18½ short stories for the sun

And some art and song and Martin Parr

Hello Vibrant Humans,
Tomorrow is Sun Day, a global activation put on by brilliant Bill McKibben, Jamie Henn, and so many others. It’s like Earth Day but brighter, because we now have the power to harness the sun’s free and profuse energy to supply our world and our lives, no dirty extractive fossil fuels needed. The clean energy revolution is not just upon us, but underway. I’m delighted by all this because it’s spot on — give people something bright and sunny to do, provide an actionable and accessible solution, wear cool shades!

Join the day of action and learn more here.

Now, some short sunny stories, snippets, snaps, and songs for the sun.

1 The Sun

Once we didn’t know how to use the sun to its fullest. Now, we do.

Solar has improved exponentially.

Life’s a beach, Martin Parr

2 The glaring truth

I used to spend weeks animating what my daughter can now do in three minutes, with an iPad and an app she bought for ninety-nine cents.

Electrotech enables us to harness the sun's enormous energy resources. The sun supplies Earth with as much energy every five days as all fossil fuel reserves combined. This makes possible a new energy era. (Ember)

3 Leapfrog

The sun is unstoppable, she’s good trouble, she’s good power. There are no shades and no dimmer switches big enough to halt her temperate takeover. Solar panels are like rain buckets, and nations like Pakistan are putting out their panels and catching all the sun. (But not all because it’s essentially infinite!) For so long we’ve wrestled with letting the world catch up to western largesse and assumed that game of catch up would require lots of fossil fuels, but a great sunny leapfrogging is underway. Leapfrog makes me think of being a kid. Full of promise and laughter and possibility.

4 Molten metaphor

Instead of risking danger in the depths of the earth to harness toxic materials, we can use the clean, forever energy of the sun to power everything we need. The metaphor feels almost too on the nose — darkest coal, brightest sun. And yet this is the high-contrast opportunity we have. Why would we keep hanging out in hell? Especially when hell is an expensive cancer, and heaven is … free?

5 Heck yeah, Electrotech (you can take the girl outta Tumblr)

Electrons will cost less and less forever.
Fossils will cost more and more, until they’re too expensive to extract.

Fossil fuel commodities get more expensive as extraction continues and their prices are elevated by major producers controlling the supply. Electrotech is manufactured and modular, resulting in clear technology learning curves, with costs falling by around 20% every time deployment doubles. Electrotech is already capturing two-thirds of global energy investment and is responsible for all the expected growth in energy jobs. Electrotech contributed 10% of global GDP growth in 2023, including 22% in China, 5% in India, 30% in the EU and 7% in the US.

6 Efficiency (is Electrotech.) Per Ember:

Waste is universally loathed.
Except in places where it’s rude to take the last bite.
Well, even in those places.

6B Top sun

Olafur Eliasson

The Top Ten Suns in Art (The Guardian goes Buzzfeed)

7 Under a Sino Sun

China is rising, but also radiating, saving us from the worst of climate change, as it not only powers itself, but positions itself to take power of the world. Renewable realpolitik realignment.

Noahpinion: America has abdicated the fight against climate change.

But that doesn’t mean the strategy I advocated for defeating climate change was a bad idea. In fact, it’s still going to work! It just won’t be America that executes that strategy. It will be China. In fact, it already is.

8 A nice ironic song about the sun

9 Köttbullar och Solfångare

Everyone likes to make Ikea jokes.
Which is good, because we’ll all laugh and celebrate with meatballs and lingonberries as Ikea helps the world electrify as quickly as you can say Solfångare.

Balcony solar, heat pumps, and induction hotplates are now available in lots of countries. Ikea won’t save the world, but its customers will.

10 How low, Carbon Bro

The irony is that petromasculinity likes a fire but not the sun.
The irony is that petromasculinity hates the sun but loves a tan.

The darkness is a petrohegemony that seeks to destabilize. Listen to this Carbon Bros. podcast from the great Amy Westervelt.

11 Sun and Systems, a duet

We need the sun to power everything and the technology to deploy that power.
We don’t need moonshots or miracles because we have a sunshot.
Let’s go.

Ember at an Eletrotech webinar last week, paraphrased: we have almost everything except maybe the last 5% super mega hard-to-abate stuff

12 A sun-adjacent short story about micromobility

Change happens slowly, and then on an e-bike. Even in the s p r e a d o u t US, micromobility has a foot on the pedal. It’s hard to imagine the suburbs on e-bikes, and yet, they are.

Micromobility is replacing car trips. (And not just for silicon valley types).

13 A sun-adjacent short story about induction

People are finally feeling the magnetic pull of induction.
People who other people copy.

More here.

14 Ozone ode

It took 50 years, but the ozone layer is almost healed. We can fix things. The sun can help. Doesn’t it always make you feel better?

15 Array music

A ray arrays. Arrays for days. A daze of rays. A raise of rays.

China will have 1 trillion watts by the end of 2025.

16 Sunifesting

I don’t believe in manifesting, but I do believe in sunifesting.

17 Agrivoltaica

The animals needs shade.
The solar needs land.
The farmers need income.
The planet needs solar.

On a finite planet, sharing is thriving.

Sheep and solar, a strategic partnership.

18 On sunny days

On sunny days I allow myself the indulgence of thinking “what if it all works out,” and know that it’s partly the sun that gives that thought the ability to be true.

(Thank you, Cathy, for the koan!)

Sundown:
“All flourishing is mutual.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry

The sun shines on all of us. The earth doesn’t care who produces the emissions nor who harnesses the sun. So together we must. All flourishing is mutual.

This planet

Write me your sunny shorty? Send it to me!

Last planet: Weave the day

Thanks, Wendy, I love this:

It just so happens that I am currently doing a big weaving project on our back porch. It’s a 9 by 9 foot rug, woven on a 10 ft frame that I cannot fit into the house. My 4th one.

It’s made from long strips of wool, sewn together and woven together in a simple pattern. The thing that’s most fun for me is that it’s made from old blankets, pants, coats, random pieces of wool fabric, my own cherished Harris Tweed coat (bought 45 years ago), a wool housecoat my mother made me before that, some skirts, a derelict kilt, moth-eaten wool scarf, pant leg cutoffs from a distant relative, and so on.

It’s certainly a blending of my possibly-misunderstood, sometimes tut-tutted, perennially-evident desire to make fun practical inexpensive things for my wonderful family (without any of the ‘stuff’ that goes into commercial rugs) and my interest in repurposing products, especially if they have some personal connection.

Enough with the new normal nonsense, writes the great Chris Hatch:

But “the new normal” is a pitifully inadequate phrase, a stumbling step towards accuracy that results in misdirection. On the plus side, it does capture the irreversibility of global heating — of fossil fuel pollution creating an ever-thickening blanket of heat-trapping gases around our planet. It correctly implies that we’ve got to adapt to what we’ve already spewed. But it totally obscures the essential point: it’s not a “new normal,” it will keep getting worse.

This is an annoying story from The New York Times. It misses the point. It’s not that Climate Activism doesn’t work, it’s that society does not work right now. Is it that playbooks and people power and protests don’t work, or that nothing works because we have no media and no accountability, and our leaders have no shame, and in some cases, total disregard for the rule of law. The left needs to do so much better, it’s true, at building structures, movements, and scaffolding. But the stuff that Bill and so many others to do catalyze movements is working, just not at the scale we need. Third Way has 100,000 members and there are hundreds of activations scheduled for Sun Day.

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STUFF

Wonderful Kat of Rewilding Mag mentioned me in this gorgeous piece she wrote about climate friendly gardening for The Globe.

Thanks, CAA (!), for featuring me, and also, for doing a whole issue about sustainability!

Love this chart (solar!) that Jan Rosenow shared. Incidentally, Jan will be speaking at the Building Decarb Alliance conference in November. Jan in Can is cool! Come!

So many wonderful friends are on Substack. Read Katharine Wilkinson’s Human on Earth. stat.

Climate Week(s)

New York
If you’ll be in NYC and are free on Wednesday night (Sept 24th), my friend Montana, who may be the best conversationalist in the world, and I are throwing a low key super chill party. Message me for deets.

Tronno
If you’re in Toronto, it’s the first ever Toronto Climate Week. So much great stuff. On Thursday October 2nd, my husband, Benjamin Errett, (author of the excellent Get Wit Quick newsletter as well as this terrif piece about circularity from the Globe last week) is part of some great programming on building reuse.

On Friday October 3rd, I’ll join former Mayor David Miller and a million other fab folks for a morning full of climate comms, organized by Allison Daisley. Commmeeeee!!! (We can waive costs if that is an issue).

Thank you!

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People dancing

There was a hate rally in the park right next to my house last weekend. Ironic, because it’s the very park where a united front of Jews and Italians fought back the Nazis in 1933. Counterprotestors outnumbered the racists by a huge amount, but it was still an unsettling thing. At the same time, I felt the welcoming beauty of Toronto that day — from my morning run along the beach to reggaeton dance class to a wonderful street party that my friend Julie organized to a David Byrne tribute show to a chaotic late night hang on our artiest new street. Toronto is full of diversity and joy, and it is home.

Home at the West End Phoenix Stop Making Sense show:

Home by my pals for my 40th:

Take good care! Hope your home is cozy and safe and SUNNY. These dark times call for light, warmth, community, and love,
Sarah