Sustain What?

• Skip the Pundits and Headlines for a Moment to Marvel at John Prine's Enduring Magic

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

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• Reviewing the Climate Science Critique Done for Team Trump

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

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• Surviving Trump, Thriving with Solar - an Update from Climate Action Lifer Bill McKibben

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

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• From Kauai to Your Town - How Data Can Help Cut Climate Threats

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

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• From Juneau to the Himalayas, Get Used to Potentially Catastrophic GLOFs

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

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