“I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. …
But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo.“
This is a quote from science fiction author Ted Chiang, from a recent interview with Ezra Klein that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (yes Ezra Klein my favorite podcast that I never stop talking about). My childhood comic book brain initially started flipping through mental long boxes and thinking, well actually that’s not the case there are a lot of superhero stories where they go against the status quo, sometimes the state or big corporations, but you know what, I am not trying to get into the business of defending superhero comics in this newsletter. Some of them I like, most I don’t, and as with any self-respecting fan of comics, I’m usually either conflicted or annoyed by the genre and its dominance in popular media.
And in broad strokes, Chiang is right about superheroes. While they often begin as underdogs, the core of most superheroism is some form of genetic or otherwise inherent exceptionalism (the super part) and a reliance on that exceptionalism for the good of the masses (the hero part). And while the best ones are usually subversive storylines that chip away at that concept, the general theme of your typical superhero story is fighting crime, eliminating an aberration, protecting the norm. When you consider the fact that four of the highest grossing films of all time have the word “Avengers” in the title, you have to wonder why that kind of story clearly appeals to us so, so much.
Fanboys often point to the universality of these themes, making the college freshmany observation about the “hero’s journey,” which has been frequently dismissed as an overgeneralization of the world’s folklore. There’s also something distinctly American about the superhero fantasy. The idea of exceptionalism is so ingrained in our own national identity that it’s an astoundingly non-controversial political opinion that America is, in fact, just plain better than the other nations in the world.
You can see our obsession with superhero stories in lots of areas of American life if you think about it, but Ted Chiang’s observation also made me think wow, this sounds a lot like he’s talking about billionaire philanthropists (also some of our superheroes are literally billionaire philanthropists). In my very first newsletter ever I pointed out that Americans actually did not always love the idea of wealthy philanthropists, at least not as an institution, but we are coming out of a long modern period in which wealthy donors were largely considered an almost purely benevolent force in society. Ahem.
We are now, perhaps, emerging from that period, and when historians look back on when it became official, they may point to the fall of Bill Gates, which now seems to be underway. For the record and to say I told you so I have never been a big fan of Bill Gates. I don’t even really like writing about him to be honest but here we are again. Not that I had some inside information that he is a total creep, which, to a degree we will no doubt discover soon enough, he appears to be. But mainly because the very existence of Gates as mega-philanthropist and the foundation he built with his now estranged wife Melinda French Gates (see above, to the right of Bono) struck me and many other longtime haters as a problem in and of itself. Gates represents so many of the aspects of big philanthropy that many are no longer willing to tolerate.
For one, the main justification for philanthropy within democracy is heterodoxy in how we deliver public goods. But when private wealth and philanthropy can grow to the size of something like the Gates Foundation, it accumulates the power and monolithic prescriptiveness of the state (or at least our worst characterizations of the state) but without any of the democratic guardrails. Even beyond the power carried out by their actual funding of this or that, they gain a special kind of authority on any number of matters and are looked to to solve any number of societal problems guided by their own particular worldview. This class of people who stand above everyone else.
As an extension of that, big philanthropy is frequently guilty of prescribing solutions that either reinforce or at least do not threaten the status quo. So aside from the wrongness of a private citizen with the authority of a Bill Gates, I usually find myself disliking the solutions he puts forward themselves, because they tend to favor the hierarchies that gave him power in the first place. That includes pushing innovation and global markets to make agriculture more resilient through monocropping, school reform funding focused on uniform standards and assessment, and his unshakeable faith that new technology is the only way we can mitigate and adapt to climate change.
While there’s been a lot of criticism of Bill Gates over the years, like many philanthropists, he still somehow retained this glow of overall goodness in popular culture. Even if you disagreed with some of the things he said or approaches he took, you couldn’t deny all the good he’s done for the world. Whenever Gates fired off some random comment on something he has zero expertise in, you could always count on a wave of fawning media. We saw this most recently with his book and press tour about climate change, which was generally treated as the latest assessment from one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic.
I guess there’s a chance Gates emerges from the current scandal intact, but the general consensus is that the aura of goodwill is already gone. One of his fiercest and earliest critics, Linsey McGoey, says it’s long overdue, not because she celebrates the Gateses’ falling out, but because of the freedom from superheroics that it grants us.
“The best thing to come out of a sad event like this divorce is recognition that today’s global problems are ours to tackle, we the people — interdependent, global members of the public — through solidarity and shared science. We can’t relinquish this task to unaccountable philanthropists. The age of deference to them is over, and it’s about time.”
Climate change is the biggest of those global problems that is ours to tackle, not to be left in the hands of ordained saviors, but the desire to leave it there is strong. In the 2020 Democratic primary, we had perhaps three climate superheroes to contend with, all of them white men, two of them billionaires. We love the idea of the “good billionaire” like that guy from Contact, who descends from the skies to use his powers for good, be it Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg, or Elon Musk delivering us electric cars but just in case plotting an escape plan to Mars. In my second ever newsletter I argued that, even if they use their riches in the best most effective way possible, we will always lose something important when billionaires are our climate heroes, in that they take the problem and the solution out of the hands of us lowly mortals.
It’s not just wealthy mega-donors, though. When the climate movement began to grow exponentially, including record-breaking demonstrations around the world in 2019, there was an inescapable narrative that this was the work of a single young Swedish girl. How remarkable that one teenager could set in motion such an uprising, people would say, the youth shall save us thank god for the youth. We should know better because Greta Thunberg herself constantly tells us that she and her generation are not here to save anything. She, like the millions of other climate activists, is just a person who wants to have a future.
We often elevate our elected officials to superhero status in this way too, with one hateful piece of shit in particular being the most obvious example that comes to mind. But so often in politics, or I guess to be more precise, in the popular portrayal of politics, the elected leader taking office is often seen as the endgame, you know, when we finally get the infinity gauntlet back and then spoiler Iron Man dies. Not only that, but voters and activists’ allegiances to these leaders are expected to be unwavering and absolute. Once you pick the person, that’s your person, and if you turn on them or doubt them or criticize, it’s seen as a failure or a comeuppance. Ahaha the left is eating itself you see look at these stark divisions that have been revealed a rift you might even say.
We saw this recently here in Massachusetts after tons of young organizers went to bat for Ed Markey in 2020, as the reliable progressive and climate champion faced a primary threat, weirdly from the center. Known as the Markeyverse, they are believed to have played a large role in his reelection, which sent a wave of fear throughout the state’s Democratic establishment. When Markey’s stance on Israel and Palestine let these generally leftist supporters down, they went after him for it.
Pundits and political operatives took delight in this, characterizing it as a lesson for these naive young people about politics. But you know what? Fuckin good for them. Really, we could all learn something from the Markeyverse, and the ease with which they fought their own hero. Because at the end of the day, they were never in it for Ed Markey. Their devotion didn’t lie with his name, or his face, or his hair or his cheugy sneaker fashion. It was with their own ideals and their own political goals.
This is why I make it a rule to never stan a politician. Not because they are inherently bad or unscrupulous people, but because they exist to serve, to act as a stand in for the people who put them there. They are a conduit for power and change, not the change itself. A coalition of Latinx and Native organizers were instrumental in putting Kyrsten Sinema in office, because she offered a better path to change than the Republican alternative. And now that she is failing to deliver, the coalition that put her there will remove her. Or if she starts to come through, maybe keep her there.
One of the core principles of Sunrise Movement‘s electoral work goes: No permanent friends. No permanent enemies. That sounds kind of foreboding, but I’ve always found it to be admirably zen-like. “Our only permanent allegiance is to protecting our communities, our shared home, and our future.” You might add to it, no permanent heroes. Which is not to say there are no people we admire or turn to for help or even model ourselves after. It’s not to say we can’t enjoy the next Spider-man movie. But we might challenge our devotion to the idea of superheroism, which can rob us of our own power and prevent us from tearing down the idols that are standing in our way.
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Links
“People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone. There really won’t be very much that we can do about it.”
“America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end… However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.”
Eversource, the utility company that was caught waging a campaign against electrification and in defense of natural gas was now caught distributing pro-natural gas propaganda in Massachusetts classrooms. These fuckin guys.
It’s taken so long to extend the Green Line to low income neighborhoods, that when it’s finally done, low income people will have been mostly forced out of those neighborhoods.
“People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”
In 2020 as millions of low wage workers lost their jobs, median CEO pay at New England’s largest companies soared 21.4%, to $14.5 million. GE’s CEO Larry Culp brought home $73 million. The national ratio of compensation between CEOs and their workers was 21-to-1 in 1965; by 2019, the ratio was 320 to 1.
Arizona’s attorney general is bringing eco-fascism to mainstream US politics. “It is shocking to see what was in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto described in more legalistic language in this suit by the Arizona attorney general.”
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Watching
Film festival continues. Fans of crime fiction will thoroughly enjoy I’m Your Woman, which is a pitch perfect 1970s neo-neo-noir thriller, but told from the perspective of characters who might have otherwise been supporting characters.
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Listening
Goat Girl, A-Men
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Welp in other news looks like we are about to run fresh out of democracy and UFOs are fully real. On a more personal note, it is a motherfucker of an allergy season out there. One of our aged little dogs Jacoby has also taken to waking up at 3 in the morning and wanting to just hang out and have fun with us for a couple of hours. Jamie thinks it was the full moon but I think he has dementia. Either way it has been a tough week sleepwise so I’m going to play some Zelda and call it a day.
I hope you all have a nice holiday weekend take some Claritin and watch out for UFOs.
Changing societal norms leading to policy change, which leads to even faster-changing societal norms
Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog, Philip Reinagle, 1805
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Every now and then I’ll read something in a book or an article in which the author at least seems to come to a conclusion about the power of social movements independently from the field of movement building. With an entirely different field as a starting point, they’ll work their way through a body of research, and the conclusion that spits out is: social movements create transformative change. The latest example of this was Robert H. Frank’s book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, in which he reaches this conclusion by way of his nearly 50-year career as an economist, specifically his pioneering work in behavioral economics.
Frank’s motivation for writing his latest book came largely from his concerns about climate change, and he’s supportive of the Green New Deal, but his entire framing of the problem is one of economic incentives, tax policy, and reaching a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.
At the core of the book’s thesis is the idea that, contrary to most economic theory, our decisions are often less a matter of individual self-interest and are far more influenced by our social circumstances than we realize. And if we were to govern based on this understanding, we could unlock cascading beneficial behaviors, and end senselessly harmful behaviors that put human civilization at risk. While there is one part of the book’s argument that I tend to disagree with, Frank makes a compelling case for the power of social forces to create sweeping change, with either profound negative or positive consequences.
Competing Freedoms
A lot of his underlying arguments about why this is the case can be read as a matter of challenging the gospel of competition and individual choice in economics. He dispels misconceptions about the father of his field of study, who is often used to justify free markets above all else: “Adam Smith…is often cited in defense of the claim that competitive markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But that was never Smith’s position. His signature insight was that the pursuit of narrow self-interest often leads to socially beneficial outcomes, but not always.”
In fact, he points out, unencumbered markets often create horrible outcomes for the group, outcomes that each individual would actually never have wanted. Some metaphors he uses include a crowded theater in which everyone stands up to see better, so then nobody can see. Or a business district in which everyone wants to make a bigger sign advertising their stores, so you end up with a cacophony of signage useless to everyone. I first wrote about his ideas in Crisis Palace #48, one of the more popular issues you guys liked it:
Sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. They liked smoking, after all, and it was a cool thing to do. But a small minority did quit as a result, and that sparked “behavioral contagion,” which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the US. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed first. Smoking is now anything but cool and when people who are definitely not me sneak a drag they do it in shame and isolation.
In Under the Influence, he expands on the smoking metaphor, pointing out that, while the danger of second-hand smoke was used to convince politicians and voters concerned about personal freedom to support laws restricting the act (smoking wasn’t just a personal matter, you see, it was actually hurting other people), it was actually kind of a uh smoke screen. It’s true that smoking does hurt other people, but the second hand smoke threat is tiny compared to social impacts of smoking. In part because of the famous Framingham study I pointed out in the earlier issue, we know that if you smoke, other people you know will too, and other people they know will too, and many will get sick and die from it. That’s the real reason for regulating smoking, and if we accept the importance of social circumstance in our decision-making, we can come up with more powerful and responsible policy solutions.
The way Frank contends with personal liberty is one of the book’s strengths. For someone who is arguably making the case for the nanny state, he genuinely cares about personal freedom and needs, but shrewdly points out that in our relentless protection of individual choice and disregard for social forces, we frequently create a world in which all of our hands end up being tied, forced by competitive markets to make decisions we would not actually want for ourselves and that don’t serve anyone particularly well (more on this in CP #77).
When legitimate aspirations are in conflict, people’s freedom to do as they please will be limited no matter which way we turn. … Clearer thinking about behavioral contagion requires careful analysis of the trade-offs between competing types of freedom, which in turn requires difficult conversations about free will and other thorny philosophical issues.
The vast majority of smokers, he points out, now wish they had never started smoking and now they can’t stop because they are addicted. Is that freedom? Even if we don’t pass laws outright banning such activities, we can at least acknowledge the profound social harm in allowing it without restraint, and pass policies that give all of us something of an edge when it comes to making beneficial decisions.
The Arms Race
Another big strength in Under the Influence is the way it frames emergent social phenomena as a concrete force we must understand and direct. Despite the book’s subtitle, the term “peer pressure” strikes me as insufficient in describing it, calling to mind schoolyard bullies. In fact, one argument against regulating for behavioral contagion is that it’s the job of parents, not the state, to teach their children to resist peer pressure. Similarly, social forces are also often dismissed as a form of vanity or superficiality, “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Neither is a fair description of what is happening here because 1) social pressure is not always a bad thing that kids or adults should resist (consider antivaxxers), 2) the poor decisions we make as a result of social forces are often completely rational and made because of very real consequences and incentives that are often out of our control. Our decisions are highly dependent on our frames of reference—what we can see around us and what our peers are doing—and that’s not necessarily a personal failing or misjudgment.
One powerful section of the book is when he describes how negative behavioral contagion creates harmful cascades, even though the decisions that lead to it are not necessarily frivolous or misguided.
For example, look at the growing size of Americans’ homes over the years—the median new house built in the United States grew from 1500 square feet in 1973 to more than 2500 square feet today, and fewer occupants means we now have twice the living space. You might argue, oh families just want to impress other people with their fancy McMansions, and there is definitely a level of selfishness that guides antisocial behaviors. But real estate values also dictate the quality of schools, meaning parents frequently buy houses they don’t need in neighborhoods they can barely afford as a rational decision to give their kids a better education. This leads to bidding wars, anxious comparisons to other neighborhoods, and ballooning housing costs that make everyone collectively less happy, as research has found after a certain point, bigger houses stop making people happier.
Another example is car sizes. The sport utility vehicle was virtually non-existent before 1966. In 1975, it accounted for just 2% of total vehicle sales. In the 90s, that all changed. By 2014, SUVs had become the highest-selling passenger vehicle category in the United States, vehicles whose nominal purpose is almost never used by consumers, whose size and design make roads less safe, and that spew greenhouse gases at higher rates, putting human civilization at risk. (Frank doesn’t make this point, but there’s a perception of personal safety in larger vehicles that is self-defeating when all vehicles become larger.) There is basically no explanation under traditional economics as to why SUVs are so widespread, other than the very fact that more people started to have SUVs. There was a spark of popularity, and behavioral contagion took care of the rest, Frank argues.
He describes these buying habits and more as the equivalent of a military arms race, in which the expansion of individual countries’ weapons stockpiles do not make anyone safer or more secure, quite the contrary. The decisions are made to improve each actor’s relative positioning, but looking at the overall picture, all parties are worse off.
This leads to enormous cascades of overconsumption, overuse of resources, wasteful spending on things that make life worse instead of things that would make it measurably better, such as improved infrastructure, education, healthcare, etc. Rising economic inequality only makes this dynamic worse, as the highest end of excess tends to pull everyone else’s frame of reference up toward increasingly unrealistic and wasteful levels of spending.
The Spark
Of course, the opposite can be true too. Frank’s big positive example of behavioral contagion is the simple fact that when one house gets solar panels, neighbors are far more statistically likely to do so, as are their neighbors, and so on and so on. That applies to all kinds of climate friendly decisions. But he is not advocating for individual lifestyle changes as the answer to climate change. Rather, the cascade he describes is a loop of changing societal norms, leading to policy change, which ideally leads to even faster-changing societal norms, accelerating at a pace that we initially never would have thought possible.
In fact, Frank is advocating heavily for one policy in particular—so-called Pigouvian taxes. These are taxes on activities that have negative externalities on society, like a gas tax, which then would reinvest funds in Green New Deal style infrastructure and technology. This would disincentivize bad behavior and allow new technology to catch fire in ways that would rapidly spread. Such taxes would need to be coupled with subsidies for lower and middle income people so as to not be regressive. For example, Massachusetts did just that last time we raised our gas tax which was way back when grunge was the most popular style of music. It makes it kind of a roundabout version of a wealth tax, but one that also influences behavior.
This is kind of where I start to lose enthusiasm for Frank’s argument, although this is really his big finale. Not that I’m against carbon taxes, which can be progressive as he describes, but I have a hard time buying how passing such a tax is the spark that sets off a cascade of behavioral contagion, turning the tide on climate change. New taxes are unpopular, after all, because people with money hate giving up their money and people without money know that they usually end up getting screwed over by tax policy.
Frank’s solution for getting past that distaste is that we must get better at explaining the idea of behavioral contagion, using strategic forms of persuasion. Specifically, he argues, we must convince the public, especially the wealthy, that paying Pigouvian taxes won’t actually have a noticeable negative impact on their lives, because their purchasing power relative to others would remain the same.
As an example, Frank points to the slow-then-fast acceptance of same-sex marriage as one of the big case studies of positive behavioral contagion, but he points to rational, repeated arguments in favor as one of the main reasons that the cascade began.
This strikes me as at best an incomplete understanding and exposes what Frank-as-economist is really missing in his analysis—power. Cascades of transformative change are prevented, not just because people don’t understand the issue properly. Rather, it’s powerful interests intentionally wielding their power to prevent the cascade from getting started. Overcoming that power takes more than just a good persuasive argument, although that’s part of it. It also takes emotion, disruption, leadership, commitment, relationship-building. It takes organizing.
This brings to mind that recent climate paper calling for “catalytic cooperation,” and the parallel research that found what is preventing climate action is not so much a collective action problem where nobody wants to act first. It’s more attributable to a range of domestic power struggles that need to be won on the ground.
That’s how I think the contagion starts, and that leads to policy that feeds back into it. That policy could very well be a Pigouvian tax that Frank suggests. But it could be any number of other policies as well, because by then the explosion has already started and possibilities are expanding. What if it was a completely different economic system! It’s almost like the carbon tax he envisions is simultaneously thinking too big and too small.
That said, I quite like Frank’s description of what it looks like after the catalyst has been set off. How social forces can create both profound harm and good, and how policy can leverage those forces for rapid change. I think he’s just missing a piece—the thing that sets off the spark, which I would say is building local power to win individual battles. Add that spark to the fire of behavioral contagion, and that’s a formidable theory of change.
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Links
“You see all of the kids around me, they’re just kids,” the girl said, pointing to a group of younger children. “Why would you just send a missile to them?”
“Just because Bill Gates puts on a pastel sweater and says he’s donating money to good causes doesn’t mean that he’s actually helping the world.”
The fact that Massachusetts’ army of progressive teens (aka “the Markeyverse”) made the New York Times is amazing. This article does have some problems though, including only quoting white kids and not pointing out that Dana Depelteau is a complete fucking clown.
Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year by increasing risk of stroke and heart disease. I used to work at a nonprofit that worshipped long hours (which was and to some extent is still the norm in the sector) and I feel so guilty and ashamed of it.
Sea level rise as a result of climate change added $8 billion in damage during Hurricane Sandy.
Arizona’s Corporation Commission nearly passed a 100% carbon-free electricity plan but then a Republican commissioner sabotaged it by changing mandates to goals at the last minute. This was incorrectly blamed on partisan divides, when really it was just the GOP fucking it up.
Climate change has redefined what we call “normal” weather. These sliding graphics of heat and precipitation over the century are brutal.
Stephen Graham Jones pens an open letter to conventions hosting Native writers. “Do they get cold sandwiches from that vendor in the hall like everybody else, or do they bring a beaded parfleche of pemmican in with them…”
ANOHNI on NFTs: “I think it’s shit. They won’t stop until they have sucked the life and value out of every remaining shred of organic life and every last gasp of analog craft or thought and crammed it into Elon Musk and Grimes’ patented space dildo, headed for Mars to reauthor the future of sentience in their own psychotic and ethically bankrupt likeness.”
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Watching
Still on the personal film festival and there have been some good ones lately including Spring Breakers, Howl’s Moving Castle, and a rewatch of Spirited Away. But one I want to highlight is this super weird French movie from 2012 called Holy Motors. It’s very hard to describe, but the director Leos Carax who is kind of a Jodorowsky sort of figure says, “It’s trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day” so there you go. The whole thing is totally unique very worth watching if you can track it down, but one of the best parts is this musical intermission:
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Listening
Let’s keep it weird and French with this psych pop band called La Femme that I have always enjoyed especially 2013’s Psycho Tropical Berlin, kind of retro bachelor pad music with an edge. But their new release Paradigmes is truly bonkers, with songs in Spanish but French accents, English with French accents, banjos, horns, like 10 different vocalists, all over the map. I love this song that is randomly about Colorado.
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I endorse
Seltzer. I’ve been joking around a lot lately about cheugy, a kind of new word that means basic or vanilla or coming to a trend late or sticking with a trend too long. I obviously have a fair amount of cheug in my life, but I was contemplating cheuginess the other day as I do, and how it’s often synonymous with objects of comfort. Comfort being, by definition, not new or cutting edge, but something that has had its edge fully worn soft, and we keep coming back to it for solace. In the winter, my comfort cheug of choice is scented candles. In the summer, it’s seltzer. Can after can. Especially cheugy is Polar’s “mythical” flavors like Unicorn Kisses and Mermaid Songs, which taste like weird blends of movie theater candy and fruit. Cheugometer malfunction cannot process too cheugy explodes.
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Well, whoomp there it is, as the Tag Team used to say. That’s what I got today. This one was honestly kind of boring but you got a good picture of a dog playing the piano. I missed you all last week, but I did get the second vaccine dose and then had a very nice birthday celebration at Castle Island, which in true New England fashion, is of course not an island. It was a beautiful day and everyone was in a good mood, we saw some friends get together and even hug each other. Some masshole family camped out too close to us and went on and on about how they chaahge too much faah pickles but you know what. We didn’t even care.
I hope this newsletter is like your version of Castle Island and even though there is some boring tax policy junk on the island this week, it is still a sanctuary of joy and clarity, even if it is not really an island.
Recognizing that climate change and policing are a similar kind of problem, but also that really they are kind of the same problem
Peonies, by Yun Shouping, via Wikimedia Commons
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There was one part in last week’s issue that I didn’t want to get too deep into, because it felt like too much of a digression from an already complicated topic, but while thinking about the idea of near enemies and carbon dioxide removal, something I kept coming back to was the overlap between police abolition and climate justice movements. So I thought I would do a little follow up today as a first step toward exploring the idea more over time.
At the end of last week’s issue, I mentioned that I watched this panel on police reform vs. police abolition, and one speaker defended the idea of radicalism as the confrontation of root problems. (I’m not going to quote the person here, because even though I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t mind it wasn’t open to the public.) But the speaker actually went further than that and used climate change as an analogy for how we might think of police abolition.
One of the near constant challenges posed to abolitionists is, “But what are you going to do when you need to call the police?” There’s a low key fear-mongering built into this question, and it also overlooks the fact that many people would already never or almost never call the police, because it creates more of a threat to them and/or their neighbors to do so. But it’s also disingenuous because abolition is just as much about creating new systems for the future as it is about dismantling the existing systems, what Mariame Kaba calls “death-making institutions.” (There’s a recent profile of Kaba in the New Yorker by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, which I highly recommend.)
So the climate change analogy was that we know we have to eliminate the fossil fuel industry, a death-making institution if there ever was one, but the resulting question is not, “What are you going to do when you need to turn on the lights?” Instead it’s, what are we doing to replace that institution, using the example of installing solar panels as an analogy for constructive abolitionist acts. So in that sense, the range of actions that could be considered abolitionist are broader than ending policing, but they all move us in that direction.
Like I pointed out last week, the difference between solutions and their near enemies can be determined by how we are defining the problem and whether what we are doing moves us in the direction of solving that problem. In the case of police abolition, a near enemy would be spending money on police departments to better train cops how to deal with people experiencing mental health issues. As opposed to the proper solution of deploying actual mental health professionals and treatments for people with mental health issues, instead of sending men with guns and punisher stickers on their cars.
What I found eye-opening about the analogy with the solar panels is that it was using climate change as a way to bring clarity to police abolition, which is challenging and anxiety-inducing for a lot of people. But at the same time, as we are explored last week, climate solutions are similarly difficult themselves, and might actually gain some clarity from the police abolition movement.
In fact, there is a version of “What are you going to do when you need to call the police?” in climate change. It is something like, we can’t get rid of fossil fuels today, be reasonable, we will need them for a long time. This is often used as a defense for what police abolitionists would call a reformist approach, which often lays claim to pragmatism in its rejection of radical systems change.
There are, in fact, incremental steps you can take toward abolition, what Kaba calls “non-reformist reforms.” In an opinion she co-wrote, the authors state that “abolition is both a lodestar and a practical necessity. Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.” Reformist reforms like piling on more training or rules are merely “asking police not to be police.”
So back to “would you get rid of fossil fuels today” question, the funny thing about it is, while making a perfectly pragmatic point, it was being used at the time to defend a foundation’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. Investments that, I would argue, are not part of a responsible, incremental transition away from oil and gas, but a perpetuation of them. Just as in 8 Can’t Wait, there are strategies—like working with oil and gas companies, or spending billions on new natural gas infrastructure—that could seem like they are a means toward a shared goal, but they are pointing in the wrong direction. Reformist reforms that further lock us into a system that needs to go away.
I’m not sure if I’m saying that there should be more explicitly abolitionist messaging in the climate movement. I’ve seen some people calling for a “carbon abolition movement” or comparing the climate movement to slavery abolitionists, and both carry a whiff of appropriation.
But there is definitely a big overlap between climate justice activists and police and prison abolitionists, and better understanding and communicating the explicit connections between the two feels important. It seems like it’s happening more often, like the case that climate justice activist Sam Grant recently made here with Emily Atkin:
“The fight for climate integrity necessitates that all human beings who care about their future are going to be standing up, practicing democracy. And if as we stand up now, we’re going to have our lives put at risk by law enforcement who are trained and paid to protect property at all expense at any cost.”
I think properly making this connection means recognizing that climate and policing are are a similar kind of problem, but also that really they are kind of the same problem, you know like when Lady and the Tramp are eating the spaghetti and then oh look it’s the same piece of spaghetti. Again from Sam Grant (check out that interview):
“We have a number of systems that are all joined together, that collectively are playing roles in shaping negative outcomes for the climate and human life. And it’s important for people who are in the climate movement to recognize the intersectionality of systems. The systems that hurt the climate and the systems that hurt human life are the same systems.”
Going forward there are a few key similarities between abolitionist politics and climate justice that I want to be thinking about:
1. How we choose our solutions all depends on how we define the problem. This is related to the near enemies thing. Are we thinking of the problem as PPM in the atmosphere, or as an inherently harmful institution that needs to end?
2. Ending the harmful institution is not a destructive act. By necessity, it’s a creative one. It’s about replacing extraction and exploitation with something different and better.
3. Doing so requires a high level of faith in what humanity is capable of. Acknowledging the need for radical change means being optimistic that we can do better for ourselves and each other.
“The reason I’m struggling through all of this is because I’m a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do.”
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Links
Near enemy alert! An investigation by the Guardian found that the carbon offsets used by several major airlines are deeply flawed, claiming credit for leaving forests intact when there wasn’t much of a threat of them being cut down. This reminds of when Homer gave Bart a dollar as a reward for simultaneously taking up and quitting smoking.
Another near enemy! Eversource energy (which is my utility company) says they are all about reducing emissions, but leaked documents show they’re part of a group of utilities waging a campaign to protect natural gas and block electrification. You can never believe what these guys say. “Everyone needs to contact legislators in favor of NG.”
More than 30 Boston cops made over $300,000 last year largely from overtime pay. The mayor makes $199,000. I love that the Globe published their first and last names and pay.
Fare-free buses in Boston were once considered an unrealistic aspiration, but are now seriously on the table. My friend and former colleague Phineas is quoted in this article hi Phineas.
Singapore is almost entirely urbanized, but there’s an aggressive effort to expand urban farming to create more resilience, including a giant farm in what used to be the island’s largest prison complex! Very on theme today Singapore.
Meet supergentrification, in which extremely wealthy homebuyers force out your run of the mill wealthy homebuyers. (This is often what’s happening when you see luxury real estate but empty storefronts.)
Why there should, in fact, be a war on meat. The stats about the increase in meat consumption are bonkers and it’s mostly because of government subsidies.
There’s something gratifying about reading people’s memories of youth when you are about the same age, like Seth Rogen writing about the 90s Bar-Mitzvah circuit.
Thanks to this law student who runs popular social media accounts on the topic, I’ve discovered that I am what you would call a “cozy gamer.”
I was really into this idea for a national one week vacation until she said no internet or video games. Pass!
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Listening
I saw some Onion article making fun of what an a-hole Billy Corgan is, which he most certainly is, but it got me listening to the lone record from his post-Pumpkins band Zwan, which broke up during their first tour because Billy Corgan was too much of an a-hole. I still think it rips.
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Watching
Film festival continues with 2019 Spanish dystopian scifi movieThe Platform. This movie is honestly disgusting and very violent but it is also a creative exploration of civil resistance and solidarity and violent vs nonviolent tactics. I’m serious though it’s super gross.
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OK that’s what I’ve got for today, kind of a short one, but lot of links there to make up for last week please enjoy this feast of links I bring unto thee.
As always, if you think of anyone who would find this kind of thing useful or otherwise satisfying, consider forwarding this email to them. And if you come across this some other way, consider subscribing.
One note is that I am taking next Friday off I might do like a little baby CP or something but probably will be a skip week. I am getting my second dose of the good stuff the day before so might be messed up and if not I’ll probably just take the day off in honor of my approaching birthday, shout out to my earth signs.
But don’t worry if you don’t get an issue next week I will talk to you the following week, when the world comes in to build a wall between us we know that they won’t win.
Near enemies is a concept that I came across a few years back that I have found useful when thinking about climate change, but also just life in general. I can’t even remember how I first heard the term, but it’s actually a Buddhist idea that says for every desirable behavior or state of mind, there’s a slightly different version of it that is actually harmful, but it’s so similar that it’s really hard to tell the two apart. We often think of conflicting forces as being polar opposites, like love and hate, for example. But we get into trouble more often when we are roped by concepts that disguise themselves as love, such as co-dependency.
I’m sure you have experienced this phenomenon many times, where you see something and are like, wait a second I was pretty sure that was a good thing, but this version of it is actually really bad. It’s tricky because as a result you can embrace the bad thing to your own detriment, but the near enemy also sows distrust in the good thing. Here is kind of how I envision of it, like if all the different things you could do in life were along a round dial:
I cannot believe how long it took me to make this shitty graphic this is copyrighted do not use without express permission.
I have mentioned this idea briefly in the newsletter before, but have been thinking about it a lot lately while reading a bunch of things about carbon dioxide removal (see last week’s issue). Climate change is lousy with near enemies, and I feel like almost every useful action you might take could be moved just one notch along the dial and become malignant (carbon taxes comes to mind, depending on how the money is collected and spent). This makes it really hard to know what the right move is. One field where this is very much the case is carbon dioxide removal. Sometimes called negative emissions, or somewhat incorrectly, carbon capture, it is a powerful idea and, as such, open to dangerous near enemies.
I have been reading a lot about carbon dioxide removal because it’s in the news lately, we’ve been running articles on it at the day job, and it’s an area in climate change where I hold a lot of conflict and concern. So I’ve been trying to figure it out via google and reading several papers with beautiful arrays of colored charts and line graphs. And now for my own benefit and maybe or maybe not yours I’m not sure, I am going to attempt a concise summary of this topic along with some of my current thoughts about it seriously I am going to do this yes ok goddamnit here we go. I’ll limit the charts and acronyms as much as possible.
What is carbon dioxide removal?
I feel like most people hear this term and think of giant industrial vacuums sucking pollution out of the sky, which is partially accurate, but that impression and all the fuzzy terminology makes this a confusing topic from the start. Carbon dioxide removal (I’m sorry but I am going to call it CDR), very simply, means removing CO2 from the atmosphere, using an array of methods, but there are two main categories.
One is enhancing natural processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere, often in the form of land use like planting trees or agricultural methods that hold more carbon in the soil. (This is sometimes called AFOLU ah jesus acronyms.) There are a lot of opinions about this subset alone, but they are not to be discounted; something like 25 of the 80 climate solutions identified by Project Drawdown involve land sinks and land management practices. The concept is deceptively simple—some carbon naturally lives in the air, some carbon naturally lives in the ground, and we have fucked that balance all up. We know how to do this already and there are lots of simultaneous benefits, but there are also big potential problems surrounding how it’s deployed at large scale.
The other gets us into giant vacuum territory. These are chemical processes that extract CO2 right out of the air and turn it into something else we can use or just stash away somewhere. There are different forms of this too: the giant vacuums sucking carbon out of the sky are called direct air capture (DAC!), carbon capture and storage grabs the emissions at the source (CCS!), and then there’s bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS!). BECCS is when you burn organic material (like corn or sugarcane or poops) for energy, and then capture the carbon it burns and put it, again, somewhere.
These technologies, especially BECCS, took the spotlight when one of the IPCC’s big “we’re fucked” reports relied heavily on BECCS in its pathways to meet carbon reduction goals, even though it was basically a hypothetical solution.
Is carbon dioxide removal at large scale necessary?
Maybe not, but probably, and if so it depends a lot on what you mean by carbon dioxide removal. I know that is evasive, but there are zillions of ways to answer this question.
I mentioned last week that it’s becoming climate gospel that meeting CO2 reduction goals is flat out impossible without CDR. While that could be technically true depending on your definitions (and which climate scientists you ask), I think when put like that it’s misleading and used for sometimes nefarious purposes. So to bring some clarity to that question, it is annoyingly necessary to parse some of those definitions.
For starters, there’s the 2°C of global warming limit, which is the original IPCC goal that would lead to lots of very bad consequences, but not nearly as bad as say 3-point-something degrees we are on target for now. More than half of the scenarios IPCC identified to hit this target require different forms of CDR.
Then there’s the 1.5°C goal, which was identified in another “we’re fucked” report from the IPCC, which said, actually 2°C is looking so bad we should really be shooting for 1.5°C, but also, it’s almost too late to do that. In that report, all of the scenarios the IPCC (which is really a mishmash of tons of researchers and their individual work) required CDR to hit the goal.
BUT, since then, different teams of researchers have in fact identified pathways to 1.5°C that either greatly reduce the reliance on CDR, or do not rely on it at all. As you can imagine, these are heavy lifts, but really, they are all kind of heavy lifts at this point, and depending on who you ask, 1.5°C may not even be a possibility anymore. The other important qualifier is that within the scenarios that do require a bunch of CDR, there are some that entirely or almost entirely rely on land use, soil, reforestation etc. Here’s one of the few graphs I will rely on (I didn’t make this one, the IPCC did).
So yeah, you can see that P1 is looking pretty sharp there, I see you P1 respect. But P4 over there? Boooo. Burn burn burn and suck suck suck. I also love the term “greenhouse gas intensive lifestyle,” like please respect my greenhouse gas intensive lifestyle.
One thing to note that will come into play later is that a hallmark of the pathways that get by with just forests, soils, agriculture, etc., is that they require very stringent emissions reductions starting pretty much yesterday, and they rely heavily on the reduction of energy demand, so shrinking the energy economy. They do, however, increase quality of life in both the Global North and Global South, and scenarios that support Sustainable Development Goals rely far less on carbon dioxide removal technologies. BECCS, on the other hand, has all sorts of dicey and uncertain side effects.
Why don’t we just do the good stuff?
So why don’t we just stick with P1 and call it a day?
For one, P1 is really hard! But there are several reasons to be concerned that if we don’t put greater focus on CDR we are going to be in trouble. One has to do with our carbon budget, which refers to the fact that there is a finite amount of CO2 we can burn before we are on a runaway train past 1.5 or even 2 degrees. And we’ve already burned almost all of it. (In fact, there’s a chance we have already exceeded it.)
Once we overshoot by certain amount, removing many billions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere becomes the only way back. Something I’m just not sure about and am more than a little worried about is whether we have crossed into territory where the mostly land use change and low-energy demand scenarios are not enough. I don’t know.
Another problem is that there are certain things we rely on, like some industrial processes and air travel, for example, that we don’t know how to do yet without burning carbon. Ratcheting up CDR could give us time to figure it out.
These arguments, and others, form the case for pouring more money and attention into carbon dioxide removal as a form of harm reduction—a way to curb damage during the energy transition. And I’m sure that actually understates the enthusiasm a lot of people have for CDR as they imagine the potential of its aggressive use in combination with other aggressive mitigation measures.
Carbon dioxide removal as the mother of all near enemies
So that’s my kind of measured summary of what I know on the topic, which to be totally honest, is still a work in progress. I have read a fair amount about it at this point, but am open to counterpoints or other research papers that I need to cram into my brainpiece, etc., and of course, what we know is always changing.
But this is where we get to the Crisis Palace part, wherein I am fairly terrified of what a big push for carbon dioxide removal could unleash, while operating undercover as a near enemy of both harm reduction and emissions reductions.
What I mean by that is, whenever someone is making the case for climate fixes that do not at their core stop the burning of fossil fuels or end the extractive energy economy, their reasoning sounds quite similar to all other climate change advocacy, sometimes even climate justice advocacy. They outline short-term reduction of X gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere, public health benefits, how it will prevent harm to vulnerable communities, improve quality of life. In fact, they often say exactly the kind of thing I would say, but then the finale is something like, “and that is why we need to switch to natural gas drilling” or “and that is why need to deploy direct air capture plants at scale.”
And I honestly give most of those people the benefit of the doubt that they do want similar outcomes as I do. The problem is, while certain benefits make these strategies appear to be solutions, they can actually work in favor of the underlying problem, or merely replicate the underlying problem in different venues. The climate justice community calls them “false solutions” which is way better messaging than near enemies, but I’m going to stick with my thingy. They look like solutions. But they are one notch over on the dial such that they become a harmful force.
A big part of the problem is that they do a lot of heavy lifting for the actual tried and true enemies on the opposite side of the dial.
Case in point: A recent study from MIT concluded that “Our projections show that CCS can play a major role in the second half of this century in mitigating carbon emissions in the power sector. But in order for CCS to be well-positioned to provide stable and reliable power during that time frame, research and development will need to be scaled up.”
This study was funded by none other than ExxonMobil. To be fair, ExxonMobil are experts on climate change because after all they did know it was coming since the 1970s and spent millions to block action to prevent it. Then again, it would probably be best for everyone if ExxonMobil and every other fossil fuel company gathered up all of their little opinions and ideas on how to stop climate change, put them all in their little backpacks, zipped them up real tight, and then fucked right off forever.
To further elaborate on what ExxonMobil envisions as a climate solution, as noted last week, citing an article in Politico:
Exxon and other oil producers are embracing carbon capture as a technology that will enable their oil and gas businesses to continue to operate in a carbon-constrained environment … Exxon, unlike European rivals like Shell and BP, has not vowed to transition away from fossil fuels, arguing that oil and gas will remain key to the global economy for decades as building blocks for plastics and to drive global expansion of electricity. Instead, the company plans to devote its attention to capturing and storing the carbon emitted from oil and gas — and capitalizing on the massive new business opportunity.
Even if well-intentioned champions of CDR technology do not share this vision of the future, they are pushing in the same direction. That direction is toward P4 up there, on steroids. Dig, burn, suck, bury, repeat. Build an entire second fossil fuel industry perched atop the first one to ensure we can continue our greenhouse gas intensive lifestyles.
Proponents would argue that they can make sure that doesn’t happen. Maybe they can build just a little bit of direct air capture or BECCS as a treat to get us back on the right track. Or if and only if fossil burning is slashed at the same time. Yes, we obviously need to reduce emissions too, they argue. If that is the plan, it demonstrates far more confidence than I have in the ability of a profit-seeking industry to operate with restraint.
When fracking was being sold by many in the environmental community as a climate solution, the pitch was that it was just a bridge fuel to get us on the right track. Yes there were concerns about methane leaks, but we could manage them. Fast-forward to now, and industry has locked in sprawling new fossil fuel infrastructure, produced a glut of natural gas in the market, poisoned water supplies in rural communities, and spewed methane—which is short-lived but eight times as potent a contributor to global warming as CO2—to all time high levels in the atmosphere. Cool bridge bro!
These same kinds of threats stand to follow a booming carbon removal industry, as “pipelines need to be built, vast geological reservoirs deep underground need to be fashioned into carbon dioxide storage facilities, costly new technologies for vacuuming carbon from the air and factories need to be brought up to scale.”
Some of these practices require enormous amounts of energy, water, and chemical absorbents. Where would these plants be located? Where would those new pipelines and underground reservoirs be built to move and store all that liquid carbon? I think we all know the answer is on Tribal land, in poor rural areas, in communities of color. This is why environmental justice advocates typically oppose carbon removal as a climate solution. They know who will pay the price as that second fossil fuel industry is built.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
So I guess my conclusion for now is, deeply concerned about chemical carbon capture, hopeful for land use solutions, and generally just worried that we’re past the time when we can reject even our shittiest solutions. But I don’t mean for this to be an anti-technology screed, either. Remember the AFOLU solutions, the agriculture and soils and reforestation that I like so much more? Those have near enemies too! Land use can become a euphemism for land theft. Planting trees, a license for business as usual in all other regards. Land management as a form of carbon reduction keeps getting exposed as a hustle that uses flawed or funny math to justify doing nothing at all. Also, forests burn.
The bigger point is that we are entering a period of climate action where the right steps and the wrong steps are going to be increasingly difficult to tell from each other, because we are exiting the period in which the right steps meant doing absolutely anything and the wrong steps meant moving backwards. Everything that needs to be done now is difficult, politically, technologically, economically, personally. What’s easier, rapidly ending the fossil fuel industry, or rapidly building a second one?
That means the solutions we choose are based on the best science we have, but also on our values. What we are willing to sacrifice, what control we are willing to give up, and what we believe is possible in terms of humanity’s ability to change.
I recently watched a panel on police reform versus abolition, and someone from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights defended radicalism by defining it as action that addresses the root of the problem. That feels like a useful framing in separating solutions from their near enemies. Our values are largely determined by what we believe the actual problem of climate change is.
If we view it not as the state of the planet’s atmosphere, but as the extracting and burning of fossil fuels for energy, we wouldn’t build new infrastructure that allows fossil fuels to burn. If we view the problem as an economy that runs on extraction and exploitation, maybe that helps us navigate difficult technology and land use decisions. Otherwise we run the risk of building a planet covered in more and more industrial plants, allowing us to keep digging, burning, sucking up and burying, all to perpetuate a system that was not working well for most of us in the first place.
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Watching
My personal film festival in which I catch up on movies I’ve been wanting to see continues, and the latest winner (there have been losers, don’t ask about X-Men Apocalypse) is Another Round, a delightful and sad and sweet and funny Danish film starring Hannibal himself Mads Mikkelsen. I believe the tagline mentions that it is “life-affirming,” and I can affirm that is the case. Just watch it you don’t have to read what it’s about first it will be better that way. It’s on Hulu.
This movie is a comedy
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Listening
Suss, High Line
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OK I’m going to wrap up because this was kind of a long and gnarly one, no links today it’s getting late but I will have all of the links you hunger for next week don’t worry. I will give you one good link, because I think it’s important to know whether or not you are cheugy, and adjust accordingly.
This was also the first issue in the new format, which now lives at crisispalace.com so that’s fun. I’m still polishing up the new site and figuring out the mail plugin and I have to migrate over the archives, but we will get there and I think it will be an improvement. Don’t you love that feeling when you move into a new palace, getting all our stuff set up, hanging up the art. See you next week roomies.
Tate
PS I don’t think there will be a like/heart function now, so what you’re going to have to do is just respond and in the text of the email say “heart” or “like” or maybe “good one” and that will do the trick.
Regardless of a community’s politics, structures emerge to protect the status quo’s grip on power
A lot happened this week. The Derek Chauvin murder conviction was, I guess I would say a relief, but I don’t know there are a lot of complex emotions in the mix. I feel like people should celebrate it as a victory, which was won only because of a months-long uprising which is what it takes to hold just one single cop accountable for murder. But like a lot of people I guess I find cold comfort from a court verdict. Policing in America is no less brutal, in fact, after Chauvin murdered George Floyd, use of force in Minneapolis dipped for a few weeks then substantially increased. Defund. Abolish.
More big climate news including Biden’s commitment to reduce emissions in the US along the lines of what climate scientists say actually needs to happen by 2030. So that’s encouraging although you know a climate pledge is as a climate pledge does as old Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump used to say in his little suit sitting on his little bench.
Today I actually want to do an update on a local issue I wrote about a while back but don’t worry I think there is some relevance here for anyone so keep reading even if you could give a shit about Boston.
So back in January, this newsletter issue was about a campaign to reform the rules of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which is one of the least transparent in the country (watchdog groups once gave it an F and a D+ ), although plenty of other legislatures are not doing so hot either so you might want to check yours out. That lack of transparency—and rules that give outsized power to House leadership—has meant that the state government is far more conservative in the policy it enacts than its average voters. From the earlier newsletter:
In the case of climate change, that has translated to 13 years going by without new major legislation, in a state that fancies itself a national leader on the issue. Out of 245 climate change-related bills introduced in the House from 2013 to 2018, 202 were quietly killed in committee. Only nine were ever voted on by the entire House, and almost every decision on every one of those bills happened in a secret vote, with no public tally recorded. That’s according to a recent, damning report from Brown University and the Climate Social Science Network, which also found that clean energy advocates were outspent by industry opposition (utilities, real estate, fossil fuel and chemical industries) 3.5 to one, and that the House Speaker wields tremendous control over what bills clear the House.
House rules have made it easier for leadership to block all kinds of policies, including immigrant rights legislation that has barely moved for decades despite hundreds of people advocating for it every year in a big lobby day; a tenant rights bill that was quietly killed after several years of broad advocacy and compromise; certain police reform measures that were killed behind closed doors. There’s anti-wage theft legislation in play that has two-thirds of the Legislature listed as co-sponsors, a veto-proof majority, but it can’t get a House vote.
When we last checked in on the transparency campaign, myself and a bunch of other people had just met with our Rep on the issue, who was mostly condescending and disinterested. In the four months since then I have followed up on the topic with four very polite and respectful emails (I swear I was really nice) and have heard absolutely not one single whisper back, which is truly model behavior for an elected official.
Meanwhile, pressure from the campaign caused the Speaker to delay a decision on changing the rules, although he indicated the House would also revisit how constituents can interact with legislators, in response to the growing number of advocacy groups contacting lawmakers. The Globe has since published twoeditorials chastising the House’s lack of transparency. Hundreds of thousands of texts, calls, and emails were sent, dozens of letters to the editor were published. And tensions continued to rise between the old boys club and lawmakers standing up to them.
We did, however, win a partial victory. A big part of the push is for public committee votes, since hundreds of bills are killed in committee for opaque reasons. In February, the legislature debated rules for joint committees (which include the House and Senate—the Senate has more transparent rules), and a big concession will make all joint committee “no” votes public. So that’s a pretty big deal!
But obviously that is not enough, so this week there was a big kickoff meeting for the next phase of the campaign, which is called the People’s House. Notably, the campaign has added a demand for House Speaker term limits. This is a big addition, because it explicitly targets the messed up concentration of power in the chamber, and calls out the Speaker himself (it has only EVER been a white man in the history of Massachusetts) and his wildly disproportionate power, which basically amounts to minority rule.
Here are some fun facts about the Massachusetts Speaker of the House: He pretty much singlehandedly controls the flow of which legislation can be considered by the rank and file reps. He alone decides who heads committees, which not only provides the lucky winners with significant power themselves, but also handsome financial bonuses. The stipend for the Ways and Means Chair is $65,000 a year, which is more than the annual salary of a representative. In other words, the Speaker of the House can double or cut in half a representative’s potential salary, depending on whether they stay in line.
As a result, most House Reps vote 90-100% in line with the Speaker. There was even a case where the Speaker once mistakenly placed the wrong vote, and at least 63 reps immediately voted the same way. When the Speaker realized he made a mistake, he switched his vote and all 63 then did the same. That is some Veep shit.
The kickoff meeting for the campaign was pretty inspiring, especially for a zoom (you can watch it if you want), with close to 200 people showing up from a range of organizations. It was an interesting cross-section of the progressive community here, including speakers from Act On Mass, which leads the campaign, immigration advocate Mijente, Sunrise, and even two legislators. Maybe the best session was led by Sakina Cotton, who I believe is a freshman in high school, representing youth advocacy group Our Climate, now a coalition partner.
I stole this from a slide deck.
So why is this campaign such a big deal? Why are all these organizations and lawmakers throwing weight behind it? I know my riveting prose might lead you to believe otherwise, but this is super dry stuff, right? It’s also worth acknowledging that several Republican lawmakers also support these rules changes, which might make you wonder, shouldn’t progressives just be happy with the Democratic supermajority and keep Dems’ control as locked down as possible?
Well, in the Massachusetts Legislature, the Democratic Party holds pretty much all of the power, so any progress needs to be won within the party. Contrary to hand-wringing about partisan polarization, many progressives and even staunch Democratic voters recognize that in a two party system, your party being in power does not inherently serve the public very well. Another way to put this is, regardless of the majority politics in any particular community, structures tend to emerge to protect the status quo’s grip on power, at all costs. In our case, it’s conservative Democrats within the majority party who block policy that would challenge both excesses of state power like police brutality, and excesses of corporate power like exploitation of workers and tenants. And without transparency, it’s difficult for the public to even organize for change, as legislators will sometimes even vote to kill bills they publicly co-sponsored.
So at stake is not just a wide range of progress on specific issues, as reflected by the breadth of the coalition involved, but also the underlying structures that control how we govern and are governed. The different interests involved recognize that. As Somerville’s State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven said in the campaign meeting, “Underneath the policies and issues, and all the things that are very explicit and on the surface, are relationships, culture, how we interact with each other, how we hold power accountable. … The reason this work is so exciting is because you’re all challenging what it means to interact with power.”
The reality that there is something screwed up in these power structures, at different levels of government, seems to be more widely recognized these days. We’re seeing heated public debate about the role of the Senate parliamentarian for god’s sake. We all see the increasingly blatant minority rule in federal government through Senate rules, the electoral college, and hundreds of voter restriction bills in state legislatures across the country. We see it in the campaign finance laws that allow special interests like the oil and gas industry to endanger humanity’s future to protect their business model. If all that weren’t enough, images that flashed before us of frothing, shirtless men smashing Capitol windows and dragging out literal chunks of the public sector as souvenirs, cheered on by members of a minority party, made it frighteningly clear that democracy isn’t something that we automatically get, and the version we do have is often not all that democratic. This is something a lot of people once took for granted, but perhaps not anymore.
The country’s largest coal miners union says it’s open to transition away from fossil fuels if it can guarantee financial aid and jobs in renewable energy for workers.
The West braces for the first federal declaration of water shortage. The housing market in Phoenix is also bananas right now so that will be interesting. I can’t remember if I shared this before, but this is a good article on how climate change is impacting the Colorado River.
The “whitest paint ever” reflects 98% of sunlight, and could offer big energy savings benefits.
A Boston musician left a $10,000 flute in the back of a cab and nine years later she just got it back.
The absurdity of the New York Times trying to “both sides” threats to democracy.
Denver’s horror-themed bar looks fun, including Midsommar-themed drinks.
Superlink
There were a couple of disturbing articles on carbon removal this week. It’s becoming almost gospel in climate discourse that some level of carbon dioxide removal is necessary to reign in the worst of climate change, which climate models mostly indicate, although what form that takes is up for debate. But it’s also clear that this narrative is going to be used to advance massive investments in a carbon removal industry that oil and gas companies believe will allow them to keep burning fossil fuels for many years to come—churning out more CO2 pollution, sucking it up, and burying billions of tons of it underground in liquid form.
Pipelines need to be built, vast geological reservoirs deep underground need to be fashioned into carbon dioxide storage facilities, costly new technologies for vacuuming carbon from the air and factories need to be brought up to scale….
The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.
Exxon and other oil producers are embracing carbon capture as a technology that will enable their oil and gas businesses to continue to operate in a carbon-constrained environment. … Exxon, unlike European rivals like Shell and BP, has not vowed to transition away from fossil fuels, arguing that oil and gas will remain key to the global economy for decades as building blocks for plastics and to drive global expansion of electricity. Instead, the company plans to devote its attention to capturing and storing the carbon emitted from oil and gas — and capitalizing on the massive new business opportunity.
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Watching
I have put a pause on all new TV series so I can catch up on movies I’ve been meaning to watch and the best one so far was Booksmart, which was very funny and very good.
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Listening
Sea Life Sandwich Boy, by Horsegirl
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Still getting the new newsletter platform set up, stay tuned. At long last got my first vaccination in a CVS in East Boston next to a display of Beanie Babies which was an interesting place to experience such a life-changing moment but you know capitalism always has to make it weird. Regardless, it was very moving and joyous and all of the things that everyone is saying about the experience. I did not do any card selfies but we did pick up burritos at Taqueria Jalisco and ate them in a little park right next to the Mass Pike which felt like a very Boston thing do like nature was healing.
How about you all, getting shots? I hope so. If you want to do a selfie with your little card just do it who cares. If you want to get a burrito after you can do that. Whatever makes you happy I just want you to be happy readers.
An interview with cartoonist and illustrator Madeleine Jubilee Saito of All We Can Save
Comic by Madeleine Jubilee Saito, from All We Can Save.
One of the many unique things about the 2020 climate justice anthology All We Can Save (see last week’s review here if you missed it), at the start of each section in the book, there’s an interstitial four-panel comic that evokes the themes of the essays that lie ahead. Each illustration is a visual poem that acts as a kind of meditation bell between the weighty pieces of nonfiction prose that make up most of the book. Along with the use of written poetry, the comics give the anthology a unique rhythm, loosening up the points of entry as you work your way through the book.
The comics are the work of Madeleine Jubilee Saito, a cartoonist and illustrator based in Somerville, Massachusetts. I first came across Madeleine’s work a couple of years ago at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) in Cambridge, where I picked up one of her zines, What the body is for, a beautiful collection of introspective comics, memorable for their quiet, understated use of words and color.
I immediately recognized Madeleine’s art in All We Can Save, and as I was reading the book I thought it would be nice to learn more about her work for an issue of Crisis Palace. Climate justice is a topic that runs through much of her art, which has been recognized in Best American Comics 2019, The Comics Journal’s Best Comics of 2018, and featured in Guernica and other publications. In 2017, she co-edited with cartoonist Andrew White the anthology Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful & Hopeful. Madeleine currently works as creative director and operations lead for the All We Can Save Project, an organization that emerged from the book with a mission of, “Nurturing a welcoming, connected, and leaderful climate community, rooted in the work and wisdom of women, to grow a life-giving future.”
I’m so grateful that Madeleine took the time to chat with me for the newsletter, and allowed me to reprint some of her comics here. We had a wonderful conversation about the role of art in climate change, the irresistible power of comics as a medium, and how her faith shapes her work and outlook on climate justice.
I hope you enjoy it.✓
Why don’t we talk about All We Can Save first, because sometimes I go off on a tangent and I want to be sure to talk about the book. Can you maybe start by telling me like a little bit about how you got involved with the project?
Doctors [Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson] had originally imagined the anthology as just a collection of essays spanning the realm of work that women are doing in climate, and then realized that it just really needed poetry, tonally, and then also realized that they really wanted visual art. And as I’ve read the anthology, I think that’s one of the things that makes it special is that presence of the breathing room that poetry and art provide.
Apparently, Sunrise Movement shared some of my comics on Twitter, and they saw them and were like, oh, this vibe is really resonant with what we’re going for, and this could be a really good fit. So they reached out to me and asked about using some of my comics and we worked together for a few months. I drew them originally in full color, and for publication purposes, we had to just do the two colors, orange and black. So I translated them to two color. And then I redrew and sort of reconfigured some of the pieces to work as chapter headers, which is where they live in the book. And that’s how that happened.
Oh interesting, so these were comics that you had done before knowing about the book.
Yeah, exactly. So every year I do a monthly comics practice called 30 days of comics, founded by cartoonist Derik Badman. It’s sort of a NaNoWriMo derivative, where every day in the month you draw a comic. And I’ve been doing that annually, since I think 2014. And I found this to be a really fruitful place for work, especially for someone like me, who finds it hard sometimes to just create out of nowhere. You pick some constraints, for me, that’s often the form, like the four-panel comic. I also usually pick a color palette, and sometimes sort of secret constraints that inform the words I choose or the images I choose. And in 2019, I had been making work about climate for a few years in various ways, but I wanted to spend a month exploring the spiritual and emotional and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis. So that series of comics was what all the comics in the book were drawn from.
And how did you choose which comics to use?
The editors picked. Basically, I was like, yeah, go for it, I’d be happy to have any of my work reprinted. And so I think as they were doing the huge task of arranging all these poems and essays into sections, they then went through and found pieces of mine that felt resonant with the theme of each section. And it’s been really, really special to read the book. I was obviously involved in editing my own work. But I hadn’t read the essays and moved through it all as a sequence before reading the final book, and it has been so special just to see the ways that my comics are sort of in conversation with the essays and poems around them.
And it’s a little surreal, because a lot of the women in the book are actually people who deeply formed my own ways of thinking about climate. So it’s just been very special. And this is something that I think happens throughout the book. You see the ways that each of the poems and essays and comics speak to each other—there’s a depth of conversation that happens just by setting these things alongside each other that I haven’t experienced before. And it’s really special.
Yeah, it’s rare that you come across comics worked into a prose book, much less of prose nonfiction book, much less a prose nonfiction book about climate change. So it really is a unique experience, I totally agree. I wonder, did this make you think differently about any of your past work? Seeing it in this context?
Oh, wow. I love that question. I feel like I’m not going to be able to think of specific ways that they came to new light. But I think of my work as comics poetry. And so I think, coming back to my work and seeing it in conversation with other pieces, it feels kind of like how I experience poems.
At least for me, unlike other pieces of writing, where maybe you are sort of consciously crafting every part of it, and designing it to work a certain way for the reader, there’s just a lot of my process that feels very intuitive and I’m trying to distill a specific feeling or draw out a certain image or metaphor. And so, because of that, a lot of the time when I come back to them, they can feel completely different. And I think that’s true when I’m looking back at past work, generally. But that’s especially true in the book, seeing them in conversation with these other pieces.
Yeah, definitely. I was looking over the Warmer anthology that you co-edited. And it was striking to me how most of those entries were similar to that. Like you could imagine climate change comics being more like Joe Sacco’s work, where it’s journalistic or explanatory. But it was interesting how in your anthology, most of them were very abstract or open to interpretation. I’m not sure what the question is there, but is there something about comics and art that is more fitting when trying to understand climate change in an emotional sense versus, say, facts and figures?
That’s interesting that you say that. So the reason that all the comics in Warmer are really poetic is specifically because my co-editor and I Andrew White, we’re both in sort of the poetry comics world. And we specifically wanted to make an anthology of poetry comics about climate. Since then, there’s been a few lovely memoir comics that touch on climate, like Sophie Yanow’s What is a Glacier? and Sarah Glidden’s diary comics about climate and her reflections on raising a child. And I’m sure there have been others.
But at the time, I think a lot of the climate-related comics that I saw were people using comics in this very explicitly, sort of pedagogical way, where it’s using comics to be like, here’s science for you to understand. And something that I felt really strongly then and I feel strongly now, is this need and this hunger for work that looks at the climate crisis in a way that is more fully human and invites the spiritual and human and emotional parts of ourselves to be present with it in a way that the more pedagogical works don’t.
I do think that text only poetry can definitely do that, as well. But I love the way that comics can be powerful and sort of irresistible. I think comics are very difficult to resist and easy to read. And very beautiful. Those are all things that I like a lot about them.
Yeah, that’s a great point. I love the inclusion of poetry in All We Can Save because climate change is a really hard thing to wrap your head around, I guess, in linear sort of terms. But with poetry, it evokes these thoughts or emotions that can help you understand it in ways that you might not be able to by reading a book, because we don’t have the right words to really describe it, you know? So I love that point about how they’re irresistible, because poems can sometimes intimidate people or people feel like they don’t understand it. Whereas a comic is very inviting.
Yeah, I think there’s a way in which text only poetry still feels for a lot of people like something that you read in school that is either inaccessible or your ability to understand it means that you’re very good and smart. And I think that media that fulfills the function of poetry, like music or comics, can fulfill that need in a way that’s less tied to people’s experiences with reading poetry in school or whatever.
You mentioned that you’re a fan of contributors to the book. I wonder, what was your response to the concept of the book in general?
So the concept, I was just very psyched about. Part of why I wanted to make Warmer initially, was just a thirst for climate work that felt more human. Hearing about All We Can Save, and then being asked to have my work in it was just, I was super psyched. Like, this is a book that I wish I had had, I wish everyone had had, like 10 years ago. And I think it would have helped me a lot as I, in the last five years or so, have been exploring how to make work about climate and how to think about it and how to think about my place in the work. I’m very glad it exists, and yeah, I wish I had had it five years ago.
What was it about the sort of mainstream conversation about climate that you felt was unsatisfying?
I think something that was tough for me, and this might be just me, having been socialized as a woman to feel tentative about my abilities in science or something. But when things are framed as, alright, here’s the science and anyone who wants to engage in this conversation, you have to be like a scientist, it’s super alienating for me, and I think everyone. And I think it’s become clear that that’s a framing that comes from the fossil fuel industry. Not framing it as, “What do we do to preserve our common home and our common good,” but rather, “Is climate change real?”
So one way of describing it is that a lot of art that I was seeing about it was around that question of, is climate change real? Which I think is a framing that benefits the fossil fuel industry, and is not a question that I think anyone’s really asking.
So maybe another way to answer that is, I feel like All We Can Save, and works like it, and stuff that I want to answer in my own work, move away from that question. And I don’t want to overcorrect here; obviously, questions of what is happening in the natural world and how do we know and what should we do are obviously incredibly important. But I’m also interested in questions of: How do we process this? How do we conceptualize ourselves in relationship to the natural world and in relationship to each other? And what does this mean for how we understand our lives? All of those sorts of questions.
Well, I would like to talk a little bit about how you got into comics and your approach to them. I’m a huge comics fan, I should point that out. So I’m curious, what were your big influences? What made you want to get into the field?
I grew up reading Sunday comics, like Sunday strips. I I grew up with a lot of Calvin and Hobbes collections around the house. I really loved them. Then I was in high school during this sort of golden age of web comics. And I was a huge fan of Dinosaur Comics and Kate Beaton’s work especially, and A Softer World. Those are some of the big ones. And then in high school, I read Persepolis for the first time. So I think Kate Beaton’s work and Marjane Satrapi’s work and Allison Bechtel’s work, those are sort of where I started making comics. In high school, I was very interested in the ways that autobiographical comics just made everyday life so magical. Life under capitalism can be so horrible and feel so meaningless, and there’s a way in which autobio comics, and making autobio comics about your own life sort of imbues magic. Maybe this is also true about writing about yourself, but there’s something special about drawing about yourself, too. So that is sort of one part of that lineage. And then, when I was in college, I read a lot of Chris Ware and I then found people like Aidan Koch, and Andrew White, who is now my friend and was co-editor of Warmer, and Alyssa Berg who is also in Warmer.
Did you ever do any autobio comics?
I did when I was in high school, but I haven’t really since then. I’m very tentative about sharing my life with the world. My work, I think, is very emotionally intimate, and sort of spiritually intimate. And I think there’s a way in which sharing that depth but not sharing, you know, like, hey, here’s my family and here’s what I do every day. I think that has felt like a good balance to me.
Yeah that’s understandable. How did you arrive at your current style and the four panel format that you typically use now?
So I started using the four-panel set up I think in 2014, which was the first year I did 30 days of comics. I picked it because I needed a format that I could easily complete in one day and four panels is long enough that you can do some interesting things with rhythm and symmetry, but it’s short enough that you can do it in a day. And I really love playing with radial symmetry and the four-panel frame allows for that in an interesting way. So yeah, I chose it as a constraint then and I really loved it and kept using it.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of King Cat and John Porcellino’s comics where they’re very simple and pared down in a way that allows these special moments of beauty to come through.
I love that. My friend Andrew White interviewed me for The Comics Journal a couple months ago, and he referenced this article about a sort of Midwestern school of cartooning, which includes definitely John Porcellino, Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga, and some other people. Basically a bunch of white guys in the Midwest. And they describe some of the characteristics of that as a deep simplicity and interest in the mundane as sort of revelatory. And I fully identify with that (laughs). So that’s very interesting. And I think John Porcellino lives very close to where I grew up [in Rockford, Illinois].
Another person I might put in that category is Maggie Umber, who is also in the Midwest.
She’s also in Warmer!
I love her comics so much.
I’m very honored by even just the association. I love her work so much.
I feel like both of you use color in similar ways. It’s a very emotional use of color. And there’s also a quietness to it, for lack of a better term. Kind of a calm to it, like a meditative quality.
Thank you. Those are definitely all qualities I see and love in her work. Yeah, I am only complimented by that comparison. Have you read Sound of Snow Falling?
Yeah, I love that book.
That is just one of the most beautiful comics of all time. It’s just so perfectly paced. It’s so beautiful. It’s so poetic and intensely emotional without having any words or humans. It’s such a beautiful piece.
And the way that she uses sequence, it’s just a very powerful use of time passing. I totally agree, it’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of color in your work and how you use it?
Yeah, I think it varies from piece to piece. There are definitely some pieces like you mentioned, What the body is for. That was the product of a daily practice during Lent in 2018. So I originally drew that with the final form of risograph printing in mind, which the zine that you have is risograph, printed beautifully by Perfectly Acceptable in Chicago. Riso is an old-fashioned way of printing, where you just print one color at a time. It’s very cheap, but it results in colors that are very vibrant. It’s a lot cheaper and I think more beautiful than just printing digitally. So it’s something that a lot of cartoonists and small artists like. So with that piece, the book starts out just blue and then as I was moving through Lent, and moving towards Easter and springtime, some of the reds that I was using came in. So sometimes color is this symbolic thing.
I also did that with another book, House Fires, again, with red and blue. But I think with my 30 days of comics work, it’s often less overtly symbolic in that way. I’ll often start a piece trying to get at a specific feeling or a specific mood. And I’ll pick colors at the beginning that feel like they relate to that. And I think maybe another element is that I’m always trying to be as succinct as possible, visually, especially. So whenever I can pare things down, I try to do that.
I strongly believe that constraints are often the most fruitful thing for comics in particular and probably with lots of kinds of art. So I think sticking to a really constrained palette—I mean it’s also cheap, in terms of the indie comic scene. Most mini comics are in black and white just because it’s way, way cheaper than printing in digital full color. But I also think it can lead to some really fruitful stuff.
You know, another thing that really strikes me in your comics is the use of the passage of time, sometimes long periods of time in a small space. Which, it seems like that lends itself to some of the challenges in understanding climate change. Some of the challenge is wrapping your head around this very large time scale. There are some comics in All We Can Save that are almost like a time-lapse of change happening. I wonder how you think about time in your comics?
Wow, that’s such a good question. So in comics, and I think maybe in film, too, there’s this thing called a beat. And certain cartoonists will use it more often than others. As an off topic example, in Doonesbury, the punchline will often be that there’s a beat panel where one character says something and then there’s a panel where they’re just like looking at each other, and then someone says something back. I’ve always felt so drawn to beats in comics, to empty spaces. And maybe part of it is just that it feels dramatic. But there’s something about the way that it creates a pocket of stillness, it just feels very good. I feel very drawn to it and I’m not sure why.
It gets back to what you were saying about how the purpose of poetry and comics in All We Can Save is that you are providing a beat between these essays. It’s that breathing space you were talking about.
Yeah, totally.
And I think that’s so useful in discussion of climate change, because it’s such a chaotic space and sometimes you just need to like, sit and be quiet for a second. Just think about it.
I did want to talk to you about how climate change became a focus of your comics. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you first approached the topic in a big way and how it became a bigger part of your life and your art.
My background is, I’m from rural Northern Illinois and I’m a white woman. And I think for me, and I think this is true for a lot of people, my sort of interest in environmental things broadly just came from childhood where a lot of the most beautiful spaces I was in were the woods, or the outdoors. As I’ve reflected on it more, being in the woods or being outside, those are some of the only spaces that weren’t sort of late-capitalist horrors. The town I grew up in, Rockford, there aren’t really sidewalks. There aren’t really any sort of common spaces besides stores and a mall. And so I think natural spaces, like when I went to summer camp, and when I was able to be in the woods, those are some of the places that I felt most human, because I think those are some of the few places that are not built in an inhuman capitalist way in the region where I’m from.
And so I think from a young age, I had this idea of like, oh, I like the woods. I like the environment. A thing that people who like those things do is they care about the environment, they want to protect it. And then I think in college, I learned a lot and had some awakenings, sort of spiritually, and I became a Christian in a new way. And I also had some revelations politically and as a leftist. And all of that sort of converged into the conviction that the climate crisis was extremely important and something that needed to be talked about, and something that I—especially as a Christian, and as a person sharing this common home with others—this is something that is among the most important things of my life. And among the most important things that we are called to respond to.
You had mentioned your faith and your spirituality a couple of times and this is totally up to you if you feel comfortable talking about it more, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about how your faith and spirituality show up in your art and your politics? Seems like it’s a big influence.
This is always a tricky question. Because for me, it kind of feels like a question of, how does your faith show up in your making breakfast and making food for your family? And it’s just, it’s the whole thing. I think there’s a way in which everything I do, and especially everything in the realm of ethics and meaning, is all very deeply shaped by the Christian tradition and my understanding of myself in it. So it feels, to me, like my comics are just 100% my faith. But I’m very comfortable, and I want people who aren’t Christian or in any sort of faith tradition to be able to interact with my work. So it feels like 100% of what my work is. But I also am grateful and want people to be able to interact with it, even if that’s not where they are, or if that’s not a dimension that they read it with.
I definitely feel like that’s the case. But it’s one of those things where, when you know about it, you notice some themes like redemption and rebirth that show up in the four-panel structure. I wonder if there any themes or ideas in Christianity that you feel come through in your work.
One thing that I have landed on as something that I really want to continue to make work about, and that I’ve been making work about for a few years, that sort of intersects with my faith and my thoughts about the climate crisis, is how we understand the material world.
I think there’s a way in which some parts of American Christianity have an understanding of the material world, that it is sort of secondary, and that it is disposable, or it will disappear, or it doesn’t matter. And I believe that that is very much not aligned with the Christian tradition. I think the fact of Christ having a body and the idea of physical resurrection, and the promise of renewed heaven and Earth, I think all speaks to me that the material world is not something that’s like a first draft that will be discarded, but is deeply sacred and deeply beloved by God, and is of extreme importance.
And I think that has a lot of implications for just about everything. But I think one part of it is that—obviously the climate crisis is something that hurts other people and so I think Christians are called to respond and stand in solidarity with others and with the people who will come after us—but I also think that the way that capitalism has extracted from and harmed and destroyed the material world is desecration of the sacred, in a way that I don’t think people always talk about. So I don’t know, that was a little meandering. But that’s definitely a theme that I’ve been thinking about a lot.
No, that’s so important. It underscores the tragedy of it all, you know? The darkness of it, I think that sometimes gets maybe glossed over because we’re talking about like electric cars and stuff.
I’m curious, was there a point where you were like, “I’m going to be like a climate change comics person, I’m going to do climate change comics”? Was it an intentional thing, or just something you were interested in?
I don’t know if there was a point where I was like, “I want to be a climate cartoonist.” Obviously, I would love to not be a climate cartoonist (laughing) because I would love to not ever think about the climate crisis again.
But I think it was around 2016 or 2017, I was thinking a lot about it and feeling a gap between what I was feeling and processing and the implications for human life and our common existence, and the art that I was seeing about it. And so I think there was a way in which I was like, oh, I actually think that maybe I have a way of speaking and drawing about this that might be able to provide some of that.
Well, first, actually, I made Warmer, because I just wanted to see it. And sometimes I think there’s a part of me that just wanted that work to exist, but was a little scared of just going for it myself. And it felt really good to do it with others. And then after that, I think I felt a little more confident in pursuing it myself.
We’ve talked a little bit about this already, but I wonder if you had more to say about what comics can do that maybe other mediums can’t.
I think one of the one of the things I love most about comics is they’re profoundly accessible, so accessible that a lot of people write them off as lowbrow. And plenty of the comics that have existed over the years have been lowbrow. But I think if I were to name something across all genres, it’s that comics are just deeply engaging. And you can’t not read a comic. If there’s just text in front of you, you can ignore it. But if there’s some little boxes with images and words, you’re gonna read it, because it looks interesting.
So I think from that perspective, I continue to be really excited about the ways that comics can continue to be engaging, and can sort of speak to people. And I mean, within it, there are so many different genres. I would love to see book-length comics memoirs about climate. I don’t think that’ll be me. Maybe that’ll be like, Sophie Yanow or Sarah Glidden, who started to do that a little bit, but I’d love to see memoirs. I would love to see more essay comics or explainer comics that take a more justice angle and less of a pure, explaining science angle.
I would love to see that too. That would be great. Well, I want to get toward wrapping up, but is there anything you’re working on these days you wanted to mention, whether that’s your art or other work related to climate justice?
So my current work is that I am the creative director and operations lead of the All We Can Save Project, which is an organization co-founded by doctors Wilkinson and Johnson, that serves to continue the mission of what the anthology started. So that’s where a lot of my focus has been in the last few months.
Is there anything you can say about the type of work that you’re doing there, or if people should keep an eye out for anything?
Yeah, so one thing that I am feeling excited about is, I have been curating our social media and also an organizational newsletter that includes poetry and art. As we’ve talked about a lot in this conversation, I very much feel that art and poetry are necessary and helpful for navigating the climate crisis. I’ve been curating stuff that I think is helpful there. So yeah, so I guess a plug for our organizational newsletter. [there’s a signup box at https://www.allwecansave.earth/]
Okay, awesome. Well, I kept you longer than I said I was going to I really appreciate you taking the time it’s been great to talk about your work. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me!
Yeah, this was super fun. Thanks so much.
OK fam, thanks for reading as always. If you liked this one, maybe send it to someone who would also like it or share on whatever tik toks or clubhouses you’re into these days. I’m going to skip the links and usual bitlets and wrap things up.
One housekeeping note following up from last week, I am planning to move off of Substack because of some of its editorial practices, specifically who they recruit and pay to write for them. No ill will at all toward people using it, I’ve just been feeling gross about it. This will not affect you at all it should be a seamless switch once I pick a new platform.
Also I know this was another gutwrenching week in America, with news of more mass shootings, more police murdering people, more trials about police murdering people. I hope everyone is OK out there. Defund. Abolish. End it.
All We Can Save offers fertile ground in which readers can find their roots in the climate fight
Violets, Pauline Powell Burns, 1890
A great anthology takes a bundle of seemingly divergent works and assembles them together to represent a coherent form of their own—a creation greater than the sum of its parts. In their excellent 2019 collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction, editors Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta take special care to explore not just the content of the submissions within, but also the form their prose takes—the way of telling. “To speak only about the contents of these vessels would be to ignore how their significance is shaped by the vessels that hold them,” they write in the introduction. To reflect that interest, they structured the book’s contents around the form of a basket, with sections organized as different components of Native basket weaving, like coiling, plaiting, and twining.
“We have understood this project as a way to hold—to hold together and to hold in place.… we see the basket not as a metaphor, but rather as a structure (form) through which to understand how the pieces included here come together in this space.”
I was thinking about this while reading the 2020 anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis because, while the material it delivers is very powerful on its own, it’s the way these essays and poems come together that makes the book even more resonant than what is conveyed in its individual entries. But instead of a basket, All We Can Save takes on a form that is like a rich soil, supporting an ecosystem of voices and ideas that are distinctive, but support and interact with each other to encourage further growth.
It’s a book that, in both overall form and individual arguments, challenges the industrial monocultures of the Anthropocene—undercutting gatekeepers, hierarchies, dominance over nature and each other. Instead, it flattens and diversifies the ways in which we might approach this topic, opting for a chorus of complementary voices. It’s for this reason that I think All We Can Save is more than just a collection of essays about climate change—it serves as an important primer that can help people find their place within a changing world that demands the best from all of us.
I guess I have read quite a few books about climate change I do not care to add them up, and some have been kind of boring and many of them have been very useful and eye-opening. But as I’ve mentioned before, you kind of take what you need from each, as every author brings a very different perspective to a problem that can viewed from near-infinite angles. So I’ve found David Wallace-Wells, for example, to be one of the most effective writers when it comes to portraying the devastating scope of the problem—how climate is now the box within which all other problems fit inside. Elizabeth Kolbert is a master at pulling together researchers’ insights and presenting coherent and compelling snapshots of the field. Cristina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac offer a view from inside global negotiations, and the relentless optimism it requires to keep working against the odds.
But reading All We Can Save made me think that the anthology is maybe the perfect format for a climate change book. Because coming to grips with this problem is something that can’t be done by tapping into any one expert’s insights or even one journalist’s analysis of many insights (except for me my analysis is flawless like subscribe and share). Climate change is not so much a topic as it is a hyperobject, massively distributed across time and space such that you can’t see or hold it in front of you, even though you know it is there. Viewing it is more like looking through a kaleidoscope than a telescope.
That said, All We Can Save does bring a certain perspective of its own, what you could call a climate justice lens, although not strictly so. Climate justice is an accurate way to describe the book’s themes but it also feels insufficient, as it accurately brings to mind the efforts of people who are most impacted by climate change, for example, communities in coastal Louisiana or Indigenous water and land protectors fighting polluting oil and gas infrastructure. Such stories are present in All We Can Save, but the book’s portrayal of climate justice feels broader. It’s a way of thinking about climate change that centers human experience in both its harms and solutions, bearing the full emotional weight that comes with it—devastation, hope, anger, love, mourning.
While men certainly do carry this perspective, inviting only women authors to contribute was an intentional course correction in a field that for decades has been embodied by a white guy in a fleece vest or a suit and tie. As the issue takes center stage, that dynamic threatens to get worse, not better, as billionaires, corporate CEOs, politicians, and mainstream journalists can no longer ignore the problem, so they anoint themselves its leading voices. As I constantly complain about, such voices tend to cast the climate problem as one primarily of top-down expertise, engineering solutions, and bloodless economic policy, which has cordoned off the topic from mass participation.
There is no shortage of policy, expertise, or solutions in this book—it is bursting with all three—but always rooted firmly in human lives and experiences, from all walks of life, making the messages within accessible and familiar, regardless of your own base of knowledge. That’s the rich soil I’m referring to—a diversity of voices speaking with an emotional honesty often lacking in climate discourse, but critical to creating a flourishing movement.
Of course, there’s also a lot of writing in this book about actual soil, which are some of my favorite entries. In “Reciprocity,” by biologist Janine Benyus, she writes about her work in forestry, and how, often reflecting changing political winds, the cooperative community theory of ecology—that species thrive by sharing mutual benefits—has fallen out and back into favor. “One of the fallouts of our fifty-year focus on competition is that we came to view all organisms as consumers and competitors first, including ourselves. Now we’re decades into a different understanding.”
Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer who started Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, writes powerfully about the work it took to restore biodiversity to the nutrient-stripped soils its founders inherited. “As Larisa Jacobson, codirector of Soul Fire Farm, explains, ‘Our duty as earthkeepers is to call the exiled carbon back into the land and to bring the soil life home.’” The farm simultaneously works to heal and restore Black Americans’ connection to the land, which was poisoned by slavery as a means of enriching the country through cash crops. Land use and the repair of soil are an underrated and critical climate change solution, as Project Drawdown outlines, but here again, we’re talking about the human bond with our surroundings, regenerative over industrial growth, literally and figuratively. As a Terry Tempest-Williams poem featured in the book states, “Soul and soil are not separate.”
Some other favorite essays:
Rihanna Gunn-Wright’s explainer on what the Green New Deal really is. “The best policy proposals—that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them—present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it.”
Kate Marvel’s cutting take on the hubris of solar geoengineering, in which we “mask the hangover but continue the bender.”
Mary Annaïse Heglar on privileged gatekeepers, both nihilists and optimists.
Emily Atkin’s journey to casting aside neutrality as a climate journalist.
Kate Knuth’s formulation of climate citizenship, and the “sacred trust between the individual and the collective.”
Katharine Hayhoe’s stories of talking about climate change in front of oil and gas executives, Rotary Clubs in West Texas, a Successful Canadian Women’s Dinner, even her husband, a former climate skeptic. “To care about a changing climate we don’t have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are a human alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need.”
The most gut-wrenchingly honest thing I’ve read about climate change and being a parent, by Amy Westervelt. “It’s a constant choice between me, my kids, and the greater good. And I almost never feel like I’m making the right decision.”
And so many more. I already knew I was going to like All We Can Save, because I like the work of so many of its contributors. But the way in which the anthology format weaves together all of these voices to make individual points, while building this larger, interactive philosophy on how to interact with climate change, makes it, for my money, one of the best books on climate change you can read. Not only that, I think it’s the perfect book for someone who maybe grasps the idea of climate change and cares about it, but has struggled to find where their own lives fit into the larger, profoundly overwhelming topic. It’s a book that provides fertile ground in which readers can find their own roots in the climate fight, to understand how their own stories and lives fit into this ecosystem, and how their contribution can make it more diverse and resilient.
I wanted to share this inspirational email I got the other day.
Nice things, cont.
This week I listened to an interview with Heather McGhee (yes it was on Ezra Klein), whose new book The Sum of Us is getting a lot of attention. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds amazing I can’t wait, and I gather she starts her argument with the framing of “why we can’t have nice things” which was the theme of last issue’s newsletter about why our infrastructure is so terrible. McGhee’s premise is that for centuries, Americans have all been sold this false zero-sum story (like the the “one-up/one-down” world view bell hooks describes) that’s prevented everyone in America from having better lives through widely available public goods.
She uses the devastating example of public swimming pools, which were these thriving community resources all over the country until integration, when municipalities shut them down and literally paved them over rather than allowing people of color to also have access. She extends that metaphor to resources like affordable public education, home ownership, and health care coverage, where in all cases white Americans have drastically cut back their own access to protect where they sit in social hierarchies. While the zero-sum story has bled beyond racial divides, McGhee argues that a racial analysis is the only way to understand and dismantle it. From the interview:
It’s really important to not ignore how profoundly racialized the story of the American economy and government is and has been for all of our history. So if you try to bring color blind tools to convince people about their economic self interest while ignoring just how profoundly racialized the economic story is, you just won’t succeed.
Links
A savage takedown of corporate sustainability efforts, from a former staffer at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “Sustainable business practices haven’t just been a distraction (bad), nor a dodge of hard, controversial work (sinister), nor even intentionally duplicitous (corrupt). The approach has been evil because it represents complicity. Complicity with the fossil fuel industry and the structure it created…”
Less than one percent of Phoenix’s population, the “water one-percenters,” consume 7.5% of all water delivered by the Salt River Project. Here are some other gross factoids. In metro Phoenix, which receives an average of 8 inches of rainfall a year, water prices are among the lowest in the nation. The average resident uses 115 gallons a day, while US average is 83 gallons. Tucsonans average 85 gallons.
Four years ago, California emerged from a record breaking drought emergency. Now it’s on the brink of another one.
Isaac Chotiner has been doing some incisive interviews about the humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The latest unpacks the “interlocking set of failures” in the American immigration system that got us to this point.
Cape Cod is a COVID hot spot right now, but it’s also bracing to be flooded with tourists and doesn’t have enough workers to handle them due to foreign travel restrictions and also service jobs not paying enough for people to risk their lives.
This massive federal funeral assistance program is a grim reminder of just how much we’ve lost in the past year.
Amid a unionization effort that Amazon juuuuust now defeated, the company’s official twitter account heckled a congressman who pointed out that its workers have to pee in bottles. The Amazon account said that is not true, then later had to apologize and clarify that yes, in fact its workers do have to pee in bottles.
Following multiple audits that found no voter fraud in the 2020 election, Arizona’s Senate president is still desperately trying to find evidence of voter fraud. She recently hired a Florida cybersecurity firm called Cyber Ninjas to crack the case.
Want to read yet another article about how we are hitting the pandemic wall? Of course you do. “Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.”
This came from my meme dealer Josh Cerretti, who I egregiously failed to credit last issue for bringing the fake Massachusetts towns to my attention.
I endorse
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so let’s plug Hecho con Ganas, the project of LA-based artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano, who you may know from his protest art and collaborations with Shepard Fairey and others. All of his work is beautiful and he has a very active Instagram. But he also has a store where you can buy prints, stickers, and sometimes shirts. I recently bought this awesome Day of the Dead themed shirt, which sent a portion of sales to Covid relief in Yaqui communities. Go buy his stuff!
Listening
Looks like emo winter has become emo spring. Here’s a fave from Restorations, Civil Inattention.
Watching
I recently watched Godzilla vs. Kong, which is an emotional film about how patriarchy and capitalism are bringing pain and suffering to a very large gorilla and all of the people he loves and the only thing that can save him is finding the will to change so he can live a life that is not driven by violence and domination but only after he defeats Mechagodzilla.
cgi has come so far
As an honest and mostly healthy middle-aged adult, I am finally eligible to get the covid vaccine as the state opened it up to people who have one of a number of mild health complications, of which I have a couple that are frankly none of your business.
It has been fun to discover that the dystopian process of finding a vaccine appointment is a remarkably similar to when I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch online, including having to create a Walmart.com account and regularly refreshing different company websites at odd hours of the day. I hope that emerging from the pandemic is as good as Zelda Breath of the Wild, but honestly, that is a pretty high bar I’m skeptical.
I probably need to wait on the vaccine anyway as I finish up a short prescription of prednisone for a fucked up nerve in my neck. It’s doing the job but have you guys taken this stuff it is like raaaaah manic. Doctors say oh you should probably not take it at night but they should really say this stuff is going to make you vibrate and also you should avoid any online shopping. I keep wanting to shave my head again but seems like I should probably hold off I think it might be a side effect.
I hope that this newsletter, for you reader, is a lot like a short prescription of prednisone, in that it eases any aches and pains you may be having and fills you with an uncontrollable surge of energy for a little while.
The trains are clean and spacious and run on time, but the destination is not always clear
Train Smoke, Edvard Munch, 1900
Back when the pandemic was first really getting fired up, I did a little communications work on the need to ensure that public transit doesn’t waste away as people flee to their cars, because specifically in Boston, that would actually be the end of the city we would all just have to live inside of our cars for the rest of our lives moving one inch in traffic per year. But it would also be the end of our chances to keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, as some 30% of this country’s GHG emissions come from transportation.
I was thinking of what it would actually look like for some much larger, necessary percentage of the population to have confidence in public transit such that they would rely on it even in a time of heightened public health threat, or for that matter, extreme weather as a result of climate change.
I think we can acknowledge that it would have to look very different than what we have now. It would require frequent high speed rail and rapid bus service you could set your watch to, constantly cleaned facilities, filtered or fresh air, enough capacity to be efficient but with much more personal space for each rider. From a broader transportation standpoint, you’d need to add a web of protected bike lanes and shaded pedestrian greenways.
What luxury compared to infrastructure in most of the country, right? And there’s need for improvement far beyond city commutes. Imagine visiting friends and family one city over via a cheap, fast train ride instead of a carbon-spewing flight. Reliable, community-owned energy in rural towns that residents can sell back to the grid. Affordable electric cars and trucks with enough charging stations you never have to think about it, regardless of where you live. Roll the tape on some future documentary where the voiceover is like, it wasn’t always like this things used be real shitty around here, but in the year 20XX, Americans made a change…
That is a nice little fantasy, but if I’m being honest, sometimes when I think about this kind of thing, I will ultimately conclude, you know what, this country would just never, ever do that stuff. Too much of our identity is caught up in personal possession over common good, it would just never happen. And this is, as they say, why we cannot have nice things.
That has been kind of a running thread around here for the past couple of months. We talked about bell hooks’ observation that patriarchy serves everyone poorly, that “well-being…is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others,” though the latter is seductive and celebrated. We talked at length during the pandemic about how people are so terrified of losing certain freedoms in the form of infringement, that they sacrifice the positive freedom that comes with being able to live a life that is healthy, safe, and full of opportunity. So we end up perpetually in this state of crumbling public goods, these janky versions of basic necessities that countries with far less wealth don’t think twice about having.
But I am starting to get more dare I say optimistic that maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Last week we talked about the misguided fixation on free ridership and collective action theory as the barrier to climate action, and how, in fact, actions that benefit the whole also offer clear benefits for individuals—if we can overcome the power imbalances that keep them from happening.
Now this week, look what rolls up but a shiny $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, in which climate action is central, that seems to be politically hinged on the argument that doing what is necessary to avert global catastrophe will also make our individual lives better along the way. It’s a policy package with its share of flaws, and climate people seem to agree it is far too small. It remains a giant open question as to whether it has a chance of making it through the Senate or if whatever does emerge will produce equitable outcomes. But it is without a doubt a big infrastructure thingy, and since we are feeling optimistic, we might view it as a crack in the door into that future country where we can in fact have nice things.
Biden’s bet
The Biden administration’s new infrastructure plan is big—five times what Obama spent on climate in the ARRA—but it is still not nearly big enough. That’s been the take home message from climate justice, housing, and transportation advocates alike. Keep in mind that those trying to sell the package to progressives are emphasizing that it’s just the beginning, but part of the issue is that eye-popping figure is spread out over eight years, which would end up equalling around 1% of annual GDP. Analysts from varying political ideologies have pegged the necessary spending toward decarbonization at more like 5% of GDP. The competing THRIVE Act, which you will not be surprised to learn that I prefer, floats $10 trillion in spending over 10 years. (Check out a line item comparison between the two here).
If you are thinking jfc is no amount of government taxing and spending enough for these people, the answer you will get from me when it comes to climate change is basically no. Any concerns about running the economy too hot or running up the deficit just make very little sense at this stage in the game. That’s because we are far behind and, as David Wallace-Wells points out in The Uninhabitable Earth, “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP.” We’re currently on pace for something like 3 degrees of warming, and if we hit 3.7 degrees, which is on the higher end but still absolutely on the table, we can expect “$551 trillion in damages, according to at least one estimate—almost double the amount of wealth that exists in the world today.” So let’s not nickel and dime this thing OK.
Nelly voice it’s getting hot in here
But the plan is still a bfd, and it has a lot of stuff in it, which has kept advocates working overtime to sort it all out since it dropped Wednesday. There is also a lot of stuff to like (see Julian Brave NoiseCat’s collection of tweets, a thread, if you will, for his reactions). As T4America says, “We have never seen this much money for public transportation and passenger rail included in a presidential infrastructure proposal.” That includes billions to modernize transit, get Amtrak up to speed, and a line item to repair some of the violence done to communities of color and low income neighborhoods by racist city freeway projects. Transit people have their share of concerns, including that there’s an opening for highway expansion which would be virtual insanity. There’s a big investment in electric cars, which some people will not like, but that includes a national network of 500,000 chargers, which could have powerful network effects and expand where it makes sense to own an EV.
It includes plans for 2 million affordable homes which is good, but far less than competing housing bills.It does, however, call to eliminate exclusionary zoning laws that block development of multifamily and affordable housing.
In other words, it’s a big old spending bill, with a lot of promise and some great features, but also kind of centrist in some ways. It also seems to have a 2-to-1 margin of support, although sadly, the Senate is so skewed to the right, even a bill that popular could very likely get not a single Republican vote.
A wind in the door
There’s a ton to say about this package of policies and whether it could pass, but what I find hopeful about it is the fact that it is sending a particular message—that the U.S. government is going to do big things, and we’re going to pay for it with some of the obscene wealth that our economy has been hoarding at the top. The plan would reverse some Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and raise corporate taxes to pay for itself.
Just as activists during the election referred to a Biden administration as a doorway and not a destination, this proposal might be seen as opening that doorway a bit wider, raising the stakes of what government is willing to do to address several converging crises. A lot of people said that was the message of the latest COVID stimulus, which was similar in size, but that was an emergency response effort. This, in theory, is about making things better.
That’s a message that is not always prominent in pleas for climate action, because, frankly, there is without a doubt a lot of sacrifice and suffering on the horizon. But the Biden administration seems to understand the power in pointing out the ways in which climate action makes our lives better, focusing in particular on jobs, as he likes to do. There’s this engineer Saul Griffith who has been beating a similar drum for years now, citing the economic and labor benefits of decarbonizing by electrification. “I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination,” he says. “We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great.”
While I’m no techo-optimist, I really do believe there is truth in what he is saying, that we’re talking about more than just narrowly averting a doomed world. Shady trees make us happy. When we don’t burn fossil fuels we breathe better, our kids are healthier, we live longer. Just this week I was reading about how we could cover the world’s canals with solar panels, which takes up no additional land, makes the panels work better, and conserves water. Or how putting them over agriculture and grazing fields make for happier livestock, in many cases more productive crops, and more effective solar panels. It’s those little glimpses that make you think we really we will figure this thing out.
The Jackpot
The big P Problem that you knew was coming is whether we can make this transition soon enough that it won’t cause mass suffering, disproportionately distributed, and whether that transition leads to this better world for all. Or if it continues moving us toward increasing accumulation of wealth and comfort at the top and increasing tolerance of societal pain everywhere else. The techno-optimists and the eco-modernists are wrong, not because technology isn’t necessary to solving these problems, but because on its own, it just never gets the solutions into the hands of the people who need them the most.
I don’t know if old Scranton Diamond Uncle Joe’s plan is up to the task. Climate justice activists are both impressed by some features and skeptical of others. A statement from the It Takes Roots Alliance acknowledged the package as a good first step, but implored Biden to do more, and do it better. They called for a doubling of spending on affordable housing, greater support for caregivers, funding for community and tribal-owned energy infrastructure, and more direct funding to frontline and Indigenous communities. The THRIVE Act, for comparison, would create a board of representatives from impacted communities, tribes, and unions to direct funding decisions, and build in community benefit agreements and wage and benefit guarantees.
Biden is leaning heavily on the idea that union labor will benefit from clean energy jobs, which is possible but not a given. It’s tempting to brush aside fossil fuel workers’ resistance, but what’s going to ensure that wind and solar and electrification jobs will not amount to a significant pay cut?
Another way to think of this is, given the starkly unequal economy we have now, what happens when you shovel a bunch of government money into the machine? Can you do it in such a way that benefits the working class? Will it actually tip the balance of power or just turbocharge the status quo? I don’t know!
Last year I wrote about the novel The Peripheral by William Gibson, in which half of the narrative takes place something like 100 years in the future in London, and it’s a seemingly hopeful place, resurfaced with flowing rivers and covered almost entirely in greenery, punctuated with gleaming high-rise towers. There are also notably few people walking the streets and eventually ~spoilers~ we learn that this future is the product of a slow-moving, multifaceted global collapse called “The Jackpot,” which over 40 years wiped out some 80% of the population. Along the way, there was a leap in technology, but the people remaining are ruled by plutocrats and democracy has been eradicated, leaving behind a hard, vacant world stripped of any social contracts. Like I wrote at the time, “Humanity figured it out. But it was too late, and it cost us everything.”
So that is an awfully dark version of what is on the other side of that doorway to another world. So much for my optimistic post. Don’t worry, I’m like 99% certain that will be not the product of this infrastructure package. On balance, passing a huge spending bill funded by corporate taxes would be a hell of a good step in the right direction. But even in this fantasy about a better country in which we can have nice things, the trains are clean and spacious and they run on time, but the destination is not always clear.
Links
The infrastructure plan is the kind of government spending that is popular among voters in both parties, so Republicans have already begun spreading bullshit to convince people it is a bad idea.
Emily Atkin has been covering the water protectors in Minnesota fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. “The ripples grow larger. We are protecting your water too.”
“At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits.”
More research on the disproportionate emissions from “super emitting” frequent flyers. In the United States, 12% of people took 66% of all flights. Almost 90% of the world’s population does not fly at all.
Super Link
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins has been intentionally not prosecuting crimes by non-violent offenders, an agenda she ran on. Cops and judges have fought her every step of the way, in some cases illegally. Rollins opened up the county’s data for an independent study on the approach, done by NYU, Rutgers, and Texas A&M.
Rollins granted the researchers’ request for unprecedented access to the data in February 2019, a month after taking office. She vowed it would be a real-time test of her public policy positions, and committed to using the research findings to shape her future policies, even if the findings turned out to be contrary to her efforts.
Researchers found that not prosecuting low-level crimes was more successful in directing nonviolent offenders away from the criminal justice system.
“Keeping these individuals out of the criminal justice system seems to have an effect; it seems to stop the path of criminal activity from escalating, and that’s the takeaway from this study.”
Watching
More of The Americans. Season 5 slows down a bit but still good. Anybody want to go in with me on a revival of EST? I think we could help a lot of people.
Waking up in the morning thinking about so many things
I love this quote she references from Bruce Sterling, “The future is about old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”
Not doing a ton of traveling by car or train or anything lately, but in my mind I’m on a bullet train to Lameham or West Lameham or Hamham where we are all going to meet up for maybe like a nice concert in the park. I can’t wait. Bring a sweater in case it gets chilly see you there.
Not one giant intractable problem, but many complicated, winnable conflicts in our backyards
Highland Raid, Rosa Bonheur, 1860
Last week I was going to write about a couple of poli sci papers that have been getting some buzz because they suggest big shifts in how we view local climate action as a path to global climate action, but I got all doped out on melange instead so we’re going to do it this week. Don’t worry, I will make it fun and maybe get some burns in along the way.
A special section in the November issue of Global Environmental Politicsdrew some attention in climate circles because it challenges a long-held assumption that climate change should be considered primarily a collective action problem—which basically means that nobody wants to be the one to sacrifice something because it benefits the collective—instead arguing that local incentives and power imbalances are far more important factors blocking climate action. Authors then build on that idea by proposing a model for how and why those local battles are won, and the mechanisms by which they cascade into global change.
One of the articles in particular got some media coverage when they came out, and David Wallace-Wells briefly wrote about one of them in his latest big climate article, which was good. But I want to give them some more attention here because I think whether intentional or not they make an unusually empirical argument in favor of the grassroots movement building approach to climate action. Maybe more importantly, they offer rare cause for hope, in that the necessary change is not presented as one giant intractable problem, but rather, many complicated—but winnable—conflicts happening in all of our backyards.
Come on and take a free ride
For many years, climate negotiators have believed that nations fail to take action largely because they don’t want to do the work or pay the price if everyone else isn’t doing it too. Because the benefits are collective and the costs are individual, there’s no incentive for individual action without some binding global agreement. This is called a collective action problem, in which people don’t want to give something up if there’s a chance other people are going to fake lift, so-called “free ridership.” Sometimes this is referred to as a “tragedy of the commons” or a complicated version of “the prisoner’s dilemma.”
Collective action problems are very difficult problems to solve, as you have to get everyone on board with some kind of pact, otherwise individual actors will be like hey what about that guy. It is also, the authors found, totally not the reason nations and other governments don’t take action. At least it’s not the main reason.
Instead, argue political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger, climate change is more of a “distributive conflict” problem. This means that power struggles at the domestic level are far greater obstacles to action, and by their analysis, nations and sub-state actors have been more than willing to make sweeping changes, independently of whether or not other nations are doing their part too.
Why is this a big deal? Because for decades, international negotiators have thought that they had to resolve free ridership as the main obstacle, through treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. When really, it seems free rider concerns were mostly rhetorical excuses for inaction—“governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do, and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.” Within each government or community, there are some actors that want climate action to happen, there are other actors that do not, and the outcome depends on who has more power.
Climate policies create new economic winners and losers. Sharp divisions in the material interests of political and economic stakeholders subsequently trigger distributive conflict over climate policy making. Conflicts over material benefits are further reinforced by ideological struggles among politicians, voters, and interest groups.
They cite two main families of conflict—special interest control and sectoral and ideological balance of power. In the first, those who stand to benefit from inaction hold undue influence on policy makers. In the second, there’s concern climate policy outcomes will change the balance of power. This will sound very familiar to anyone who works in organizing or applies any kind of power analysis to climate change. But the paper offers data to back it up, looking at the widespread proliferation of climate policies despite US free ridership in the form of withdrawal from treaties (which is our favorite thing to do, withdrawing from treaties did you know that we reversed our decision to join a treaty banning landmines? We did! We are in a select group of pro-landmine countries.)
The paper also calls out the frequent concern over free ridership cited by American politicians as a smokescreen. For example, the Byrd-Hagel resolution in 1997 that opposed US participation in any international climate agreement that exempted developing countries from carbon pollution limits, which is a real morning vineyard worker move. The paper points out that Byrd and Hagel were influenced by labor and industry interests in their constituencies and also climate deniers, rather than any international conflict over free ridership. That resolution started a pattern that has come up repeatedly in US climate policymaking and negotiations.
What is critical here is that the decision-making process was almost entirely driven by internal conflicts within the executive branch and the legislature. The individuals pushing for the reversal of US climate commitments were not conditional cooperators but unconditional noncooperators with ties to carbon-intensive economic sectors; these individuals simply used the rhetoric of collective action theory to help legitimize their domestic bargaining position.
One way that you could misread the paper’s conclusions, which the authors explicitly warn against, is that they are suggesting that all climate action should be local, or that they discount the need for global treaties and negotiation. This paper is not an argument against global climate action. Rather, they find that domestic conflicts and international negotiations both play a role, and have significant impact on each other. Climate change is many battles and it is also one battle. But when international negotiators concern themselves primarily with busting cheaters—rather than supporting pro-climate actors so they can overcome opposition—they’re trying to solve the wrong problem.
Catalyst to cascade
The other paper from this issue that I want to get into is by public policy researcher Thomas Hale, who uses the distributive conflict article as a springboard to explore the interplay between local conflicts and global change. He arrives at a different, more nuanced model of collective action, which he calls “catalytic cooperation.” Hale argues that even though we can better understand climate change as driven by domestic power struggles, they are still part of collective action toward global change. It just works differently than one big treaty that makes everyone do something.
Hale points out three unique features of the climate problem that set it apart from common ideas about how different actors behave.
First, while it’s often assumed that climate action is a collective good that requires individual sacrifice, there are actually “joint products” that provide a combinedpublic good and private benefit. While Hale doesn’t make this point, this is largely the thrust of the Green New Deal. That climate action isn’t just a big carbon tax etc, but a whole bunch of policy decisions, many of which have profound positive benefits on individual communities—better transportation, less time in traffic, clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, new industrial sectors and jobs, etc. That’s a much better political landscape than one pain in the ass thing thing that nobody wants to do but everybody has to do.
Second, different actors will experience very different costs and benefits as a result of climate action, aka “preference heterogeneity.” As I like to say when defending my love of Jethro Tull, different people like different things. This is what the previous paper referred to as climate change policy “creating new winners and new losers.” This might seem like a liability, but it’s actually good news. The more variability in benefits and costs, the more chances you have that some of those people will take up the fight. And you don’t need all of them to do so, at least not at first.
Third, climate action offers increasing returns. More benefits are unlocked for more people, and more people join team climate. One straightforward example is the reduced cost of renewables over time. Another is that climate wins form new constituencies that increase their power over time. An example that comes to mind is PUSH Buffalo, a nonprofit that does energy efficiency overhauls, neighborhood renewable energy projects, and job training to directly benefit locals. They’ve not only revitalized their own community, PUSH has also become a force within state politics as constituents reaped the benefits of local action. One final area of increasing returns will be familiar to anyone who read the CP issue about Robert Frank’s work on behavioral contagion. Climate action changes norms.
As Finnemore and Sikkink argue, norms progress through a life cycle from emergence, to a “norm cascade” in which they become widely followed in practice, to internalization, in which they are embedded in the beliefs and preferences of most actors. As more action takes place, more of this self-reinforcing logic applies.
Hale’s other big conclusion is that we can create “catalytic institutions” that spur these processes along. The paper argues that the Paris Agreement could potentially be one of these catalytic institutions, but is also careful to point out that the conclusion is not that the Paris Agreement itself is a perfect version of this or that this is why the agreement is the way that it is. But a bottom-up approach could have the intended outcome if it can act as a facilitator in various ways for those cascading climate victories, backing up the leaders on the ground and helping to replicate their victories.
This part of the argument gives me some pause because I’ve become pretty skeptical of the Paris Agreement for the simple fact that it just doesn’t seem to be working. You might also read this as a suggestion that weak, incremental commitments are all that is necessary, which we know is not the case. But the point here is not that the Paris Agreement is the right fix, but that if we better understood its role and the problem it is solving (power struggles) it could work.
There’s also nothing inherently weak about how this model plays out. “The number and diversity of sub- and nonstate actors makes them excellent laboratories for climate policy,” the author states. Such local advances could be as radical and transformative as leaders on the ground are able to pull off, and then spread like a fractal. And the paper doesn’t discount the need for policy interventions that basically force recalcitrant actors to do what we need them to do.
From immovable to unstoppable
The thing that really interested me about this research is as a potential framework for connecting the grassroots to global change, which is always a tough sell. The grassroots movement-building perspective on climate, which I largely share, says the only just approach to mitigating and adapting for climate change, and indeed, the only way to create durable policy that forces compliance, begins with community, particularly those impacted by climate consequences the most.
But, admittedly, how community level solutions translate to the global change necessary—how these distributed fights lead to a top-to-bottom transformation of the world’s economy—is usually presented as something of a matter of faith. At least, it’s a non-linear process. This research is one attempt chart the path.
You could imagine it going something like this: Global institutions do everything they can to support and empower climate leaders, put a thumb on the scale to help them win. Communities build power to make extreme changes and others replicate it until it becomes the norm. We hit a series of tipping points that accumulate until it’s far more than just climate leaders taking action. Those same institutions help larger currents emerge that make it impossible for holdouts to resist—a combination of economic reality, social pressure, and strict regulation.
It also suggests a more hopeful, if more complicated, way to think about the problem of climate change. One of the big sources of climate pessimism and certain soft forms of climate denial is the idea that there are some immovable tendencies in human nature that make this problem particularly difficult, if not impossible, to solve. Essential to that argument is that the solution to climate change requires sacrifice for a larger good, and we just never do that. In his now-notorious article “Losing Earth,” Nathaniel Rich writes, “These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” While Rich’s prisoner’s dilemma pits the present against the future, he’s describing a collective action problem. Nobody wants to do the hard thing even if it’s the right thing.
That idea has fueled repeated failed attempts at top down policies and blunt, market-based instruments to incent all of us selfish people to act a certain way. But what if that view of what’s holding back climate action has always been kinda bullshit? An excuse for the powerful. Rich drew much criticism in his article for basically overlooking special interests and power dynamics in his narrative, favoring fatalist explanations about the way people are hard-wired.
But the reality is, people support and oppose climate action for all kinds of reasons. They win and they lose for all kinds of reasons. None of them are fixed. That’s a messier kind of problem, but the more variables there are, the more there are to change.
More Lessons of Arrakis
Pretty fun issue last week, right? In retrospect, between Dune and Jethro Tull, it was probably the Boomeriest Crisis Palace to date. But I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed the responses I got from folks. Turns out, people have thoughts on Dune!
My friend Jacob, who is a fan and has read all of the books, gave me the scoop on Paul’s eventual downfall. “It’s get progressively worse until he finally sacrifices himself for the greater good, starts the cycle again, which really is a depressing message…can’t change anything, just play your role and enjoy the ride.” He also notes that Paul sort of turns into a sandworm, god which makes so much sense! At first he’s learning to ride these dangerous and unpredictable forces of change and he masters it until, finally, he has become one himself. Damn could have used that in the original review!
My very funny and smart Uncle Ed recalled first reading it in the 70s and remarked on the complete separation between transport and government, so for any planetary government to invade or wage war, it had to pay for it. He also highlighted some of his favorite lesser known sequels, “Children of Dune,” “Aunts and Uncles of Dune,” “I was a Teenage Dune,” “Dune Redux,” and “There’s Money in Them Thar Dunes.” He also recommends Iain Banks’ Culture series for similarly impressive world building.
And my friend Farhad sent me this very important and relevant tweet:
Some of you may be following some garbage anti-trans and otherwise hateful stuff that Substack is allowing and sometimes paying writers to publish and also that it’s starting to generally seem like the “publishing platform for assholes,” a certain type of self-proclaimed centrist dude who considers himself the truly oppressed amongst us. Readers will know I just cannot stand these guys and am not thrilled to be using the same email platform as them. I tend to agree with Ashley Feinberg that for now, Substack is still “up for grabs.” But I wanted you to know that I am aware, I hate this kind of shit, I’m not making any money for or from Substack, and if it continues to suck I will bounce the fuck out of here in a heartbeat. I have no love for these bros they just make the typey typey go into the screen, plenty of other options.
Links
In Biden’s upcoming legislative agenda, “no longer merely an environmental imperative like saving the polar bears, or a side element of a stimulus package like it was under the Obama administration, climate change has become the centerpiece.”
Georgia Republicans just passed a sweeping law to suppress voting and establish partisan control over election results. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are trying to expand and protect voting rights. This country is so polarized!
“If you say Tuskegee, then you don’t have to acknowledge things like pharmacy deserts, things like poverty and unemployment. You can just say, ‘That happened then…and there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
A Mauritian climate activist held an underwater protest in a meadow of seagrass in the Indian Ocean.
2020 was supposed to be the year when big corporations would get serious about deforestation. Instead deforestation hit a 12-year high because those corporations decided they actually did not give a fuck.
In what Luke O’Neil called “news from no-shit island,” 50 years of tax cuts for the rich did not increase GDP, but it did increase the wealth of rich people!
The Department of Health concluded a carcinogen in the water that came from a large manufacturing plant in Wilmington, Mass. likely gave at least 22 children cancer.
In what appears to be a prank, someone put a “Not Haunted” sign outside of a home for sale near Boston. We know it is not a real sign because every house in New England is 100% haunted.
There you have it everyone, I hope this week’s wasn’t too dry I promise next week I will write about some kind of science fiction or comic books. Nobody seems to be clamoring for an all-Jethro Tull issue so I will put that one on the shelf. I hope you all are doing OK out there. Seems like we may be turning a corner here. Spring has sprung we have a couple of cardinals that are using our bird feeder and I named them Cardi A and Cardi B.
But my favorite little chickadees are you all, readers. Keep coming around and I will keep putting out the sunflower seeds, aka newsletters about climate change and TV shows I am watching.
Tate
PS. Do you like this thing? Forward it to someone you love but who needs a good talking to.
Wow it’s hard to believe a whole year has passed. Such an overwhelming experience, so many ups and downs, tragedy and triumph. That’s right, it’s been a year of reading Frank Herbert’s Dune. And now I have finished. I’m only joking of course it only took me like 8 months, and I took a break for a couple of months in there. So I know there are people out there who pick up Dune and tear through it and it immediately becomes their favorite book, and I think a lot of people even read it when they were kids, which is wild to me. And I am definitely glad I read it and it was long overdue, but I don’t know, I found it to be a dense and sometimes frustrating book.
(HUGE SPOILERS ahead, but let’s be honest you’re probably not going to read it so just keep going.)
I also find it almost impossible to say whether I actually liked Dune or not, although if one measure of a book is how much you think about it after reading, it has definitely delivered. That’s because the strength of Dune as science fiction, and why many consider that it was a kind of turning point for the genre when it published in 1965, is that it is much more about grim societal critique and competing philosophies than the 1950s yarns of scientific imagination. In particular, Herbert’s book is fixated on the interplay of belief systems and power structures, especially how they are subverted, toppled, and replaced, often to bloody ends.
If that sounds like not great fodder for a Hollywood blockbuster, well, I would actually agree with you, even though I will most definitely and eagerly watch the new movie(s). But I have come to the conclusion that, although it has lots of cool outfits and giant sandworms and a box of pain, it is really not very good source material for a movie. That’s evidenced by the 1984 David Lynch movie that everyone knows is really bad but come on we all love it be honest.
Roger Ebert famously called it “a real mess … incomprehensible” but to be fair, that’s also kind of what the book is like too. Aside from being heavily steeped in Dune’s many tropes from a young age, part of why it’s so hard for me to rate as a work of literature is that it is a book just jam packed, bursting at the seams with characters, concepts, plot points constantly being picked up and put down, with seemingly every thought that every character has put to page, word for word. My dear friends and family members Josh and Theresa recently told me about when they got regrettably roped into playing the notorious Dune board game, and as Josh described it:
It’s a super complicated asymmetric combat game where every faction not only has totally different rules and goals, but everybody has a secret traitor in somebody else’s team that they get to reveal at some point AND there’s both a sandstorm that rotates around the board on top of shai huluds [sandworms] popping up randomly.
Again, that’s a pretty accurate reflection of the book. Which means basically any attempt to make a popular, mainstream adaptation has no choice but to completely flatten the story, or hopelessly pick and choose which elements to focus on. Some say that’s actually why Dune the book is so enduring. It is so loaded with ideas that it seems to mean something different to everyone who reads it. As Emmet Asher-Perrin writes:
Dune is so complex, so layered as a piece of literature that it is impossible to isolate one aspect that is responsible for its successes. That makes the series, particularly the premiere novel, a difficult one to discuss casually—everyone draws something from it that is unique to their own reading. Everyone has a specific draw, key-in character, academic interest that the story fulfills for them.
For that reason, though an extremely political book, it similarly does not map easily onto modern political ideologies and conflicts. Herbert himself was a baffling figure, politically and culturally. He spent much of his youth in a socialist commune in Washington, and was practically raised by a member of the Hoh tribe. Herbert’s closest friend as an adult was Quileute elder Howard Hansen, who even gave him the idea for Dune. Herbert was a naturalist and conservationist, became a Zen Buddhist, tripped on peyote in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. But at times he also campaigned for Republican politicians, hated government, railed against the Soviet Union, and was possibly a huge homophobe.
On that note, it must be said that, like so many early sci-fi works, Dune has problematic elements. It is hard to view the portrayal of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen as anything but homophobic. It’s also, at its core, a white savior story, a la Dances With Wolves or Lawrence of Arabia or Game of Thrones, in which Paul Atreides, a stand in for Western society, lives among an indigenous people the Fremen, who are a kind of composite of Arab cultures. Paul, who is for some reason the best person at everything, is eventually worshipped by the Fremen and leads them to take over the universe.
But again, it’s complicated. Dune’s world is patriarchal, but in some respects very feminist. Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother, is in fact maybe the most well-developed and the only really sympathetic character. Herbert writes beautifully about the desert and ecology, and humanity’s place in it. The book is punctuated with these thought-provoking zen koans. While some take offense at Herbert’s use of Islam and Sufism, others find it a surprisingly nuanced representation. “Herbert’s Islam was…great, capacious, and often contradictory discourse. … Herbert understood that religions do not act. People act. Their religions change like their languages, slowly over time in response to the new challenges of time and place,” writes Islamic studies scholar Ali Karjoo-Ravary. He praises Herbert’s use of the term jihad as more dynamic than its usual Western “holy war” connotation:
…at root, it means to struggle or exert oneself. It can take many forms: internally against one’s own evil, externally against oppression, or even intellectually in the search for beneficial knowledge. … Herbert’s nuanced understanding of jihad shows in his narrative. He did not aim to present jihad as simply a “bad” or “good” thing. Instead, he uses it to show how the messianic impulse, together with the apocalyptic violence that sometimes accompanies it, changes the world in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways.
That nuance of ideas is probably Herbert’s and Dune’s greatest offering, and what I think makes it successful as sci-fi. Good science fiction allows us to poke at the edges of our most challenging and radioactive problems and try out worlds different than our own, for better and worse. Similar to another political genre classic, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the characters’ belief systems vary widely and none of them are all that great. (Although, as with Watchmen, fascists have latched onto certain aspects of Dune as affirmation of their beliefs.) Most ideologies in Dune manifest in both benevolent and malignant forms. Dune is as suspicious of religion as it is of mysticism, as it is of science, as it is of corporations, as it is of government.
In that sense, I can see an anarchist reading of Dune. It’s hard to know what Herbert personally believed at the time he wrote the book, but one thing he clearly disliked were power structures. On one level, this is a book all about oppressive hierarchies. The villainous empire in the novel is a galactic government that is a hybrid of feudalism and the military industrial complex, fueled by a substance extracted from an oppressed planet that allows the galaxy’s elite to travel through space, all of which may sound faintly familiar to some of you.
But just as Herbert tears down power structures, he also warns of the danger of absolute control within revolutions, especially in the hands of a Messianic figure. This becomes the final lesson of the novel during a heel turn in which Paul, shattered by the murder of his infant son, knowingly goes down a path of mass murder to get revenge (did I mention Paul can see into the future Paul can do all kinds of stuff). He weaponizes multiple religions, the Fremen people, actual nuclear weapons, and the patriarchal monarchy in order to basically conquer the universe. In the sequels (I googled it), Paul’s reign as emperor kills 60 billion people. See you at the movies!
So kind of a dark turn there, but just as there are no inherently good belief systems in the world of Dune, there are also no good outcomes for its characters. It’s all a big lose-lose. But they have to live with some outcome, and the tragedy is that Paul knowingly chooses one of violence and domination, despite initially being driven by love of his community and his family. “He felt emptied, a shell without emotions. Everything he touched brought death and grief. And it was like a disease that could spread across the universe.”
I’m betting there’s a lot of debate about the extent to which Paul is an agent of free will, but as I read it, he could have chosen differently. He knows that even though there are powerful forces that guide us, we can set the rules that shape society. Before his son dies and he goes full goth Paul, there’s this hopeful moment that stuck out to me, when he convinces the Fremen to eliminate trial by combat as the way leaders take control. He stands before the Fremen, who insist that this is the way it’s always been, that “Hard tasks need hard ways.” Paul responds, “Ways change.” But not always for the better, he will learn.
Dune is not a book about climate change, but it is a book about the structures that control resources. It’s also a book about transition and transformation. As powerful as the feudal government and the corporation that control the universe appear, currents shift, shai huluds surface, sandstorms emerge, and ways change. Sometimes we can steer these forces, sometimes we are steered by them, but systems are overturned in radical ways. One concern in climate discourse that I’ve been increasingly hearing is that our system of government may simply not be equipped to meet the challenge of climate change. Too beholden to profit, too structurally conservative, too slow-moving and self-moderating for the kind of rapid transformation needed. That’s a scary thought, both the possibility that our current system could simply fall short, and the thought that it needs to be radically overhauled in order to survive.
What that means exactly is up for grabs. For some, it starts with rules changes like eliminating the filibuster. Political scientist Hélène Landemore envisions the next evolution of democracy as one of more direct participation, leadership by the masses rather than electoral representation, a feature that has perhaps hit a wall. David Wallace-Wells explores different possibilities in The Uninhabited Earth, through the work of Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright. “If neoliberalism is the god that failed on climate change, what juvenile gods will it spawn?” he asks. Mann and Wainwright pose a “climate leviathan,” in which “capitalism overruns the world’s borders to address the planetary crisis while protecting its own interests,” along with the possibilities of one climate world government, climate dictatorships, a protection racket via climate mafia boss.
Around the middle of Dune, Paul is doing his future gazing thing, but it doesn’t always work that great. He often sees the many threads of possibility but the outcome is fuzzy, “a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.” None of us has the singular power of the Kwisatz Haderach (Paul has like 10 different names it’s so annoying), but it does feel like we are living in a boiling of possibilities. That’s a frightening, overwhelming thought. One lesson from this 1965 book about giant worms is that you can indeed change the world, but you can’t take it for granted that the outcome will be better than before.
“Your grief is your grief. You can’t compare it to other people’s.” Disenfranchised grief is that which isn’t acknowledged or supported by social ritual, something many people have experienced during COVID.
The looming wave of evictions is a policy choice, not an inevitability.
Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate says organizers of a climate conference tried to censor her speech because it criticized world leaders for inaction.
Nuclear power will be around for some time, but has drawn little interest as a major path to decarbonization, in part due to huge geopolitical baggage. “The technology used to turn on lights or charge mobile phones shouldn’t need to involve national or international defence apparatus.”
Liberals who sang the praises of JD Vance in 2017, please step forward and apologize.
Massachusetts started out in February with an F grade on its vaccine rollout, but is now up to a B.
Since COVID hit, some cities are cutting back on excessive zoning and permitting rules for small businesses.
Online mobs are carrying out sustained harassment campaigns against women journalists. (Critics of “cancel culture” are mysteriously unconcerned.)
Cities are turning confederate monuments into public spaces that promote healing. My favorite part of this article is how to get around a state law blocking cities from removing monuments, Memphis sold two parks to a nonprofit for a dollar each and tore down their monuments immediately. 🤝
Watching
I’ve known for a long time that if I ever had a mid-life crisis it would have to do with knives and other bladed tools, and my rate of purchases has indeed been on an upward trend. I don’t know why exactly. But we’ve been watching this show called Forged in Fire, which is a truly ridiculous bladesmithing competition. Part of the fun of it is you get to see a rare cross-section of American masculinity (it’s almost always men, it’s an issue), united by their love of leather necklaces, kilts, creative beards, and of course, knives. Also, sometimes people pass out and go to the hospital during the competition.
This dude is full Renn Faire, 24/7.
Listening
Continuing the theme of embarrassing interests, right after college I had a cringey period where I grew out my hair RIP, smoked a lot of pot, and played frisbee golf at least once but usually twice a week. I also listened to a lot of late 60s rock in that time, and one band that stuck, which baffles almost everyone I mention it to, is Jethro Tull. Haters gonna hate.
Reading
I’m about to wrap up poet Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, her first novel, which is about an extremely online main character who became famous worldwide for tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” If you spend a lot of time jacked into cyberspace this book will resonate, but beyond that it is a masterful satire of the complete fucking absurdity of modern life. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever read about the internet. As in her poetry and her twitter account, Lockwood is staggeringly clever which is counterbalanced by her weirdness and savage criticism of everything from pro-life dads to the dirtbag left. One of a kind book, highly recommend.
“In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?”
…
Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to “chug it with her ass.” Already it was impossible to explain these things.
There’s my Dune hot take issue, I hope you enjoyed it. I only read the one book and haven’t seen any of the shows or anything so if you have some good Dune takes or counter-takes I would love to hear them. I guess I sort of think of this issue of Crisis Palace as my own version of Dune. Complicated, messy, too long, unsatisfying ending. But the world building—unmatched.
For you, I hope this newsletter is like the precious spice, the water of life, in that it allows you to peer through time and space with heightened awareness. And it is highly addictive. And it turns your eyes blue and smells like cinnamon. Please enjoy next week’s newsletter Crisis Palace Messiah, then Children of Crisis Palace, and Heretics of Crisis Palace.
