyone reads it or not, and don’t stop revising a post till it doesn’t suck.
So, there it is… the plan. Write about climate change as a hobby knowing that I have something to say – (at least) 1500 words published weekly come hell or high water. Exploring the complexities and depth of the 5 ideas embodied in these 10 words – it’s real, it’s us, experts agree, it’s bad, there’s hope – that is why we write.
If this post seems more about me and less about the climate, it is. I am writing this for myself as an investment. I needed to just write something. And these are the words that showed up. Thanks to two chance encounters with writers giving me insight that I processed with my prepared mind, I have arrived back to The Frog Blog with a renewed sense of purpose.
One of the labels often pinned on those of us who choose to speak up about the climate is “tree hugger”. You probably have your own vision of what that it means, but the implication is that we somehow care more about the Earth than the people who live on it.
My response is typically “the Earth is indifferent”. Over many millions of years it appears (from ice core analysis) that the Earth does what it can to keep the CO2 concentration somewhere on average between 200 and 300 ppm. Humans invented fire and found it convenient and advantageous to dig up and burn fossil carbon – sometime in the early 1900s the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide went above 300 ppm and has been going up ever since.
The Earth does not care if we do nothing to arrest and reverse the accumulation of carbon dioxide pollution and the disastrous changes to the climate that comes along with it. If we do nothing and create a climate that we cannot survive, the Earth will not care. Without us, the Earth will begin a long, slow process to bring the CO2 concentration back to a manageable level, including growing tropical forests, letting them die and decay and turning what once was carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbons with heat and pressure.
As much as I am personally relieved by the results of the 2020 US presidential election, the Earth doesn’t care that Joe Biden just got elected, even if his Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice is likely in its best interest – at least better than anything the US in play right now. As much as I am relieved, it is disheartening to know that US politics have gotten to the point that the act of simply doing the right thing has become Herculean. I despair that without progressive if not radical action, our approach to the climate crisis will be that status quo maintaining, incremental thinking we embrace now.
If the Earth were watching and actually had an opinion, it may observe with keen interest our attempts to turn around our thus-far appalling inaction on the very real pandemic crisis that immediately threatens so many of us, and then see if we leverage that action to address the existential crisis of climate change.
As often is the case, Greta Thunberg is a voice of reason and urgency. In a recent interview in The Guardian she warns of too many loopholes in existing climate agreements, and too little action not fast enough: “We shouldn’t be focusing on dates 10, 20 or even 30 years in the future. If we don’t reduce our emissions now, then those distant targets won’t mean anything because our carbon budgets will be long gone.”
“As long as we don’t treat the climate crisis like a crisis, we can have as many conferences as we want, but it will just be negotiations, empty words, loopholes and greenwash.”
Greta Thunberg
It is encouraging that Biden uses the term “environmental justice” so prominently. His plan includes a focus on a clean energy economy, achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, building climate resilience, working globally and supporting those communities most at risk. A plan far better than the denial, distraction and distrust that forms the official position of the current US administration.
But Greta Thunberg is quick to condemn most politicians: “I wish there was one politician or one party that was strong enough on these issues”. It is, however, justice she seeks, saying “that’s why we are fighting for climate justice, social justice. They are so interlinked, you can’t have one without the other.”
“Leaders are happy to set targets for decades ahead, but flinch when immediate action is needed” – Greta Thunberg
I have to admit to being quietly optimistic about the future again, after a long, hard four years. But as William Arthur Ward says, “the pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects it to change, and the realist adjusts the sails”. Despite the damage inflicted by a disastrous US administration, despite the sustained assault on science, despite racism and injustice, we have to center ourselves, embrace the essential reality of our climate crisis and commit to the long, and difficult fight that we cannot and must not lose.
We cannot express enough gratitude for Howard and Heidi’s exploration and guidebook to practical action, pushing back against the much-ignored…