Sustain What?

More climate and other news and analysis anon, but here we pause for a musical interlude, starting with a program note: Join me for another Sunday Sanity show on Sunday October 12 at 7 p.m. with the Grammy-winning activist folk music duo Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer to talk about their recent string of viral tunes confronting the Trump regime (there’ll be singing):Paste this post link in your calendar for showtime, then watch on Substack Live, Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter or YouTube.Listen to “No Kings Here,” written and sung by Cathy Fink and Tom Paxton. And here’s “It Ain’t Gonna Go Away - Ode to the Epstein Files”:And now for my latest song, which is about the power of community - musical or otherwise.Most folks here know I’ve been a performing songwriter in the background behind my journalism for decades. Music is a fine counterpoint to reporting - giving me the ability to tackle issues, observations and questions that simply don’t fit into a “story.”Three years ago, I scribbled the line “life is a band” on a scrap of paper in a songwriting workshop at Bagaduce Music, a great hub for music making here in Downeast Maine. [Disclosure: I just joined the board.] That line has finally grown into a song, which is still being refined but is close enough to post. The lyrics and a YouTube video are below.Here’s what it’s about:I used to sing and strum up on the stage all by myself...I’d been a solo performer most of my musical life and only co-created a band for the first time around 2003 - a quartet and then quintet called Uncle Wade, centered on making “simple music for complicated times.” We avoided ego trips by each mainly playing the instruments we were least good at. For me that was fiddle and mandolin. This 2013 WFDU radio show appearance gives the story:In that band and others later, I began to appreciate the musical value of mixing personalities, instrumentation and voices, particularly when there were differences! (Lennon and McCartney were the ultimate expression of this phenomenon.) But “Life is a Band” didn’t solidify until recently. A few months back, I started frequenting a Monday evening “kitchen junket” - a potluck supper and singalong - at the Conscious Cafe in Ellsworth. This cozy eatery is tucked into a yoga center in an old house on a side road. Under chef Jesse Steiger, the mission is “to build community and connection through conscious food and living.” The regular crew ranges from octagenarians to youngsters, from tuba players to a saz player from Turkey.The junket began last January, with the music side cheered on and semi-organized by the marvelous fiddler, dancer and music educator Molly Gawler. Listen above or scan my lyrics below to see how the song relates to these sessions.And I hope you’ll consider starting a junket of your own in a living room or accommodating cafe.Here are the lyrics (which I’ve updated slightly since I made the recording!):LIFE IS A BAND - Andy Revkin, Oct 2, 2025 A D E A I used to sing and strum up on the stage all by myself. E A Bm7 E Some Dylan and John Prine, Mixed with some songs of mine. A D E A But something was not there. Licks and lyrics were too spare. Bm7 E Customers drinking and scrolling and yapping, once in awhile some scattered clapping. D E A A Then walking home from a sleepy gig a fellow called my name.. Bm7 E A He said I love the way you play, but there is a better game. chorus D A E Life is a band, no more singing on your own. D A E Life is a band, grab a uke or saxophone. D A E Life is a band, tenor, bass or baritone. D E A Come add your voice. Let’s make it grand. Life is a band. (twice) A D E A He said right down the block there is a place you have to see, A A Bm7 E We gather every weekend for a potluck jamboree. A D A E Bring some wings or a casserole, a flute or mandolin. Bm7 E A Choose folk or blues or an Irish tune and then we start to sing. chorus bridge E E Like a town needs a mayor and a baker and a plumber A A A band has a singer and a picker and a drummer Bm7 Each, on its own, is monotone. E Put ‘em all together for something better…. Put ‘em all together for something better…. Put ‘em all together for something……better… chorus Is there anything like this where you live?Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

This is the podcast post for my special September 28th Sunday Sanity conversation with my friend Dar Williams. Here’s the updated “curtain raiser’ post with all the background on our chat and Williams’ first album on Righteous Babe Records, Hummingbird Highway:Thank you Dave Finnigan, Bart Ziegler, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

Boy this was a bracing, high-velocity and fun discussion with longtime renewable-energy analyst and evangelist Joe Romm. If you missed it live, now’s your chance to listen or skim the transcript and post questions or reactions. We explored a heap of issues related to climate, energy and online communication. We went back in time to our Dot Earth and Climate Progress tussles and moments of agreement but mostly focused on current and future events.One thing we absolutely agreed on was that our disputes back in the Bush and Obama days over the mix of clean-energy policies aimed at mass deployment or research and development were microscopic in the context of the reversals engineered by the Heritage Foundation and industry and initiated under Trump 2.0.We went through Romm’s recent mythbusting aroun carbon offsets and “green” hydrogen. I recommnd that you follow him on LinkedIn, where he does a good job highlighting relevant output from others as well as his own (the mark of a good blogger). Here’s an example - pointing to Stephen Lacey’s Open Circuit podcast:Here’s a highlight from our Sustain What conversation in which Romm explains what’s behind rising electricity bills and offers a suggested message to anyone wanting to return the U.S. to rational climate and energy policy:People’s electricity bills are going up and they are pissed and they don’t understand their bills…. First of all, we haven’t invested in the grid for 10, 20 years, and we’re blocking transmission lines, and we’re making it hard to actually deploy renewables as fast as we could. And Trump has come in and has gutted the credits for renewables. And we’re still going to build renewables and batteries because they’re still going to be the cheapest and fastest to deploy.They’re just going to be more expensive. So we have [also been] exporting our cheap natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas - a bad idea that Biden at least put a pause on. The fossil fuel industry loves it.But guess why? This is arbitrage. Natural gas is expensive in places like Europe. It’s cheap here. What they want to do and what they are doing is taking our cheap gas, liquefying it, shipping it overseas, making a lot of money and therefore reducing our amount of gas, setting our gas prices up. It is very basic supply and demand.I do not know why our side does not message on [this]. We’re exporting our cheap gas to other nations and it’s costing us problems.There is much much more, so dig in and weigh in with questions (I’ll forward to Romm) and do SHARE this post with others.And do consider chipping in to help me justify the time it takes to develop the podcasts and post here.I’m close to an exciting threshold for paying supporters. I’d love to meet via video chat privately with the next four folks who can afford to chip in $50 to keep Sustain What going,Thank you Dann, Peter van Soest, and others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

I hope you’ll watch and share this fresh and fascinating discussion of a project hosted at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at fostering “adversarial collaboration” when researchers - as just one example - clash in the literature over data that could reveal why humans tend to hold fast to certain beliefs and when and how they update them. I can’t imagine a more important question these days. My guests were project co-director Cory J. Clark and Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell who is involved with several such efforts. You can explore some of the resulting papers and other background below.Here’s a description (full story in Penn Today):Led by Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist and visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology, and in partnership with Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Philip Tetlock, the Adversarial Collaboration Project encourages scientists with competing perspectives to work together to design research that can adjudicate their dispute and test where the truth lies. Clark’s team is currently running 10 projects with several dozen researchers from some 30 institutions worldwide and recently published on this work in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.You can also watch the conversation and share this Sustain What episode on Facebook, LinkedIn, my X account, Substack Live or on YouTube.We talked about a wide array of insights and issues, including when I asserted that the news media and social media tend to cut against any effort at adversarial collaboration. I used the example of content in The Atlantic on the research camps warring over the impact of mobile phones on children and teens (an issue I’ve tweeted about).The processes used by the project team, in some cases, have included a mediator (Clark has filled that role sometimes). I noted how much time and effort is involved in what is a very bespoke effort and asked whether artificial intelligence could help mediate between clashing teams’ views of relevant date. Can AI mediate research disputes?That hasn’t been explored much, Clark and Pennycook said, but there has been work showing that AI can durably nudge the beliefs of study participants. Here’s the editor’s summary of one such study (Pennycook is a co-author): Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI (Science Magazine, 2024):Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to, and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. This intervention illustrates how deploying AI may mitigate conflicts and serve society. Clark and Pennycook noted that research tends to show this is NOT about the AI bot, but about getting appropriate evidence to people in ways they can ingestHere’s some related research to explore: Is Overconfidence a Trait? An Adversarial Collaboration (pre-print) - Jabin Binnendyk, Sophia Li, Thomas Costello, Randall Hale, Don A. Moore, and Gordon PennycookAn Adversarial Collaboration on the Rigidity-of-the-Right, Rigidity-of-Extremes, or Symmetry: The Answer Depends on the Question (pre-print) - Shauna Marie Bowes, Cory J Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas H. Costello, Danny Osborne, Phil Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van ProoijenOn the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompts Across Partisan Lines: An Adversarial Collaboration - Cameron Martel, Steve Rathje, Cory J. Clark, Gordon Pennycook, Jay J. Van Bavel, David G. Rand, and Sander van der LindenCrisis counseling for scientists clashing over big questionsI noted there’s a lot of synchronicity with a longstanding effort in Earth science - the U.S. Geological Survey’s John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis - essentially a crisis counseling center for intradisciplinary disputes. I held a conversation long ago about a mediation related to earthquake hazard analysis with two seismologists and the project director Jill Baron.The center is in the Rockies and one method for overcoming rancor is taking hikes that make everyone so short of breath it’s harder to argue. Read this EOS commentary to learn more:I’m close to an important threshold for paid supporters and hope those who can afford it can chip in $50 to help me justify the time this takes to do this webcast and newsletter.Thank you Aron Roberts, Kim M., Jeff Jolley, Zvi Leve, Lauren Chua, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

The death of John Prine early in the early weeks of the pandemic was a wrenching blow for his many fans among both audiences and fellow musicians. As I wrote in the weekend curtain raiser, among songwriters I deeply admire, no one is on a higher plane than Prine. Around 1975, just a few years after I began learning guitar and singing, a college roommate, Aron Wolf, introduced me to Prine’s mix of touching, hilarious, folksy, bittersweet compositions. (I sorely miss Aron, who went on to a fantastic NASA career designing interplanetary spacecraft missions and was taken far too soon by cancer.)Aron and I began playing at Brown University’s coffeehouse and other Providence hangouts. A big chunk of our set list was Prine:“Please don’t bury me down in that cold, cold ground; I’d rather have you cut me up and pass me all around….”“Sam Stone was alone, when he popped his last balloon, climbing walls while sitting in a chair….”“Then the coal company came with the world’s biggest shovel, and they tortured the timber and tore up the land….”We hit the road to Williams College (some time around 1977) and performed at some coffeehouse there with my brother Jim and a talented guy playing a melodica named Tom Piazza.There was no way to know then that Piazza would go on to become a much-lauded writer of novels, television (Treme) and nonfiction, and would in 2018 meet, befriend and travel with Prine. One result was a beautiful on-the-road profile for Oxford American Magazine.Another is Living in the Present with John Prine, a book that originally was going to be a co-authored Prine memoir. But the musician, like so many people with pre-existing health challenges (he had many), was taken from this world by COVID-19 in April 2020. The book shape-shifted into a captivating, deeply-observed chronicle of the folk singer’s last few years. Piazza beautifully captures what he describes as Prine’s mix of “a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster.”This nugget from Prine’s older (and now also departed) brother David gives a taste:We talked about Prine’s subtle kind of political messaging, including this line from The Great Compromise: I used to sleep at the foot of Old GloryAnd awake in the dawn's early lightBut much to my surpriseWhen I opened my eyesI was a victim of the great compromiseAnd of course Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore:We were joined by my old Breakneck Ridge Revue co-conspirator David Ross (best known as the former director of the Whitney Museum).Here’s one of our Breakneck Ridge Revue performances of Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” (Breakneck Ridge and the Trouble Sisters):I hope you enjoy this brief break from Trump’s zone-flooding horror show.If you can afford to chip in, I hope you might consider becoming a financial supporter of Sustain What.Also consider contributing to The Hello in There Foundation, run by Prine’s family and supporting a heap of fine causes. I chipped in over the weekend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. (You can explore a rough transcript here.) You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers who you may have gotten to know through my post on climate tipping points; and Pam McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers who’s also been a past guest on Sustain What talking about biodiversity loss and indigenous land management. Also on hand was Matt Burgess, a University of Wyoming professor focused on the environmental and social implications of various economic pathways. He’s written a lot about the Trump climate report.Insert, 9 am ET Sept. 3 - Burgess has a Guided Civic Revival post up on the Dessler et al review and our conversation. He makes a vital point here:I think the Trump administration shoulders the blame for the rushed timelines, though, because they could have just commissioned a National Climate Assessment (as required by law), and none of this would have happened. They still can. We can still have a National Climate Assessment! (I know. I’m a broken record on this.) Also read the latest post by Judith Curry, one of the authors of the Trump administration’s climate science critique. Here’s her self-described bottom line:Bottom line: interesting report, laudable effort. We will be going through this report in much more detail. But in my initial assessment, the Dessler et al. report didn’t land any strong punches on the DOE Report, and I wouldn’t change any of the conclusions in the DOE Report in response. The combination of the DOE and Dessler report highlight areas of disagreement among climate scientists, and illustrates how weighting of different classes of evidence, addressing different topics, and different logical frameworks for linking evidence can lead to different conclusions. The existence of this kind of disagreement is essential information for policy makers, which hitherto has been hidden under the banner of “consensus” enforcement. - end insertTo me the most valuable aspect of this 85-plus-author review is clarifying that the report Secretary of Energy Chris Wright commissioned from his “Climate Working Group” is anything but a formal assessment. The downside is that the review renews a boxing-match model of thinking about climate science as teams vying for a win/lose decision. Back in 2013, I wroried about this in the context of debates over attributing aspects of particular local extreme weather events to human-driven global climate change. Those trying to highlight uncertainty and build doubt, I wrote, were like Muhammad Ali leaning against the ropes, drawing an opponent into wasting energy - rope-a-dope. They tend to win.At the same time, I completely understand why these hard-working researchers had to break away from summer vacations to respond. Listen and weigh in.Unfortunately this is a long ugly slog of a fight.Dessler’s post on the report is here:My “curtain raiser” post here has links to both the Trump-commissioned report and the response:Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime political scientist focused on the interface between climate science and policy (now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute), has posted an initial review of this review of the Trump-commissioned review:Do read Burgess’s full post, which includes many valuable reflections and references:Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To sustain my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.Thank you Dr. Ryan Maue, Dirty Moderate, Scott Killops, Leonard S Rodberglenrod, Lee, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

Bill McKibben and I differ on some issues (the decarbonizing role of nuclear energy is one; big theories of change are another) but we agree on a lot and vive la différence given the inevitability of “response diversity” facing wicked stresses.And he’s right that the accelerating surge of solar electricity generation, from Pakistan rooftops to African villages to the California and Texas grids, is a powerful and hopeful force amid so many dire signals.Here’s what he said about Texas, renewable energy and natural gas:Texas is completely fascinating. First thing is, Texas is now putting up more clean energy than California. That's true. California has done a better job with all of this, in part because they have things like building codes. So they're not using as much energy. Texas is use as much as you can, generate as much as you can. But they are at least true to their free market principles in that they've pretty much opened their grid to all comers. And it's so clear that the cheapest way to produce power for a growing Texas is to turn to the sun and the wind and batteries, that that's where it's gone. What was really interesting was what happened this spring in the legislature. The fossil fuel industry basically tried to do the same thing that they did in Washington with success, put the kibosh on sun and wind. And the bills that they proposed in Texas, everyone thought they would pass, even though they were sort of nuts. I mean, the most prominent one was described by many people as DEI for natural gas. If you wanted to put up five megawatts of solar, you had to put up five megawatts of gas too. And they didn't pass because lots of people appeared out of the hinterlands of Texas to say, boys, this is how we fund our school system now in rural Texas.So I hope you’ll listen to and share our full Sustain What conversation, which occurred pretty late in the east-coast evening. Let me know what you embrace or reject, and why. Ted Nordhaus posted a pretty biting The Breakthrough Journal critique of McKibben’s new book, and I hope you’ll read it, too. As I said above, response diversity guarantees smart folks will have different perceptions and messages facing the same data and situations; the key is finding cooperation amid those difference more than presuming one or the other will win a narrative battle.To sustain Sustain What , consider becoming a contributing subscriber.Here’s the “curtain raiser” post with lots of links:Thank you Gavin Lamb, Kim M., Dann, Tracy Frisch, Carter Brooks, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Here’s my Sustain What conversation with Ted Nordhaus of Breakthrough Institute from March 18, 2024:Explore the Overheated Social Climate with Ted Nordhaus This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

This is the podcast post for my Sustain What conversation eploring how cities, counties and perhaps your community can use data mapping and visualization tools to get ahead of climate risks as people and property increasingly sprawl into flood, fire, heat and storm danger zones - and as human-amped climate change intensifies some of those hazards.Watch above and share this post, or do the same on LinkedIn, Facebook, X/Twitter or YouTube:My guests were Alan Clinton, planning officer for the County of Kauai, Hawaii, and Taisha Fabricius, a technology leader at ESRI’s R&D Center in Zurich working to facilitate the capacity of risk managers, emergency preparedness personnel and planners to use “digital twins” of facilities or communities to identify and mitigate threats.Clinton described a particularly interesting case study in Kauai in which data on coastal erosion isn’t just clarifying decisionmaking; it has been directly integrated into regulations governing seaside building.We've been trying to find ways that we can really thread the needle on balancing community impacts and private property rights. And so the little viewer on the left actually indicates data that we integrated into something called a shoreline setback ordinance. And so this is another Esri application that we brought our data into. And this is my favorite snapshot of this area because there is a small boat harbor smack dab in the middle of that beach. You can see just based off the coloring on the left, it is leading to a disruption of the movement of sand, of wave energy, and so those properties on the left are dramatically facing chronic erosion at a rate of about, I believe, that transect is 3.5 feet per year. And so that is substantial. And on the right of that, it's a growing beach that is gaining sand. And so we've been very mindful of trying to limit shoreline hardening because we realize these are dynamic natural ecosystems that require some fluctuations. Our shoreline setback ordinance was a really great stepping stone for how we integrate science and satellite imagery to evaluate the march of the beach inland or as it grows and bring it into a regulatory policy.Taisha Fabricius from Esri took us on a tour of various applications of the company’s suite of urban and community planning platforms. Here’s a snippet of video showing how Zurich can anticipate flood impacts. I noted how valuable such a tool would be in Juneau, Alaska, where glacial lake outburst floods have become a chronic threat, as I just explored the day before:More resourcesGeo Week News - How Kaua'i County uses GIS to future-proof development Data Smart City Solutions (Harvard Kennedy School) - Future Tides: How Kaua'i Fights Sea Level Rise with DataThank you Lucy Gray, Sean Higgins, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Help sutain Sustain What if you can afford it. I hate paywalls. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

I pulled together a quick live Sustain What event today zooming out from the latest dramatic glacial lake outburst flood generated in Suicide Basin up in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska. That’s pretty far from most of us, but the challenge posed when glaciers block rivers and suddenly disgorge vast volumes of water extends to the Himalalyas, where millions of people live downstream of such deadly dynamics. This webcast starts with my overview of current events, I include this video snapshot I made from the many great National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey and university resources (juneauflood.com) focused on GLOF monitoring and warning along the Mendenhall River and glacier basin.I then segue to a rebroadcast of Deadly Himalayan Glacial Outburst Flood Foretold, With More Coming - my 2023 Sustain What conversation on a far more devastating outburst flood in Sikkim India with South Asian scientists and journalists (and US water-focused journalist Keith Schneider), including a researcher who predicted one such catastrophic flood two years before it unfolded. Here’s that 2021 paper led by Ashim Sattar: Future Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) hazard of the South Lhonak Lake, Sikkim Himalaya.Even more presciently, the Himalaya-based journalist Ramesh Bhushal wrote thie 2020 feature: Glacial lakes become more deadly as Himalayan ice meltsResearchers map the most dangerous lakes and call on China and Nepal to work together to reduce the threat of catastrophic floodingI follow journalists and scientists who tend to get ahead of threats and hope you do, too.Here’s more on Juneau’s chronic summer flood threat situation. There’s a fantastic Story Map on the threat here:Alan Gerard posted a great piece on Balanced Weather explaining how much federally funded science goes in to identifying, tracking and warning of such hazards:To keep track of the situation in Juneau go to KTOO public media’s livestream:Sustain What is only sustainable if a few more of you join the 2 percent of subscribers who chip in financially. Thanks for considering this! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

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 resilienceFacing 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 HubRead: How Kaua'i County uses GIS to future-proof developmentRead 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

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 falsehoodsMy 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 NerdThe 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 is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

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 dayCoincidentally, 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 countriesThe 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 reviewNaomi 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 a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.su

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 2017How 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:PostscriptFormer 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

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 collideWe 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe