Agreed. I’m getting tired of these pencil-pusher reports implying that “the economy” is going to keep chugging along at a reduced rate, as if we can just shuffle around our stock portfolios and weather the storm.

The “Planetary Solvency” report by IFoA is one of the first mainstream papers that’s taking a sober look at the climate crisis. If we hit 2°C by 2050, they’re seeing a significant likelihood of:

• 2 billion deaths
• High number of climate tipping points triggered, partial tipping cascade.
• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.
• Major extinction events in multiple geographies.
• Ocean circulation severely impacted.
• Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost.
• Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions.
• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

I don’t even want to think about 3°C and 4°C scenarios.

Jesuits are real ones. The Nazis considered them to be one of their “most dangerous enemies” due to their principled opposition. Glad to see they’re keeping the flame alive.

Banks trying to take profits buying air conditioner stocks while society and the biosphere is crumbling around them is a perfect encapsulation of this crisis. I’m doing my best to laugh at the absurdity of it all, because the alternative is paralyzing depression.

If you’re interested in the more fundamental dynamics at play here, I’d highly recommend giving these a watch:

• William Rees: The Enigma of Climate Inaction
• Daniel Schmachtenberger: Modeling the Drivers of the Metacrisis

It is the stock brokerage division of banks giving their boiler room reps a “hot tip” lead.

“When it gets hot, people will use more air conditioning.” Thanks Morgan Stanley, that’s some real insider knowledge.

Thank you for sharing! I’m a big proponent of the planetary boundaries framework, it’s a great way to visualize overshoot. While climate change is a big (perhaps the biggest) issue facing global civilization right now, it’s extremely important that we don’t get tunnel vision and try to solve for one variable without looking at our biosphere holistically. (That’s how we get carbon capture and geoengineering.)

A few more links/resources for those interested:

• This is the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s home page for planetary boundaries, showing the change in overshoot from 2009 (when the framework was established) to 2023.
• Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries is the corresponding paper for their 2023 update, which goes more in depth into each boundary and what constitutes a transgression.

The IPCC, FAO (UN), and the World Resources Institute put emissions from (all) agriculture at around 20%-25% of total emissions.

This article cites a single paper in opposition, which claims that emissions from animal agriculture are more than double that number. I don’t have the time or expertise to comb through that paper with a critical eye, but the reports of the above organizations cite dozens of studies so it seems the weight of evidence is tilting towards the 20% figure.

This isn’t to say that animal agriculture isn’t an issue - it’s a huge issue, and not just for the climate. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that these emissions numbers aren’t widely accepted.

Some key findings from this report:

• A review of 50 research articles finds there is strong evidence climate activism influences public opinion and media coverage, but it depends on the tactics used and the way the media covers the events.
• There is moderate evidence that climate activism influences voting behavior and policymaker attention.
• More research is needed on the influence of climate activism on policy change and environmental outcomes.

The YPCC summarized the findings below:

The review finds strong evidence that climate activism influences public opinion and media coverage, although the specific relationship depends on the kind of actions taken and the way the media covers the events. The evidence shows that protest usually increases support for the movement when protests are peaceful, but not when they are violent. But there was also evidence that the influence of activism on public perceptions could be positive or negative, depending on the tone of the media coverage of the protests.

The review found moderate evidence that climate activism can influence voting behavior and policymaker attention. One study in Germany found that areas that experienced Fridays for Future protests had a higher share of the vote go to the Green Party, and that repeated protests increased the effect. Multiple studies in the UK found that protests successfully increase communications by policymakers about climate change or pro-climate actions.

There was less evidence that climate activism leads directly to policy change or improvements in environmental quality. This is not necessarily because climate activism does not affect these outcomes or others we reviewed—it is likely because studies that capture these outcomes are difficult to conduct.

The vast majority of pollution is created by the vast majority of people. The impact of the ultra-wealthy is large individually, but small collectively.

From an engineering standpoint it may have something to do with battery size, but from a marketing standpoint it seems like (in America) carmakers decided bigger = better a couple decades ago and have been running with it (and charging more money for it) ever since. I miss the car-sized cars of the 80s.

Colorado had a crazy rebate deal that allowed people to lease a Leaf for $20/month (after $2,400 upfront).

I don’t believe that we should be pursuing growth in an era of global overshoot, but I do believe that this kind of messaging has a better chance of getting through to people who care more about the economy than the biosphere.

The difficulty in regulating mining in international waters are precisely why companies are rushing into this market. It’s much harder to stop something that’s already been started, and regulatory agencies are notoriously slow.

What we do know of seabed mining is that it’s incredibly destructive to marine ecosystems. As Peter Watts writes,

Very little research has been done on the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. The only real study was undertaken thirty years ago, led by a dude called Hjalmar Thielon. It was a pretty simple experiment. They basically dragged a giant rake across 2.5 km2 of seabed, a physical disturbance which— while devastating enough— was certainly less disruptive than commercial mining operations are likely to be. Today, thirty years later, the seabed still hasn’t recovered.

But what’s more concerning is what we don’t know, as very little research has been conducted on its impact. Moreover, many of these ecosystems are largely uncharted. We could very well destroy something before we have the chance to understand it.

On a higher level, this is what happens when you attempt to solve for one variable (climate change, in this case the transition to renewables and its associated mineral demand) instead of looking at an issue holistically (i.e. the total integrity of our biosphere).

I’m not a fan of manufacturers continually foisting larger vehicles on us. Improvements in range and charging are always welcome, but the Nissan Leaf was the perfect size for its niche (an affordable urban vehicle). Our local CarShare has a Gen2 Leaf, and I never had an issue hauling work equipment with the seats down. You can’t fit sheet plywood or lumber in there, but that was never its intended purpose.

With increases in size come increases in cost (and decreases in MPGe). The Chevy Bolt was another great pocket rocket that recently fell victim to the oversizing trend (in this case being canceled entirely to manufacture e-pickups).

Ignorance, petulance, and a willful dismissal of the truth are the new norms for this “administration.” But information wants to be free, and this is a good example of how the internet can be a force for good.

Thank you to Fulton Ring for making the raw data publicly available on their Github. I’ll be downloading this data and hosting the risk maps on my website as well; the more copies of this information out there, the better.

The level of obstinacy and stupidity in this administration never ceases to amaze me.

Each year the WEF publishes a Global Risk Report, surveying over 300 global experts and leaders from business, government, and academia on what they believe are the most pressing threats facing the world. For the past 3 years, climate change and its associated impacts have consistently ranked #1, #2, and #3 among all quantified threats.

To not only downrank this threat, but pretend that it presents no risk entirely implies that the US doesn’t even have object permanence at this point.

For me, this is the key paragraph:

Few outsiders have gotten a glimpse of Stardust’s plans, and the company has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t want to become more beholden to private capital for critical societal needs, and a stable atmosphere is at the absolute bottom of the pyramid. Dave Karpf has a great take on the geoengineering situation, so I’ll let his words take it from here:

First, we have to believe that the science of geoengineering is rock-solid. Second, we have to believe the science of real-time climate modeling and forecasting has been basically perfected. You need your climate models to be extremely good in order to forecast what the effects of geoengineering will be. And you need the geoengineering not to have any surprising downstream consequences that the engineers couldn’t predict. You particularly need this because “termination shock” is itself a warning – once you start this process at scale, you cannot end it without disastrous consequences. You had better be right.

Geoengineering would absolutely be a minefield of unintended consequences. It has never been attempted before. We are incapable of testing it at scale without, y’know, actually pulling the trigger and trying. The degree to which we just don’t fucking know what the unintended impacts of geoengineering would be is off the charts here. The models are based on two major volcanic eruptions, with limited contemporaneous data collection. We’re starting from an N of TWO! Model it all you want, but those models will be based on assumptions that can only be refined once we’ve pulled the trigger on the giant silver bullets.

For those who are coming straight to the comments, essentially the Fish & Wildlife Service is proposing culling tens of thousands of Barred Owls in order to prevent them from displacing Spotted Owls. The issue is that landowners can also apply for a culling permit, and the two species are close enough in appearance as to be indistinguishable from each other (especially at night), which means Spotted Owls are just as likely to be killed as Barred Owls.

In short: a good intention, a very bad idea.