The full discussion is below and on YouTube here. Here’s a key nugget:

Pre-webcast post: I imagine you’ve heard something about a still-unfolding drone panic.

It’d be one thing if drone-mania was confined to X. There I’ve been among a host of folks trying to push back. I particularly loved when the Goodyear Blimp X account shaned someone trying to harvest clicks using fuzzy video of the Goodyear Blimp.

But network TV news reporters, usually citing unverifiable assertions by elected officials, continue to amplify the story - often slipping from describing reports of drones to just saying drones (as if unmanned armadas are indeed roaming the skies).

Insert - 2 p.m. ET - I want to be clear that I’m not asserting there are no drones in the mix here. A Wall Street Journal story today includes links to a more-documented drone incursion over sensitive sites last year:

The recent wave of drone sightings involving large, unmanned aircraft often flying near sensitive sites started last month in New Jersey and has spread to other states such as New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The drones appear similar to a fleet seen near sensitive national-security sites in Virginia a year ago.

But it’s also clear that most of what’s made headlines and social media so far is spurious. - End insert

I imagine the buzz recalls some things you’ve heard recently about pet-eating immigrants, UFOs, and more. But do you recall the great “crazy clown” panic of 2016? I didn’t until I began poking around. There’s a broader, deeper pattern here.

I ran a webcast and posted about UFO-mania a couple of years ago and have been back-and-forthing about all of this with one of my guests on that episode - the longtime conspiracy-debunking journalist Keith Kloor.

Kloor pointed me to the invaluable cross-cutting research on social panics and the like by the medical sociologist Robert E. Barthlomew. I’m happy to say Bartholomew, who has written a batch of relevant books and writes the “It’s Catching” blog at Psychology Today, is my guest on today’s special pop-up Sustain What show on the current social-media-amped drone bubble and the underlying phenomena that feed such moments.

Watch and engage with us on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube or my X/Twitter @revkin account.

Bartholomew latest “It’s Catching” post is a short piece laying out how New Jersey was a focal point for another kind of aerial panic, during “The German Scare” around World War I. Here’s an excerpt but please read the full article:

Mysterious aerial lights—seemingly under intelligent control—are spotted above New Jersey and adjacent Delaware, sometimes over sensitive military installations. Some express fear that it may be a foreign adversary carrying out reconnaissance missions. The current drone scare? No, the northeastern United States over 100 years ago.

Back then, the sightings of mysterious aerial objects coincided with World War I and "the German Scare." Most of the sightings turned out to be misidentifications of known astronomical bodies, such as Venus. Others were fire balloons, which consisted of paper balloons with candles attached near the mouth and were made buoyant by the generation of heat….

The [current] drone scare reflects two recent moral panics in America—the fear of new technologies coupled with the longstanding fear of foreigners and the so-called "enemy at the gate." Just as the lights over New Jersey and Delaware were once attributed to German spies or advanced warfare technologies, today's sightings are likely shaped by fears of foreign interference, espionage, or technological threats. Whether these objects have been sent by a foreign actor or an illusion fueled by modern fears, the current panic appears to be rooted in the same anxieties that marked a similar scare over a century ago.

In early 1915, with war anxieties at a peak, the Canadian Government declared a state of emergency and posted sentries around the Parliament after a series of UFO sightings near the border with New York State amid fears that German sympathizers in America were going to conduct a bombing raid on Canada.

Historically, UFO scares have had a tendency to spread. It would not be surprising to see reports pick up around the country and globally as people scrutinize the skies and begin to notice objects that have always been there.

I also urge you to follow the social media postings of meteorologist Matthew Cappucci on the drone surge. Here’s a great one from his Instagram account.

Mick West, a popular and much-attacked deunker of UFO reports and the folks who anmplify them, has posted an excellent explainer of the drone sightings:

Almost a decade ago, I was approached by a publisher of illustrated histories of ideas and disciplines (The Law Book, The Physics Book, ….) to pull together an illustrated volume exploring 100 moments in humanity’s relationship with, and understanding of, weather and the climate system.

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It was a lot of work, but illuminating and fascinating work - and took a little village. My wonderful wife, Lisa Mechaley, a longtime sustainability educator, joined in the research and writing. I also enlisted a batch of friends and scholars with particular experience or specialties to contribute some of the mini chapters.

The result, Weather: An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change, was reviewed favorably by many. I particularly enjoyed Jason Samenow’s description in a mini review and interview with me in the Washington Post: “Think of this book like dining on tapas, boasting savory flavors, some unexpected, that constitute a satisfying whole..”

I really do see the book just that way - as drawing people of all ages into the deeper story of humany’s ever-evolving relationship with the elements.

There’s still time to buy and receive the book before Christmas and Hannukah (at least via Amazon), and I hope you’ll consider doing so!

Here’s an excerpt from my conversation with Ira Flatow on Science Friday to get you started

Here’s one spread on the history of air conditioning, which was marketed as “manufactured weather” in the early 20th century (way before discussions of geoengineering - essentially a manufactured climate; that’s in the book, as well, of course).

Here’s a video in which I explain the book project:

Here’s some of the Q&A Jason Samenow did with me for the Post, along with some spreads from the book.

Jason - Who is its intended audience?

Andy - It may sound pat, but this book was literally written for everybody — in the sense that it’s descriptive, not prescriptive. The chronology shows how research and observations pointing to human-driven global warming are an inherent part of the broader sweep of science illuminating the nature of Earth’s climate system — including the parts that remain unknown and some even unknowable.

It was designed for everybody in another way — with art accompanying every milestone and clarity guaranteed by my co-author, Lisa Mechaley, a longtime middle school science teacher who now helps other busy teachers incorporate environmental insights into lesson plans (and who happens to be my wife!).

Jason - In researching all of these fascinating vignettes about our evolving understanding of weather and climate throughout history, what one thing surprised you the most?

Andy - I was most surprised, after more than three decades of reporting on climate and weather, by how much I didn’t know — that the worst wildfire in U.S. history wasn’t in the West, that so many amateur scientists played vital roles in knowledge building, that a woman first documented carbon dioxide’s potential to warm the planet and another invented the windshield wiper, that the jet stream was weaponized in World War II.

Jason - You write a lot about some of the most important people who made critical, groundbreaking discoveries about weather and climate. Is there someone who, in your mind, stands out as being vastly underappreciated for his or her discoveries?

Andy - I loved stumbling on a pioneering insight about the potential for climate to change written by an observant Chinese polymath and government official, Shen Kuo, in 1088 — after he’d seen fossil bamboo in a region with no bamboo.

Hitler’s disastrous disdain for meteorologists

Jason - What is your favorite, single most memorable vignette in this book effort?

Andy - As you can imagine, this is an excruciating question, given the range of events and insights we discovered. So I’ll offer one that has both memorable artwork and an extraordinary look at Hitler’s dim view of meteorologists — a stance that did not serve him well on the Russian front:

Weather has often played an unpredictable role in the outcome of wars, as when a change in the winds helped Britain’s fleet defeat the more powerful Spanish Armada in 1588. But sometimes its importance, even when highly predictable, has been underappreciated. This has been especially true when it comes to invasions of Russia, so famed for notorious cold and paralyzing soggy thaws that historians of war have written of “General Winter” and “General Mud” as battlefield foes in that country. Whether in Sweden’s failed 1708 invasion during the Great Northern War or Napoleon’s try in 1812, the cold was generally not the only, or even the decisive, factor. But it was always there, killing, crippling, and debilitating troops.

In Germany’s attempt to crush Russia in 1941, Hitler’s overconfidence led to a delayed approach to Moscow, allowing winter to join the fray. In his 2011 book, The Storm of War, historian Andrew Roberts recalled how, on December 20, 1941, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels appealed to German citizens for warm clothing to send to the front: “Those at home will not deserve a single peaceful hour if even one soldier is exposed to the rigors of winter without adequate clothing.”

It was too little, too late.

Hitler’s dismissive attitude toward his weather forecasters could well have contributed to the disastrous setback. In a monologue on meteorology recorded late on the night of October 14, 1941, he made his views clear:

“One can’t put any trust in the [meteorological service] forecasts. . . . Weather prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature — whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. . . .”

In his account, Roberts noted that Hitler’s library contained many books on Napoleon’s campaigns. With some irony, he added, “Yet he did not learn the most obvious lesson from his predecessor.”

Read on to hear from a batch of the scientists and scholars who collaborated across many disciplines to write this new Nature Climate Change paper warning against overuse of the tipping point frame in describing both human-driven global warming and societal responses to this threat:

‘Tipping points’ confuse and can distract from urgent climate action

Robert E. Kopp, Elisabeth A. Gilmore, Rachael L. Shwom, Helen Adams, Carolina Adler, Michael Oppenheimer, Anand Patwardhan, Chris Russill, Daniela N. Schmidt & Richard York

I’ve highlighted the names of the authors you’ll meet.

You can watch and share the conversation on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or via my X/Twitter account.

Watchwords is my running series on terms that confuse or distort, either unwittingly or intentionally, in pursuit of climate and wider sustainability goals.

Tipping points language has steadily built around humanity’s climate change challenge for a couple of decades. There’s now an international science collaborative, the Global Tipping Points project led by Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter.

(Here’s an interview I did recently with Lenton on humanity’s shrinking niche.)

And yet big concerns about this approach to understanding and addressing global warming are being expressed researchers across a range of fields, as this new paper summarizes in its abstract:

Tipping points have gained substantial traction in climate change discourses. Here we critique the ‘tipping point’ framing for oversimplifying the diverse dynamics of complex natural and human systems and for conveying urgency without fostering a meaningful basis for climate action. Multiple social scientific frameworks suggest that the deep uncertainty and perceived abstractness of climate tipping points render them ineffective for triggering action and setting governance goals. The framing also promotes confusion between temperature-based policy benchmarks and properties of the climate system. In both natural and human systems, we advocate for clearer, more specific language to describe the phenomena labelled as tipping points and for critical evaluation of whether, how and why different framings can support scientific understanding and climate risk management.

This divide is not new. See my 2009 New York Times article at the bottom of the post.

One concern of these authors: A murky mess of different dynamics are being distilled under a single label. Here’s a table from the paper.

The paper is behind a paywall, but lead author Bob Kopp of Rutgers has posted a great thread on Bluesky (yes Bluesky is proving valuable), that you should explore. Here are some key points from the thread:

The natural and social phenomena described as “tipping points” are individually important to study, and have been studied since well before the “tipping points” framing rose to prominence in climate science…

At the dawn of the modern science of projecting future sea level change, John Mercer in 1978 warned of the “threat of disaster” from West Antarctic ice sheet collapse. And a key 2002 National Academies report, “Abrupt climate change: inevitable surprises,” chaired by Richard Alle[y], covered topics including rapid changes in the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

[I wrote about the 2002 report and a followup from the National Academies in 2013.]

But the “tipping points” frame itself rose to prominence later, in the mid-2000s. Scientists like Hansen, Schellnhuber and Lenton built the framing on top of the pop sociology of Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a 2000 bestseller entitled “The Tipping Point.” And use of the term has been growing since…

With nearly two decades of hindsight since this early work, our Perspective asks: is this framing useful for scholarly insight? And is it productive for triggering the sort of climate action envisioned by its founders?

In both cases, we find most of the evidence favors the negative, but also that more systematic research into framing choices is needed….

Does lumping the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet together with social phenomena like anomie, polarization, radicalization, or technology learning curves help advance understanding? We are dubious….

The word ‘point’ in ‘tipping point’ also misleads. It suggests that there is a ‘point’ that might be uncertain but is in principle theoretical identifiable in advance, beyond which change is unavoidable.

Even in a classic example like the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, climate model results suggest that the *same* greenhouse gas trajectory can sometimes cause a collapse and sometimes not. (eg @aromanou.bsky.social et al 2023)

On the threat of overheated tipping point warnings around that Atlantic Ocean heat conveyer, see my earlier discussions of the peril of “running AMOC.”

Here’s more from Kopp on tipping points:

‘Point’ also collapses the multidimensional complexity of real complex system to a mental model of unidimensional change. Think of the coral example — it’s not just temperature, but also oxygen concentration, calcite concentration, human stressors, etc that determine the propensity to die-back.

The paper’s dominant focus is on social science and here’s a key Kopp observation from the Bluesky thread:

Social psychology indicates anticipatory action is more likely for threats perceived as relatively certain and nearby in time and space; climate tipping points are diffuse, uncertain (often deeply so) and often global.

He talks about the danger of incorrectly implying that a political, negotiated marker like avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming beyond the pre-industrial temperature is a tipping point in the physical climate:

In theory, a tipping point threshold might be known very precisely: for example, we *could* know that sustained global mean warming exceeding precisely 1.50 °C would lead to an irreversible commitment to ice-sheet collapse, global coral reef die-off, glacier melt, and ocean circulation changes.

If this were the case, then it might justify great effort to limit global mean warming to 1.49 °C, even (for example) invoking ‘emergency’ geoengineering measures to avoid crossing this point of no return. Friends in the Bay Area tell me that this belief isn’t uncommon among tech bros.

And it’s easy to find examples in popular media of the 1.5°C policy target of the Paris Agreement being confused for a physical threshold of the Earth system.

Kopp points to this unbelievably bad and false World Economic Forum post, which upends decades of scholarly and scientific discussion: 1.5°C is a physical limit: Here’s why this target can’t be negotiated.

Please read the full thread (and full paper if you have access; I did). Here’s his kicker:

To my eye, after nearly 40 years of reporting on global warming science and societal responses (or the lack of them), nearly all of potential worst-case jolts resulting from unabated global warming remain much more like the “monsters behind the door” described by the Princeton climate researcher Steve Pacala many years ago. Here’s my snippet from the 1922 film Nosferatu to illustrate Pacala’s idea.]

More viewing, reading and resources

Here’s a related Tipping Points Reality Check conversation I had with Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer:

NASA climate science veteran Gavin Schmidt first discussed the need for caution in applying tipping points framing to climate science context in a 2006 post on Realclimate.

Schmidt ended with this still-apt passage:

Much of the discussion about tipping points, like the discussion about ‘dangerous interference’ with climate often implicitly assumes that there is just ‘a’ point at which things tip and become ‘dangerous’. This can lead to two seemingly opposite, and erroneous, conclusions – that nothing will happen until we reach the ‘point’ and conversely, that once we’ve reached it, there will be nothing that can be done about it. i.e. it promotes both a cavalier and fatalistic outlook. However, it seems more appropriate to view the system as having multiple tipping points and thresholds that range in importance and scale from the smallest ecosystem to the size of the planet. As the system is forced into new configurations more and more of those points are likely to be passed, but some of those points are more globally serious than others. An appreciation of that subtlety may be useful when reading some of the worst coverage on the topic.

I’ve been writing about the tipping point frame and climate change since 2009:

If you appreciate what I’m doing here, clicking the ♡ button supposedly boosts the post’s visibility on Substack. And of course subscribe and, if you can afford it, financially support Sustain What.

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Updated post-broadcast: Please watch my food-focused Sustain What conversation with my friend George Steinmetz, who has spent the same four decades I’ve been reporting on global change photographing it - mostly from above, and in his pre-drone decades from the dodgy vantage point of a powered paraglider.

He is truly one of a kind. This image from his last book, The Human Planet, for which I wrote the text, says heaps about his obsession with aerial vantage points:

A top-down view of fish, fields, flocks and more

Steinmetz has a singular obsession with capturing and conveying the dynamics, for better or worse, at the interface between communities, resources and ecosystems. For the past decade he has centered most of his photography on a single theme: how human communities around the world glean or raise food - from deserts to the deep sea, the arctic to the tropics, fields to laboratories.

He has distilled the best imagery into a new book that is a visual feast, Feed the Planet, with text by the journalist and author Joel K. Bourne, Jr. and a foreword by Michael Pollan.

You can get the feel for the book in Steinmetz’s million-follower instagram account:

geosteinmetz

A post shared by @geosteinmetz

Watch and share here or on LinkedIn, my X account @revkin or YouTube. And please share this post with others who’d be interested!

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In the second half hour, we were joined by two researchers focused on food and nutrition economics and trends, William A. Masters of Tufts University and Amelia B. Finaret of Allegheny College, who are the authors of the open-access textbook Food Economics.

On Bluesky, I noticed that Masters took issue with a Science Magazine article distilling some of the book’s focus on large agriculture systems. Here’s one graph he posted from the textbook showing how the vast majority of farms around the world are miniscule operations.

Also watch my 2021 Sustain What conversation with Steinmetz, done around the release of our book The Human Planet - Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene:

Vaclav Smil’s recipe for feeding the world

Someone else who’s tracked food and agricultural trends for decades is one of my top go-to brains on resource trends, Vaclav Smil. If you’ve never seen the 2009 conversation we had at Canada’s Perimeter Institute on this question - 9 Billion People + One Planet = ? - I urge you to do so.

Smil’s new book, How to Feed the World, is being published this spring and I’m posting a foundational conclusion below [with my bracketed notes] and will be citing it in this conversation:

[A] realistic outlook for maintaining adequate global food supply remains promising. No unprecedented gains and no untried radical solutions are required to provide the next generation with adequate food supply: we just need to keep on improving production efficiencies, reducing waste, adjusting diets, and promoting measures that reduce food’s overall environmental impact. [Keep in mind that word “just” hides a lot of big challenges]

Declining populations (now the norm in all high-income countries that do not allow large-scale immigration), falling fertility rates (which includes all populous countries, with Asian rates already below or near the replacement level, but with African countries still well above it), and moderating demand for food (typical of all aging societies) should make these quests easier than we thought a generation ago, when the best long-range forecasts saw the global population rising well above 10 billion people. Now the most likely outlook is for a peak of 9.7 billion by the mid-2060s, followed by a decline to about 8.8 billion in 2100, a total some 2 billion lower than some previous forecasts. [After three decades tracking population trends, I’m with him on this, despite assertions by overpopulation campaigners and Musk-style implosion catastrophists.]

At the same time, the unequally distributed climatic consequences of global warming will bring a combination of negative and positive changes, and hence the quest will become harder in some regions and for some crops. And while the potential for radical gains due to the genetic modification of crops and animals looks impressive, the dates of large-scale commercial adoption remain unknown, as do the prospects for any substantial voluntary modifications of prevailing diets. Global transitions take a long time. [See my recent reality check on the slowness of energy transitions.]

There is nothing new in facing such combinations of uncertainties. I wrote this book to offer facts rather than speculations, and as it happens, the facts are reassuring. We should remain suspicious of any long-range quantitative forecasts, but—considering basic biophysical realities, continuing performance gains, and a realistic assessment of future improvements—it is rational to argue that, barring mass-scale conflicts and unprecedented social breakdown, the world will be able to feed its growing population beyond the middle of the 21st century, when the combination of new demographic realities and new scientific advances may present us with entirely new options.

So please watch and share this conversation and weigh in with food practices and experiences that you see leading in a positive direction.

Abuse of marine resources remains widespread, as this paper by Boris Worm and others in Science last January made clear: Global shark fishing mortality still rising despite widespread regulatory change.

Nontheless, projects like Global Fishing Watch are making a difference, as I explored last January.

Now I’m happy to share an update posted by , one of the most innovative investigative journalists I know. He made a prize-winning beat out of covering environmental and human-rights abuses in the world’s largely-ungoverned "outlaw ocean" beyond nation’s economic zones. But he and his team are also working on a new tool to help quickly clarify whether some activity spotted within a nation's waters violates its laws. Read his post here:

“Is That Legal?”

Here’s more on this tool and the other service-oriented tool kits developoed by this journalism project:

And if you missed our 2023 Sustain What conversation looking at the ’s many dimensions, here it is:

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Here are some additional sources we touched on in the conversation that weren’t in my initial post:

• Human activities now fuel two-thirds of global methane emissions (Global Carbon Project, R B Jackson et al 2024 Environ. Res. Lett. 19 101002)

  

  The distribution of emission changes from 2000 to 2020 by latitude emphasizes the tropics, which contribute an estimated ∼60%–70% of the total global change over the last two decades for both approaches (BU: 45 [29–68] Tg CH₄ yr⁻¹; TD: 36 [6–47] Tg CH₄ yr⁻¹) (table 2). Mid-latitudes are responsible for the additional 30%–40% increase in global emissions; in contrast, emissions from higher latitudes (60–90°N) are estimated to be stable or to have decreased slightly, attributable to slightly decreasing anthropogenic emissions (table 2).

• Microbes, not fossil fuels, are behind recent methane surge - Climate.gov staff, Oct. 29, 2024

• Maine Farmers Receptive to Seaweed Feed - Survey highlights receptiveness of organic dairy farmers to feeding methane-reducing feeds

• Atmospheric methane removal may reduce climate risks (Sam Abernethy and Robert B Jackson, Environmental Research Letters, April 12, 2024)

Much of the modern world was built in a gap between far more powerful earthquakes, as my #MindTheGap disaster-awareness cards note:

That makes it easy to lapse into somnolent “whatever” mode and focus on the inconvenience of a tsunami warning that didn’t pan out.

The initial 7.3-magnitude quake assesssement and warning were quite stark, leading to a bit of public whiplash when the warning was canceled about 50 minutes later.

The New York Times ran a story on San Francisco reactions with this subheading: “Many Bay Area residents raced away from the ocean after a jolting cellphone alert warned, ‘You are in danger.’ Others raced toward it.”

That is the human way….

Disaster warnings in situations where data are initially scant are a tough judgment call and must be accompanied by a lot of pre-disaster education (like the annual earthquake “Great Shakeout” exercise). The ground motion is only one factor determining if a seafloor jolt generates dangerous waves.

Insert, Dec. 7, 7:45 a.m. ET - I reached out to veteran University of Colorado earthquake researcher Roger Bilham and others and Bilham sent this note from the field, where he is out collecting data along the San Andreas Fault (I cleaned up some typos): “The Mendocino fracture zone can’t generate tsunami. I was surprised to see any kind of alert. It is a strike slip fault on flat (ish) sea floor- the sliding doesn't push water around.”

The Substacking earthquake researchers posted a helpful explainer noting that there was a significant possibility of a tsunami nonetheless, and that justified the warning:

Because the earthquake was strike-slip, causing lateral rather than vertical motion of the seafloor, it was not expected to trigger a tsunami. However, it is always better to be safe than sorry: even strike-slip earthquakes can cause underwater landslides, which can create tsunamis. Because underwater landslides are difficult to detect (much more difficult than earthquakes), the only way to be sure this did not happen is to wait and see. - end of insert

Times reporter Camille Baker filed a helpful short explainer on the assessment and decision process delineating which type of alert is issued.

The tsunami of confusion on Elon Musk’s X

Twitter, which had become a mainstay for disaster-warning communication, utterly failed as X, thanks to a host of changes mandated by Elon Musk, as Times reporter Ryan Mac explained in an X thread (and on Bluesky):

The tsunami scare today in the Bay Area illustrates how Elon Musk has changed X for the worse in emergencies. This is the real account of Berkeley PD. But changes in verification means it no longer has a verified badge. Anyone searching for immediate info might be uncertain if this post is legit.

The link in the post meant it did not get as much play by the X algorithm. And not having a verified badge meant other content was prioritized over it as well. Now some users are seeing that X is removing exact time stamps from posts. That will only lead to more confusion in emergencies.

Public service accounts were so crucial to Twitter and Musk undermined them almost immediately after his takeover. Twitter employees warned him when he wanted to change verification.

Ryan Mac is the co-author, with Times tech reporter Kate Conger, of an essential book on Musk and Twitter, Character Limit (one of the best double entendres ever?) and I’m working with them to join a Sustain What webcast soon.

I hate to say I told you so, but I did write this piece two years ago drawing on the wisdom of a former disaster-comms-focused Twitter engineer, Jim Moffitt, and , among others:

A monitored Earth is a safer Earth - all hail DART buoys

I’ll close by circling back to the tsunami warning itself. One thing to note about the warning: it came because of substantial - but still insufficient - investment in realtime monitoring of Earth systems that can threaten human affairs in big, if rare, ways.

The little red squiggle in this image below is the signature of the earthquake detected by and transmitted from one of the buoys in the DART earthquake and tsunami monitoring network established across the Pacific and Indian Oceans (and some other water bodies) in recent decades. [Insert, Dec. 7, 7:30 a.m. ET: Just to be clear, the squiggle was not a passing tsunami; it’s the record of what’s called a Rayleigh wave passing in the seabed.]

Here’s a wider view.

This system is getting old and outdated and it’s worth crediting the outgoing Biden administration for devoting $30 million from the Bipartisan Infrastrucuture Law to beef it up. Incidentally, the buoy in the photo is the one in Mendocino Bay that generated that vital signal.

Somehow I don’t think you’ll be seeing that kind of long-term investment in resilience coming under the incoming Trump administration with its DOGE advisors including Elon Musk, and with NOAA already a stated target of Project 2025. I’ll be eager to credit them all if they do the right thing.

Coda

I’m best know for my 40 years on the climate beat, but I’d like to think my earthquake risk reporting has been as helpful to society.

In December 2004 I was the lead writer on a New York Times deep dive into the science pointing to under-appreciated tsunami threats, focused on the Boxing Day catastrophe as the tsunami pulse from an Indonesian mega quake exacted horrific tolls across the Indian Ocean. Before and after that event, I’d written about vastly increased exposure to such danger, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where the “mind the gap” warnings are particularly clear.

I’ll be keeping at this with your help, so please support what I’m tring to do financially if you can.

Related post:

In recent years, I and other journalists have mainly paid attention to emissions of methane from natural gas, oil and coal extraction. It’s sexy and fits political and activist frames. (Remember the fracking fight?) As long ago as 2009, I was reporting on how new technology, particularly infrared imagery (gift link), was revealing methane leak hot spots.

Now satellites are doing this as well. If you’d asked me in 1992, when I did some work with the Environmental Defense Fund, that this environmental group would be launching its own methane-tracking satellite, I would have laughed out loud. And yet..

It’s vital to pursue these no-brainer emission cuts. But it’s grossly insufficient, as you’ll learn.

Media also focused on dramatic instances of methane releases in the Arctic, like combusting puffs of the gas released from warming lakes, as shown here by Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

But it turns out that the tropics, and particularly wetlands, are the main source of emissions growth in recent years (see this comprehensive 2023 analysis). The Arctic may shift into the plus category down the line, but much-clicked permafrost “methane time bomb” headlines - part of the grander theme of catastrophic climate tipping points - don’t hold up too well, as you’ll learn a week from Friday in a webcast on this new paper: ‘Tipping points’ confuse and can distract from urgent climate action. I’ll post on this event shortly. An earlier tipping point dicussion with one author, Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton, is here.

My guests on December 6 were two top-notch methane researchers, Rob Jackson of Stanford University and the Global Carbon Project, who has a new book on climate solutions, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere; and Sylvia Englund Michel of the University of Colorado, who led a new study pointing to biological sources - not gas and oil produciton - as the main source of the recent buildup.

Here’s the open-access study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Rapid shift in methane carbon isotopes suggests microbial emissions drove record high atmospheric methane growth in 2020–2022. Michel was also a co-author of the 2023 paper I cite above pointing to the tropics.

You can also watch and share the show on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or X/Twitter.

Explore Jackson’s new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky - The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere.

Here’s an excerpt from a previous Sustain What conversation on the methane side of the climate challenge and a global pledge for deep reductions made as part of the climate-treaty negotiation journey. The full discussion is here.

A deeper methane dive

Heat-trapping carbon dioxide remains the gorilla in the global greenhouse - with its long lifetime once liberated making its heating influence on climate cumulative. It builds like unpaid credit card debt, meaning the pain doesn’t stop just because you cut spending.

If all human-generated emissions somehow stopped, warming would rapidly come to a halt, as just explored on . But there is zero chance (even net-zero chance) of that happening for decades given global trends in energy demand compared to advances in clean-energy options, infrastructure lock-in (see my energy-transition chat with Mekala Krishnan and the output of ) and the scale and cost of methods for drawing carbon dioxide out of the air and putting it in millenniums-long cold storage (see my epic CCS conversation with Vaclav Smil).

Those realities, along with arguments that rapid cooling steps are necessary to forestall imminent tipping-point catastrophic warming (even though many climate scientists say that threat is overstated), have put the spotlight on actions addressing the methane problem.

Methane matters

The CH4 molecule is the main ingredient in what industry calls “natural” gas - with leaks from coal mines and gas and oil infrastructure a major source. It’s also generated through biological processes taking place in the guts of ruminant livestock as well as wetlands around the world - whether natural or human-built (e.g., rice paddies).

Methane has dozens of times more heating influence than CO2 but is broken down within a decade or two, meaning stopping emissions can rapidly stabilize the amount in the air and limit this contribution to planetary heating.

Here’s a deft summary of the situation by the longtime methane analyst Drew Shindell of Duke University (part of a package published in July with a multi-author Frontiers in Science paper laying out a three-pronged strategy for methane stabilization):

[T]he amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled since the Industrial Revolution, with increased methane emissions causing about two-thirds as much warming as CO₂ to date [2]. But, on the bright side, methane is naturally cleared from the atmosphere much more quickly than CO₂: while CO₂ sticks around for centuries, most methane only stays in the atmosphere for about a decade. This means that while reducing CO₂ emissions is the most important thing people can do to protect Earth from climate change in the long term, reducing methane is the most important thing we can do to help our climate in the shorter term, to keep the planet as healthy as possible while you and your friends grow up.

Also read this September commentary in The Conversation, by Pep Canadell, Marielle Saunois and our guest, Rob Jackson: Methane emissions are at new highs. It could put us on a dangerous climate path

Yglesias and a batch of Substackers have a campaign set up to support a village in Rwanda, with a substantial matching opportunity today - Giving Tuesday. I’m chipping in today and hope you can, too. Here’s his top-line summary of the ask:

For those of you who prefer to skip straight to the ask, this Giving Tuesday, we’re inviting readers to join us, along with Nate Silver, Brian Beutler, Mikala Jamison, Rachel Cohen, Tim Lee, Joey Politano, and other writers in raising money to support cash transfers to people living on less than $2.15 per day. Donations will be matched up to $400,000.

Donate to GiveDirectly

Here’s an excerpt from Yglesias’s post explaining how, and why, this works:

[T]he rise of cell phones has enabled mobile payment systems in many countries around the world, including some countries that are incredibly poor and otherwise lack well-developed banking systems. It’s not available in every country, but GiveDirectly’s poverty relief programs have operated for years now in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda and Uganda, with other cash transfer programs in Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, Morocco, Mozambique, and the US.

The way they run their poverty relief programs is that first they identify villages where the majority of the population is living on less than $2.15 per day, and then after explaining the program to everyone, they set up a transfer of approximately $1,000 to every household in the village with no strings attached.

There are obviously other ways you could think about doing this, but their method has a lot of advantages, like ensuring that you don’t provoke intra-village rivalry between those who receive the benefits and those who don’t. Ideally, of course, at some point we won’t have tons of villages that have so much systematic poverty that this works, at which point we’d need more sophisticated methods of identifying specific very poor people. For now, though, there’s unfortunately enough poverty that GiveDirectly is not running out of village-level targets.

And it works well! Meta-analysis shows a large majority of studies find positive impacts on monetary poverty and a preponderance of evidence showing improvements on savings, investment, and production.

Importantly, there are also studies looking at the question of whether one-off cash transfers reduce employment and education, which seems like the most plausible way cash transfers could backfire. But while there are some studies that find reductions in employment, three times as many find that employment increases (most show no result) and the evidence on education is even better. I don’t think we can necessarily promise a positive upward spiral of health gains, educational gains, and employment gains generating sustained long-term growth increases. But there are enough positive findings out here that indicate it’s at least possible with complementary good governance or good luck. Beyond that, though, I think the mechanical impacts on poverty are more than enough to make this a worthwhile cause.

Incremental but…

Yes, this is incremental. I’ve been in communities from the depths of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest to the periurban informal settlements of Nairobi to rural India where the same situation exists.

But the opportunity is concrete and consequential given the amplifying power of helping even one kid take a safer, more productive path to an empowered life.

Shanize Njeri Wanjiku, a 10-year-old poet I met and interviewed in 2016 in one of Nairobi’s poorest neighborhoods (a settlement largely composed of recent arrivals from even poorer rural regions), is just one example of the human potential that exists everywhere - when granted safety, nutrition and education:

Here’s the related Dot Earth post: A Girl from a Nairobi Slum Issues a Resonant Call for Post-Tribal Unity in Kenya.

If you care about extreme weeather preparedness, I hope you follow research meteorologist Ryan Maue’s Substack.

And I also hope you read and share his New York Times op-ed warning the incoming Republican-controlled Congress and the next Trump White House against rash actions at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Here’s my paywall-free gift link to Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting and here’s the nut:

For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” An arm of Mr. Trump’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wants to eliminate $500 billion in spending by cutting programs whose funding has expired. That could include NOAA.

With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future.

In the op-ed, Maue highlights sustained efforts by Republican Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma’s 3rd District to forge legislation advancing NOAA’s capacities to do its work and, most recently, to establish it as a freestanding agency. Listen to this April 2023 House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on Establishing an Independent NOAA for more:

As Maue writes:

While there are already multiple efforts at NOAA to improve weather modeling, observation collection and marine management, Congress has piled more responsibilities on the agency, and the funding has not kept up. NOAA is spread thin, with a backlog of maintenance and upgrades that will probably take years to get through without significantly more sustained budget support.

Given that Maue served for a time as NOAA chief scientist in the first Trump administration, there’s actually a chance what he says here may reach key members of Congress - if not necessarily penetrate Trump’s growing protective ring of loyalists. (His tenure in the first Trump administration was bumpy, as the Washington Post explains.)

Here’s his kicker:

We are in a golden age of technological advancement in understanding and predicting what is happening in the atmosphere and the oceans, and NOAA is uniquely well positioned to lead the way. Instead of jettisoning decades of expertise, we need an all-hands-on-deck NOAA modernization strategy to meet a rapidly changing climate. Building a weather-ready nation for the future will require hard work, but Americans of all political stripes should back NOAA to lead the way.

Maue has frequently been disparaged by progressive climate campaigners and scientists, given a pedigree including a stint at the libertarian Cato Insitute. But I’ve found his views on extreme weather and human-driven climate change mostly sync with the state of climate science as laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

INSERT, 12/1, 2 pm ET - The University of Georgia climate and weather scientist J. Marshall Shepherd pointed me to a WeatherGeeks episode he did with Rep. Frank Lucas: Enshrining NOAA into Law. - end insert

I hope Congress listens to Princeton physicist Will Happer, as well. Happer, who was vetted by Trump in early 2017 as a possible science adviser and, yes, thinks more carbon dioxide is great, warned that the United States needs more, not less, sustained climate monitoring and analysis in a video interview I did while reporting a Propublica story:

Will Happer:

I’m all for climate science. You know. If I were king, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things…. One of our problems in climate is there you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’

Better weather warnings and a disaster review board

I also suggest you watch my related weather-forecasting conversation with another longtime extreme weather meteorologist, Mike Smith. For many years he’s warned about the declining skill of National Weather Service tornado and thundersrtorm warnings and he’s a longtime advocate for a National Disaster Review Board.

On Helene's Inland Flood Catastrophe and the Need for a National Disaster Review Board

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From Dot Earth, November 26, 2010 → Twitter can be a remarkable tool. For me, it’s kind of like having a planet-spanning two-way sensory apparatus tracking sources of information or insights ranging from Stan Lee to the Dalai Lama, NASA’s Asteroid Watch program to the hashtag #SaveSharks. [This remains true, when you dive beneath the toxic surface.]

But it’s also a medium, like all others, that reflects broader societal norms, including the one requiring almost anything useful to provide a revenue stream for its creators. And so comes the dawn of a very strange concept, the Twitter “promoted trend.” [Now there are “trend takeovers” on X].

Imagine if someone paid society to shift back to, say, wide polka-dot ties. Well, you can nudge a “trend” on Twitter to the top of the list for money. (Of course you can also cut the security lines at airports with money. And the yellow identifying labels, as in the image above, distinguish this from what record companies did to manufacture hits.)

The first one I noticed was the paid promotion of #BlackFriday by Target in the run-up to today’s shopping frenzy. Countering such efforts is the perennial “Buy Nothing Day” campaign of anti-consumption crusaders like Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir.

Try “Make Something Day”

There’s another alternative to both extremes, which I’ve pushed once in awhile on Dot Earth: Make Something Day. I’ll give it one more push, including a proposed (and unpromoted) Twitter hashtag: #MakeSomething.

It can take time, sure. It took me more than two years to move from plans to action in turning field-sawn boards into a kitchen table. But it sure feels gratifying to sit at that table each morning.

[I’ve made several other tables since then now that we’re settling down in Maine.]

It is an uphill battle, of course. The marketing of consumption itself, let alone specific products to consume, has been in high gear since at least 2006, when President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to “ go shopping more” to avert a recession. That message, although tempered by the housing implosion, has grown louder in the United States of late, with the confidence of consumers a predicate for resumed prosperity.

Now the mantra has spread in a big way to China, and among economists who see more spending by Chinese consumers as a way forward for the global economy. This passage from David Leonhardt’s magazine story, “In China, Cultivating the Urge to Splurge,” says it all: “For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack.”

In the end, a balance will be needed, involving savings and commerce, if there is a chance of developing economies that function for the long haul, and that can fit on a finite planet. There was an interesting discussion of the need for balance, and a smaller role in the global economy for American consumers, on the Room for Debate blog last year.

The argument for getting Americans to save more and the Chinese to spend more was laid out on the Harvard Business Review blog.

Chances of the world settling in on a common sweet spot of saving and spending are low to nil. And while it’s great to make something, it’s impossible for everyone to make everything. (While I could make the kitchen tabletop, I couldn’t make the saw, the sander or the finely turned legs, which I ordered through the miracle of the Web from a Vermont company called TableLegs.com.)

So some shopping is inevitable, and commerce is a prime driver of innovation and progress, as Matt Ridley has so convincingly described in “The Rational Optimist” (which I think would make a great holiday present, actually ;-).

Only you can figure out for yourself how much is too much, and when to make something instead of buying something. <- end of the 2010 post from Dot Earth

Postscript - Kalle Lasn, the former ad man who launched Adbusters and Buy Nothing Day, is still at it. And of course so is Reverend Billy Talen.

As the decades flow, the gaps in our human fabric widen - from the family to the town council to our schools and businesses and bands. I’ve thought about this a lot of late, having seen far too many around me killed by cancer or other ailments with, of course, vexing randomness.

It wasn’t easy, but I recently wrote a song about this as part of a songcrafting workshop I’ve mentioned before, at Bagaduce Music down the road a ways in Blue Hill, Maine. A key takeaway is to go beyond raising a glass and voices - to seeing what you can do to carry forward the work and visions of the departed.

You can also download the audio file on revkin.bandcamp.com or watch and share the video on YouTube.

Let me know what you think. This is a rough recording - I’ll be doing an album-worthy version with some harmonies this winter - but it gets across the basics.

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Good Souls

©2024 Andrew Revkin

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

The quiet ones who’d never mind

A temper lost or a word unkind.

Who’d lend a hand, lend an ear,

Watch your back, ease your fears.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

Who’d douse a fire, fix a tire.

Join you in a midnight choir,

Firm friends who’d lead us from behind

But fate took them before their time.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

Some were healers, some connectors,

Some were builders, some were menders.

All gave a little more than they had to.

But they still left some work for us to do.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

I have my list of names.

I’m sure you have yours, too.

Let’s raise a glass and voices

And see what we can do

Not just to honor those who’ve gone,

but see their visions through…. (rousing finish)

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

Here’s to good souls taken far too soon.

As I wrote, I have my list of names; I’m sure you have yours, too.

Here are just three of many gone too soon from my circles - Amy Lipton, an environment-focused art curator and co-founder of ecoartspace; John Teagle, a wonderful musician, rock historian and community leader in our former Hudson Valley town; and Derek Wilson, an artist, activist and mentor of the Henaaksiala/Haisla peoples of the Kitlope River valley in northern British Columbia.

Here was a moment from the fine memorial celebration we had for John last year.

So do take that breath. It’s a vital practice given what’s coming. I’ve always reached for my friend Richard Butler’s song Breathe at such times.

But also make sure to read the latest dispatch from the masterful future-focused and risk-focused thinker and writer Annalee Newitz from her newsletter The Hypothesis. Subscribe here. Annalee writes science fiction and nonfiction with equal verve and skill, with novels including The Terraformers and Autonomous and a timely recent nonfiction title, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. I asked her permission to post this excerpt.

As Annalee explains in that book and below, the confusion-sowing behavior of President-elect Donald J. Trump and the strategies of his minions are nothing new, and that’s not good.

Annalee Newitz - “normalize the resistance”

There is a void at the core of our imaginations right now, and it is America’s future. It’s hard to know what will happen after Trump’s inauguration. Especially because the new regime’s goal is to keep us confused and unsure about what is really happening.

Weaponized confusion is a classic form of psychological warfare, deployed by militaries against foreign adversaries for centuries. It lowers morale, induces a sense of hopelessness, and makes decision-making nearly impossible. Increasingly, in the 21st century, governments are using it against their own people. In Russia, the tactic is called maskirovka (literally: camouflage); in America, Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit.” You know the drill. Political leaders unleash a barrage of contradictory, often false messages, and we the people have no idea WTF is going on.

It’s hard to protest policies that you can’t even pin down.

This is something I thought about a lot over the past few years while I wrote Stories Are Weapons, a deep dive into the history of psychological warfare in America. What I learned is that there are many ways to resist modern propaganda: you can protect schools and libraries from censorship; keep careful records of the histories that authorities are trying to erase; and tell your own truthful stories about what is happening. (I talked in more depth about these strategies during a virtual lecture at Cary Library in Massachusetts.)

But it is impossible to completely eradicate government disinformation campaigns.

Instead, we need to normalize the struggle against them.

Last year when I spoke at TED, I met Slava Balbek, a Ukrainian architect who now works part-time as a drone operator fighting the Russian invasion of his country.

He told me that Ukrainians joke about “work/life/war balance,” trying to carve out a place in their lives for family and jobs while also fighting a war. His grim point was that ordinary life does go on, even if your city is bombed by foreign enemies, or your government starts rounding people up.

Part of normalizing the fight against disinformation means preparing yourself — in big and small ways — for the rise of an authoritarian government….

Please read the rest here and weigh in with your reactions.

Read Annalee Newitz's full post

For more from Annalee on how to survive disruptive and dangerous times, here’s a flashback to Dot Earth days, when the threat was various possible drivers of mass extinction:

I also asked:

Will human civilization on Earth be imperiled, or enhanced, by our own world-changing technologies? Will our technological abilities threaten our survival as a species, or even threaten the Earth as a whole, or will we come to live comfortably with these new powers?

Annalee replied:

If there is any kind of tool-making skill that humans excel at most, it’s creating dual-use technologies. Often, our greatest technological achievements — say, trains in the nineteenth century or computers in the twentieth — can be used to improve our environments and to degrade them. As we look to the future of our civilization, we have to bear in mind that our tools will never lead to an either/or proposition in terms of progress. There will always be ambiguities. The burgeoning field of geoengineering, which could one day help us draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere and improve the environment, could also be appropriated by the military to wage war with weather. Synthetic biology could be used to enhance the health and abilities of our species, or to launch a racial purity movement.

And this isn’t a new story. Humans have made dual-use technologies since our ancestors began chipping out flake tools — which are great for making food and clothes, but also great for murdering. There is a kind of grim hope to recalling this story from our early evolution. Despite our worst instincts, we have made it this far, often fumbling, but always solving our problems with tools. We are not perfect, and sometimes we make horrible mistakes like relying on fossil fuels for energy, or building atom bombs.

Now, we are on the brink of understanding how to use the Earth itself as a machine to solve the problems our industrial technologies have created. As I said, our history offers a grim hope. With each new error, we build tools to remediate what we’ve done (though admittedly we then make more mistakes). It’s important to remember that there is no one thing we can do, nor any one technology we can deploy, that will guarantee all humans will use their powers wisely. Still, we can invest our efforts in new development as wisely as possible, choosing solar over coal and biodiversity over factory farms. In coming centuries, I believe we’ll strive to make the anthropocene comfortable for as many species as possible, if only for the selfish reason that it will make us comfortable too. My hope is that in the very act of inventing tools to improve the environment, we will come closer to understanding our place on the planet, as well as in a global society of creatures like ourselves.

Don’t leave without exploring these great free online tools for such moments, Mindovermedia.us, developed by past Sustain What webcast guests, Renee Hobbs of the University of Rhode Island, and callingbullshit.org, by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington.

Takeaway tidbit: my book chat with Newitz and Betsy Kolbert of The New Yorker:

My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive questions, starting with “Sustain what?”

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Watch or listen above and share this post, or watch and share on YouTube:

I gave the talk for the Jay Heritage Center, a nonprofit group on a historic estate once owned by John Jay, one of America’s Founding Fathers and its first Supreme Court Chief Justice. The estate is a refuge for people and wildlife tucked between the busy 1-95 corridor through Westchester County, N.Y., and Long Island Sound. The center is working to make the park into what it calls an “educational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American history, historic preservation, social justice, and environmental stewardship.”

In a story for the Rye Record, reporter Jacqui Wilmot nicely summarized my core point:

While early climate reporting focused on the science and data, he said, he came to recognize the need to go beyond the numbers and engage communities in dialogue. He seeks out conversations that transcend political divides, looking to find common ground and practical ways forward on climate change….

“How do you manage a complexity monster like climate change?” Revkin asked. “You break it into parts. Shouting ‘climate emergency’ is vague for most people, unless you can break it down into actionable steps. Moving beyond traditional storytelling means encouraging productive conversations and empowering communities to act, adapt, and build resilience together.”

Please watch and weigh in - and share this post of course to grow our community and help others learn how to tame, if not defeat, the climate “complexity monster.”

UPDATED 11/20 10 a.m. ET - Migration is a core shaper of a nation’s economy, size, sustainability and culture. This graph from a 2009 Dot Earth post - “What’s the Right Number of Americans?” - created by the independent demographer Joe Chamie1, showed how profoundly different the United States population would be without the flow of newcomers. (Below you can read some of Chamie’s relevant columns.)

Migrants and related policies are also a perennial and polarizing focus of politics, with Donald J. Trump winning a second presidential term in part by lumping all unauthorized migrants as enemies and pledging mass deportation of unauthorized migrants.

I ran a special reality-seeking discussion of migration, crime and politics that you can now watch on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook or X/Twitter.

My guests were David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, and Paolo Pinotti, professor of economics at Boccini University in Milan.

Bier just wrote a report showing that in Trump’s first term his administration “deprioritized serious criminals to target asylum seekers.” Read the report at https://bit.ly/catomigrantcrime and post questions in the comment thread now or during the livestreams.

Here’s an excerpt from Bier’s Cato report followed by some relevant new analysis from Europe.

New Data on Trump’s Border Security Record: Releasing Criminals to Jail Asylum Seekers

David J. Bier

Donald Trump has portrayed his immigration policies as good for public safety. He said [last] month that he had the “safest” immigration policy in history. However, data obtained by the Cato Institute through the Freedom of Information Act challenges this narrative. The newly uncovered information shows that while the Trump administration (2017–2020) was prioritizing prosecutions of migrant parents, separating families, and banning asylum, it also released criminals, including those who went on to commit crimes. 

Candidate Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda will make the country less safe in two significant ways. First, it would remove a population that is less likely to commit crimes, ultimately making America’s neighborhoods less safe. For instance, Cato’s research has shown that both legal and illegal immigrants are nearly half as likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States. With unique data from Texas, we have found that immigrants—both legal and illegal—are less likely to commit homicides. Numerous studies have also found that immigration is linked to lower crime rates, homicide rates, and drug-related deaths.

The second problem with mass deportation is just as significant: it would shift focus away from the removal of immigrants who do commit crimes. Noncitizens who commit serious crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and deported. Whatever amount the government spends on immigration enforcement, it should spend on detaining and removing this small minority of individuals. Donald Trump claims that he did that, but the facts tell a different story regarding his record on migrant criminals….

Here’s a relevant new commentary Pinotti co-authored for The Conversation focused on the same question but broadening out to other countries. It is reposted here under the website’s publishing guidelines:

Does immigration really drive up crime? Not according to the evidence

Paolo Pinotti, Bocconi University and Olivier Marie, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Immigration and crime were once again central themes throughout the US presidential election campaign. The belief that immigration drives up crime is one of the oldest – and strongest – convictions held by the public, spanning over a century in the US and elsewhere.

This view remains deeply rooted despite mounting evidence to the contrary, in large part thanks to politicians such as Donald Trump, who are all too keen to amplify this narrative. Since his first presidential campaign announcement in June 2015, Trump has persistently linked immigration to crime.

At that time, he stated: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems … They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.” He has since stepped up this rhetoric.

In the final stretch of his recent presidential campaign, he made claims such as: “The corrupt media is outraged that I keep talking about migrant crime and the migrant crime epidemic. It’s the worst thing that’s happened to our country in 50 years. They’re taking over our small towns and cities.”

According to survey evidence from the Pew Research Center, an American thinktank based in Washington DC, immigration and crime were two of the top three issues for Trump voters in the 2024 election, after the economy.

But what does the evidence really show? Our analysis reveals that studies consistently find no causal link between immigration and increased crime across a variety of countries. Research from the US, including both older and more recent studies, as well as research on Italy and the UK, demonstrates that immigration does not have a significant impact on crime rates.

Our paper also provides new evidence from Europe that reinforces this conclusion. After analysing 15 years of data on immigration inflows and crime rates across 216 regions in 23 European countries, we found no significant link between immigration levels and crime rates.

Indeed, through the application of robust causal methods, our findings demonstrate that even in areas experiencing substantial immigration, crime rates do not rise – and may even decline slightly – as immigration increases.

Why perceptions and reality diverge

One of the main reasons why the belief that immigration drives crime has persisted for so long is the influence of media and political rhetoric. During an election campaign, for example, selective coverage and targeted political messages can fuel public fears.

In Chile, where the foreign-born population tripled over a decade in the early 2000s amid a booming economy, public concern about crime intensified and demand for private security increased. However, research indicates that this surge in immigration had no impact on crime rates, and that intense media coverage played a significant role in shaping and amplifying public misperception.

Such negative messaging, though effective (as exemplified by Trump’s successful campaign), often diverges sharply from reality. Developing policies that focus on the social and economic integration of immigrants, rather than assumptions based on fear, can promote safer and more cohesive communities.

This isn’t to say migrants are not involved in crime. In fact, immigrants are often over-represented in the prison populations of many host countries.

But the fact this doesn’t lead to a rise in crime rates, according to our analysis, could be because immigrant populations are often too small to alter crime rates significantly. And it is also possible that some form of offender substitution occurs, where immigrants replace natives in local “crime markets”.

One strand of research has explored whether the over-representation of immigrants in crime statistics may stem from external factors, such as restricted legal status or limited economic opportunities, rather than any inherent criminal propensity.

Our review highlights how legal work permits and stable employment are directly linked to reductions in crime rates. For example, in cases where certain Eastern European immigrants to other countries in Europe were granted legal work permits, their crime rates dropped by over 50%.

This is consistent with separate research that finds that granting immigrants legal status can lead to significant reductions in criminal activity, and that policies expanding legal access to work can help reduce crime rates among immigrant populations.

In fact, one study from March 2024 that examined long-term trends in the US revealed that immigrants today are much less likely to be imprisoned, compared with the 1960s. The same study attributes this reduction in crime to better work opportunities and more stable family structures among male immigrants. These insights provide a pathway toward policies that value integration over exclusion.

Expanding access to legal work, particularly for asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups, could foster safer communities. But restrictive policies focused on criminalising undocumented immigrants or barring them from employment may, paradoxically, increase crime.

As the US considers its approach to immigration, prioritising causal evidence over fear-driven narratives could pave the way for policies that benefit both immigrants and the communities they join. By fostering economic participation and addressing public misperceptions, we can build fairer, safer societies for all.

Paolo Pinotti, Professor of Economics, Bocconi University and Olivier Marie, Professor of Labour Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A longtime source of mine on everything related to human development and sustainability policy, Jesse Ausubel, sent a response to this post by email that’s worth including here because it shows a close-focus view of how the recent migrant surge is affecting life in New York City:

Try to set aside time for this Sustain What episode zooming out to the global picture of people on the move on a heating planet full of imbalances

Sustain What: Stop Debating Climate Dislocation and Start Enhancing Climate Mobility

Hundreds of millions of people are on the move in a changing climate – and a disrupted global economy, and turbulent political climates and a persistent pandemic. Labels are flung. Debates rage over responsibility.

In this Sustain What episode, I led a discussion with solution-seeking social scientists and practitioners pursuing a shift from arguing causality to enhancing, safeguarding and more fully understanding mobility – a fundamental human response to change, stress and opportunity.

My guests were:

Michael W. Doyle, University Professor, Columbia University, is a renowned scholar of global constitutionalism, international affairs, and democratic peace theory. He led the development of the Model International Mobility Convention, a framework for a holistic, rights-respecting governance regime for all aspects of international migration.

Gustavo Macedo is a professor of international relations at the University of São Paulo and a former researcher at the Columbia University Institute of War and Peace. Here’s a piece on the Global Compact on Migration and Brazil’s role in shaping international policy: http://j,mp/mobilitybrazil.

Lisa Thalheimer was a doctoral candidate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford (@ClimateLisa). Her research gauges the impacts of human mobility and extreme weather events in the context of climate change. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she graduated with an M.Sc. in Sustainability Management from Columbia University.

His post describes three ways to manage a tough part of what I call the climate “scale monster” - emissions from existing or planned fossil-based energy systems that are - because of economic, political and technical factors - “locked in” to the human enterprise for years or even decades to come. His definition:

“Lock in” is shorthand for complex market phenomena. Once pipelines, export terminals, and power plants are built, they will remain in use. The investors who committed capital want to recover their money and the jobs in these facilities want stability. Ongoing operations means more [greenhouse gas] emissions, both from direct hydrocarbon use and upstream leaks (these are extra bad for climate). Emissions will add to atmospheric stocks, compounding global warming. Absent early retirement (in itself an expensive proposition), the plants will operate and emit.

He focuses on three solutions - carbon capture and very long-term storage, designing systems for new post-carbon purposes, and making sure they can scale back through policy choices.

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Carbon capture is much debated, with climate activists focusing on it as moral hazard (distracting from the core need to cut warming pollution) or a greenwash path for industry and some global development analysts like Vaclav Smil deeply dismissive of its capacity ever to work at the gigaton scale of the global warming challenge (watch Smil do the math in this 2009 onstage conversation we had).

But I’m with Friedmann and others who see it as one vital tool in the decades ahead. The climate challenge is all about YES AND. An important task is discriminating between greenwash - which is real - and legitimate research and deployment policy and practice. Here’s a 2022 Department of Energy report.

Friedmann has moved from climate and energy research into the business of carbon abatment but remains a trusted guide for me. He is transparent about where and how this technology makes sense and what it can’t do.

CCS realities and questions

Here’s a conversation I had with him one year ago laying out the landscape (you can also watch and share it on YouTube):

Here’s an excerpt from his post but please click the link to read the full piece and subscribe:

Lock in is a choice, not fate

Infrastructure & investment can counter emissions inevitability

The forces that lead to “lock in” are real. Governments want the energy, the jobs, the tax base. Communities want them too. Investors want their money back. Shuttering infrastructure early is expensive – so is replacement with new infrastructure. In reality, the key stakeholders aren’t comparing options based on marginal or levelized costs – they’re comparing tear-down costs.

Does this mean we’re doomed? Roll the credits?

No. It does not.

“Lock in” is a choice. Existing fossil fuel infrastructure, whether pipelines or power plants, also can be retrofit, repurposed, and reimagined.

First choice: manage carbon emissions

You want to limit emissions from fossil fuel plants? Here’s an idea – limit the emissions.

Continuing emissions from fossil fuel facilities is a choice. We have the technology to capture the emissions and keep them out of the air and oceans indefinitely. Carbon capture is well established technology, operating for nearly 30 years in Norway and the US, working today in 16 countries capturing >50 million tons of CO2 each year. Over 600 projects are in design and commissioning, with >230 project added in 2023.

YES, it costs money to stop emissions this way. Clean ain’t free.

However, in most markets capture is a cheaper option than premature shut-down or repowering with renewables or nuclear. Durable policy in the US and Europe supports the deployment of carbon capture retrofits, so existing steel, chemical, fertilizer, and power facilities emit less. Even without incentives, the cost of abatement using carbon capture is cheaper than many options in most economies – including repowering with renewables.

For maximal climate benefit, the captured CO2 should be locked up indefinitely, stored for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years

Punchline no. 1: If you’re pro climate action, you should be pro CO2 pipeline, so they can take captured CO2 to dedicated facilities that.  There’s already 5000 miles of CO2 pipeline in the US (compared to 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines). Without the pipelines, more expensive choices could do the same job, requiring more road, rail, and barge traffic.

Second choice: repurpose what you have.

LNG export terminals will be built. Period.

Can they be repurposed? Yes.

Specifically, they can be converted into ammonia export terminals for about 11-25% of the original cost. Ammonia is the main ingredient in fertilizer and can itself be a clean fuel. In the future, we can choose to convert LNG terminals to export other things – the opposite of lock in.

Already some existing natural gas pipelines have been converted to transport CO2. Some fossil export terminals can be converted to receive CO2 from other nations, creating new trade and commerce.

Third choice: reduce use before shuttering.

One can use existing facilities less.

When we succeed in the future at accelerating the deployment of clean energy and fuels, these can displace capacity in existing plants. This has happening in some advanced economies – a combination of mandates and incentives help deploy renewables and reducing the use of fossil fuels in existing facilities.

This must be accelerated, and someday will be. That’s a choice as well.

One last thing. Friedmann is a fine musician and once composed a climate melody reflecting global temperature since 1400. He joined many of my Sustain What Sunday Sanity webcasts during the pandemic.

Flashback

I covered carbon capture on Dot Earth back when it was called “clean coal” in climate context - a very dubious notion, yet promoted during the Obama administration as well as back in George W. Bush’s time in the White House. Here’s a look back, including a remarkable scene at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 (and this group was also at the Republican Convention that year).

So I reached out to my favorite “disasterologist,” Samantha L. Montano of Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

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We explored the politicized attacks on FEMA, and recent grotesque missteps by a now-fired employee (which I tweeted about quite a bit).

We also explored Montano’s timely push for a ”disaster justice” movement. She sees public pressure as vital to driving new approaches to disaster risk reduction and management as climate extremes and community vulnerabilities combine to worsen calamities like Hurricane Helene.

Here’s a concise summary of her concept of disaster justice from an earlier Sustain What show on disaster readiness and responsiveness with my former Columbia colleague Jeff Schlegelmilch:

I’ve been a big fan of Montano for years, particularly because of her passion for testing the wide span of media paths, from books to TikTok to integrating Twitter into teaching a course on Hollywood’s myth-amplifying approach to disaster storytelling during COVID. Even there, she didn’t restrict her output to X. She wrote an article for Writers Digest’s screenwriter-focused publication breaking down best and worst practices. And she recently co-authored an academic paper on this teaching method: Disasterologists at the Movies: An Innovative Use of Twitter for Disaster Education. (Lead author, John Carr, tweeted a fantastic distillation of his related work for his doctorate.)

And is here on Substack, where I hope you subscribe to her monthly roundup of disaster news and nuggets:

Read her book: Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis. To get a feel for her writing and wisdom, you can start with a gripping excerpt posted by Amazon, in which Montano describes her experiences confronting the catastrophe wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. As she explains, the long devastating shadow the flooding cast on thousands of lives put in harm’s way was not so much a result of the water as of racism, poverty, corruption and other drivers of loss in such events:

She’s doing the brave work of testing out TikTok. Here’s a useful fresh explainer of the profession and field called “emergency management”:

@samlmontanoThere should be no such thing as a part time emergency manager in the year 2024. Be serious, please! #disaster #disasterrelief #emergencymanagement #fema

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More reading and watching (Montano is here):

There are no natural disasters

This deserves repeating and repeating. Here’s a tight excerpt from a fabulous short explainer by YouTuber Miriam Nielsen in which Montano distills things perfectly:

Rethinking Readiness Amid a Pandemic and Climate Crisis

I've been trying to write a post about Twitter's degradation in the ugly transion to Elon Musk's X, its persistent utility (yes, it's still unique and valuable, as George Monbiot explained in a thread today), and nascent alternatives like Bluesky Social. If you missed my recent Sustain What chat on Bluesky with a staffer, Emily Liu, and the disaster-prevention-focused former Twitter engineer Jim Moffitt, here it is.

But it's depressing terrain. I’ll get there, but today had to break away again to my music side and finally record a quick take on my updated tune about the rat race and alternatives, called "Where Will You Be."

A version long ago centered on the baseball commentator Ralph Carpenter's 1976 line "When the fat lady sings" - as in "When she sings, when the fat lady sings, where will you be when she sings?"

Yes, it might seem a tad woke, but I ultimately felt that song frame was not only distasteful but also missed a key idea - that we approach life too often like a win/lose race.

Here’s the song (a rough quick recording!):

The lyrics are below. You can download the tune at my revkin.bandcamp.com page. or share video versions on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and even staid LinkedIn.

Where Will You Be

All of your life you struggle and strive
To get just a little ahead.
Days of rest few and far between.
You rush from your job to your bed.

Someday you’ll sit on a nice heap of money.
Your mate may wear silk and gold rings.
You’ll dine on food a’plenty.
But where will you be when you win?

When you’ve won, when your race is all run,
Where will you be when you’re won?
You spend all your days caught up in the game.
But where will you be when you’ve won?

When it’s time to account for your days and your ways.
When you’re asked to tally the score,
They don’t add up the piles of pennies.
They don’t measure the size of your floors.

They’re more apt to ask how you treated your friends,
How you dealt with your enemies, too.
When the going got tough did you turn tail and run,
Or stand firm and stick to the truth.

When you’ve won, when your race is all run,
Where will you be when you’re won?
You spend all your days caught up in the game.
But where will you be when you’ve won?

Bridge

Did you give more than you got?
Forgive more than you fought?
Relish every day, or let time…slip away?

All of your life you struggle and strive
To get just a little ahead.
Days of rest few and far between.
You race from your job to your bed.

But when you’ve won, when your race is all run,
where will you be when you’re won.
You spend all your days caught up in the game.
But where will you be when you’ve won?

But a second Trump administration, as I laid out for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a few days ago, will sadly threaten to undo many gains made under Joe Biden on climate and clean energy policy. It’s great that the lawyers at the Center for Biology Diversity are “ready to rumble,” as the group’s leader Kieran Suckling tweeted on November 6, but Trump’s team has a lot more sympathetic federal judges now and is assembling a loyalist-dominated administration to drive his fossil-centered agenda.

There’ll be much more to say about this in the weeks and months ahead, including on how Trump’s reported loyalty-oath requirement for cabinet members and armies of political appointees (loyalty to the man more than the Constitution) will fill this administration with hyper partisanship.

A few days ago I spoke with someone I assumed would be a top contender to head the Energy Department or serve as science adviser in Trump’s White House. I can’ t name him at the moment because we were e-chatting on background, but he said:

Expect I’d fail the loyalty requirement allegedly being imposed on appointments, as scientific facts are sometimes at odds with political goals.  Better to be an external adviser.

As a starting point for this journey, I thought it’d be worth reposting two things - an anxious but determined climate conversation I participated in on the Warm Regards podcast eight years ago, just hours after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, and a simultaneous Dot Earth post examining prospects for the environment and climate under Trump.

I’ve opened comments to all subscribers. I’m looking back at my views the first time to be sure I don’t repeat mistakes.

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Warm Regards was the brainchild of the then-hyper-online meteorologist Eric Holthaus. He’d sent around an email plea trying to convince a range of climate communicators to convene and converse regularly. The University of Maine climate researcher Jacquelyn Gill and I partnered up with him in this experiment at the time, and took on the production side. Have a listen. Here’s a rough transcript if you’d prefer to sift and read.

Here’s the Dot Earth post. What did I get wrong then? What will be worse now? (I hinted at why things will be worse in that Bulletin piece).

Prospects for the Climate, and Environmentalism, Under President Trump

President Donald J. Trump.

Get used to the sound of that, my environment-oriented friends.

Is this end times for environmental progress or, more specifically, climate progress?

No.

The bad news about climate change is, in a way, the good news:

The main forces determining emission levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will be just as much out of President Trump’s hands as they were out of President Obama’s. The decline in the United States has mainly been due to market forces shifting electricity generation from coal to abundant and cheaper natural gas, along with environmental regulations built around the traditional basket of pollutants that even conservatives agreed were worth restricting. (Efficiency and gas-mileage standards and other factors have helped, too, of course.)

AR - This is clearer than ever, both domestically, as I explained at the top of this post, and internationally. “We’re not going back,” on coal for sure. In October, the International Energy Agency said, “demand for all three fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – is still projected to peak by the end of the decade.”]

At the same time, the unrelenting rise in greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries is propelled by an unbending reality identified way back in 2005 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he said, “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.”

At the same time, as well, other fundamental forces will continue to drive polluted China and smog-choked India to move away from unfettered coal combustion as a path to progress. An expanding middle class is already demanding cleaner air and sustainable transportation choices — just as similar forces enabled pollution cleanups in the United States in the last century.

That’s why the Paris Agreement on climate change will continue to register progress on emissions and investments in clean energy or climate resilience, but only within the limits of what nations already consider achievable (as others will be explaining in detail because the first post-Paris round of negotiations is under way right now in Marrakech).

[AR- COP 29 is set to start on Monday in Azerbaijan, a petrostate if there ever was one, reflecting the longstanding reality that fossil fuels are a part of the global energy mix for decades to come. Keep in mind it’s fair to call the United States a petrostate as well, as some have recently noted.]

Long ago, Jesse Ausubel, a veteran Rockefeller University analyst of global resource and environmental trends, asserted that, “in general, politicians are pulling on disconnected levers” at the intersection of energy and environmental policy.

As I wrote in 2014, that doesn’t mean environmental agendas by politicians are useless, and environmentalism remains vital as a result. But what approach is most workable, particularly under a Trump administration with Congress in Republican control?

Is it end times for 20th-century-style us-them environmentalism?

That’s up to the movement. One response to a Trump presidency will be to double down with more pipeline blockades and other efforts to “keep it [carbon] in the ground.”

I’m not saying there’s no utility there. As I wrote on Monday, the Dakota Access Pipeline actions have brought much-needed attention to some longstanding grievances of Native Americans, including the diversion of environmental risks from the neighborhoods of more empowered constituencies onto Sioux lands and waterways. And revealing, and pressing, the banks financing the pipeline project is great.

But timing matters. Thinking ahead, for example, to the next congressional race, in 2018, I’d recommend avoiding the tactics used by those who tried to make the Standing Rock action as much about climate and carbon as Native American justice. With that in mind, I think it’s worth including a section I cut from my Monday post — a section I held off running at the time following Mark Twain’s dictum about the value of “unsent letters.”

The section dealt with Bill McKibben’s message in an Op-Ed article in The Times explaining “Why Dakota is the New Keystone.” I felt it was a mistake for McKibben (an old friend from decades spent in parallel, but divergent, tracks on climate change) and others to make this a green litmus test for Hillary Clinton:

“In the final hours of an incredibly consequential presidential race in which every vote — centrist or liberal — will play an important role, I was discouraged to see him use this moment to criticize Hillary Clinton’s campaign for “ugly silence” in not jumping to the ramparts on this. Is there any logic to this at the end of an extraordinarily divisive campaign in which polls are tightening? Let me know if you see it.

“Late last week, the pressure from the left did elicit a response from the Clinton campaign, which was predictably, and woefully, parsed, as Evelyn Nieves describes in The Nation today.

“Is forcing that statement a victory? Should this have been made an Election Day issue? I guess we’ll find out.

We just found out.”

Of course Clinton’s defeat was a devastating political death of a thousand cuts — many self inflicted, others not. But this strategy of the green left was surely in the mix because it negated real concerns of working people facing economic uncertainty.

Obama recognized the importance of taking such concerns into account in hist great “South By South Lawn” climate conversation with the scientist Katharine Hayhoe and the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio:

“I think it is important for those of us who care deeply about this — and Katharine is a wonderful example of the right way to do it — to not be dismissive of people’s concerns when it comes to what will this mean for me and my family. Right?

“So if you’re a working-class family, and dad has to drive 50 miles to get to his job, and he can’t afford to buy a Tesla or a Prius, and the most important thing to him economically to make sure he can pay the bills at the end of the month is the price of gas, and when gas prices are low that means an extra 100 bucks in his pocket, or 200 bucks in his pocket, and that may make the difference about whether or not he can buy enough food for his kids — if you just start lecturing him about climate change and what’s going to happen to the planet 50 years from now, it’s just not going to register.”

[ AR - Here’s the video of that moment on the White House South Lawn:]

So what do environment-minded citizens, including journalists, do next?

There’s plenty to do, much of which is continuing lines of effort that are already under way — as with communities and organizations and media identifying a host of problems, from Volkswagen’s cheating to continuing leakage of methane from “super-emitter” sources in our oil and gas infrastructure.

I’ll be trying to do what I’ve done for a very long time — hold people in power accountable for actions or inactions that can result in harm or betterment. There are green glimmers amid the most polarizing sound bites of the Trump campaign. One came in his responses to the questions posed by the Science Debate organization:

“Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels.”

That’s a statement I plan to hold him accountable on. I wrote on it in my piece on Trump’s choice to run the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency — Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Last night, I sent Ebell a note asking for his new contact information. I’ll be getting in touch as soon as he’s up and running.

Here’s another answer Trump’s team provided to the Science Debate folks:

“[T]he federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.”

I’ll be keeping track on that front, as well, given the critical role invigorated basic research will have in accelerating a transition from the fuels of convenience to clean-energy choices that can work not only here, but everywhere.

Insert Nov. 16 - Rep. Jared Golden won the tight race when the final ranked-choice voting was fully tallied.

Nov. 10 - The Golden victory called on Wednesday by the Bangor Daily News is now looking premature at best. New York Times running tally.

Wednesday afternoon the Bangor Daily News called the tough race for Maine’s conservative Second Congressional District in favor of three-term incumbent Democrat, Rep. , who narrowly fought off a tough challenge from Trump-backed Austin Theriault, heavily backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Team Trump. (Update: The recount has greatly tightened this race as of Saturday Nov. 9.)

I haven’t met Golden yet since our move to the coastal side of his sprawling district three years ago, but look forward to doing so. I’ve been impressed by his ability to navigate a political and cultural landscape as full of hazards and bounty as the reef-laced, fogbound waters here.

His traits and insights are worth examining given the need for everyone to navigate a similarly rocky nationwide landscape revealed by President-elect Trump’s victory in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

Golden is a maverick Democrat, having pushed for a 10-percent tariff on all imports. He broke with his party on Biden’s student-loan forgiveness package and offered a compelling argument centered on privilege and the new class wars - which are not just about money, and which Trump exploited in his win:

Is it bad to be working-class and good to be upper-class? Why do we simultaneously argue that the cost of a college education is crushing one generation while lending support to the myth that to succeed the next generation must get a college education? Perhaps we should question the logic of an economic and higher education system that forces young men and women to borrow against their future to “get ahead.”

This matters to me not just because we need a politics of compromise but because a clean-energy and resilience buildout (whenever that can still happen) requires a vastly increased skilled-trades work force, and that expansion will require a lot more support for vocational education. (See my conversation with journalist-turned-electrician Nathanael Johnson for more.)

I came to appreciate this glaring issue - and opportunity - after watching a compelling Commonwealth Club talk on donor-class-dominated politics by the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon, whose new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, powerfully reveals some of the forces behind the Trump surge:

She summarized the issue this way (I doublechecked the numbers and they’re shockingly right):

We give $200 billion a year to fund higher education and just one measly billion to fund vocational training, which is an immensely profitable avenue to the American dream for working class people. That's just a scandal. It's just an absolute scandal. Especially because we are overproducing college educated people. So 50% of people who have a college degree are what's called underemployed. They're working a job that doesn't require a single skill they learned in college.... So our economy simply cannot sustain any more college educated people. So there has to be another way for people to achieve the American dream, getting rid of degree requirements for jobs that don't require them, making it illegal to use software that immediately funnels out anybody without a college degree...

Governing from the middle

By aligning with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in other splits with his party and the Biden agenda, Jared Golden ended up facing attacks from the left even as he grappled with the MAGA movement.

His race was widely considered one of the most critical and uncertain in the country. If Democrats hold off the Republican wave and prevent a governing trifecta, his win will be a big part of that. I’m writing this as vote counts in some 18 other House races continue.

I’m drawing attention to Golden now because of something he wrote back in July, when Biden was still the candidate. It was an op-ed published just days after the Trump-Biden debate forced Biden out of the race and the entry of Vice President Kamala Harris. The headline was unthinkable coming from a Democrat - even one who’d distanced himself from his party’s line more than a few times: "Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine.”

And here we are, hardly feeling fine.

Here’s an excerpt making what I see as some vital points about the months and years ahead:

Some of Congress’ best work in recent years has happened in spite of the president, not because of him. A handful of responsible Democrats, including myself and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, rejected Biden’s bloated “Build Back Better” bill and instead passed a law that supercharged American energy production, saved Medicare billions of dollars and reduced the deficit. Years earlier, Congress stood up to the GOP establishment who tried to hijack Trump’s agenda to achieve their long-held goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Defeating them saved health coverage for tens of millions of Americans and protections for people with preexisting conditions.

It was Congress that wrote and passed the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act to bring back manufacturing so we can once again be a nation of producers, not just consumers. We wrote laws to unleash American energy by tapping domestic natural resources — oil and gas, biomass, the sun and wind — as well as nuclear power to ensure a steady supply of affordable, reliable energy. And we passed an infrastructure law that’s already building and improving roads, bridges and ports.

In 2025, I believe Trump is going to be in the White House. Maine’s representatives will need to work with him when it benefits Mainers, hold him accountable when it does not and work independently across the aisle no matter what.

Congress will need to stand up to economic elites and so-called experts in both parties who are already working overtime to stop Trump’s proposed trade policies that would reverse the harms of globalization and protect American businesses from unfair foreign competition. We need to protect from extremists the law I helped pass that caps seniors’ insulin costs at $35 and forces Big Pharma to negotiate and lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Perhaps more importantly, members must stand up to the GOP old-guard who will use a Trump presidency as cover for handouts to the wealthy and powerful at the cost of America’s working families and communities.

We must stabilize Medicare and Social Security, without cuts for seniors. We must guarantee women’s reproductive rights. And Congress must be ready to once again protect the ACA and to end huge tax breaks for the wealthy and for multinational corporations.

I urge everyone — voters, elected officials, the media, and all citizens — to ignore the chattering class’s scare tactics and political pipedreams. We don’t need party insiders in smoke-filled back rooms to save us. We can defend our democracy without them.

I know this is a departure from the normal flow here, but there’ll be little progress on environmental or resilience challenges without more governing of this sort. And I’m aware of course that there’s no “middle” without other factions pushing the edges of what’s possible. But even there, politicans like Senator Bernie Sanders are echoing some of the same points, as he did the other day on X and elsewhere:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Postscript - a Slow Boring pocket card for Dems

In a great tweet, posted the smartphone equivalent of a pocket cheat card for commonsense Democrats “to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones — delivering a coalition that can win on health care, reproductive rights, the safety net, and quality for all”: