The grossest word I'd never heard
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Hello Vibrant Humans,
I lightly followed the firestorm around Bill Gates’ climate walk-back last week. Another episode in the ongoing series: Powerful Men Call Do-Over on Climate. So catchy.
Mostly, I try to find the good in these Important Memos. But lately I’ve been realizing I might just be…naively overoptimistic. A few years ago I read Eleanor Catton’s riveting novel, Birnam Wood, and spent most of the book waiting for the billionaire to have a climate awakening. Surely, I thought, he can’t be this evil. Surely there’s a third-act moral reckoning coming. Vibrant reader, there was not. It shook me then, this capacity of mine, to assume that deep down everyone is secretly trying to do good and is just playing 9-dimensional chess.
And it shook me anew last week — with Gates. I once again thought it was all just a wee bit of posturing, a nothingburger of a press-driven positional move, and not all that surprising from a guy who’s been middle of the road on climate for many years — helpful in his ways, but not around to do anything but his own things. Which is…what billionaires do. Then a colleague posted on a chat that Gates has actually donated to Bjorn Lomborg. Millions. For years. When people tell you who they are, listen, Sarah.
Who gets to reset?
Which brings me to the real topic…who gets to reset? And how can we keep these resetters from dominating the headlines, which is no different than Trump flooding the zone? Last week, for example, instead of talking about the fact that Trump and cronies used goonish threats and pressure tactics to upend a shipping treaty that would have lowered that sector’s emissions by 3%, everyone lost their minds about Gates. That was what made my skin bristle first — alllll the heds and deks saying Gates had walked back on climate. They took up precious climate attention space. Space that we can’t afford to donate to sensationalist nonsense when there’s a planet afire.
I hate doing a blame the media thing — Because the media is not a monolith, and most journalists are doing heroic work on villainous salaries. And also because it’s naive — headlines drive traffic, traffic drives money, and nuance gets flattened into clickbait pancakes. It was almost ever thus. But must we, the climate commentariat, feed the beast?
There have been a spate of ‘reset’ pieces. Last week’s Volts, recorded way back at Climate Week NYC, featured yet another one. Said Dr. V:
Lately, everyone from Tony Blair to Daniel Yergin is calling for a “climate reset,” so I brought on clean-energy analyst Michael Liebreich to discuss his own, very different version.
Liebreich’s version is not actually that different — he’s just a super smart center-right climate dude who isn’t afraid to call other center-right climate dudes’ reset takes stupid. And he’s right on lots of things, and wrong on others. But I take issue with the idea that we need a climate reset. We know what to do, we just have to do it. And where we do need, if not resets, then refreshes, I think they are less likely to come from stodgy old rich establishment men, and more likely to come from the voices we don’t listen to enough (in the Global South), and fresh voices just emerging.
Let’s find the better billionaire stories.
Billie Eilish’s brave and fun billionaire-poking quote got a bit of press last week, but was largely overshadowed by Billionaire Gates. She said:
Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.”
British MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle is a bird of a feather. He went viral a couple of years ago for stating much the same.:
To my mind, the notion that billionaires should not exist is rather commonplace, and I am confident it’s an idea shared by the majority of the population. After all, the expression “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” is as old as Christianity. And experience tells us that a billion pounds, even for those accustomed to lives of unbridled luxury, is more than anyone could need or even spend.
Like Russell-Moyle and Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, a terrific book about wealth inequality, I think this is right. A system that allows people to amass a billion dollars…isn’t a great system. That’s a billion-dollar duh. But what’s worse is that the philanthropic largesse of that extractive system is built from that system itself, so, as Giridharadas writes, it favours modest liberal tweaks, but never anything that would require structural change.
New fave onomatopoeia
What’s more, Russell-Moyle’s confidence in thinking that most people agree that having billions is bad is not misplaced. The internet’s new favorite genre seems to be celeb-vs-billionaire fanfic: for the past few months I’ve seen ‘inspiring’ stories about celebrities taking a stand against billionaires, whether it’s Riley Keough or Adam Sandler. A recent one:
Riley Keough “torches” Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires right to their faces for their greed — and then proves it with action.
At a glittering charity gala in Manhattan, Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis Presley, shocked a room full of the world’s richest elites by doing what few would dare — speaking truth to unimaginable power.
Fun to be sure, and these posts rack up thousands of likes and tons of (anecdotally) positive engagement, but… completely fake! Per Snopes:
This story resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.”
Glurge. Such a perfectly gross word for how this treacly content makes me feel. But the fact that these posts make people lots of money demonstrates that many people agree with the very obvious idea that wealth-hoarding billionaires are not helping the world right now. Millions of families are wondering how they will buy food — it’s no surprise that people would be into a beautiful, made up, Eat the Rich monologue from an unlikely celeb.
Lock in.
Back in Canada, our new budget dropped this week. And while he’s not a billionaire, I find myself warily extending my Birnam-and-Bill recalibration to PM Carney, unlike media outlets The Juice and The Goose, which call billionaire BS in this almost funny but mostly just sad video. (At least there’s some Canada-Aussie collabs happening?)
I want Carney to be the climate-economics short king he’s always promised to be, a master of realpolitik playing tariff Tetris. The budget has promising nuggets that could help us hit our targets — but as always, the reductions are in the (as-yet-nonexistent) details.
I was obsessed with the phrase Let’s Go for a number of years. But its time has come and gone. We’re in ‘Lock in’ mode. Friends locked in to watch the Jays. Journalists locked in to parse all seven million pages of the budget. And emissions? They’ll be locked in, too, unless we can tune out the billionaire circus, flesh out the fine print, and fight for this beautiful world, leveraging the powerful tools that actually cut carbon. Like carbon levies, electrification, and eating more pulses. Does the word pulse sound more or less appetizing than the word bean? I dunno.
This planet: Bills, bills, bills
Last planet: Weaving the cutest links
This is actually a comment from reader Tina in Hawaii about my weaving post from a few weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about it for ages, and I love it so. She writes:
I have never considered myself to be creative. But it’s interesting to me that in reading your description of weavers and the more recent modern use of the word (which I had not been introduced to yet), it reminded me of what a friend and colleague from my time teaching in Japan used to call me: Little Link. For the same reason. I do have a knack for connecting people and forging disparate relationships. Very interesting indeed.
Thank you so much, Tina. What a beautiful little nickname. How are you acting as the Little Link in your world? Let me know!
Don’t talk about climate? I’m re-reading this September report from Searchlight Institute that advised electeds and would-be electeds to not talk about climate with a different lens after last Tuesday’s Democratic sweep. It annoyed me a bit. It’s not that we can’t talk about climate, it’s that we need to talk about affordability first, and bring solutions that center upfront relief.
Americans aren’t interested in substitutes or long-term schemes. They don’t want to be sold electric vehicles or appliances with claims that they will see lower utility bills. They want relief right now. They want necessities like electricity and heat to get more affordable as soon as possible, and they’ll notice if that doesn’t happen, no matter what they are promised.
To be clear, I very much agree with this post from Ross Morales Rocketto. I don’t think we can take away anything around affordability and Dem success in owning this narrative from Tuesday’s elections, and the breathless commentary that suggests that Democrats are winning the affordable clean energy narrative seems, if not completely off base, then at least premature.
People voted against bad stuff, and with anger. They don’t like marble bathrooms, Gatsby parties, and gaslighting about the price of a turkey dinner. And it’s all making Trump very angry.
Again, and rather like the billionaire boondoggle above, it feels like a sensational headline written to drive a not-that-sensational takeaway: “We framed it in a particularly provocative way to sort of get conversation going,” the report author told Kate Yoder of Grist. That seems right, because the actual takeaway in the report makes perfect sense: It’s not about climate over affordability. It’s about affordability that happens to solve for climate. Whether you mention climate or not depends on where you are, whether clean energy is affordable, and what your constituency ate for breakfast.
Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on “climate” over affordability and low energy prices, and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems. Solutions that address affordability first, and also help fight climate change, are more likely to see strong support from voters.
Stuff and things
Are you in Toronto? Two book launches!
I could not be more excited about this talk at my alma mater, Massey College. Julian Brave NoiseCat and Tanya Talaga in convo about his beautiful new book, We Survived the Night. Join me there!
I’m interviewing the witty David Berry about his new book about art and money and money and art at Type books this Thursday. Come!
Get on my roster, part one? Are you a climate, lifestyle, or biz journalist in Canada? I’d love to know you. Next week, the most efficient and most beautiful heat pumps launch across the country, and I’m helping get the word out. Interested in interviewing someone who’s installed one or anyone from the company? Just want to know more? PLEASE get in touch. In the market for a heat pump yourself? Go go go! (I’ll have a whole post on these beauties next week but I’m happy to answer questions, always!)
Get on my roster, part deux? Are you a web developer, designer, copywriter, campaigner, or digital marketer in Canada? I’d love to know you. More Vibrant, my climate comms consultancy, is building a freelance roster. Climate comms experience is a nice to have, but I welcome lateral skills, different backgrounds, and unconventional trajectories. Say 👋!
Free stuff for you is Notionally live
I finally made it. Mostly. My Stuff for You Notion is full of high-res versions of my MVP comics, doodles, and inspirational nonsense. Everything is free to use and share (just please credit/link me when you can). I’ve also put up all fifteen languages of the Buyerarchy of Needs here. Need a different language? LMK! Thank you to all the paid subscribers who gave me a bit of time to make this! And if you see any of my drawings in the wild and don’t see a high-res version on this Notion, please let me know and I’ll get them up there.
People dancing
My husband and I used to make dance videos before there was a Tik or a Tok. Our kids always refused to participate. Somehow, they humoured us last week. I don’t expect it will ever happen again, so I’m savouring this.
Hope you are healthy and safe and finding joy in these volatile times.
Have a lovely week,
Sarah