Hi!
It’s been a while. I hope you are healthy, warm, and as happy as can be in a world that jostles with pain. Things that have been helping me find the light lately: Helen DeWitt, dark chocolate digestives, and the reggaeton performance class I joined. (🎵Favourite NSFW regaetton bop of late.)
I’ve been interrogating my climate deeply helds for the past few months. A core one: which systems can change, and which cannot, in the time we have left to turn the ship. Capitalism is one of the biggies (followed closely by the Imperial system). Indeed it’s imperfect, but upending capitalism and rebuilding the entire world order to create a flourishing, climate-safe planet in the next eight years seems, I dunno, a wee bit impossible. I mean, it takes me that long to hang a picture. Fave journo Amy Westervelt quibbled with precisely this capitalism-must-stay contention on the incredible Planet Critical podcast last week: (around the 18:00 mark)
Amy: I had an interesting conversation with Akshat Rathi recently from Bloomberg. He wrote a book called Climate Capitalism…which the title, I’m like, the book kind of makes me cringe a bit. I'm not gonna lie. And he’s like, ‘No no I don’t think that capitalism is the best system either, but I'm worried that we have a limited time to completely replace all the economic systems in the world in the next eight years.’ So how do we make capitalism work for us? How do we reign it in? Everything you’re suggesting sounds good but it ignores the fact that people like you are not in charge…It feels like there’s no way to do that without a large amount of regulation.
Host Rachel Donald: That dialogue decontextualizes the problem. If we just reigned it in…No, capitalism, plus your 80s reforms of neoliberalism plus your injection of fossil fuels is literally how we got here, you know, you want to tame the beast…
Sure. But also…we have eight years!
I was hoping they’d dig into this a bit deeper but Amy hopped over to carbon capture, which, in some ways, is precisely the issue: There’s a strange sort of cognitive chasm in these discussions — we always seems to leapfrog from capitalism to cynicism, when there’s lots of space in between. Yes, it’s folly to think that the people and systems that got us into the problem will get us out of the problem, but also, we’ve never had such a large baby to throw out with the bathwater, nor the prospect of no more baths. We cannot be naively optimistic, but there HAS TO BE SPACE for taming the beast, maybe somewhere between deep adaptation and the Pathways Alliance. I’m sure of almost nothing but this. And jumpsuits and cake. Totally sure of jumpsuits and cake.
Climate economist, and my occasional jogging partner, Gernot Wagner, puts it best in this para from an interview today with
that also cites some data we helped bring to bear at my place of work, Rewiring America (yay!).I’m not saying that IKEA is going to solve climate change, and I am not making some naïve laissez-faire – “free markets” rah rah! Government out of the way! – argument. Far from it. But clean, green, lean technologies are getting better and cheaper so quickly that there’s simply no stopping them.
Of course, fancy climate economist ballast or not, I could be wrong, and should maybe be less sure! Just as I should have been less sure about wearing skirts over pants in the early aughts. I love this from Maggie Jackson’s brilliant NYT Opinion piece, How to Thrive in an Uncertain World, based on her new book:
At heart, being unsure demands a crucial admission: The world is unpredictable, dynamic and flawed — and so are we. It’s an approach that recognizes that the strength of knowledge — and of our own minds — derives from its very mutability. It’s a realm of second chances.
I like uncertainty as a less demanding version of resilience. Resilience feels like an ineffectual government department (though it needs to be effectual), or an item on an alpha parent’s checklist (my own, to be sure). I’m bent on making sure my children are gritty, resilient, witty. Being ok with being unsure feels like a less Tiger Momish take. It’s also a balm in these hot take-y times, where bold statements win the day and nuance dies in darkness (Sorry, WaPo).
Humans naturally need answers and so typically find uncertainty aversive. With a presidential election, war erupting in multiple zones, rising climate volatility and myriad other types of flux, it’s easy to feel overwhelming angst for the future and see certainty as a beacon in a darkening time.
But a wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean into uncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress, not a royal road to angst, as many of us assume. A growing body of evidence and a range of new interventions suggest that skillfully managing uncertainty in the face of what’s murky, new or unexpected is an effective treatment for anxiety, a likely path to building resilience and a mark of astute problem-solving ability.
It reminds me of another great Planet Critical podcast (can you tell I just discovered it?) on how varied the very idea of a fixed sense of self is, from a conversation with the brilliant Sarah Stein Lubrano. W.E.I.R.D. or Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries have a very fixed definition of the self. It makes change hard, because if the self is fixed, straying from its tenets induces major cognitive dissonance. In other geographies, the self is more malleable. And certainty of belief more malleable too, it would follow. This is essential, in a world that demands embrace of new ideas and new ways of doing things on the quick. My sense of self was that I was a starchy ballet girl. And now I do reggaeton. Poorly, it should be stated, but with a selfless gusto. Of course, there’s so much more ambiguity to break open, so that, as Jackson writes, we can leverage the mutability of belief, to always be improving our choices and the state of the world.
But back to Rathi, Westervelt et al. Is it limited to accept our current systemic boundaries, to not imagine the broader realm of what’s possible? Am I naive to think climate needs to be an inside job, given our carbon budget and my current marathon pace, which are exhausted and slow, respectively? See Angela Davis:
I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.
Maybe. But also, change happens faster than you think when it must. And if we can power that change with people, power, and pathways that make life better, capitalism might not know what hit it. A better world is possible in any system, especially if enough people come together to make it so. Also, maybe all these things aren’t sooo mutually exclusive. At the end of this same podcast, host and guest share a hearty laugh after Amy utters the phrase, “If you think we’re going to get millions out in the streets for batteries!” And sure, it sounds incongruous, but is it? I can easily imagine people pouring into the streets for right to repair, for batteries, for things that materially impact their lives and demonstrate how the systems have been rigged, and need to change. Hey hey ho ho, a battery world is possible. Maybe that’s cynically status quo-y, but it also feels real, tenable, imaginable. And also, still really effing hard!
Of course, it’s best for my own climate anxiety, per the literature Jackson mentions, if I hedge, and remain open. Which is easy to do, with visions of communal solarpunk greenery dancing in my brain. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a picture to hang.
This planet
What beliefs have you mutated? Where are you certain? Where are you uncertain? Let me know!
Last planet
What can we do to bring the temperature down? What will you do this year? I loved this from J:
1. Finally find someone willing to give us an estimate on a heat pump installation. If we can make that work, that's the last appliance left to electrify around here! But so far I've only seen heat pumps in very small or very new homes, and can't find a local vendor willing to even consult.
2. Step up the journey to "meat only as a special occasion (travel, weddings, mom's brisket, etc)". When I eat meat, I want to appreciate it as a once-in-a-while treat. My household isn't ready for 100% vegetarianism, but I've omitted meat from breakfast (harder now that Starbuck's discontinued their beyond meat breakfast sandwich) and most lunches, now to tackle the once or twice per week dinner...
3. Write even more letters to politicians on climate matters. I do this maybe quarterly, but am stepping it up after Mike Schreiner says our letters actually help. Who knew?!
4. Figure out something about flying. A bit vague here... I fly a lot. Like, Air Canada bottom-tier elite status (so not in the real "frequent" club, but it feels like it). Of course I try to omit business travel where I can replace it with a call (maybe success once per year), and take the train instead of flying (only achieved 2x in my career...damn you, Southern Ontario infrastructure). I buy offsets when I fly (Air Canada's carbon offsets are graded very highly by Air Canada), but not exactly pleased with that system. So I still fly...just with lots of guilt. I need to work out a personal way to improve this. It might be working with my company travel agency to implement some changes. Not sure yet. So this is not yet "resolution" caliber.
Bonus non-climate resolution: this year I'm going to make a pousse-café.
Does a neapolitain shake count, J? My sister-in-law recently got one, and 🤯 !!!
Stuff
⚡️ Substack decision deferred because I’m uncertain. If I ever charge for Substack, I’ll consider switching!
⚡️Fixing media is a climate solution. This this this this this!!! Amy Westervelt nails it.
⚡️Climate Defiance is doing things. Reading about those things is interesting.
⚡️Katherine May on her book, Wintering: I joined Meg Bennett’s excellent climate book club for a discussion on this book and was blown away. Listen to Katherine May on On Being here. (Thanks Katie Harper for the invite!) Here is one perfect para from the book:
“Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while, while we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind, to find our own grit in our own time.”
⚡️Planet Critical, where have you been all my life! Just subscribe now. So much good stuff.
⚡️Enjoying your central heating? You might want to thank a Black woman for that. Neat piece by Kimberly Sevilla.
⚡️A microadventure sounds so much better than a staycation! I loved this piece by Alastair Humphreys. H/t to my colleague, Tom Carden, for sharing.
⚡️I really enjoyed this Anne Helen Petersen joint on solitude, and doing less but meaning more.
⚡️Not climate, but Phoebe Maltz Bovy is nailing the cultural criticism for me of late!
⚡️My friend’s mum, the wonderful Jodi White, passed away last week. She was the first woman to lead a National political campaign in Canada, and the first female chief of staff to a Prime Minister. She was also an incisive thinker and cool customer, who stood up to some bad actors when she was chair of the Tides Foundation. May her memory be a blessing.
⚡️Chat climate jobs with me! My friend Breene asked me to do this climate jobs #opendoorclimate AMA. Love it because I very much love chatting with people interested in making the switch but don’t have time to talk to everyone in the way I’d like. February 29th 3-4 PM EST.
PEOPLE DANCING
I’m not saying this is me and husband. I’m not saying this is not me and husband. JK, They’re better!
Thank you, as always, for reading! Let me know how to make this newsletter better. Have a lovely week!
Sarah
Last night I watched a movie sent to me by the Director, Rob Herring. Movie called; The Need to Grow."
Amazing and sad. An outstanding achievement showcased, was burned to the ground [probably arson, but unprovable]. It took almost 2 years for the inventor to begin re-building. Grieving and anger takes a lot out of a person.
I am an optimistic person, but there are still people in the grocery store [Colorado] who pack their stuff in gazillion plastic bags, which gives me nightmare-ish indigestion; do they recycle? Or do they go in the closest handy landfill? sheesh.
So I'm on the fence, as to your question of what I believe will happen. I'm just trying to do my part to make sure we have a democracy after our next national election.
Best,
Lauren
P.S. One year of a functioning heat pump, and a very cold month cost me $$ but the whole summer was free, so... Love my electric car, a LEAF, now with me 6 years. I recycle like crazy, even purchased a monthly recycling service for stuff the city doesn't collect. [The service takes styrofoam !!!]