Explore every episode of the podcast Sustain What?

I hope you’ll watch, listen to and/or share my Sustain What conversation with Daniel Palken, a highly-regarded guide to energy trends and legislation at Arnold Ventures.

My curtain raiser for the webcast has background on the new U.S. Energy Data tracker we discussed and the permitting reform bill negotiated by two senators from each party:

A core question in our chat was, should proponents pursue passage of this bill in the lame duck congressional session after the election or wait until next year. Palken is for prompt passage, despite imperfections. I alluded to a new Axios story that lays out the risks in trying to do so, and in waiting:

Palken said this:

I want the bill to kind of be in roughly its current form, not because I think the current form is the best possible form it could be in. But because I think that if either side tries to renegotiate it — and there have been voices on both sides, Republicans and Democrats…who are on major committees and have positions of power… — you’re going to end up either with a bill that has, in fact, very little in it that either side likes, because each side will be taking out the other side’s things, or even more likely, you’re going to end up with no bill at all.

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He explained that the Democrats and Republicans behind the bill are essentially betting that their preferred energy sources and systems are a better fit for an even regulatory playing-field. Right now, he said, solar has suffered far more from delays under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) than, say, pipelines.

He cited this 2023 paper as illustrating this:

NEPA Litigation Over Large Energy and Transport Infrastructure Projects

Environmental Law Reporter 5 Jul 2023

It’s a sobering read: “The highest litigation rate is in solar energy projects, nearly two-thirds of which are litigated. Other high-litigation sectors include pipelines (50%), transmission lines (31%), and wind energy projects (38%).”

Listen to this clip:

As I wrote yesterday, for a much deeper look, you must carve time for David Roberts’s epic session with Palken on the permitting reform debate:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

On October 3, The New York Times published a provocation (more than a story) comparing songs generated by humans and generated by giving prompts to generative artificial intelligence trained on vast catalogues of human-created music. The writer was Matt Richtel, a wide-ranging, Pulitzer-winning reporter for The New York Times who’s a songwriter on the side. Here was the headline:

Musicians Versus the A.I. Machine. Why Bother Writing Songs Anymore?

Richtel described how he spent a weekend creating productions of two of his songs with four studio musicians, then — five weeks later — spent about an hour churning out about 30 songs using Suno with Juliana Castro Varón, The New York Times’ senior design editor for A.I. initiatives.

He wrote, “This was our cage match: carbon life-forms versus silicon chips, with you, the readers and audience as the ultimate judge.”

Given my 30-plus years of songwriting, my recent test drives of Suno, and my sung manifesto proposing that “life is a band,” you might understand why this all got my attention.

Read his story and listen to the songs he asked readers to compare (gift link here) then come back and listen to our Sustain What conversation, which took place last Sunday. Watch and listen above or here on X (@revkin), LinkedIn or YouTube.

His experiment, of course, was about plumbing the concept of creativity more than a trite competition between human and machine. Along with discussing the story we dove into his 2022 book Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul.

He asked me about my songwriting process, which is a variable mashup of fact-finding, deep plumbing of my life experiences and musical experimentation. I described how “For Those Who Put To Sea” started with a prompt from Peter, Paul and Mary’s Noel Paul Stookey at a workshop here in Maine: write a song built on some sound around your home, like the open-door beep of your refrigerator.

I chose our neighbors’ wind chimes and then married the melody and rhythm with stories of tragedy from commercial fishing in neighboring Maine towns that I was already probing as a journalist. Listen to the chimes:

Then we talked about imperfection as a path to artistry.

Again, watch and listen to the rest of our conversation and weigh in.

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As regular readers know, I consider the sustainability of government of, by and for the people part of the focus of Sustain What. You won’t get anything productive done on climate, biodiversity, AI or the other issues of our time if autocratic rule continues to gain power here.

With that in mind, I just had a sobering and yet still-hopeful conversation with Jacob Weisberg, the longtime politics-focused journalist whose new book, Profiles In Cowardice, charts the shameful and dangerous capitulations of eight Americans whose self interest has gotten in the way of their love of country.

You can watch the webcast here on Substack or LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or X (at my @revkin account).

The curtain-raiser post has lots of background:

In the show, Weisberg started with one hopeful development — the stand taken by major news media against Trump locking CNN and other organizations he despises out of the White House. Read this post by the Committee to Protect Journalists for more.

We focused on high-level figures who’ve faltered or blatantly failed — like the eight in his book and heaps more he has pilloried on Facebook and Instagram. Here’s his post on Tammy Stidham, a 35-year employee of the National Park Service who has not resisted Trump’s grotesque moves to remake Washington, D.C., in his image:

I then asked Weisberg who he might include in a book published in 2044 charting the actions of Americans who turn the tide back toward a more perfect union. (The year was chosen because that’s the presidential-election year I explore in my song “Good News from 2044.”)

I love what he said here:

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Amid the flow, a story out of Singapore from The Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It’s the kind of sidenote feature that can be easily missed, but I feel is very important. So I did a quite live video chat and I’m posting the lede and a gift link from me here.

Barrels of Sake and Rooftop Galas: Energy Traders Toast the War Boom

As geopolitical conflict disrupts global supply, commodities brokers and traders are reaping profits

By Rory Jones and Rebecca Feng, Sept. 17, 2026 10:03 am ET

Sake and tuna sashimi were handed out at a party hosted by brokerage BGC. (Video: Rory Jones/WSJ)

* Commodities brokers, traders and shippers are reaping large profits as geopolitical conflict in the Middle East disrupts global energy supplies.

* Traders and brokers across Singapore this past week toasted an industry that for some is delivering a bumper year.

* Brokers are profiting from commissions as buyers purchase financial derivatives to hedge against wild price swings in jet fuel, diesel and gasoline.

SINGAPORE—The crowd gasped as the brokers swung the wooden mallets on the lid of the sake barrel, cracking it open in celebration. “Everyone please give them a hand,” the MC said, as Japanese liquor was passed around.

The party, held in the Rendezvous Hotel, was hosted by BGC Group, a U.S.-listed brokerage who has seen its fortunes boom since the Iran war upended global energy markets.

It isn’t the only one. The Middle East is locked in an intractable conflict and oil prices are rising, bringing pain to consumers around the world. But it is good times for those who produce, trade and ship oil. Across Singapore this past week, traders and brokers toasted an industry that has faced its biggest-ever shock, yet for some is delivering a bumper year.

“What we’ve seen this year is the biggest crude-oil supply disruption in history,” said Jim Burkhard, S&P Global Energy’s head of crude-oil research. “When you have big dislocations like this, there’s going to be opportunities.”

Executives gathered in the wealthy city-state for S&P Global Energy’s Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference, or Appec….

[T]he conference is increasingly defined by its sideshow of parties: galas in rooftop bars, museum mixers and dinners held in the city’s colonial-era hotels.

This year, there was much to celebrate. High oil prices are benefiting producers—even some of those dependent on the Strait of Hormuz—by offsetting lower export volumes. Traders and shippers are demanding premiums to navigate riskier waterways. From their desks, brokers are profiting as buyers of jet fuel, diesel and gasoline mitigate wild swings in prices with derivatives….

One of Appec’s hottest parties was organized by Oil Brokerage, a small commodities broker based in London with an office in Singapore. Guests were served Champagne as they walked into a hotel ballroom, according to one guest….

I encourage you to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

In March 2021, I hosted a fascinating discussion on the stormy, co-opted, polarizing online media environment with Georgetown Internet scholar Renee DiResta, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology and Jeff Orlowski, the director of the hit 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (not to mention Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, Chasing Time).

We explored the film and issues that now seem a bit tame given how much more co-opted and polarizing online discourse has become, but still provides a useful milestone. I wanted to be sure it’s in the Sustain What archive here.

A particularly fascinating section came when Harris described what he saw as a pivotal and, yes, depressing revelation about the gulf between the public interest on the Web and corporate interests. It came around 2007-8 and involved me, my Dot Earth blog, The New York Times, Google and others.

The Times was the first customer for a startup he created called Apture. I remember my excitement when this skinny young Silicon Valley guy showed up at our headquarters to pitch his product. My blog had become something of a crash-test dummy for new stuff. The company had built a plug-in for websites that created a pop-up bubble when a reader scrolled over a link. I loved it. This Times blog post shows why:

We’ve enabled a new feature called Apture on select New York Times blogs: Dot Earth, Economix and Diner’s Journal. Apture allows readers to dig deeper into a subject without ever leaving the page. In a blog post like this, when you see a hyperlink with a small icon next to it, click on that link. You’ll instantly see related videos, maps, documents, photos, New York Times topic pages and other content, all while staying on the same page.

Apture ultimately evidently didn’t meet The Times’ goals for boosting time on site. It’s hard to find any trace since Google bought the company. Tristan Harris has gone on to far bigger and more important things and is a keystone voice in AI governance discussions right now (here, here and here via Center for Humane Technology).

More on that soon.

Listen here if you can’t watch or listen to the whole show on a podcast platform or above.

This and the loss of Times Topics Pages (see the footnote) and so much more since then is the Cory Doctorow slide to enshittification.

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Here are my pop-up Sustain What AI conversations with a top cybersecurity expert who says the Trump administration is poorly positioned to undertake the steps necessary to avoid superintelligence hacking us all, and a philosopher of technology who sees the path to safer artificial intelligence coming through dialogue with the technology more than direction.

As President Trump on Sunday said the race with China requires a full-speed-ahead approach to this technology, the heads of all of the leading companies in the AI surge spoke about throttling things back. Here was The Wall Street Journal editorial board Sunday night:

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei issued a statement on Saturday calling for the slowdown amid the escalating progress of Anthropic’s Claude and other AI models. Sam Altman of OpenAI and ChatGPT quickly agreed, as did Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis. The four compete in AI development, so their simultaneous warnings are striking.

An early drill in 1999

As the last millennium drew toward a close, I diverted from my environment beat at The New York Times and asked to join our team reporting on the looming technological crisis called Y2k - short for the year 2000 computer bug.

Somewhere in the vicinity of half a trillion dollars was being invested in sifting through myriad computerized systems to be sure they wouldn’t break down when ‘99 ticked over to ‘00.

I spent New Year’s Eve at the, yes, Millennium Hotel down the block from The Times newsroom in Times Square. The lights stayed on. The world did not end. And doubters and believers remained locked in debates over whether this had been a panic or was a legitimate massive, and successful, preemptive surge.

My first byline of the 2000s, with my friend and colleague Barnaby Feder was “Vast Effort to Fix Computers Not Over (And It’s Not Over).” Along with assessing claims and counterclaims, we looked at the general merits of the preventitve approach:

Computer experts said the United States had benefited in several ways from its heavy spending, pegged at $100 billion by the government and several times that amount by some private analysts. One of the most important, some said, was a recognition by business and government leaders that computers and software must be more carefully managed as information technology becomes more pervasive.

Mr. Rubin [Howard Rubin, then chairman of the department of computer science at Hunter College and an international expert on the year 2000 computer problem] called the rollover an “extraordinary success” after a belated start working on year 2000 flaws. Such slow reactions may not work in the future, he warned.

“When computers are in your face -- when you have an Internet refrigerator -- you won’t be able to take that kind of chance,” he said. “Soon, Earth will have an Internet skin. This skin will be a critical thing. As everything becomes more responsive in real time, the technological risks get higher.”

“Soon, Earth will have an Internet skin. This skin will be a critical thing. As everything becomes more responsive in real time, the technological risks get higher.” - Howard Rubin, January 1, 2000

Now, of course, Earth — and nearly all of human enterprise — has that digital skin, and were are in the midst of a fresh crescendo of warnings about the fast-approaching advent of unmanageable superintelligence.

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I posted several times on this last week and I agree with those calling for a pause to assess what steps can mitigate worst-case outcomes — just as I did joined in calls for caution in 2023:

I also just interviewed two very different experts: Bruce Schneier and J. Gray Cox to get their thoughts on how to survive superintelligence.

Schneier, who calls himself a public-interest technologist, assesses and writes about security risks and opportunities at the intersection of technology and society. He gave a must-watch talk on hacking and AI at DEF CON 34, the latest in a long-running series of hacking conferences on computer security and its opposite:

He describes his talk as a combination of the potentialities he raised in his 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. Here’s the YouTube summary:

Humans are hacking AI systems. Humans are hacking with AI systems. But also, AIs are hacking human systems. They’re finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer code, and they’ll soon be doing the same with all sorts of other codes. For example: the tax code can be hacked. Vulnerabilities are called loopholes, exploits are called tax avoidance strategies, and black hats are called accountants. Similarly, financial markets can be hacked. So can any system of rules or laws, including democracy itself. AIs will hack these systems at our request, and they’ll also do this innately, organically – and possibly in ways we don’t immediately see. We need to consider a world where increasingly sophisticated hacks or our social, economic, and political systems are discovered computer speeds, and then exploited at computer scale and scope. Right now, our systems of patching these systems operate at a human pace, which won’t be good enough.

In a section on how AI agents are the modern equivalent of genies, he notes how most genie stories don’t turn out well for those who do the wishing. If you have time, read the essay on genies and AI that he co-wrote with USC computer science professor Barath Raghavan for the security publication Lawfare. Here’s the Midas example:

King Midas was granted his wish that everything he touches turns to gold. Then his bread turned to gold, and his wine, and his daughter. This is a story about greed, but it’s also a story about language. The gods did not cheat him; Midas got exactly what he asked for. He simply could not delineate, in advance, the full set of restrictions to his wish. Neither can anyone who gives tasks to an AI agent.

Gray Cox is a wide-ranging professor of philosophy, peace studies, artificial intelligence and sustainable development at College of the Atlantic down the road from me in Bar Harbor, Maine. Key readings include:

* This new paper in the journal Artificial Intelligence: From control to relationship: A peace studies approach to AI alignment, with evidence from multi-model dialogue. He told me how the standard approach to managing technology is an unworkable fit for AI agents. Negotiation methods used in pursuing peace are needed. And research on this needs to start now.

* Cox’s book From control to relationship: A peace studies approach to AI alignment, with evidence from multi-model dialogue (Creative Commons download here)

I asked Cox what the average person can do and he said Congress has a core role to play, so connect with your senators and representatives. Whether or not you agree with all of its agenda items (I don’t), PauseAI US is a decent portal for doing so.

Schneier said it’s clear that the current administration is incapable of doing what’s needed on the international front so voting in November is a key step.

In my conversation with Cox, I had to bring up the failed negotiation between the astronaut and Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There is absolutely a lot of work to be done, starting yesterday.

For further reading, don’t miss The New York Times op-ed “This is Really Bad” by Stephen Witt, the author of The Thinking Machine (on the rise of Nvidia). An excerpt:

Researchers in Silicon Valley — and around the world — are beginning to recognize that A.I. may no longer be entirely within human control. Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue….

The more I learn about these rogue systems, the more I am reminded of the first two months of 2020, when a small group of epidemiologists was attempting to raise alarms about Covid. We have a short window, right now, to rein these systems in. This is A.I.’s warning shot, and we might not get another one.

For sanity’s sake

I also encourage you, as something of a counterpoint, to listen to Lex Fridman’s most recent conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson (Lex’s intro: “…also known as DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, creator of the new Omarchy Linux operating system, best-selling author, race car driver, and one of the most outspoken and prolific programmers in the world”).

A key point from DHH is to embrace this astonishing moment in human and planetary history instead of recoiling:

Maybe I wasn’t always like this, but stoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate, is an incredibly liberating way to live. And you could attack that and say, “Well, that’s a point of privilege.” True, but also I had the same directional point when I didn’t have all this, quote unquote, “privilege.” So I think there’s a way to live and interact with the world where you accept the things you can change and the things you cannot change and fall in love with all of it. Fall in love with the fact that the world today has jumped two decades forward into technology industry from where it was last year.

Here’s a bit more from Fridman’s transcript (advice for programmers that I think applies to all of us):

Lex Fridman(01:16:51) So certainly at the societal level, at the macroeconomic level, growth is exciting. But at the individual level, there’s going to be a lot of anxiety, potentially a lot of suffering. So by way of advice, if you’re like a young DHH or young developer programmer now, what would you, what would you advise they do?

DHH(01:17:11) Don’t try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy. Because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It’s an absolute waste of time, and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers. You can make them do the most amazing things if you lean in. If you maybe for a hot moment force yourself to learn where the state of the art is, I double dog dare you not to get excited about what’s possible….

DHH(01:19:33) And if you’re just sitting in your little isolated cave worrying about the future, yeah, you’re gonna go a little nuts. I think if we learned anything during COVID, it’s that people will go nuts sitting in their little cave inside by themselves worrying about what’s gonna happen. That is indistinguishable from depression, ruminating endlessly about things you can’t control. I’m sorry to channel some Jensen Huang here, but that’s just loser talk. You don’t have to be a loser. You can choose to lean in and- … win. And win is very broadly defined as learning more, making more, contributing more, being part of more. And at the end of the day, what are your choices? You don’t have a choice, mate.

DHH(01:20:29) The future’s coming whether you like it or not, so you might as well choose to be excited about it….

Lex Fridman(01:21:38) Maybe there won’t be programmers, like agentic engineers at all. And so yes, your advice is wise to focus on the moment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s just a crazy rollercoaster ride, ’cause we don’t know what this December or what this January will look like.

DHH(01:21:55) We don’t know, and therefore, we should choose to have faith that it’s gonna pan out. That is my best advice towards fighting anxiety, is that you have a choice, to a large degree, of how to lean. Do you wanna lean into (P)Doom? (P)Doom is gonna happen whether you lean into it or not. You don’t have control. [(P)Doom is the probability of human extinction.]

From one of my earlier posts on AI:

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Amid the still-unfolding tragedy following the Nepal rock and ice collapse and tsunami-like mountain flood, there are hints of a safer future.

That was the core idea emerging from a pop-up conversation I had Friday with Basanta Raj Adhikari, the director of the Center for Disaster Studies at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. He had just returned to Kathmandu after an overflight and on-the-ground inspection of the demolished path of the August 26 water and debris flood. He laid out the gargantuan scale of the destruction and losses and we explored next steps.

We dug in on the physical processes behind the event, the challenges trying to monitor high-altitude hazards, and the need for more international scientific cooperation.

We were joined partway through by Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech whose specialty is studying ground subsidence and motion using satellites and other sources of data. On X, he’d posted a fascinating rapid analysis of seven months of Sentinel-1 data (right up until one week before the rockslide) appearing to show the slow downslope movement of the bedrock in the region had been accelerating.

In his tweet, Shirzaei said, “The results suggest that the slope was deforming prior to failure and raise an important question: could satellite radar observations help identify developing instability in high-mountain glacier and rock systems before catastrophic collapse?

It’s far too soon to have a clear picture of the cascading and interlaced sequence of events high on Lantang Lirung mountain and a team including Adhikari is assembling to assess the causes and consequences.

But if it turns out that satellite tracking of subtle deformations of mountainous landscapes might reveal advance signs of such an event, this could lead to better warnings and fewer deaths, both of my guests said. (It is clear this is an area where artificial intelligence could help identify danger hot spots.)

But this will only happen with a lot more integration of data sets and expertise in disparate fields, combined with far more education and planning in the crowding communities across the Himalayas.

I mentioned how the deadly extreme flooding in western North Carolina from the remains of Hurricane Helene was essentially a small-scale version of the August 26th Nepal disaster.

We walked through a fantastic New York Times visual report showing what is known at the moment about the sequence of events.

We discussed the findings in a paper co-authored by Adhikari and many others titled “Increasing risk of cascading hazards in the central Himalayas.” Here’s a graphic that’s worth sitting with:

I learned about an important, and mostly voluntary, international Geotechnical Extreme Event Recconaissance Association, aiming to “systematically collect perishable post-disaster data that can be useful in advancing our understanding of extreme events when they happen.”

There’s lots more to learn of course, and the best way is to listen above or on the podcast outlets listed higher in this post.

Please share what you learn!

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Also see my earlier post about Adhikari’s work:

After my initial post on the unimaginably violent and deadly flood in the crowded valleys along the Nepal-Tibet (China) border, I reached out to two experts on this kind of catastrophe and just ran a pop-up Sustain What conversation on the still-unfolding situation and science.

You can watch above or on X/@revkin, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. (If you go there, please SHARE the videos with others.)

My guests were:

* Ramesh Bhushal, a Kathmandu-based journalist who’s been reporting for many years on the profound threat posed by ice and mountainside instability in the Himalayas. Please subscribe to his Substack Himalaya Speaks. Read his 2020 article

* Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary who’s a top expert on this hazard and has been super helpful on Bluesky and elsewhere. Follow him on Bluesky to keep track of trustworthy analysis and developments.

My curtain raiser yesterday pointed to lots of high-quality analysis of this awful event and hauntingly similar ice and rockslide disaster in 2021 that Shugar and Bhushal both assessed in depth from their scientific and journalistic vantage points:

Insert, 8/27, 10pm ET - Stunning before-after imagery of the China-Nepal Gyirong Port/Rasuwagadhi border post:

/photo/1

Read Bhushal’s 2020 story (republished on Substack) for more on the wider landslide threat in Nepal:

Here are several valuable papers to read when you have time:

Glacier changes in Langtang Catchment, Central Nepalese Himalaya from the Little Ice Age (∼1815 CE) to 2023 CE

Gunjan Silwal, Bethan Davies, J. Rachel Carr, Owen King, Sammie Buzzard, Jonathan L. Carrivick, Prashant Baral, Global and Planetary Change, September 2026

With enhanced warming at higher elevations, fragmentation and disconnection will likely become dominant mode of glacier recession in the region, with significant implications for future glacier evolution, meltwater availability, regional hydrology and associated geohazards.

Decoding the Fate of Himalayan Glaciers under Climate Change: Impacts, Challenges, Research Gaps, and Policy Pathways

Rayees Ahmed, Evolving Earth, 1 January, 2025

Mass Movement Hazard and Exposure in the Himalaya

Saket Dubey, Ashim Sattar, Manish Kumar Goyal, Simon Allen, Holger Frey, Umesh K. Haritashya, Christian Huggel, Earth’s Future, 12 September, 2023

Sudden large-volume detachments of low-angle mountain glaciers – more frequent than thought?

Andreas Kääb, Mylène Jacquemart, Et al., The Cryosphere, 12 April, 2021

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Postscript - At one point in the show I played a clip from Instagram that I noted could be fake. This BBC Verify videos uses it as a case study!

Thank you Ranjit Singh, Deanne Wilson, Tom Lefebvre, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I just held a solution-filled Sustain What conversation with three people working to spread materials and methods that can substantitally stem wildfire risk to communities (by cutting vulnerability) even as the long fights to stem human-driven global heating and manage wildland fires at the source play out.

Two of them, James Greer of Wildfire Defense Mesh and James Brooks of the consultancy Fire Aside, said the first step is to “think like an ember.” See this chilling video clip from a doorway camera in the horrific Eaton Fire in Los Angeles to get the idea (provided by James Greer).

Here’s a compelling test showing how the stainless steel mesh sold by Greer’s company (which can be used in many ways around a home or business) cuts the threat:

Everyone in this discussion emphasized that wildfire risk reduction is a systemic challenge with no silver bullet and never a situation where you’re fully safeguarded, particularly because conditions — both the climate and communities — are in flux.

I’ll be expanding this post when I have time but in the meantime explore the curtain raiser post that ran on Friday for more info:

Please share this post directly with friends in fire danger zones and do consider becoming a paid subscriber if you can afford it.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

Think of how Anthony Fauci has become kind of a tainted totem, tussled over by starkly opposed factions in fights that omit almost all of the complexity that attended the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then watch my pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the 11 authors of an important recent Nature commentary: "Six ways to put the public at the heart of science and policy."

A key passage:

At a time when trust in governments is falling across many democracies6 and populists are casting scientists and academic institutions as untrustworthy ‘elites’7, it’s crucial to make the general public a part of research and policy. This would foster trust and make academic research and government policies seem more legitimate. People are more likely to support — and champion — science advice that they helped to generate8. Democratizing research and science-policy processes will mean rethinking how scientists, citizens and policymakers interact.

My guests were:

* K. L. Akerlof, an associate professor at George Mason University who, among other things, leads the university’s “Communication for Environmental Science, Policy, and Human Behavior” concentration within the master's degree program.

* Musa al-Gharbi, an assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who writes Symbolic Capital(ism) on Substack and is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

* Chris Tyler, an anthropologist and associate professor in the University College London’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy. Among other previous work he spent five years as director of the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

Here’s how al-Gharbi described the paper’s genesis on LinkedIn:

Trust in experts and scientific findings has grown increasingly polarized. Populists across the political spectrum and around the world insist that mainstream institutions do not represent or serve the public to the extent that they should. Their message resonates, in part, because there actually have been significant shifts in how scientific knowledge is produced and put to use. Technological and scientific changes *have* significantly transformed how people work and communicate with one another. The benefits and costs of these shifts *have* been unevenly distributed. Many of these changes *were* implemented top-down, with little consultation with or buy-in from those facing the highest levels of risk, cost, or disruption. In short, the growing social distance between experts, policymakers, and the public is not imagined, it’s real. It’s also highly consequential.Leaders on every continent have exploited growing public suspicion of experts and institutions to justify circumventing checks and balances, streamlining decision-making processes, and consolidating power into their own hands. Scientific institutions across the globe are facing budget cuts, increased government scrutiny, and censorship attempts.However, times of crisis and disruption can also be moments of opportunity. Scholars, practitioners, and institutions around the world are responding to these challenges by piloting long-overdue reforms. There is a growing consensus that it may be possible to increase the quality, impact, and long-term viability of science and policy by more rigorously integrating the public at every stage.To explore the challenges and opportunities of communicating science for policy in a populist world, Chris Tyler and K. L. Akerlof convened a working group that included 23 other researchers and practitioners from across fields and around the globe…

The working group gathered together in-person for the first time on September 8th in Arlington, VA to exchange ideas and foster collaborations. Drawing from these conversations, their diverse scholarship and experience, and successful documented initiatives from around the world, they produced evidence-based recommendations for constructively responding to the challenges of growing mistrust, alienation, and social distance. These suggestions were then vetted and refined by external peer-reviewers….

I don’t have sufficient income from my Sustain What project to have a staff so, yes, I’m judiciously using Google’s AI to summarize the discussion from the YouTube stream. If you can afford to, do feel free to chip in:

Consider becoming a paying supporter of this Sustain What work.

This discussion, hosted by Andrew Revkin, features researchers K. L. Akerlof, Chris Tyler, and Musa al-Gharbi exploring a Nature commentary on how to improve public trust and engagement in science and policy amidst a global rise in populism (0:04, 0:58, 2:36).

Key Takeaways:

* Rethinking Science Advice: Chris Tyler emphasizes that the scientific community needs to stop acting like part of the problem and start becoming part of the solution by modernizing how science advice is delivered (5:16).

* Embracing Humility and Uncertainty: K. L. Akerlof and Musa al-Gharbi note that researchers often naively hide uncertainty to maintain authority. Evidence shows that being candid about disagreements and limitations actually increases public trust (9:45, 12:44).

* Moving Beyond ‘Elite’ Circles: Musa al-Gharbi argues that institutions often fail to engage beyond their narrow, affluent, liberal bubbles. He advocates for meaningful engagement with diverse stakeholders, including right-leaning or rural audiences, using local media and community venues (53:23).

* The Three-Legged Stool: Chris Tyler proposes that universities should integrate research expertise, public policy expertise, and public participation expertise to maximize societal impact (19:51).

* Avoiding Extractive Research: K. L. Akerlof warns against ‘extractive’ engagement, where researchers parachute into traumatized or marginalized communities to collect data without providing genuine support or respecting the community’s time and infrastructure (57:05).

Key Perspectives:

* Andrew Revkin observes that despite the logical nature of calls for interdisciplinary, community-based science, these changes remain difficult to implement due to path-dependent institutional structures (43:00).

This 2021 webcast explores this issue: How Universities Can Support Interdisciplinary Careers for Climate and Sustainability Progress

* Chris Tyler notes that the goal is for researchers to act as ‘honest brokers’ rather than lobbyists, empowering decision-makers by providing transparent evidence (48:38).

* Musa al-Gharbi highlights that when mainstream experts position themselves solely in opposition to populist movements, they lose the ability to influence policy, leaving a vacuum often filled by less reliable sources (29:22).

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I encourage you to click back to these previous webcasts on related themes:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

Updated below July 25 - My new song, "For Those Who Put to Sea," honors men and women who harvest the ocean's bounty and is sung in memory of those who sometimes don't come back. I just posted this fresh video version on YouTube and TikTok (and will post elsewhere soon). Please share this song with anyone who enjoys seafood or lives in a coastal community.

I shot most of the footage at the Maine Commercial Fishing Remebrance Day ceremony at the Lost Fishermen's Memorial in Lubec. There were 10 ceremonies up and down the 3,478-mile coast. At the event in Boothbay Harbor, Pat Shepard, the co-founder of Redde Marine Safety, narrated as a boat and crewman just off the dock demonstrated a valuable set of safety systems (video from Facebook).

Insert, July 25 - After the ceremony in Lubec, I interviewed Clarissa West, a lobster fisher operating out of Steuben whose father, Thomas West, died after evidently falling from his boat on April 21. He was one of two casualties, along with Stephen Johnson Jr., honored with the sounding of a hand bell at the ceremony as the chairwoman of the Lubec memorial, Annie Sokoloski, read their names.

Clarissa West said her children have started lobstering using her dad’s boat, the Aces and Eights:

Clarissa - I’m here in honor of my father. He just passed away in April 21st. He had fallen over. And we found him the 22nd, that morning. Actually, it was my brother that found him. We were up all night trying to search for him. The Marine Patrol was out in their boats. I was even in there with them to help. And we didn’t see him. There were fishermen that went out and helped look for him in his boats and shined the shores and the waters for us. And like the next day at three o’clock in the morning, my brother had found him. He was actually wrapped up in a crate. So I would say he tried to save himself. He got on a crate and then we don’t know if it rolled over. When it hit a rock or with the tide turn, and his hand was actually wrapped in it, and that’s what kept him afloat to bring him to shore.

He was 63. He just turned 63 on the 2nd of April. His boat was the Aces and Eights. He was doing his bait and fuel and was bringing it to his mooring, and we don’t know... If he fell off putting it on the mooring. We have no idea what happened.

Andy - People think of this as like a storm strikes a boat and it capsizes. But there’s all the other ways. All it takes is a little...

Clarissa - Just a little slip or mishap, I guess, so you never know what happens, really.

Andy - So what do you think of the idea of a Memorial Day, a Remembrance Day?

Clarissa - It’s good for everyone to gather, everyone that’s mourning, …and for our loved ones to be recognized together. And, well, it just brings us all together to know that nobody is alone. On the hard days, or on the day of... Because you never get over it. You really don’t. It’s just one day at a time, and you... Like I tell my kids, I said, we have the memories, we have the stories, and that’s what keeps him alive.

Andy - And what’s it like going out fishing, do you think about it when you’re out there?

Clarissa - Yeah, it’s hard… So we used to sail by each other all the time. And you don’t have that anymore. My kids actually took over his boat. I guess that gives a sense of peace for them to take over the tradition.

I’m using the song to raise funds for the Maine-based organization Green and White Hope, launched after the tragic loss of 18-year-old Tylar Michaud in 2023 and now working to boost safety for commercial fshing crews and shore-side responsiveness when the worst happens. My conversation with Liz Michaud, the organization’s founder (and Tylar’s aunt) is here:

Have a safe weekend, whatever you do. And if you enjoy some seafood, as I sing, “raise a glass and say a prayer for those who put to sea.”

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My new song about maritime dangers, “For Those Who Put to Sea,” is out on all platforms (YouTube, Spotify, etc.). Here’s my post from Maine’s Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day:

Growing up in Rhode Island, I got out on the water any way I could, ranging from skin diving to sailing to fishing to clamming. In summers during high school and college, pondering a career in marine biology, I got a job helping state fisheries biologists, including spending weeks on lobster boats tracking the sex and size of the catch. I loved getting to know the lobstermen, one of whom was old enough to remember when a German U-boat surfaced near him off the coast and siphoned off his fuel.

At The New York Times, I wrote quite a bit about fisheries issues, including Maine-focused stories like one in 1996 on the dangerous boom-and-bust harvest of sea urchins and, in 2001, on the lobster-boat races in my wife’s ancestral home town, Winter Harbor.

But it’s only in recent years, since we settled in Downeast Maine, that I’ve come to appreciate fully not only the allure of harvesting the bounty of the sea, but also the profound dangers. One after the other, fishers young and old have perished or been maimed in sudden storms, accidents or other mishaps in an ocean environment that leaves almost no room for error. A rope snaps like a shotgun blast. A rogue wave strikes. A boot slips. A scallop dragger flips.

The dangers spread far beyond Maine of course. As I wrote last year, nationally, commercial fishing is second only to logging on the Bureau of Labor Statistics list of deadliest jobs.

Just up the coast from us in Steuben, a particularly wrenching story unfolded in the summer of 2023 as Tylar Michaud, a high school graduate bound for the Maine Maritime Academy in the fall, took his boat out solo one day and didn’t return. The boat was found empty. Weeks of searching ended in heartbreak.

Amid the prolonged grief enveloping the family and community, Tylar’s aunt, Liz Michaud, was moved to found Green and White Hope, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing safety at sea and named for the colors on Tylar’s buoys. The group, working with growing array of partners, has taken a systemic approach to cutting risk in commercial fishing in Maine (and beyond) - working on safety education, boosting access to safety gear and building the capacity of communities to launch search and rescue operations swiftly when the worst happens. Every minute matters here, with sea temperatures even in summer rapidly sapping strength.

I’m making a substantial donation and hope you can help as well.

I just had a sobering and inspiring Sustain What conversation with Michaud and key partners one week ahead of Maine’s second, and now annual, Maine Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day — a memorial day that she helped create. I’ll be attending the event at the Lubec memorial and may get down to the one in BoothBay Harbor, as well.

My other guests were:

Ann Marie Sokoloski, the founder of Voices of the Fleet, an initiative dedicated to strengthening communication between fishermen, regulators, scientists, and coastal communities. She’s also the chair of the committee managing the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec, Maine, and a yoga instructor working with traumatized veterans, many of whom experience “ambiguous loss” — a condition also afflicting fishers and their communities when someone is lost at sea with no trace. She wrote a powerful post about this last year for the blog of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. Here’s an excerpt but do read the rest:

The sea can be generous—feeding, sustaining, and binding a town together—but it can also take without giving back. When it does, there is no gravesite to visit. The memorial becomes the shoreline, the harbor, the tide itself.

This absence echoes far beyond the family. In a small town, everyone knows the lost crew, their children, the boat’s paint color, the sound of its engine when it headed out before dawn. The loss ripples through the wharf, the coffee shop, the bait shed—felt in ways that are spoken and unspoken. [READ ON]

The pain of ambiguous loss

INSERT 07/15 - In the discussion, Sokoloski explained that the work to boost success in search, rescue and, yes, recovery of a body can also help avoid haunting ambiguity:

I’m certified in post-traumatic stress disorder.

So we deal with ambiguous loss and grief within the veteran population for veterans, of course, in combat. So this is something that happens within the fishing community as well, when we have fishermen that are lost at sea. And, you know, when there’s somebody that hasn’t been returned there is this continuous craving that occurs.

And that’s what ambiguous loss or grief is. So there’s no closure…. So this is what keeps occurring when there’s no body recovered and when these communities have to keep searching. And this is kind of where we tie into the search and rescue and the devices.

It’s for people to have have that recovery. Recovery of the body so that they can have that closure. - END INSERT

In the conversation you’ll also meet Josh Duym and Pat Shepard, the founders of the startup Redde Marine Safety, which operates along Maine’s 3,400-mile corrugated coast filling demand for up-to-date safety equipment, regulatory compliance and training.

Shepard noted that the realities of fishing hazards go way beyond postcard views of maritime life in Maine:

When people think about the fishing community in Maine, they think about big lobster boats with life rafts up on the roof and EPIRBs [Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons] that can tell your position and life jackets and survival suits and all of that stuff. Clammers go out in a 16-foot aluminum skiff to some of those outer islands and clam for the entire day — in the middle of the winter. And we just saw how dangerous that can be this last winter when we lost two clammers down in Jonesport.

And I think organizations like Green and White Hope and companies like Redde Marine are really well poised to make a difference in some of those sectors of the industry that you don’t necessarily think about when it comes to safety gear.

Here’s what clamming looks like in winter here (Marlboro Beach, about five minutes from our home):

I capped off the show by playing the video of “For Those Who Put To Sea,” the updated version of my song about the under-appreciated dangers facing those working these waters. My fiddling friend Gus La Casse added haunting lines. Let me know what you think:

The song releases everywhere music is found on July 19 and I’ve set the video up as a fundraiser for Green & White Hope. The lyrics (with links to relevant background) are here as a pdf:

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I found myself having a quiet moment (I’m hoping you find them) at home and thought I’d share a bit of a musical ramble as a “Sunday Sanity” offering. You can find a short playlist of previous episodes of this track of Sustain What shows here.

I’m playing my first guitar, which I bought in pieces for $35 (Canadian) in Halifax at age 17 in 1977 and then fixed up in my dad’s basement workshop back home in Rhode Island — under threat that he’d throw it away if I didn’t make it playable by the end of the summer. How could I buy a broken guitar for that much money!?

I wrote a song about the guitar (a 1949 Gibson Southern Jumbo) and my dad a couple of years ago and you can hear it here:

I’m playing in open-C tuning — which I love because it’s full of octaves that give the feel of a 12-sstring guitar without having to own yet another instrument.

You can download my two albums and some singles on Bandcamp.

Here’s the evening episode in which I introduced my new album, “Wake Me up Martha”:

I started this webcast series back in the pandemic and that multi-year playlist is here.

Here’s a particularly fun episode with Alex de Grassi and Joachim Cooder and other friends:

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Insert, July 16 - Listen to or read this conversation between Rob Verchick and Dan Farber, two legal eagles on the muzzling of the Sloop Clearwater:

Insert, 3:15 p.m. - Months of planning and permits amounted to nothing as the Coast Guard, apparently on orders “from above” (see below), ordered the captain of the Sloop Clearwater, launched in 1969 by Pete Seeger and friends to clean the Hudson, to “turn your vessel around” instead of taking its place escorting a Portuguese square rigger up the Hudson in the big Fourth of July Sail 250 event (video by Tom LaBarr of the Beacon Sloop Club on Facebook).

Original post - I just had a conversation witth Dave Toman, executive director of the fabled Hudson River environmental and education organization Clearwater from the deck of the Sloop Clearwater after Coast Guard, Navy and New York Police Department vessels diverted the fabled sloop from its long-approved participation in the Sail250 Parade in New York Harbor and up the Hudson River.

The reason was reportedly that the vessel was displaying banners supporting inidigenous rights, climate action and preserving the Clean Water Act. I’ve reached out to Sail250 to get their input on why this happened and will update the post then.

Insert 3pm - Just posted by Clearwater:

BREAKING NEWS: Clearwater was removed from the Sail4th 250 Parade of Sail by the USCG and escorted out of the Exclusion Zone by the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and NYPD.

Captain Rory Kane inquired why, and was informed the removal was due to the presence of banners reading: ‘Save the Clean Water Act and Indigenous Rights, Racial Justice, Climate Solutions’”.

A representative from Sail4th 250 informed the Captain the decision was ‘above them.’

The sloop has a long and storied history of using the mains’l to share messages of hope and advocacy.

The Clearwater will continue sailing south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge until 3pm and has 29 passengers and 19 crew aboard. Follow our stories to see how we’re building solidarity from Gravesend Bay, waiting out the expiration of the security zone.

In the meantime, support Clearwater’s education and conservation work at clearwater.org.

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live. Join me for my next live video in the app.

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These days, many of us tend to think of coders, algorithms and AI as a predatory threat stalking our online communication environment, and all too often that is true. But here is an inspiring example of an effort to put these skills and technologies to vital use in an unfolding catastrophe.

Jorge Bastidas normally spends his days in Buenos Aires as CTO of The Empire, a small Florida-registered company building the online impact of a variety of clients around the world — from a natural-dog-food company to EmpathyAI. When Venezuela was shattered by double-barreled earthquakes one week ago, with some people he worked with among the tens of thousands affected, Bastidas abruptly shifted gears in a powerful way.

This Sustain What episode is part of the six-years-and-running track on Sustain What called Thriving Online. Explore the YouTube playlist here.

Facing communication blackouts and a desperate need to connect survivors with families, he and a fast-expanding team launched a portal for exchanging information among families and friends of those missing and hospitals and rescue teams handling an influx of survivors. Go explore desaparecidosterremotovenezuela.com and then come back to listen to how the project came to be, what it is achieving and what the emerging toolkit can do in the next disaster (or war zone). If you don’t have time to click, here’s a sample of what you see. Each image is someone missing or someone found but not connected to a family.

Bastidas tells me they making everything open source for use in future calamities. You can contact him to help at contacto@theempire.tech.

“This is our tragedy, this is our earthquake,” he told me. “But in all over the world, things like this happens every day. So we want to share this with the community so they can apply this same technology on every disaster or another emergency situation when people need it.”

Here’s one powerful moment for starters. As we spoke and I scrolled the list of images of the missing, I noted that there were 2,920 pages to click through. He grew emotional, raising his palms to his face and agreeing, “That is a lot of pages.”

Adaptive networks in a crisis

What’s most interesting to me is how Bastidas and hundreds of dispersed volunteers now working with him quickly diverted from their normal lives, taking their skills and applying them in a new way in a crisis. They are demonstrating that #AIForGood is not just a hashtag and programmers for good exist.

That pattern reminds me of a show I did early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as India locked down and its poorest citizens faced starvation even in big cities. A small nonprofit group focused on reducing plastic waste in Bhopal became a food distribution network. Listen to them and you’ll recognize the pattern.

Here’s Gemini’s summary of my conversation on the reconnection website (from the YouTube stream):

* Rapid Response: Within an hour of the disaster, Bastidas and his team began building a database-driven platform from scratch to help people report missing relatives and allow others to update their location (4:36 - 5:31).

* Tech Stack: The team utilized TypeScript for the front and back end, and AWS for hosting, implementing security measures like reCAPTCHA and firewalls to manage the massive influx of traffic (7:16 - 8:58).

* Collective Impact: The initiative has expanded significantly, involving hundreds of volunteers, auditors, and integration partners who use the platform’s API to share data with organizations like the UN (13:33 - 14:58).

* Facial Recognition: Collaborating with the company Lab Co, they integrated an AI-based facial recognition tool. This allows hospitals to upload photos of patients, which can then be matched against reports submitted by families (9:53 - 12:28).

I note that the facial recognition effort reminded me of “Trace the Face,” a longstanding project of the International Committee of the Red Cross that works this way: “If you have lost contact with someone while moving from one country to another or if you have a relative who has gone missing during migration, you can search our photo gallery or contact us to publish a photo of yourself for someone else to find.”

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live. Subscribe to be sure you get alerts when I do this kind of pop-up segment.

Rather than encouraging those who can afford it to chip in for Sustain What, I urge you to make a donation to Give Directly’s dedicated fund for Venezuelans facing the extraordinary challenge of rebuilding lives in a country beset by troubles well before this seismic nightmare. I just did.

As I’ve written before, this nonprofit tries to get direct benefits to those in need as a way to cut through bureaucracy. I’ve become convinced of the value of this strategy in large part through Matthew Yglesias’s writing and Slow Boring ’s support for them. Their “Emergency Cash team is entering Venezuela today,” the group just reported on its website.

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Here’s the post-show post and audio podcast for my conversation with the Capital Weather team, who’ve just returned to independence after 18 years of weather communication and community building affiliated with the Washington Post.

Details are in the curtain-raiser post:

We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder Jason Samenow was at the Environmental Protection Agency working on the possible carbon dioxide endangerment finding while experimenting in his spare time with weather blogging. Boy, it’s wild to look back:

We talked about the potential impact of Trump-driven federal budget and staffing cuts on the basic data that private forecasters rely on — a question their colleague Matthew Cappucci has been closely tracking:

We explored how the implosion of local TV budgets is spawning a nationwide array of independent meteorologists building their own audiences and businesses. Samenow mentioned that the American Meteorological Society has launched a Certified Digital Meteorologist (CDM) training and certification program to offer communities some assurance of the skills of the forecasters they depend on.

There’s lots more, so please watch and please share this post! If you don’t, someone who could benefit from these insights won’t see them.

And do consider chipping in to sustain my Sustain What work.

Consider becoming a financial contributor.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

Parting weather shot: Net hats are an essential spring fashion accessory on muggy hot days here in Downeast Maine.

I just hosted a pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the dozens of climate and weather scientists who are running a 50-Hour livestream to boost public appreciation of the observational and analytical science that bolsters societal resilience and boosts understanding of our amazing, and changing, planet. A goal is to sustain federal support for weather & climate science even as the current administration seems deadset on demolishing it.

My guests were Clare Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Nadir Jeevanjee, a research physical scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; and Rob Socolow, an emeritus professor focused on interdisciplinary environmental science and engineering at Princeton.

Socolow made an important point here about the Trump era appearing to be the end of an arc of American appreciation of science that began with Sputnik and is having its “anti-Sputnik moment”:

Please watch above and share this post now with fellow citizens - and your elected representatives in Congress. Our conversation is also on YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and my X account.

The scientists’ webcast is under way through June 3:

Make sure to visit the Weather & Climate Livestream home page, where you can find a host of short videos excerpted from last year’s 100-hour stream.

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Thank you Matt Burgess, Mary Powers, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

The only way to build our Sustain What community is to share this post now with others.

Program note: Today at 11 a.m. Eastern, join me live with several of the dozens of scientists participating in a 50-Hour livestream to sustain federal support for weather & climate science: YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and X. The webcast is under way through June 3:

My conversation with Chris Mooney

Here’s the post-webcast post of my conversation with Chris Mooney. In 20 years, Mooney has gone from progressive blogger and author of the prescient bestselling 2005 book The Republican War on Science (yes, 2005, yes, prescient) to Pulitzer-winning Washington Post climate reporter to the new holder of an endowed chair at the Univeristy of Tennessee, Knoxville, created to “advance public understanding of complex scientific, technological, environmental, and medical issues by fostering excellence in teaching, research, and outreach.”

The curtain-raiser post has lots of background:

Here’s one nugget in which Mooney examines the early roots of the divide that has grown between Republicans and science:

I can say for sure that the rift that I was detecting between scientists and one side of the political spectrum has worsened since that time. I think that’s pretty objectively true. And you can actually look at the polling data, for instance. Something happens during COVID that really politicizes science in the minds of the electorate in a way that it wasn’t before.

You can see the trust divide widen between Democrats and Republicans much more than it was caused by something like climate change…. And one thing about the climate issue is that not everyone is really that engaged with it. It’s always seen as something in the future or what have you. But COVID was not. It was in the present. You had to have a view about it.

There is much, much more. Here’s Gemini’s answer when I asked it to summarize key ideas that emerged (using the YouTube video; if more subscribers chip in I might be able to hire an intern to do this work, but that’s up to you):

This conversation explores the evolving landscape of climate journalism, the role of data in storytelling, and the impact of new technologies on the media industry.

* Data-Driven Narrative Structure: Mooney discusses his experimental approach to writing, which involves treating stories as data sets to better understand and map narrative structures. He argues that applying data-driven thinking to journalism can help writers craft more cohesive stories. (4:24 - 9:09)

* The Evolution of Science Communication: The speakers reflect on the importance of “framing” in science communication—choosing which aspects of a complex topic to emphasize based on the intended audience and context. (21:04 - 23:48)

* The Challenge of ‘Single Study Syndrome’: A major concern highlighted is the tendency for media outlets to treat individual scientific studies as sensational “Eureka” moments, which can lead to reader disengagement and a lack of context. They advocate for a broader, trend-based approach to science reporting. (38:09 - 42:01)

* The Future of Journalism and AI: The conversation touches upon the integration of AI in newsrooms and the potential risks of automated, traffic-driven reporting models versus human-produced, verified journalism. (34:33 - 35:12)

* Climate Journalism in Practice: Mooney recounts his work on a Pulitzer-winning project at The Washington Post, which utilized data visualization to identify regional climate trends that were previously overlooked. (57:29 - 1:03:24)

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I’m continuing to write songs along with my Sustain What webcasting and blogging here — in part to keep sane and in part because this has always been one of my ways of connecting people with ideas. (Buy my new album here.)

In this post, you’re getting the first look and listen to the first rough recording of “Nothing is Quiet.” The lyrics — also still a work in progress — are below. Everyone can listen but I’d love it if a few more of you might chip in financially to help me sustain my output.

The path from idea to song

The songwriter Amy Love was one of the songcrafting workshop leaders this spring at Bagaduce Music, Downeast Maine’s prime hub for musical education and a world-class library of printed music. In one session she offered this prompt: Write a song about an object.

I immediately focused on the red wool caps my wife started weaving from a pattern sold by a Minneapolis-area shop to raise money for local nonprofits helping immigrants facing the brutal ICE invasion. You may remember this from my post on “craftivism”:

The back story is quite remarkable, with a Minneapolis knitting-shop employee recalling a Norwegian red wool cap design dating from World War II.

I began scribbling.

Knitting is quiet, even serene.

Small talk and tea cups and needles weaving….

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

Cooking is quiet, but not these days

I could have written the full song about the Minneapolis saga, but wanted to widen the picture. What else is normally quiet, but not these days? I’d also recently listened to Trevor Noah’s conversation with José Andrés, the superstar chef and restaurant impresario who founded World Central Kitchen after the calamitous earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

I encourage you to listen to the full show, which has fascinating details on how Andrés learned on the run, grew a network of hundreds of collaborating restaurants and related busineses and nonprofits and has built an agile and gutsy operation that has served 600 million meals in dozens of disaster and conflict zones.

Fourteen WCK workers have been killed in the field — seven in an Israeli attack on a convoy in Gaza, six more in Ukraine. (Today’s recording of the song says seven… updates to come!)

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Seven died in Gaza, six more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

At the end of the song I widen out the view once more, noting other quiet, but essential actions — from meeting to healing to voting.

This section may evolve, along with other elements of the song. Feedback is welcome!

I composed the tune on my Maine-made bouzouki because I find that breaking away from guitar — my instrument of choice for more than 50 years — helps free me from mental ruts.

Nothing is Quiet These Days

Here are the lyrics at the moment:

Knitting is quiet, even serene -

Small talk and tea cups and needles dancing.

Counting up stitches, unballing yarn.

Wool becomes sweaters to keep loved ones warm.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

In cold Minnesota, a knitting brigade

Made red wool a shield

To keep immigrants safe.

Red capped resistance

When ICE agents swarmed.

Wore hats in a pattern passed down from a war.

Those caps got their start back in snowy Norway.

A symbol of freedom from Nazis and hate,

I say nothing is quiet ‘bout knitting these days.

Thanks to hat makers with something to say.

Cooking is quiet as stirring a pot,

peeling potatoes, keeping soup hot.

Turning meat into stew, wheat into bread,

Dishing it out to keep everyone fed.

But nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

From Haiti to Congo, Beirut to Turkey

His World Central Kitchen serves hot meals for free.

Under bombardment, teams cook beans and grain.

Ten died in Gaza, seven more in Ukraine.

But still they cook on, fighting famine and fear.

Try to support them with more than a cheer.

Nothing is quiet ‘bout cooking these days.

Thanks to a kind-hearted chef named José.

Silence is deadly in this day and age.

So raise up your voices with heart and not rage.

But singing alone will not fix what is wrong.

Start knitting and cooking,

Reaching and teaching,

Marching and voting,

To get the job done.

Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s a related post from Drop Site News:

Here’s an Atlantic Council video on World Central Kitchen’s work in Ukraine: “‘In Focus: Voices from Ukraine:’ World Central Kitchen on humanitarian needs in Ukraine”:

And Here’s Jorunn Hernes 🇳🇴 — the Nordic Knitter — on the history of the red wool hats:

I just wrapped a super-sobering and, at the same time, fun and hopeful conversation on the urgent issues surrounding the plaid-speed evolution of AI. With my guests Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard at Arizona State University, the prime focus was the Vatican rollout of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter and the Pope’s admonition today that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”

Please listen and weigh in with your thoughts - and SHARE this post so we can widen our Sustain What community.

Allenby’s research has focused in part on how nations’ fears about the existential threat posed by NOT embracing AI in security arenas. He basically wished the pope luck in trying to hold back that tide. He pointed out how Russia is actively working with transnational criminal networks to exert power. That’s not something that will bend to papal desires any time soon — let alone the United Nations or the like.

Maynard, who tends to focus these days on practical ways to make the most of AI, said something vitally important that is one reason I have diverted a lot in recent years from my focus on environmental sustainability:

I actually think we make a mistake when we try and equate AI to human intelligence. This is absolutely an alien form of intelligence. And as soon as we try and equate it to humans,

we make categorical errors because it means we can either be wowed because we say

it’s better than human intelligence or we can be dismayed or dismissive because we say it’s not as clever as me. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve got something completely alien that is increasingly in charge of the things that our lives depend on.

Brad Allenby jumped in to hammer the point home:

Let me reinforce that Andrew has made probably, I think, the most important point that people need to grasp. We are not talking about artificial intelligence. That language itself takes us back to thinking that somehow human intelligence is the sine qua non of cognition, which we know it’s not.

We are dealing with a truly alien intelligence that we’re building and distributing with very little idea of what it’s going to do.

I mean, this is an extraordinary roll of the dice by all of humanity. And I think you’ve got to be careful not to trivialize it. Andrew’s absolutely dead on.

Here’s their double-barreled warning. Listen and pass it around!

Share this post with others please!

Who’s responsible?

I asked Gemini to draw a cartoon illustrating the disconnect between those of us affected by AI’s high-speed spread and those “in the bus.” Andrew Maynard said it’s important to understsand that those in the bus are not just AI developers:

[The cartoon] reminded me of something which I think often gets missed. So we’re often looking at the developers of AI saying all the responsibility lies on them and they’re not doing this right.

But I would actually add another category there. It’’s the first-mover implementers. It’’s the companies that are rushing to incorporate AI into everything. It’s the governments that are trying to AI-ize everything.

It is the universities that have decided that they have got to go fast and throw caution to the wind to put AI in everything. They are all people in this bus that are pushing AI progress so it’s not just the tech bros it is every company that is saying we do not have time to ask about care and responsibility and ethics because we just got to go fast. And that is propagating the challenges I think that we’re seeing beginning to emerge.

There is much, much in the full webcast above. See my curtain-raiser post for some unnerving comments made at the Vatican today by Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic:

In today’s discussion, I mused on whether humanity’s techno-surge at the moment is replaying a script that all technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe have followed — and that perhaps this explains why it’s so damn quiet out there (Google for “great filter” or “Fermi’s Paradox”). Do all possible civilizations burn themselves out this way?

Maynard made me feel a lot better by bringing the focus back to what each of us — and our institutions, and popes — can do today no matter what lies ahead:

I think there’s a very real chance that as a civilization, we will burn out, that we will discover that human exceptionalism means nothing to the universe and to the march of entropy. But I don’t care.

I think what is important, and again, this is just my philosophy, is what it means to be human here and now, what it means to be human in terms of the value we create for ourselves, how we identify worth, how we create value with relationships with others.

That’s not being exceptional. It’s just, to me, being human.

And if you focus on that and the near term, it really doesn’t matter too much what the future of humanity is. Maybe our candle will burn bright and burn out. But the here and now then becomes important. And that, in a sense, is what is reflected in the encyclical.

Not all of it, because the encyclical is wrapped up in a religious sort of bubble that says actually sort of human’s relationship with God and by extension with the universe has primacy here.

I would disagree with that, but I would agree 100% with the fact that you find meaning and value in those relationships in the here and now. And so that actually gives me hope and it gives me excitement when I see what happens with AI, because wherever it goes, if we keep hold of what it means to be human within that, we can continue to create value on our own terms.

That felt like the key takeaway, to me.

What about you?

And do pass this to others, subscribe if you don’t already, and consider chipping in if you can afford to do so.

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Thank you Bryan Pfeiffer, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I hope you’ll watch and share this illuminating and constructive face-to-face discussion with four key analysts of the scenarios for emissions of planet-heating gases that indirectly have shaped, and sometimes misshaped, climate policy discourse and decisions (and media coverage).

My guests were Richard Tol, Zeke Hausfather, Matt Burgess, and Roger Pielke Jr.

As I discussed here recently, the worst-case emissions track, a k a RCP8.5, is being dropped from the basket of plausible futures used in modeling studies that underpin core conclusions in the periodic reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Read the April paper describing the revisions to scenarios, which the authors explain came about because “underlying projections…were somewhat outdated by the time climate model output became available… Also, over time, critiques emerged about the plausibility of the most extreme scenarios.”)

My guests, like most researchers dug in on this area of climate research, largely agree that the highest emissions scenario is deeply implausible. The debate is mostly on whether that is a new development — the result of the enormous progress in cutting the cost of renewable energy — or because the scenario was never plausible. (I favor the second camp.)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s curtain raiser post, a key 2017 paper led by Justin Ritchie of the University of British Columbia laid out the near impossibility of mining and burning the amount of coal required to get such high emissions. Click back for that paper and other background:

Here’s Hausfather, who works at the company Stripe and at the research lab Berkeley Earth (and of course co-writes The Climate Brink):

Even though Roger and I like to spar online a lot, there’s a couple of things that I think we’d all agree are true today. One is that RCP 8.5 was never a particularly plausible baseline scenario. And there was a mistake by the community to refer to it as business as usual.

I like to call it a mistaken game of telephone. No, I don’t think there was a bad intent there.

I think that a lot of climate scientists didn’t necessarily read the energy modeling literature, which made it pretty clear back in 2011 when RCP 8.5 was formally published that it was intended to represent the 90th percentile of baseline outcomes in the literature at the time,not a particular likely outcome….

I think there’s sort of two separate questions that we’ve been debating a lot here. One is, how plausible was the scenario ever? And I think we all agree it was pretty implausible. And the second is, has the world actually moved away from higher emissions scenarios?

And that latter question, I think the answer is probably yes.

Driven in part by, as Richard pointed out, the falling cost of clean energy, which is mediated obviously by some policy actions taken by various countries, including the US, China and others. Exactly where we might have been headed, I think is a really tough question to answer.

Roger Pielke acknowledged that clean energy tech has advanced tremendously but said his key metric is the overall rate of decarbonization of the economy, and — wheteher you look at the United States or the planet as a whole — that rate has remained a straight declining line decade after decade. I showed that decarbonization curve from one of his Substack posts and he said:

My hypothesis is a lot of the wonderful things that have happened, and it’s true. Technologies have advanced, costs have gone down. But they are basically maintaining a trend that’s been in place long before Paris, long before Kyoto, long before the Rio Conference.

So we’re calling climate policy the sort of things that we used to call other names. There are some differences around the world. If we want to have deep decarbonization at a rate faster than this linear decline, this curve is going to have to have an inflection point. It’s that simple.

When RCP8.5 “escaped the courtyard of science”

Roger Pielke explained (and no one disagreed) that one of the biggest harms from the exreme warming scenario came as it became used outside of the world of climate simulation - something he and Justin Ritchie explored in depth in Issues in Science and Technology in 2021 (as well as in this paper: “Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios.”) Here’s the main point:

At some point, Justin and I in our paper, our incredibly long, boring paper on the history of all this, we quote a researcher who says, we didn’t realize that RCPs could take on a life of their own. these scenarios escaped from the courtyard of science and went out in the real world.

And it turns out they’re used in policy, they’re used in regulation, they’re used in global banking, they’re used in insurance, rate setting and risk assessment. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that everyone in the planet is in some way touched by these scenarios. And so the institutions of science really didn’t keep up with the growing importance of climate change as a topic and climate institutions. And so here we are in 2026. And like Richard said, better late than never, but it would have been better if it happened 10 or 15 years ago.

There’s much, much more from Hausfather, Pielke and Matt Burgess and Richard Tol.

We also discussed how research conclusions centered on the extreme warming scenario long provided just the kind of dramatic fodder that climate-focused journalists need. I brought up the pull of “narrative capture” — my shorthand for the dynamic where internal or external dynamics cause people to cling to validating visions of a problem (the climate crisis) even when data shift.

I’m on the run all week and this is where AI tools are incredibly useful. Here’s the Gemini summary of some other points (you can ask the AI on YouTube to do this kind of task). I asked: “Distill the key observations and assertions made by the guests in this discussion of the value and limits of developing scenarios for human activities that could worsen or lessen global warming. Pick out half a dozen key moments and create time stamps.”

Here’s Gemini:

This discussion examines the history, misuse, and eventual retirement of the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario, which was widely but erroneously labeled as “business as usual.” The panelists — Richard Tol, Zeke Hausfather, Matt Burgess, and Roger Pielke Jr. — argue that while scenarios are useful for scientific modeling, they have often been misinterpreted by the media and policymakers, leading to flawed risk assessments.

Key Moments and Insights:

* The “Business as Usual” Misconception: (16:07-17:20) Zeke Hausfather explains that the climate community made a mistake in referring to RCP 8.5 as “business as usual,” noting it was originally intended to represent a 90th-percentile baseline, not a likely outcome.

* Institutional Lags in Science: (13:10-14:50) Richard Tol discusses the necessity of updating scenarios more frequently than the current decadal cycle, pointing out that scientific modeling cycles often struggle to keep pace with the urgent needs of policy and global risk assessment.

* Policy Evaluation vs. Scenario Reliance: (46:51-47:20) Roger Pielke Jr. asserts that evaluating actual policy—whether it accelerates or reverses emission curves—is significantly more important than relying on static, hypothetical emissions scenarios.

* The “Franken-Scenario” Problem: (51:06-51:44) Matt Burgess criticizes the practice of combining extreme high-emission scenarios with slow-growth economic assumptions, which creates “Franken-scenarios” that produce misleading results about climate vulnerability and adaptation.

* The Media’s Role in Alarmism: (59:00-1:00:43) The panel discusses how sensationalist headlines are often incentivized by journals and media outlets, making it easier to publish studies that claim climate change is “worse than we thought” compared to more nuanced assessments.

* From Scenarios to Warming Levels: (1:13:30-1:14:43) Zeke Hausfather suggests the community should pivot away from specific emission scenarios entirely, instead focusing on impacts associated with specific global warming levels (e.g., 2°C or 3°C worlds) to better communicate risk and uncertainty.

Please listen and offer your thoughts below. Also share this post or go to LinkedIn or Facebook or X/Twitter to share the webcast on those platforms.

And do consider chipping in here (I know the overlaod) if you can afford to help keep Sustain What open for all and help me justify the time I take away from my songwriting and family and the rest.

Thank you Martha Morningsong, Bruce Maslack, Zach Keeshin, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Postscript

Dan Miller and Leon Simons had an informative conversation with Detlef van Vuuren, the lead author of the April paper laying the groundwork for the changes in emissions scenarios.

I just hosted a great discussion of the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy.

As I wrote in the curtain raiser post on Thursday, what drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this section of my mind-blowing 2017 ProPublica conversation with Will Happer, who was a top candidate for science advisor in Trump’s first term and who is in/famous for his assertion that more carbon dioxide is great.

He said this:

One of our problems in climate is that you need long-term good science — for example long-term temperature records, long-term records of CO2, and it’s very hard for the government to support that kind of stuff because you go to Congress and they say, ‘Isn’t that what you were doing 20 years ago or 50 years. Aren’t you finished yet?’

…I’m all for climate science, you know. If I were King, I would maintain and improve, if I could, any measurement systems we have — satellites, ocean buoys. I think those are wonderful things.

President Trump has done grievous damage to such capacities in his second term (see links at the bottom), although thankfully Congress has blunted the spending cuts.

The discussion centered on the work of the Keeling Curve Foundation, which is trying to build momentum for philanthropic, governmental and private-sector investment in Earth observation capacity.

One indicator of trouble is the declining budget for maintaining the flow of data behind the iconic “Keeling Curve” of carbon dioxide concentrations, generated through decades of work by Charles David Keeling and now his son Ralph,

Here’s the introuctory post with more info on my guests: Ralph Keeling, the climate-focused Stanford ecologist Chris Field and Betsy Weatherhead, a leading researcher focused on earth observation science and technology.

Here are a couple of highlights. But do watch (and share!) the conversation!

Ralph Keeling explains how sustained atmospheric monitoring revealed both the problem posed by ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, the decline of the synthetic compounds under the Montreal Protocoal - AND a suspicious resurgence of CFC-11 that led to the discovery that Chinese companies were cheating:

I asked Betsy Weatherhead what would signal a revival of commitments to keep this planet closely observed and she said it’s already happening - to a significant extent overseas:

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Relevant coverage and context

* From satellites to services: Financing Earth observation for public value (ECDPM think tank)

https://ecdpm.org/work/satellites-services-financing-earth-observation-public-value

* NOAA Defends Cuts to Research and Climate Monitoring at Budget Hearing

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29042026/noaa-defends-trump-cuts/

* ‘It’s just madness’: Trump administration to close three-quarters of Forest Service research stations (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/its-just-madness-trump-administration-to-close-three-quarters-of-forest-service-research-stations/

* How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A. (The New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/climate/epa-science-trump-cuts.html

* Designing the Climate Observing System of the Future (Earth’s Future; research paper led by Betsy Weatherhead)

https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000627

And thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Snag “Wake Me up Martha,” a sonic survival guide for these crazy times, on Bandcamp today - Bandcamp Friday - when the company doesn’t take its percentage: revkin.bandcamp.com. You can listen on every conceivable platform and they’re all here: andyrevkin.hearnow.com.

Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

J.A. Ginsburg, a k a Janet Ginsburg, is a business analyst and writer (and many other things) who is scouring the world for scientists and startups pursuing substitutes for the materials societies have long depended on — but that are in short supply because of bottlenecks like the one created by President Trump’s war on Iran.

I urge you to sign up for her Substack project, which is the learning journey leading to an eventual book.

But I also urge you to give yourself a dose of optimism and excitement by listening to our conversation above!

Here are links to the work of just a few of the companies or sectors she mentioned (I’m adding a paywall break as a reminder that Sustain What takes work; I’m going to take it down after publication):

* Maxwell Labs - cooling with light https://mxllabs.com Here’s her description:

* Simplyfiber - fabric without spinning, weaving, sewing…

https://www.simplifyber.com

* Strongbyform - wood as technology

https://www.strongbyform.com

* Hertha Metals - getting around the China issue for steel and high-quality iron https://herthametals.com

* Enso - making better tires for EVs (which have a tire problem) https://www.ensotyres.com/en-US

* Plantd Materials - board and other products made from grasses

https://www.plantdmaterials.com

* Shellworks - plastic-free materials that behave like plastic https://shellworks.com

* On - running shoes and clothing https://www.on.com

* Colorifix https://www.colorifix.com

* Five Startups Reducing Data Center Water Consumption - “Startups are rethinking data center cooling with liquid, immersion, and closed-loop systems to reduce water consumption while supporting rising AI-driven compute demand.”

* TOCCO - you have to explore to understand this “agency” for materials sourcing and tracking. “First-hand intelligence from the materials frontier.”

https://tocco.earth

Ginsburg also mention that Trump, in essence, has created a carbon tax that is spurring all kinds of action to cut fossil fuel use. With that in mind, also read Larry Kotlikoff:

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Peter Raven, 1936 - 2026

Rhett Ayers Butler, the founder of the biodiversity-focused online news network Mongabay, has posted a marvelous tribute laying out the extraordinary life and legacy of Peter Raven, a groundbreaking botanist and fierce defender of Earth’s biological diversity who died over the weekend at age 89.

I was lucky to get to know Raven over a couple of decades as an expert source in my environmental reporting and then work with him when I joined the Executive Committee for Resaearch and Exploration at National Geographic Society, which he led at the time I joined. (Watch this video about Raven’s Hubbard Medal.) Here’s the opening to Butler’s piece:

Life on Earth is often described as a web, but for much of modern science it was catalogued as a ledger: names, specimens, distributions, relationships drawn in careful lines. Over the course of the 20th century, that ledger gave way to a more connected view. Plants and animals were no longer just entries in a system; they were participants in it, shaping one another across deep time. The implications of that shift were not merely scientific. They pointed, more directly than before, to the role of a single species—our own—in altering the terms of that participation.

Few scientists did more to define that transition, or to explain its consequences, than Peter Raven.

Peter Hamilton Raven, who died this weekend, aged 89, was among the most influential botanists of the past century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he combined taxonomy, evolutionary biology and conservation into a coherent body of work: to understand the diversity of life, and to argue for its preservation with a clarity that was unusual among scientists of his generation. PLEASE READ THE REST:

So many greats from the early generation of conservation leaders are gone, including Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy.

But so many more leaders are emerging. To understand that, and to feel Raven’s mix of deep knowledge, puckish humor and trenchant analysis, I encourage you to watch the Sustain What conversation above, which was recorded in May 2021 but is eternally relevant. I introduced Raven to two younger generations of botanist: Angelica Patterson, who calls herself the “shotgun scientist” because that’s the tool she uses to collect the flowering and fruiting treetop branches that help identify a tree species; and Hilary Callahan of Barnard College.

This 2022 short documentary is also well worth your time.

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And share this post with others. That’s the only way to grow the Sustain What community.

There’s no one more focused on building a future with affordable, delicious, nutritious, ethically produced food than Bruce Friedrich, a onetime PETA animal rights activist who’s co-founder and president of the Good Food Institute.

His focus is protein - in the form we know of as meat. I was very happy to get a chance to speak with him about the group’s work advancing alternative meats (whether plant based or built in the lab) and his new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food―and Our Future.

Please watch or listen above and share this post or the archived videos on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or YouTube.

The mission statement of the nonpartisan nonprofit organization tightly meshes with my view of how to feed 9 billion or so people with the fewest regrets:

Billions of people around the world love meat and want to keep eating more of it. Simply ramping up business-as-usual ways of producing that meat, however, is not a viable path if we want to achieve the world’s climate, biodiversity, public health, and food security goals within the next two critical decades.

While multiple interventions will be needed, a transition toward alternative proteins—made from plants, cultivated from animal cells, or produced via fermentation—is the only one that can scale to address the demand for meat. Such a transition can dramatically reduce emissions, feed more people with fewer resources, reduce the use of antibiotics in our food system, and enable the conservation of lands and waters.

His book masterfully untangles the issues and options - technical, financial and political - that could give people the protein they need without ravaging more forest, overheating climate, threatening health or adding to the nonstop, vast and growing slaughter of our animal kin.

He describes his learning and work journeys, which started in the 1980s with reading books like Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet and work focused on poverty alleviation and food sufficiency.

He walks through the stutter-step start of the field in the last decade or so and the emerging reality that large-scale alternative-meat production is absolutely doable. It’s easy to get fooled by the slow start, he told me, adding:

“Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University, said in 1906 that automobiles will never be more than a plaything for the idle rich. because they were really hard to start. They were breaking down constantly and they were really expensive. In 1908, Henry Ford solves those first two problems and puts us on the trajectory of solving the third. And 20 years later, the automobile industry was the largest industry in America. So the question is, how do we get to that 1908 moment?

Listen for the answers.

We also talked about my reporting journey on lab-grown meat, as well, which started in 2008 when I proposed that cultured foie gras would seem an ideal starting point. It took a bit longer than I’d envisioned but Australian and French companies are there!

Of course the holy grail isn’t exotica like fatty liver. It’s mass production. Watch our conversation to get the latest from Friedrich on what’s needed from science, investors and nations to boost protein security and cut environmental damage for the long haul. As in so many areas, China appears to be leading the way.

Read Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins - a report by Zane Swanson, Caitlin Welsh, and Joseph Majkut for the Center for Strategic and International Studies - and Friedrich’s Foreign Policy article on how China is poised to do for alternative meats what it has already done for electric vehicles.

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Related Sustain What posts

Other voices

My vegan “solutionary” educator friend (and neighbor) Zoe Weil had Friedrich on her Solutionary Voices podcast:

David Roberts did a great climate- and energy-focused Volts chat on the future of meat with Friedrich:

Also watch Alex Crisp’s interview with Friedrich:

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On a road trip from Maine to Nashville and back, visiting our sons and other kin, my wife and I spent a couple of days back in the Hudson Valley, where I popped into the studios of Radio Kingston to speak with my old environmental-media compadre Jon Bowermaster for his Green Radio Hour show.

Bowermaster, a couple of years older than I am, has amassed an extraordinary globe-spanning body of great journalism — most of that in documentary films. His latest, “The Keeper,” is an intimate portrait of Hudson Riverkeeper John Lipscomb’s quarter-century effort to curtail pollution and revive the ecosystem along “the river that flows both ways.” (Lipscomb retired in 2024.) See a clip and more on Bowermaster’s other films below.

Radio Kingston has grown substantially since my last visit and now includes 2/47 Spanish language programming for the large immigrant community in the region.

I’d been on Bowermaster’s show many times, but this was the first time in more than a decade that I’d gotten to sit face to face with my old friend in the studio — and also the first time I was there with my guitar and bouzouki and a new album of original songs. My album, Wake Me up Martha, is launching April 30th and this was my first radio interview supporting the record. Let your favorite stations know about the album! Here’s a promotional flyer you can share.

We ranged widely in the hour, talking about how some environmental challenges (climate, ecological degradation) seem immune to even the best efforts of journalists, about the importance of truly engaging audiences, about his fine films. And we talked about my growing focus on my music.

I’m pasting some highlights below, but I hope you’ll listen to, and share, the full conversation! I’m grateful to Bowermaster and the station for allowing me to post the segment on Sustain What.

How I fell in love with blogging at The New York Times — as a way to build a conversation on complex questions; how the name of Sustain What derives from the main tool of journalists — the quetion mark — and why asking questions isn’t always a delay-seeking form of “whataboutism”:

How my journalistic and musical journeys intersected off and on — here when I wrote “Liberated Carbon” to describe the long human love affair with fossil fuels:

Why sustaining democracy has become a vital focus of my sustainability quest, and why the plasticity of the Constitution is its greatest strength, and now greatest weakness — one being exploited almost hourly by President Trump:

Bowermaster asked me for my thoughts on what Lee Zeldin has been doing at the Environmental Protection Agency. I responded with the point I made in a meme and column here awhile back:

Watch the conversation for some of my songs. And please SHARE this post. That’s really the only way we can grow the Sustain What community.

Here’s more on Bowermaster’s films, starting with “The Keeper”:

I loved “Sink or Swim - Learning to Crawl in the Maldives” because it gets at a critical issue for safety and sustainability I’ve explored before: making sure people in coastal communities can appreciate the ocean environment that surrounds them.

I love his short intimate film about The Wonder of the Bobolink, a threatened field-nesting bird with an intercontinental migratory cycle that we’ve come to love in our part of downeast Maine because they nest in hayfields near us (and are beginning to return as conservationists work with farmers to time mowing safely).

There’s so much more from Bowermaster and his team.

Thanks, Jon, for helping elevate my music side!

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This is the post-webcast post of my invigorating and unnerving conversation with Andrew Maynard and Jeffrey Abbott, the authors of a “practical guide to thriving with AI while rediscovering yourself in the process.”

The curtain raiser post is here with more background:

The more I dive into the free downloadable (and AI-uploadable) version of AI and the Art of Being Human, the more I appreciate what they’re trying to do.

But the more we talked, the more, also, I became convinced that the ungovernability of the technology, and the norms of those shaping it, pose the most existential challenge of all. Here’s a key point from Maynard:

I think there’s another challenge here as well. And that is that so much of what we’re seeing is being driven by ideology. So it’s not just making money. If you look at the big tech companies, they’re driven by people who have a very, very specific vision of the future.

And I would say in many cases, it’s a very naive vision, a very flawed vision. But it’s this vision that drives them. This is what they’re trying to build. You look at someone like Dario Amodei or Elon Musk or others; it’s not the money. It’s creating the future that somehow has got locked in their heads.

Thank you Monica Dubay, Jamey Findling, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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It’s hard to stay centered on issues around sustainable development and climate policy when the fragility of nations — economicaly, politically or otherwise — is in the foreground. (Sure we should get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible as Bill McKibben and Rebecca Solnit and so many others wisely counsel in the face of the latest Gulf war. But even best-case possibilities on that track will take many years, so oil and gas are still vital.)

Without functioning democracies, forget about climate policy

That’s why I focus periodically here on the vital need to maintain the kind of political systems and norms that are vital for any progress on deeper themes. In February, 2025, I hosted a conversation with scholars at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden who, for a decade, have been charting nations’ vital signs in ways that reveal drift either toward or away from autocracy.

Their 2025 report was gloomy but focused on analysis showing that, in recent decades, countries that had moved to control by a single individual or cabal could experience u-turns back toward democracy. My first Sustain What conversation with them is here: Amid the Worst Surge Toward Autocracy in a Century, Here’s How U-Turns Toward Democracy Can Happen.

No bright spots this time in Trump’s America

In our discussion of the V-Dem Project’s 2026 report, I kept pressing Staffan Lindberg and Marina Nord for good signals, but we came up empty. The section on the United States — no surprise — is very grim. Read these nuggets, but don’t weep; get busy! Sustained civil resistance across society is an essential precursor for restoration of good governance.

Their new report, like last year’s, noted that the autocratization trend remains strong around the world and is measurably worse than in the 1930s. We discussed a range of situations, from efforts to influence the upcoming election in Hungary to questions around what comes next after the youth-driven uprising in Nepal.

I hope you’ll take time to listen, and SHARE, and let me know what you’re doing to defend humane democratic government from the local to global scale.

Here’s Lindberg describing the evidence that the current global situation is worse than the 1930s:

Thanks to those who tuned in live.

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Here’s the post-show post of my conversation with planetary-intelligence analyst Adam Frank on the roles of science and fath in human affairs, the arguments for and against humanity’s sustainability, the need for multi-generational approaches to addressing climate change and so much more.

Please listen to the full show and, as important, SHARE it. Sharing is the only way we grow the Sustain What community.

Here are a couple of highlights if you’re in a hurry. We started out talking about threats from space given the dramatic meteor explosion over the U.S. Midwest. Frank pointed to his recent Everyman’s Universe post positing that if dinosaurs, way back when, had had the planetary defense technology we are developing now, we wouldn’t be here now:

Here Frank described the vital challenge of reintegrating the human journey within the biosphere’s constraints.

Here Frank describes how he tries to use practices he learned in Buddhism and meditation to pull back from the zone-flooding dread around us: “You’re only given so many hours on this planet. So spending every moment of it in terror, you’re not helping anybody. You’re not helping the future by being freaked out 99.9 percent of the time.”

Please considering chipping in, if you can afford it, so I can justify the time it takes to do this work and keep most of the output open to all.

Thank you Aviva Rahmani, BCz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Just in case you missed the live event, here’s my Sustain What conversation with two passionate climate communicators, both with experience in broadcast news media, pursuing distinct strategies via online video. Each has a very distinct vision of the path to action, and - as I exclaimed during the show, that’s exactly what’s needed. The climate challenge, and audiences out there, are both far too prismatic for one approach to be “right.”

My guests:

* Chase Cain, who recently left NBC News after a decade focused on climate change reporting there, has launched a YouTube channel aiming to bridge cultural gaps by highlighting stories forging closer, and more relisient, relationships between people and nature.

* Betsy Rosenberg, a former CBS radio journalist who has spent decades trying to engage audiences on the vital need to stem global warming and conserve the natural world. Her current platform, also on YouTube, is Code Green:

In our conversation, a listener on Facebook, Courtney A. Kaaz, posted this great question:

Make more desalination, hydroelectric dams, that chemically filter water, make breakwater piers that also clean the water, explain how you can use solar in a way that is actually economical in real time. All of Texas could get on board if you can give us economical, safe water and solve our toxic summer oceans, ponds and lakes.

Cain offered an answer that completely syncs with my view that often the best way to gain traction on energy and resilience choices that can improve climate outcomes doesn’t involve focusing on that grand, and divisive, thing called climate change:

I think what i think part of what [Courtney] is saying is she didn’t also say the word climate, and in a place like Texas that’s probably what’s going to reach people.

If you say climate you’ve lost the Fox News audience but we need and want the Fox News audience. I’m not saying that everything I’m going to do is devoted toward that. But I do want to create content that is accessible and as an invitation to those people.

…The Fox News audience probably spends more time in the outdoors, probably spends more time in nature than an MSNBC audience or an MSNBC audience, whatever it’s called. So they love the outdoors. They love nature. I just don’t know that they’ve connected the dots to how some of these policies are impacting the things and the places that they love. And so if we bridge that divide, then gosh, you’ve just won a huge segment of the American population, which would, I think, almost overnight flip our politics.

That closing assertion about a quick flip is pretty questionable (and Rosenberg expressed a very different view and strategy) but Cain’s core point is important.

Please watch and share the full show and weigh in.

There’s more background in the curtain raiser post that preceded the show:

And here’s my related conversation with Sammy Roth, the former Los Angeles Times climate columnist who’s moved to Substack:

Thanks for reading Sustain What! This post is public so feel free to share it.

There’s a lot going on.

For me, at least, one vital counterpoint is music — writing it, performing it, and convening with musician friends to talk about it. (If you happen to be in Downeast Maine this Thursday, March 5, come hear my first effort at an event in which I talk and sing about my interrelated life tracks in journalism and songwriting.)

Today, I want to introduce you to a dear old musical friend, Vince Bell. I hope you’ll listen to our conversation and his music above (recorded a few days ago), and on his vincebell.com website. He’s just dropped a wonderful song from his second spoken-word album (words spoken over marvelous music from a spectacular ensemble he convened in 2024 in Brooklyn, N.Y.). The song and album are “Break My Heart”:

Vince’s roots are well worth understanding. Here he was singing his song “The Sun, Moon and Stars” back in 1977, having emerged from Houston to join a remarkable cohort of Texas bards including Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Here’s Griffith’s interpretation of the song.

In December 1982, just as he was getting into high gear and recording his first album, his life and musical journey were derailed by a near-death encounter with a drunk driver in Austin.

He suffered brain damage and the near amputation of one arm. It took him a decade of grinding effort to rebuild his ability to sing and pick guitar. In 2009, he wrote “One Man’s Music,” a touching and sometimes-amusing memoir of his journey back to health and creativity.

I can’t recall my first meetup with Vince, but it was in New York City in the mid 1990s when he was beginning to tour in support of his 1994 album “Phoenix.” The name of this collection of spellbinding songs reflected his physical and professional ressurection. I consider it one of my “desert island” records. Here’s “Mirror, Mirror”:

We became friends and I’ve had the utter pleasure of backing him up on mandolin or guitar in some shows in the New York Region.

“Is it hot enough for you, yet?”

I’ve also visited him a couple of times in his Santa Fe home and got a chance to play slide guitar in this take on his great song about pollution - “Local Charm”:

For a Dot Earth post way back in my New York Times days, he explained its origins:

Vince says: “Local Charm was a joint in the old Harrisburg part of Houston down by the ship channel. I lived there for a few years among the railroad tracks and the rust. The imageries in this piece were my backyard.” An excerpt:

Miles and miles of twisted trash,railroad tracks in all directions.Whining ‘dozers climb like antsin holes they can’t get out of.Above the filth so wide and deeppyrites spire before the sun.Where water taps as clear as glassbefore it gets to here.Is it hot enough for ya, yet?

Beyond his music and wordsmithing, Vince is an absolute paragon not just of resilience, but of dogged determination to squeeze the joy and creativity out of whatever life brings his way.

I sense that’s a pretty rare quality.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live Sustain What show on Team Trump’s effort to demolish a foundational finding by the Environmental Protection Agency - that heat-trapping greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare.

My guests were:

* Jonathan Adler, a William and Mary Law School professor and commentator with a libertarian orientation who’s deeply dug in at the intersection of law and federal climate policy. Read his analysis of Trump’s endangerment strategy:

* The Dangers of Pursuing the Endangerment Finding

* Why Trying to Undo the Endangerment Finding Is A High-Risk (and Low-Reward) Deregulatory Strategy

* Jean Chemnick, a longtime climate journalist at E&E News/ Politico. Read her excellent coverage.

* Sean H. Donahue, a longtime environmental lawyer representing the Environmental Defense Fund in the litigation that has begun over the endangerment action.

Donahue and Adler differ on some points but strongly agreed that the Trump administration, perhaps in trying to rush to put the question swiftly to the Supreme Court, may be its own undoing - chasing what Adler calls the “white whale” for zealots opposing climate action. Beware what you seek. I made a piece of art to illustrate the point:

Here’s a nugget from Adler in which he explains the flaw in a strategy trying to undercut EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases by saying the science points to less severe risks:

I used Google’s AI to generate this summary of key points:

Jonathan Adler highlights the legal difficulties and potential strategic missteps of the Trump administration’s approach to revoking the endangerment finding (7:10-7:46). Adler also emphasizes that the motivation behind this strategy appears to be political rather than based on sound climate policy or scientific arguments (7:52-8:19). He points out that the auto industry, a key regulated sector, hasn’t expressed significant concerns about the endangerment finding itself (10:08-10:17).

Jean Chemnik discusses the origins of the push to overturn the endangerment finding, tracing it back to individuals within the Bush administration and later at organizations like the Heritage Foundation (11:19-13:58). Chemnik also notes the symbolic importance of the endangerment finding for those who deny climate change as a serious problem (9:05-9:15).

Sean Donahue asserts that the administration’s strategy is ill-advised from a legal standpoint, lacking sound justification in law or the existing record (15:16-15:26). Donahue points out the strong legal precedents, including Supreme Court decisions, that uphold the endangerment finding and greenhouse gas regulation (18:47-19:58). He also touches on the political implications, suggesting that if this repeal holds up, it could lead to significant demand for new climate policies at state, local, and federal levels (1:00:14-1:00:58).

Thanks for watching the show and sharing it!

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Boy this conversation with End of Science author John Horgan and transhumanism fan Steve Fuller was fun, given how dark some of our conclusions were. Read the pre-show post to get a lot of relevant links and background:

Precautionary versus “proactionary” strategies for managing the present with the future in mind

Fuller said it’s important to let go of many of our worries about how present actions related to science and technology might affect future generations. “We get very hyped up about future generations,” he said. He added:

I think we need to imagine when we think about future generations that their baseline about what counts as a good life will be whatever they’re born into. So in other words, they will not be thinking like us, just like we’re not thinking like Aristotle….

But there is an issue here about how you face the uncertainty of the future. And this gets to the business of the precautionary principle versus what I’ve proposed — the proactionary principle.

These are two different attitudes toward risk, right? And the precautionary principle, you could trace it back to the Hippocratic Oath. Above all, cause no harm, right?

So it’s a harm avoidance approach to risk because you treat uncertainty under those conditions as potential threat. So you set very high standards with regard to regulation for new technologies, stuff like that.

The European Union actually has a version of the precautionary principle built into its environmental regulations.

The other is the thing that is associated with transhumanism, and that is the proactionary principle. And the pro-actionary principle treats risk as an opportunity.

So in other words, you treat it as like a fair throw of the dice almost. You adopt the attitude kind of the way entrepreneurs do.

When they see a sort of uncertain situation, they’re going to make something out of it. And this idea then leads to a much more open sense of what the future can be.

I mused on the reality that there’s little sign among the current world’s great powers — big tech firms, the oligarch class, superpowers — that regulation can be meaningfully applied.

Horgan, long largely a techno-optimist, wrapped up our chat with this uplifting thought:

And I’ve just concluded over the last five years, and it’s just been growing on me lately, that humanity doesn’t really give a s**t about understanding, illumination. It is always all been about power with the quest for truth as kind of marketing and window dressing. My view of the future of science and even of civilization is quite dark right now.

There is much, much more. Please listen to the full show if you can and post reactions. I’ll drop the paywall, although I would love it if a few more of you decide to chip in to help me keep this Sustain What project going.

Please consider becoming a financial supporter of Sustain What:

Insert, Feb. 19 - Via Googl AI, here’s a summary:

* Introduction to the Guests and Discussion Themes (0:44-2:25)

* Andrew Revkin introduces his long-time friends and intellectual sparring partners, John Horgan and Steve Fuller.

* The core topics of discussion are set: artificial intelligence (or synthetic/simulated intelligence), the “end of truth,” and the current state of our information environment.

* Steve Fuller’s Background and Approach to Knowledge (2:38-5:04)

* Steve Fuller explains his academic background in the history and philosophy of science.

* He describes his focus on the social and political dimensions of science, particularly how technology and changing political economies influence the production and evaluation of knowledge.

* The Impact of Social Media on Knowledge and Power (5:09-7:00)

* The discussion shifts to how social media has drastically altered the dissemination of knowledge and the dynamics of power, especially in politics.

* Steve Fuller highlights Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon as pioneers in using social media to channel information for ideological purposes, leading to a fragmented epistemic landscape.

* John Horgan’s “End of Science” Revisited (10:56-12:05)

* John Horgan reflects on his book The End of Science, suggesting that major scientific breakthroughs aimed at understanding the world (like relativity, quantum mechanics, and evolutionary theory) are largely behind us.

* He expresses a dark view of the future of science and civilization, concluding that humanity primarily seeks power rather than truth or illumination.

* AI: Horror vs. Positive Potential (15:13-17:03)

* John Horgan admits his horror at AI, viewing it as bringing out his “Luddite” tendencies, despite his love for other technologies like his MacBook and iPhone.

* He contrasts this with Steve Fuller’s more positive outlook on AI, particularly its potential to utilize vast amounts of scientific material that currently goes unused.

* The “Replication Crisis” and AI’s Role in Science (27:00-27:51)

* Steve Fuller attributes the “replication crisis” in science to narrow and competitive research frontiers, where pressure to be first leads to cutting corners.

* He suggests that a broader distribution of scientific effort would reduce incentives for fraud.

* The Future of Wikipedia in the Age of Generative AI (28:08-29:00)

* Steve Fuller predicts that generative AI will put Wikipedia out of business because AI can provide customized, Wikipedia-style answers more efficiently.

* He views Wikipedia as “old-fashioned crowdsourcing” that is laborious and prone to disputes.

* Science as Faith and the “Conservation of Ignorance” (1:16:14-1:19:00)

* The host plays a clip of Pete Seeger discussing his father’s view that scientists have the “most dangerous religious belief” – the idea that an infinite increase in empirical information is inherently good.

* John Horgan challenges this, noting that science, unlike religious faith, has materially altered the world through technologies like the hydrogen bomb.

* The “Conspiracy Mentality” and Endless Data Seeking (1:19:00-1:20:05)

* Steve Fuller connects Pete Seeger’s critique to the “conspiracy mentality”, where people constantly seek more information, believing something is being hidden.

* He argues that science, when working correctly, engages in “self-limitation” through method and tests, drawing lines rather than seeking data endlessly.

And do share this post with friends concerned about the future and the present state of science.

Thank you Larry Hogue, Jeanne Manion, Karen Malpede, Eleanor Margulis, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I just had a truly helpful - and dare I say hopeful - pop-up conversation with Columbia University’s Gernot Wagner - a top-notch climate policy and economics analyst - on what to think and work on as the Trump Administration carries out its long-pledged plan to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama.

Quick points:

* The litigation over this Trump move (details are still to come later this week) will play out for many years.

* There’ll be lots of CO2 released inside the Beltway as anti-regulation zealots pop Champagne corks, but decarbonization trends will be sustained globally.

* In the meantime, Wagner points to substantial areas of Trump policy that align completely with past Democratic policies - on geothermal, nuclear energy, energy storage (and, yes, carbon capture). Read this post by Wagner and colleagues.

* We discussed how the huge surge in AI infrastructure investment is coming with a surge in solar/battery systems (yes and gas). Read his recent post with colleagues: “The Race to Power Data Centers.”

Endangering “Endangerment”

As the EPA website explains, the Endangerment Finding is the formal scientific determination that greenhouse gases—specifically carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—threaten public health and welfare. The finding established the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The Wall Street Journal was fed the exclusive by the administration in a story with on-record comments from the EPA admnistrator and Secretary of the Interior.

The New York Times published a revealing deep dive focused on four key figures who’ve been working for 15 years or more to get to this moment. One is the lawyer Mandy Gunasekara, who helped Senator James Inhofe toss his snowball in the Senate in 2015 (seated behind him).

One reality of course, as Cardiff University’s Aaron Thierry quipped on Bluesky, is that “You can repeal an endangerment finding. You can’t repeal the endangerment.”

To me, it’s vital to keep a focus - amid all the destruction and backsliding - on what can be sustained or even advanced around clean energy choices even as the fight over regulation rolls on, enriching new generations of environmental lawyers.

Wagner’s Columbia-based Climate Knowledge Initiative is one place to look for insights. Here’s that post I mentioned above: America’s Clean Energy Transition Will Continue Despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Listen to Wagner here if you can’t watch the whole show right now:

If you like what I’m doing here, do consider chipping in a bit as a paying supporter.

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Thank you Sarah Lazarovic, David Gelber, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is the post-show podcast post of my Sustain What conversation with Christopher Mims, the Wall Street Journal tech columnist and author of How to AI, and Melanie Mitchell, the Santa Fe Institute researcher deeply dug in on the thing called artificial intelligence that remains pretty unintelligent.

If you want to understand where this exposively evolving technology is, and isn’t, taking us, you have to subscribe to Mitchell’s Substack blog:

And if you want to make the most of the AI toolkit at work or in the rest of life - from investing to music making to…. - you really need to read Mims’ book.

I loved this moment when Mims introduces the concept of “productivity theater” - when AI produces what looks like work, but the work required to make the output useful can eliminate any true productivity gains:

One thing AI is good at is efficiently summarizing conversations, so here goes, thanks to the Google AI tool embedded in YouTube:

* Introduction of Guests and AI Context (0:48-1:31)

* Andy Revkin introduces Christopher Mims and Melanie Mitchell, setting the stage for a discussion on managing information in a world increasingly shaped by AI.

* Christopher Mims’ new book is highlighted as a user’s guide to AI technologies, emphasizing both their capabilities and limitations.

* Critique of AI Hype and Investment Bubble (4:25-8:18)

* Melanie Mitchell expresses skepticism about the predicted societal transformation by AI, noting the “crazy” amount of money flowing into the sector (4:52).

* Christopher Mims discusses the significant investment bubble in AI, predicting an “ugly” outcome when it inevitably bursts, leading to stranded assets like half-empty data centers (7:44-8:18). He introduces the term “productivity theater” to describe AI’s ability to generate “products that look like work” (6:42-6:56).

The limits of simulated intelligence

* Understanding AI: Simulation vs. True Intelligence (9:22-12:21)

* The conversation delves into the nature of AI, explaining that these systems are “incredibly good at simulating intelligence” but lack abstract reasoning, long-term planning, and world models (9:36-10:17).

* Melanie Mitchell elaborates on the ambiguous definition of “intelligence,” suggesting that AI should perhaps be viewed as “complex information processing” rather than “artificial intelligence” (10:48-12:09).

* AI’s Role in the Workplace and “Jagged Frontier” (13:31-22:20)

* Christopher Mims describes AI’s “jagged frontier,” where it excels at retrieving and remixing information (e.g., coding) but struggles with tasks outside its training data or in novel environments (13:31-14:57).

* Melanie Mitchell discusses the misunderstanding of how AI impacts jobs, noting that AI systems often fail in real-world scenarios despite performing well on benchmarks (18:00-19:44). She emphasizes that a “job is not equal to a set of tasks” (18:37).

* Christopher Mims adds that AI’s high failure rates can lead to a decrease in human productivity, as time is spent correcting AI-generated “messes” (20:29-21:20).

* Regulation and Ethical Concerns (28:57-32:17)

* The discussion touches on the need for AI regulation, especially in critical areas like healthcare, where AI is being considered for Medicare benefit applications (29:10-29:23).

* Christopher Mims highlights intense lobbying efforts against state-level AI regulations and uses the example of Grok on X (formerly Twitter) to illustrate the “horrific ways” AI can be abused without proper oversight (29:48-31:22).

AI’s energy demands will shrink

Melanie Mitchell made a fascinating and important point responding to a viewer’s question about energy and water demands. What she says parallels the shift from “baseload” power generation to distributed renewable and solar energy (not to mention from mainframe computers to your phones):

* Environmental Impact and Future of AI Architecture (32:26-35:54)

* The energy and water consumption of AI data centers is discussed, with Melanie Mitchell noting the push for more efficient and smaller AI models, a trend she believes will continue in the long term (33:07-35:02).

* Christopher Mims agrees that efficiency drives will lead to more localized AI models, eventually running on devices like phones (35:07-35:28).

* AI as a Tool vs. Superintelligence and Scientific Inquiry (37:33-46:51)

* The guests discuss whether AI’s simulated intelligence is “good enough” for certain applications, like companionship, but caution about the potential for catastrophic failures and detachment from reality (38:08-40:11).

* They debate the scientific and commercial pressures within the AI field, with Melanie Mitchell arguing that the focus on “making products” (43:04) hurts fundamental scientific inquiry by de-incentivizing “slower science” (44:56-45:12).

* Christopher Mims contrasts AI development with other technologies (like energy), noting that AI breakthroughs have often been “kind of an accident” rather than the result of patient, long-term research (46:12-46:51).

AI and the arts - music case study

I closed things out by demonstrating how Suno took my barebones guitar-and-vocal version of my song “Save Dreams for Sleeping” and generated a rousing anthem. As I explained, the downside is a lot of SLOP on Spotify etc, but also demoncratization of music making. What do you think?

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This was a deeply illuminating conversation with top-flight researchers aiming to get beyond the back-and-forth edge-driven volleys on global warming’s role in shaping severe winter weather in the United States.

Watch above or watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and X/Twitter.

Here’s one key point from Jacob Chalif, the lead author of a 2025 study that found the recent upswing in waviness in the jet stream was matched or outmatched by earlier periods several times in previous decades back through the 20th century.

This doesn’t mean global warming isn’t changing such atmospheric and weather patterns. It does mean that natural variability in the system is capable of such dynamics as well.

The details and background are in the pre-show post here:

Here are some of the papers we discussed:

* July, 2025 - The intensification of the strongest nor’easters https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2510029122

* July, 2025 - The Mid-20th Century Winter Cooling in the Eastern U.S. Explained https://eos.org/editor-highlights/the-mid-20th-century-winter-cooling-in-the-eastern-u-s-explained

* May 2025 - Attributing climate and weather extremes to Northern Hemisphere sea ice and terrestrial snow: progress, challenges and ways forward https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-025-01012-0

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We also talked about a keystone need - vulnerability reduction - and something Trump could do (that he won’t do of course):

Thank you Michael Ludgate, Vivian Henry, Graham Chant, Peter van Soest, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I have deeply mixed feelings about AI in music, which I’ll elaborate on soon.

But as a songwriter in act three of my life, and facing the reality that it takes a lot of time and money to build full productions of songs, I’ve started using Suno to envision what my barebones guitar-and-vocal tunes can sound like on a bigger scale.

I am going to pull together some of the wonderful musicians around our Downeast Maine home to record an album later this winter and spring. But given the latest atrocity in Minneapolis, and the even more atrocious spin by scum like Stephen Miller, I had to put this Suno take on my song “Save Dreams for Sleeping” out for you to hear, sing along on, and hopefully share.

Here’s the rough bedroom recording of the basic song as posted here and on CD Baby last year, followed by the lyrics.

Save Dreams for Sleeping

© 2025, Andy Revkin, Written Feb. 4, 2025, updated August 3, 2025

We all hold a dream somewhere deep in our minds,

Where everything’s fair and everyone’s kind.

Flowers all blooming, no smoke in the skies.

No wars in the headlines, no tears in your eyes.

But save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crimes.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray.

A more perfect union is coming our way.

Our country needs mending, but how to begin?

With problems so tangled, no start and no end?

Begin by protecting those facing the fire.

Reach out by connecting through common desires.

One day at a time, the trust you create

Will carry us further than fighting and hate.

One stitch at a time the fabric you weave,

Will grow ever stronger than you can believe.

So save dreams for sleeping. It’s time to get real.

Hard workers are suffering while billionaires steal.

Young women in trouble can’t find caring hands.

House builders born elsewhere get bundled in vans.

I’m not saying it’s easy. All good things take time.

Those trying to divide us are good at their crime.

But if we stop dreaming, dive into the fray

A more perfect union is coming our way.

~ ~ ~

To sustain Sustain What and my music side, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There were many notable moments in my Sustain What discussion of Russian and American political propaganda, so I encourage you to watch the whole show. But here are a couple of highlights:

Andrew Ryvkin, who created propaganda for the Kremlin for many years and now writes about information wars (now living in the United States), described a talk show he produced more than a decade ago, called “Honest Monday” (seriously), which would explore an issue each week (chosen by Kremlin officials) through several vantage points.

It’s an illusion of a debate. People, the guests, this really is their opinion, what they’re saying. They’re not lying. Some are left, some are right, some are centrist. But the point is to align what they’re saying into a structure that would lead the viewer to realize,to realize, well, the more centrist, Kremlin, point of view is actually best.

I immediately noted how that structure was echoed by Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes, back in the “fair and balanced” days at the Murdoch-owned network.

Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy at the University of Rhode Island, stressed how visual information like the flood of White House-generated memes in the past year bypasses critical thinking and spurs strong emotions.

I urged viewers, and urge you, to read the Fox News op-ed posted last summer by Billy McLaughlin, who ran White House social media from inauguration through August before heading to the private sector.

Here’s an excerpt:

We did not build a cautious, government-style account. We built a fast, culturally fluent content machine designed to cut through the noise and win online. And it worked.

In just six months, the administration’s platforms added over 16 million new followers, with the fastest growth among Americans aged 18–34. We generated billions of video views and gained more than half a million new YouTube subscribers – nearly triple the previous administration’s total growth over four years.

But it was never just about numbers. Our success came from echoing the humor, passion and identity of a movement that was already alive. We did not invent the culture. We gave it a megaphone.

This was not entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Our meme-heavy, content-first strategy was aligned with the president’s priorities. Digital was not a sideshow. It was a frontline tool for shaping narratives, building momentum, and applying pressure.

One of the big takeaways was to try hard to avoid taking the “rage bait” he and others are creating for you. A fresh example emerged even as I was running the show, as a Trump line about cold weather and global warming prompted heaps of replies from climate-focused liberals, many of whom overstated the science on their end. That is NOT productive, I warned:

The curtain raiser post has lots of relevant links and a related Sustain What chat with Hobbs:

Thank you Andrei Codrescu, Michael Ludgate, Jeremy Zilar, Marshall Mermell, Tim Buxton, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

First, I hope you can find time to listen to this evergreen conversation I had with Renee Hobbs, a leading authority and educator (at the University of Rhode Island) aiming to spread propaganda literacy. Her mission, in essence, is to help us all cut through the ever-evolving superstorm of online material and widgets designed to alarm, disarm, distract, confuse or entice - in other words, to enshittify what could otherwise be a miraculous set of tools for connecting and informing society. We spoke at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.

But make sure to watch below as well. On Sustain What I just introduced Hobbs live to Andrew Ryvkin, a Russian-born writer and analyst focused on propaganda, authoritarian rule and international relations with a special level of expertise: he spent many years producing propaganda inside the Kremlin’s multi-layered media system.

Watch and weigh in (and share) on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube.

As Ryvkin has been explaining in a series of “Pop Propaganda” talks (and will lay out in a forthcoming book), “Modern Russian propaganda is much more than angry talk-show hosts waving missiles on TV or troll farms flooding social media. It’s influencers, streaming platforms, and marketing campaigns that promote the Kremlin’s agenda, just as Nike advertises its sneakers….”

Make sure to subscrribe to Andrew Ryvkin’s Substack letter of course. Start with his origin story: I used to work for the Kremlin…

And read his articles in The Atlantic.

Just for the record, despite our super similar names, we don’t seem to be related. He says his roots go back to Odessa. Mine go back to Ripky, a village in Ukraine my paternal grandfather fled around 1905 amid a peasant revolt and pogroms.

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Just in case missed, here’s ANOTHER evergreen conversation I did with Hobbs in year one of the pandemic:

I’ll be doing another conversation about Trump’s threats to take Greenland soon - with Greenlanders. But I had to elevate the important statement made on January 9 in defense of the 57,000 citizens who inhabit Greenland’s coastal communities - signed by more than 200 American scientists who have worked on that giant ice-sheathed island.

The curtain raiser post for this webcast with Greenland-focused researchers Yarrow Axford and Paul Bierman has all the relevant links:

Please watch (and share!) the full show, which addresses lots of question, including why scientists feel the need to weigh in. We also explore relevant coverage and commentary, including a Wall Street Journal editorial board piece criticizing Trump’s bellicose approach.

As for geopolitics, the longtime Greenland-focused scientist Paul Bierman says the national security debates so far have missed the strategic threat posed by the 20 feet of sea level rise banked in the island’s two-mile-high ice sheet. Here’s that clip and statement:

Protecting Greenland’s ice is the most important piece of national security you could imagine and global security you can imagine. It’s not critical minerals. It’s not military strategy. It’s keeping that ice frozen.

Bierman’s reflection resonates with Bill McKibben’s post on Trump’s aggression last week:

Below I’m adding input from two of the statement signatories who couldn’t join us last night - Eric Rignot and Raymond Bradley.

I do greatly appreciate the financial contributions of a small, but growing, portion of subscribers chipping in a bit of cash to help me justify the time to write and organize these Sustain What shows.

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Longtime polar scientist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, a signatory, sent this note:

I have worked in Greenland for the past 33 years (first campaign was in 1993) funded by NASA and NSF on aircrafts, helicopters, ships, and on foot; I have flown all four corners during PARCA (1993-2008) and OIB (2009-2019), visited many fjords to map the bathymetry (2010-2019), and have been several times on Petermann glacier (2002, 2023), Jakovshavn glacier (2016-2017) and Zachariae Isstrom (2024).

The Greenlanders have always been supportive of our work. We often hired them on boats, or we hired their boats and crew, they gave us permits to operate and collect data, and we interacted with them, although not as often as I wish. They are good people who survived 2 centuries of colonisation. They have been brave enough to form a semi autonomous government for the past 26 years, which is an amazing achievement.

I am proud to say that fishermen use our bathymetry in a phone app. While they know their own fjords very well, they do not know every corner of them; our maps helped them find new fishing ground. For us scientists, to see that our work is directly useful to them, is very rewarding because we are very thankful they let us conduct science in their country.

The US military in Greenland, esp. Pittufik, have been instrumental on many levels to facilitate work in Greenland as well. I would not throw a stone at them. They have been keen over the years to entertain a good relationship with Greenlanders and Danish people. I wish that this “collaboration” would continue and be encouraged and facilitated. Similarly, the Danish military has collaborated with us over the years.

The threat of mining companies in Greenland is real. They will destroy the environment, pollute the fjords forever, ask fishermen to go away, and they won’t clean up. Clean mining does not exist. Greenlanders are opposed to mining because environmental regulations are weak.

I won’t comment on the attempts of the US government to overtake Greenland. They already have military presence, bilateral agreements with Denmark, they do not need more than that. They are already a unique partner.

A takeover by the USA could put an end to many international scientific studies in Greenland, which would be dramatic. We need to leave Greenland to the greenlanders. We need to respect them and work with them. We need to find a way to cooperate with them on the terms of their choosing. They have all the reasons in the world to be scared by the USA. The USA has not taken care of its own indigenous people, the condition of American indians is absolutely terrible. Until we show the world that we can take care of our own people, we should not pretend that we can take care of greenlanders.

Greenlanders will protect the environment in Greenland, they care about it deeply, they have done so for many generations. No other nation will do that job better than them. This is their home. Leaving Greenland to greenlanders is the best way to protect Greenland and the best way to show greenlanders the respect that they so much deserve.

Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a signatory and longtime analyst of long-term Arctic climate variability and change, sent this statement:

I’ve worked in different parts of Greenland and currently lead an NSF-funded project in northern Greenland (north of the ice sheet) investigating environmental conditions (don’t say CLIMATE!) when the earliest people arrived on the island ~4500 years ago. The project is a collaboration with archeologists from the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk.

The whole idea of the US ‘Invading” or “occupying” Greenland is ridiculous and I’m afraid it has been hyped up by the media and egged on by Trump & his henchman Miller to distract from their other domestic problems. The media falls for it every time.

Let’s just consider what an invasion or occupation means. There are only about 5 or 6 airstrips in all of Greenland where you could land a C-130. The most “strategic” location of those airstrips is at Station Nord in NE Greenland, and that dirt runway is a mud bath in the Spring and so often inaccessible. The base itself would be hard-pressed to house 100 people and the canteen can handle about 40 people at a time. So...good luck “occupying” that key location.

Other sites include Kangerlussuaq, Nuuk (the capital) and Thule (now called Pittufik) on the West coast & Narsarssuaq in the south (a new runway is being prepared at nearby Qaqortoq, I believe). Minor airfields in Kulusuk & Mittarfik Nerlerit (Constable Point) on the east coast provide access to commercial flights from Iceland on Dash 8 aircraft--probably limited to other STOL aircraft. There are no hangars to repair large aircraft and very limited fuel supplies.

60% of Greenland’s population live in Nuuk-the rest are scattered in small villages up and down the coast, often only accessible by helicopter (Air Greenland) or boat.

There may be Russian (or Chinese) submarines operating around Greenland, just as they do around the US but I don’t think there are surface ship operation in the area--something the media has not investigated, yet it’s Trump’s main argument for taking over Greenland. I am quite sure that there are more Chinese ships approaching the West coast of the US every day than have been to Greenland in the last decade.

If Trump was really concerned about N. Atlantic security, he’d pay attention to Iceland (where they do have airfields and docks for ships) or even Svalbard (where they also have coal!) and the Russians operate there already (in Barentsberg). (Not that I would encourage anybody to show the guy a map).

He is obsessed with rare earth minerals, of which Greenland has an abundance. But often rare earth minerals are found along with uranium. That concerns the local people who have already rejected plans to mine in S. Greenland for fear of contamination of their land. The costs of extraction in some areas are enormous. The 2nd largest known zinc deposits (designated by the USGS as a strategic mineral--the biggest deposit is in Russia) is in NE Greenland (north of Station Nord at Citronen. An Australian mining company has explored and mapped the deposit & received full blessing of the Greenland Govt to extract the ore. The US EXIM bank put up over $600M to support the operation, but the company was unable to raise the required additional private equity and after several years of trying, they just abandoned the license. The reality is, extraction requires ships, which need to know the offshore bathymetry (rarely mapped in detail) and a reliable dock (generally missing). And then...did I mention sea-ice? How many icebreakers does the US currently have? Just a fraction of what the Russians (& even the Scandinavians) have...

We’ve just seen how reluctant oil companies are to venture back into Venezuela, so I don’t think there are too many mining companies that will be ready to put up huge amounts of money to extract ore in Greenland versus other locales.

Thank you Aviva Rahmani, Keith Kloor, Vivian Henry, Tracy Frisch, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Here’s the audio/video podcast post of my live conversation with a determined duo of longtime broadcast journalists spending two months with intrepid scientists aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon seeking fresh data that could show how fast Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice mass, the Thwaites Glacier, could raise sea levels.

Miles O'Brien and Kate Tobin are an independent team working together through three decades at CNN and now independently, with their output seen on CNN, PBS and now Substack through O’Brien’s Miles Ahead newsletter.

This map from the latest report of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration shows vividly why this region is so important.

Here’s a relevant portion of the research collaborative’s 2025 report:

Following some key studies beginning two decades ago, it was widely recognised that Thwaites Glacier posed a potential threat of rapid contributions to sea level. Prior to our research, little was known about the mechanisms controlling the retreat of this enormous glacier - one of the largest and fastest-changing glaciers in the world. If it collapsed entirely, sea level would rise by 65 cm. Thwaites Glacier spans an area equal to the island of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and in places is almost 4000 m (13,000 ft) thick. The amount of ice flowing into the sea from Thwaites Glacier and its neighbouring glaciers more than doubled from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the Amundsen Sea region now accounts for 8% of the current rate of global sea-level rise of 4.5 mm a year.

Here, O’Brien describes why this particular ice mass matters so much:

From ice sheets to Main Street

We also explored the challenge of linking Antarctic ice sheet dynamics with decisions in coastal communities around the world faced with the reality that sea levels of the past - relatively stable for centuries - are history. I noted my earlier Sustain What show on the importance of driving “managed retreat” or other policy shifts, as articulated in a great paper by Lizz Ultree et al, “From ice sheets to main streets: Intermediaries connect climate scientists to coastal adaptation.”

A viewer asked about ways to stop the ice escape and warming and O’Brien mentioned that David Holland of New York University is on the research team aboard the ship. He’s part of a collection of researchers eager to test whether a “seabed curtain” - a small-scale geoengineering intervention - could hinder the melting influence of warm waters getting beneath the ice sheet.

Learn more at the seabedcurtain.org website.

Conveying a momentous story without hype

And we got into the challenges of doing accurate but effective journalism in a world fixated by, but also paralyzed by, overstatements. O’Brien makes vital points here about the challenge of balancing compelling narrative and the real complexity and time scales revealed by the science:

For more on that issue, make sure to explore my post and Sustain What #Watchwords webcast on asking “by when” when you see the word COLLAPSE in the context of glacier science:

Thanks for watching, weighing in AND sharing this post. I guarantee you know at least a few people who don’t know about Sustain What but could benefit from the information and ideas here.

And of course chip in to help me justify the time it takes to do this work in my 69th year. :-)

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I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth. His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.

Here’s his foundational post explaining how he focuses his work and why culture and the industries around it - including Disneyland - matter as much as energy systems and the industries around them:

We explored a heap of issues, including why he moved from the Times to Substack (freedom!):

He talked about his Times coverage of the 2022 “Glaring Absence” study by the The Media Impact Project at USC’s Norman Lear Center of climate and related references in Hollywood productions:

They analyzed 37,000 scripts of TV shows and films for the second half of the twenty tens, which was quite ambitious. And they found that only 2.8 percent of scripts included any mention of climate change, and they didn’t just look at climate change. They had a list of, I think, three dozen different climate keywords. They had greenhouse gas, sea level, clean energy, fossil fuel…

The moral of the story, even with three dozen different keywords, only 2.8 percent said anything about climate change or anything related. They said that they found the mention of the word dog 13 times as often as all 35 climate keywords put together.

There is much more, so dive in and please share this post.

And do subscribe to Climate Colored Goggles and consider chipping in.

At my stage of life, Sustain What is more a labor of love than a monetary project. Sammy Roth’s newsletter is his foundational source of income and young journalists need all the support they can get. I created a subscribe button for him here:

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

Here’s the webcast/podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Jennifer D. Sciubba, the new president of the near-century-old Population Reference Bureau, a longtime source of unspun demographic data and analysis.

The focal point was her new book (with two veteran expert coauthors), Toxic Demography - Ideology and the Politics of Population.

Learn more in my “curtain raiser” post:

But here are some quick takeaways and links to material we explored. We discussed long cycles of politics and fear mongering, as I noted how Elon Musk’s December 11 tweet about New Zealand losing its whiteness (so much to think about there) echoes the anti-immigrant U.S. political art of 1903.

Sciubba stressed that while a core goal of the book is creating more reality-based discourse around population data, some critical sources of such data are threatened under Trump and the current Congress.

I pointed to George Monbiot’s column - “The facts are stark: Europe must open the door to migrants, or face its own extinction” - and Sciubba spoke about the limits to what governments can do - even in China - to reverse fertility trends (read this related Mercator Institute article)

I pointed to the latest piece by longtime demographer Joseph Chamie on fertility declines, in which he echoes Sciubba et al’s conclusions about the limits of what countries can do to change fertility trends:

There’s lots more in the conversation of course. Please watch above and offer some thoughts in the comments. Or watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, YouTube.

And of course consider supporting my work if you can afford to:

I hope you’ll consider becoming a free or paid subscriber or you can send a one-time donation below.

Thank you Susan Spencer, Rachel of Sunchoke Falls, Bart Ziegler, Patricia Watts, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop, a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires.

Here’s the curtain raiser post with lots of relevant links:

Here are some relevant papers and posts we alluded to:

2021 PNAS paper: Stewardship of global collective behavior https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118

The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

2023 paper (article summarizing): Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/

Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study is the first to offer estimates of the number of youth users on these platforms and how much annual ad revenue is attributable to them. The study was published on December 27, 2023, in PLOS ONE.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier’s manifesto:

https://www.jaronlanier.com/tenarguments.html

Reversing “enshittification” of everything - my chat with Cory Doctorow

Bluesky’s for-profit model

https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

The Conversation - a global op-ed page, in essence, largely facilitated and populated by universities.

https://theconversation.com/us/partners

The website for the philanthropy efforts of YouTube’s titan, “Mr. Beast”:

https://www.beastphilanthropy.org/our-work

When Expertise Becomes a Requirement: Lessons from China’s New Influencer Regulation https://www.ssbm.ch/when-expertise-becomes-a-requirement-lessons-from-chinas-new-influencer-regulation/

Center for Humane Technology - social media in society

https://www.humanetech.com/social-media-society

How to Fix the Internet podcast, Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/how-to-fix-the-internet-podcast

A sobering moment from my conversation with Tristan Harris (a founder of the Center for Humane Technology) after the release of the Netlix documentary Social Dilemma

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Thank you Steve Chapple, Victor I. Covaleski, R Hull, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I think you’ll love this Sustain What conversation I just had with Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, the brilliant young playwrights behind Kyoto, the tragicomic play describing the titanic diplomatic and political tussle as climate change science threatened to bring an early end to the fossil fuel age.

My “curtain raiser” post has a heap of details and related links:

But much more emerged in the discussion, which also included Ben Santer, a veteran climate scientist who’s a character in the play (he writes about that here), Jean Chemnick, an E&E News/Politico reporter who wrote in depth on petrostate and industry efforts to derail climate talks, and Jenny Shalant, a Natural Resources Defense Council writer who wrote a great essay after seeing the play.

If you appreciate what I’m doing curating these webcasts, please consider pausing on Giving Tuesday to chip in so I can keep at it in 2026.

Here are a couple of highlights, starting with Joe and Joe’s origin story as public-minded playwrights, which involved building a performance dome in a Calais, France, migrant community.

Here’s Ben Santer, who was consulted in the writing of the play and has seen it three times, describing a crucial turning point in the play and in history - the fingerprint analysis he and others did showing the human effect on climate that undercut the industry’s argument for delay:

Attacks and dead rats

Santer also discussed the discomfort of watching the play describe the attacks he faced, and the fear his son faced, when a rat was left on his doorstep:

The Joes described how they are working on two more plays in what they see as a series - on the Copenhagen round of climate talks in 2009 and the journey to and beyond the Paris Agreement in 2015.

I’m looking forward to the next steps in their theatrical journey.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app.

I needed an intervention today and reached out to my old friend from the anti-consumption wars, the Rev Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping, and to Lloyd Alter, one of the great longtime guides to low-impact and low-carbon building, transportation and the rest.

I hope the resulting conversation above offers a tonic during this crazy “Black Friday” week. You can also watch and share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and YouTube:

I needed help after reading a great piece by Alter calling out CNBC for this insanely ridiculous piece warning that people and businesses were holding onto their technology too long: “Americans are holding onto their devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy.”

Alter quotes the piece’s core warning:

“While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.”

He goes on:

Author Kevin Williams argues that we need the latest, fastest stuff. “Lost productivity and inefficiency are the unintended consequences of people and businesses clinging to aging technology.” The dean of a business school says, “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness.”

He concludes that all of this is, in essence, a call for more combustion:

Basically, our economy is built on the conversion of fossil fuels into heat and carbon dioxide, with a helping of plastics on the side. There is a reason why COPs always fail, why Donald Trump kills wind and solar, and why even Mark Carney pushes pipelines; they know that fossil fuels ARE the economy.

Alter kicks into higher gear:

It is all about turning energy into stuff and selling as much of it as possible. And when we buy, we are contributing directly to that conversion of energy, a byproduct of which is carbon dioxide. It’s why we have been inculcated in this culture of convenience, to go through all this effort, to keep the fossil fuels flowing and the economy pumping out wealth.

Please read the full piece!

In our conversation, Alter goes deeper, saying:

This is what we do. We extract oil, we refine it, we turn it into plastic, we make it into a spoon, we truck it to a store, we use it once.

And the story doesn’t even stop there. Then we put it into piles and we have someone take it away and we go through all the pretend recycling when we really know it’s just going into a dump. And the whole process is completely insane. And all it does is mean that someone somewhere is pumping more oil.

And that’s what we have to break in this economy. It all goes back to the fossil fuels. And as I said in it, that’s why, of course, Trump does what he does to promote the fossil fuel industry. It’s why COP just failed because none of the fossil fuel producing countries want to do anything.

We’re all gray-haired old curmudgeons, of course, which is why I was excited to hear Talen’s “church” was going to co-host a Buy Nothing Day event in New York City’s East Village with the Lamp Club, one of a dispersed array of latter-day Luddite groups popping up around the country.

Talen pointed me to a big New York Times feature on this percolating movement: They’re Trying to Ditch Their Phones. Their Methods Are Unorthodox.

Here’s a snippet:

The Lamp Club is part of a growing ecosystem of “neo-Luddite” groups across the country that encourage people to transform their relationship to technology. Other groups include the Luddite Club, APPstinence and Breaking the (G)Loom — organizations that, for the most part, were started not by parents wishing their teens would get off their devices but by the teens themselves, who fault phones for fraying human connections as well as accelerating inequality and climate change. There are now more than two dozen Luddite Clubs in North America, from Ithaca, N.Y., to Irvine, Calif.

Please listen to the full conversation and share it with others. I need your help growing our Sustain What network. And do chip in financially if you can afford it.

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I’ve been enthusiastically tracking the Buy Nothing effort since 2007.

And for more on Luddites, old and new, please subscribe to Brian Merchant’s vital Blood in the Machine Substack:

I hope you can watch and weigh in on this conversation I had on the final official day of COP30, the thirtieth round of climate treaty talks, which are wrapping up in Belém, the gateway city to Brazil’s vast portion of the Amazon River basin.

First we had a pop-up update from my friend Cristiane Prizibisczki, a veteran Brazilian environmental journalist covering the meeting for the great online publication ((o))eco. A big focus of their coverage was the call for a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty (a tough sell in the formal sessions even without the Trump administration on hand given the suffocating role of Saudi Arabia in these talks (and the entire three decade process).

Around 80 countries have signed on, as Prizibisczki reported, “through the launch of a coalition – or “collective effort”, as the COP presidency has used the term – for the abandonment of the use of fossil fuels at a global level. Among the countries present were Germany, Colombia, the United Kingdom and Kenya.” A crucial qualifier is that such a process would need to be “just” - offering different paths for low-emission poor countries than wealthy fossil-fueled powers. (A related concept that I explored in a previous Sustain What show is a “takeback obligation” for fossil fuel companies to capture their CO2.)

She also gave a vivid description of the dramatic evacuation triggered by a contained but smoky fire in the negotiators’ “Blue Zone.”

My feature guest was Kim Stanley Robinson, the longtime climate-focused science fiction author who’s just returned to his home in Davis, Callifornia, after speaking at the COP30 climate treaty conference in Brazil.

He left before the fire erupted in the Blue Zone complex Thursday, causing a mass evacuation just as countries’ delegations were in the final press of negotiations over next steps 10 years after the Paris Agreement.

Here’s my curtain raiser post for the webcast, which includes info on the fire:

Here’s Robinson’s description of the indigenous protests at COP30:

We also talked about the importance of fiction, from Robinson’s sprawling 2020 novel to the play “Kyoto,” which had its first run in London a year ago and is currently Off Broadway at Lincoln Center Theatre in New York City through November. I played a scene from the London production that deeply resonated with my decades reporting on Saudi Arabia’s sustained role trying to prevent substantive agreements - and my personal experience with the protagonist, a lawyer and lobbist for fossil interests, Don Pearlman.

Please watch and weigh in with your reactions in the comments.

And do consider supporting what I’m doing here on Sustain What by sharing this post with friends and contributing financially.

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Thank you Meera Subramanian, Keith Kloor, David R. Guenette, Martha Morningsong, Entropy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

James Fahn founded the Earth Journalism Network 20 years ago. The organization has helped foster the reporting capacity of journalists around the world and helped build innovative colllaborative news networks like InfoNile and InfoAmazonia.

Here I caught him in the middle of the 30th session of negotiations under the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that is the foundation for the Paris Agreement a decade ago.

Share this post or do so on X, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.

Fahn lays out the key points being negotiated - in the absence of United States participation under President Trump’s second term.

We also discussed the enormous indigenous presence at this COP - not unxpected given that Belem sits at the mouth of the Amazon River.

You can explore the stories being generated by journalists affiliated with the Earth Journalism Network here:

Sustain What is mostly a labor of love. To support my work, consider becoming a financial supporter.

I hope you’ll take time to watch and share this Sustain What conversation withCory Doctorow, a tireless champion of the best that digital technology can give society and foe of those who are enshitifying this public good for profit or power.

Also please pass it around on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter. And do subscribe to Sustain What and consider chipping in if you like what I’m doing:

Doctorow has done grueling work through innumerable Pluralistic posts and his many books, including Enshittification, the main focus of this chat, and another coming soon on the impending implosion of the AI bubble. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post he wrote that captures that part of what we discussed:

[T]he AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (“humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations…. [Read the rest, please]

He has also long worked for or advised the Electronic Frontier Foundation, devoted to digital privacy and oline free speech. He suggested you might get involved by finding and joining one of the branches of the related Electronic Frontier Alliance, “a grassroots network made up of independent community organizations…across the United States work to support digital rights and empower their local communities.”

Click here for the curtain raiser post that has more context:

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