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A lot happened this week. The Derek Chauvin murder conviction was, I guess I would say a relief, but I don’t know there are a lot of complex emotions in the mix. I feel like people should celebrate it as a victory, which was won only because of a months-long uprising which is what it takes to hold just one single cop accountable for murder. But like a lot of people I guess I find cold comfort from a court verdict. Policing in America is no less brutal, in fact, after Chauvin murdered George Floyd, use of force in Minneapolis dipped for a few weeks then substantially increased. Defund. Abolish.
More big climate news including Biden’s commitment to reduce emissions in the US along the lines of what climate scientists say actually needs to happen by 2030. So that’s encouraging although you know a climate pledge is as a climate pledge does as old Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump used to say in his little suit sitting on his little bench.
Today I actually want to do an update on a local issue I wrote about a while back but don’t worry I think there is some relevance here for anyone so keep reading even if you could give a shit about Boston.
So back in January, this newsletter issue was about a campaign to reform the rules of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which is one of the least transparent in the country (watchdog groups once gave it an F and a D+ ), although plenty of other legislatures are not doing so hot either so you might want to check yours out. That lack of transparency—and rules that give outsized power to House leadership—has meant that the state government is far more conservative in the policy it enacts than its average voters. From the earlier newsletter:
In the case of climate change, that has translated to 13 years going by without new major legislation, in a state that fancies itself a national leader on the issue. Out of 245 climate change-related bills introduced in the House from 2013 to 2018, 202 were quietly killed in committee. Only nine were ever voted on by the entire House, and almost every decision on every one of those bills happened in a secret vote, with no public tally recorded. That’s according to a recent, damning report from Brown University and the Climate Social Science Network, which also found that clean energy advocates were outspent by industry opposition (utilities, real estate, fossil fuel and chemical industries) 3.5 to one, and that the House Speaker wields tremendous control over what bills clear the House.
House rules have made it easier for leadership to block all kinds of policies, including immigrant rights legislation that has barely moved for decades despite hundreds of people advocating for it every year in a big lobby day; a tenant rights bill that was quietly killed after several years of broad advocacy and compromise; certain police reform measures that were killed behind closed doors. There’s anti-wage theft legislation in play that has two-thirds of the Legislature listed as co-sponsors, a veto-proof majority, but it can’t get a House vote.
When we last checked in on the transparency campaign, myself and a bunch of other people had just met with our Rep on the issue, who was mostly condescending and disinterested. In the four months since then I have followed up on the topic with four very polite and respectful emails (I swear I was really nice) and have heard absolutely not one single whisper back, which is truly model behavior for an elected official.
Meanwhile, pressure from the campaign caused the Speaker to delay a decision on changing the rules, although he indicated the House would also revisit how constituents can interact with legislators, in response to the growing number of advocacy groups contacting lawmakers. The Globe has since published twoeditorials chastising the House’s lack of transparency. Hundreds of thousands of texts, calls, and emails were sent, dozens of letters to the editor were published. And tensions continued to rise between the old boys club and lawmakers standing up to them.
We did, however, win a partial victory. A big part of the push is for public committee votes, since hundreds of bills are killed in committee for opaque reasons. In February, the legislature debated rules for joint committees (which include the House and Senate—the Senate has more transparent rules), and a big concession will make all joint committee “no” votes public. So that’s a pretty big deal!
But obviously that is not enough, so this week there was a big kickoff meeting for the next phase of the campaign, which is called the People’s House. Notably, the campaign has added a demand for House Speaker term limits. This is a big addition, because it explicitly targets the messed up concentration of power in the chamber, and calls out the Speaker himself (it has only EVER been a white man in the history of Massachusetts) and his wildly disproportionate power, which basically amounts to minority rule.
Here are some fun facts about the Massachusetts Speaker of the House: He pretty much singlehandedly controls the flow of which legislation can be considered by the rank and file reps. He alone decides who heads committees, which not only provides the lucky winners with significant power themselves, but also handsome financial bonuses. The stipend for the Ways and Means Chair is $65,000 a year, which is more than the annual salary of a representative. In other words, the Speaker of the House can double or cut in half a representative’s potential salary, depending on whether they stay in line.
As a result, most House Reps vote 90-100% in line with the Speaker. There was even a case where the Speaker once mistakenly placed the wrong vote, and at least 63 reps immediately voted the same way. When the Speaker realized he made a mistake, he switched his vote and all 63 then did the same. That is some Veep shit.
The kickoff meeting for the campaign was pretty inspiring, especially for a zoom (you can watch it if you want), with close to 200 people showing up from a range of organizations. It was an interesting cross-section of the progressive community here, including speakers from Act On Mass, which leads the campaign, immigration advocate Mijente, Sunrise, and even two legislators. Maybe the best session was led by Sakina Cotton, who I believe is a freshman in high school, representing youth advocacy group Our Climate, now a coalition partner.
So why is this campaign such a big deal? Why are all these organizations and lawmakers throwing weight behind it? I know my riveting prose might lead you to believe otherwise, but this is super dry stuff, right? It’s also worth acknowledging that several Republican lawmakers also support these rules changes, which might make you wonder, shouldn’t progressives just be happy with the Democratic supermajority and keep Dems’ control as locked down as possible?
Well, in the Massachusetts Legislature, the Democratic Party holds pretty much all of the power, so any progress needs to be won within the party. Contrary to hand-wringing about partisan polarization, many progressives and even staunch Democratic voters recognize that in a two party system, your party being in power does not inherently serve the public very well. Another way to put this is, regardless of the majority politics in any particular community, structures tend to emerge to protect the status quo’s grip on power, at all costs. In our case, it’s conservative Democrats within the majority party who block policy that would challenge both excesses of state power like police brutality, and excesses of corporate power like exploitation of workers and tenants. And without transparency, it’s difficult for the public to even organize for change, as legislators will sometimes even vote to kill bills they publicly co-sponsored.
So at stake is not just a wide range of progress on specific issues, as reflected by the breadth of the coalition involved, but also the underlying structures that control how we govern and are governed. The different interests involved recognize that. As Somerville’s State Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven said in the campaign meeting, “Underneath the policies and issues, and all the things that are very explicit and on the surface, are relationships, culture, how we interact with each other, how we hold power accountable. … The reason this work is so exciting is because you’re all challenging what it means to interact with power.”
The reality that there is something screwed up in these power structures, at different levels of government, seems to be more widely recognized these days. We’re seeing heated public debate about the role of the Senate parliamentarian for god’s sake. We all see the increasingly blatant minority rule in federal government through Senate rules, the electoral college, and hundreds of voter restriction bills in state legislatures across the country. We see it in the campaign finance laws that allow special interests like the oil and gas industry to endanger humanity’s future to protect their business model. If all that weren’t enough, images that flashed before us of frothing, shirtless men smashing Capitol windows and dragging out literal chunks of the public sector as souvenirs, cheered on by members of a minority party, made it frighteningly clear that democracy isn’t something that we automatically get, and the version we do have is often not all that democratic. This is something a lot of people once took for granted, but perhaps not anymore.
The country’s largest coal miners union says it’s open to transition away from fossil fuels if it can guarantee financial aid and jobs in renewable energy for workers.
The West braces for the first federal declaration of water shortage. The housing market in Phoenix is also bananas right now so that will be interesting. I can’t remember if I shared this before, but this is a good article on how climate change is impacting the Colorado River.
The “whitest paint ever” reflects 98% of sunlight, and could offer big energy savings benefits.
A Boston musician left a $10,000 flute in the back of a cab and nine years later she just got it back.
The absurdity of the New York Times trying to “both sides” threats to democracy.
Denver’s horror-themed bar looks fun, including Midsommar-themed drinks.
Superlink
There were a couple of disturbing articles on carbon removal this week. It’s becoming almost gospel in climate discourse that some level of carbon dioxide removal is necessary to reign in the worst of climate change, which climate models mostly indicate, although what form that takes is up for debate. But it’s also clear that this narrative is going to be used to advance massive investments in a carbon removal industry that oil and gas companies believe will allow them to keep burning fossil fuels for many years to come—churning out more CO2 pollution, sucking it up, and burying billions of tons of it underground in liquid form.
Pipelines need to be built, vast geological reservoirs deep underground need to be fashioned into carbon dioxide storage facilities, costly new technologies for vacuuming carbon from the air and factories need to be brought up to scale….
The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.
Exxon and other oil producers are embracing carbon capture as a technology that will enable their oil and gas businesses to continue to operate in a carbon-constrained environment. … Exxon, unlike European rivals like Shell and BP, has not vowed to transition away from fossil fuels, arguing that oil and gas will remain key to the global economy for decades as building blocks for plastics and to drive global expansion of electricity. Instead, the company plans to devote its attention to capturing and storing the carbon emitted from oil and gas — and capitalizing on the massive new business opportunity.
Watching
I have put a pause on all new TV series so I can catch up on movies I’ve been meaning to watch and the best one so far was Booksmart, which was very funny and very good.
Listening
Sea Life Sandwich Boy, by Horsegirl
Still getting the new newsletter platform set up, stay tuned. At long last got my first vaccination in a CVS in East Boston next to a display of Beanie Babies which was an interesting place to experience such a life-changing moment but you know capitalism always has to make it weird. Regardless, it was very moving and joyous and all of the things that everyone is saying about the experience. I did not do any card selfies but we did pick up burritos at Taqueria Jalisco and ate them in a little park right next to the Mass Pike which felt like a very Boston thing do like nature was healing.
How about you all, getting shots? I hope so. If you want to do a selfie with your little card just do it who cares. If you want to get a burrito after you can do that. Whatever makes you happy I just want you to be happy readers.
One of the many unique things about the 2020 climate justice anthology All We Can Save (see last week’s review here if you missed it), at the start of each section in the book, there’s an interstitial four-panel comic that evokes the themes of the essays that lie ahead. Each illustration is a visual poem that acts as a kind of meditation bell between the weighty pieces of nonfiction prose that make up most of the book. Along with the use of written poetry, the comics give the anthology a unique rhythm, loosening up the points of entry as you work your way through the book.
The comics are the work of Madeleine Jubilee Saito, a cartoonist and illustrator based in Somerville, Massachusetts. I first came across Madeleine’s work a couple of years ago at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) in Cambridge, where I picked up one of her zines, What the body is for, a beautiful collection of introspective comics, memorable for their quiet, understated use of words and color.
I immediately recognized Madeleine’s art in All We Can Save, and as I was reading the book I thought it would be nice to learn more about her work for an issue of Crisis Palace. Climate justice is a topic that runs through much of her art, which has been recognized in Best American Comics 2019, The Comics Journal’s Best Comics of 2018, and featured in Guernica and other publications. In 2017, she co-edited with cartoonist Andrew White the anthology Warmer: A Collection of Comics About Climate Change for the Fearful & Hopeful. Madeleine currently works as creative director and operations lead for the All We Can Save Project, an organization that emerged from the book with a mission of, “Nurturing a welcoming, connected, and leaderful climate community, rooted in the work and wisdom of women, to grow a life-giving future.”
I’m so grateful that Madeleine took the time to chat with me for the newsletter, and allowed me to reprint some of her comics here. We had a wonderful conversation about the role of art in climate change, the irresistible power of comics as a medium, and how her faith shapes her work and outlook on climate justice.
I hope you enjoy it.
Why don't we talk about All We Can Save first, because sometimes I go off on a tangent and I want to be sure to talk about the book. Can you maybe start by telling me like a little bit about how you got involved with the project?
Doctors [Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson] had originally imagined the anthology as just a collection of essays spanning the realm of work that women are doing in climate, and then realized that it just really needed poetry, tonally, and then also realized that they really wanted visual art. And as I've read the anthology, I think that's one of the things that makes it special is that presence of the breathing room that poetry and art provide.
Apparently, Sunrise Movement shared some of my comics on Twitter, and they saw them and were like, oh, this vibe is really resonant with what we're going for, and this could be a really good fit. So they reached out to me and asked about using some of my comics and we worked together for a few months. I drew them originally in full color, and for publication purposes, we had to just do the two colors, orange and black. So I translated them to two color. And then I redrew and sort of reconfigured some of the pieces to work as chapter headers, which is where they live in the book. And that's how that happened.
Oh interesting, so these were comics that you had done before knowing about the book.
Yeah, exactly. So every year I do a monthly comics practice called 30 days of comics, founded by cartoonist Derik Badman. It’s sort of a NaNoWriMo derivative, where every day in the month you draw a comic. And I've been doing that annually, since I think 2014. And I found this to be a really fruitful place for work, especially for someone like me, who finds it hard sometimes to just create out of nowhere. You pick some constraints, for me, that's often the form, like the four-panel comic. I also usually pick a color palette, and sometimes sort of secret constraints that inform the words I choose or the images I choose. And in 2019, I had been making work about climate for a few years in various ways, but I wanted to spend a month exploring the spiritual and emotional and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis. So that series of comics was what all the comics in the book were drawn from.
And how did you choose which comics to use?
The editors picked. Basically, I was like, yeah, go for it, I'd be happy to have any of my work reprinted. And so I think as they were doing the huge task of arranging all these poems and essays into sections, they then went through and found pieces of mine that felt resonant with the theme of each section. And it's been really, really special to read the book. I was obviously involved in editing my own work. But I hadn't read the essays and moved through it all as a sequence before reading the final book, and it has been so special just to see the ways that my comics are sort of in conversation with the essays and poems around them.
And it's a little surreal, because a lot of the women in the book are actually people who deeply formed my own ways of thinking about climate. So it's just been very special. And this is something that I think happens throughout the book. You see the ways that each of the poems and essays and comics speak to each other—there's a depth of conversation that happens just by setting these things alongside each other that I haven't experienced before. And it's really special.
Yeah, it's rare that you come across comics worked into a prose book, much less of prose nonfiction book, much less a prose nonfiction book about climate change. So it really is a unique experience, I totally agree. I wonder, did this make you think differently about any of your past work? Seeing it in this context?
Oh, wow. I love that question. I feel like I'm not going to be able to think of specific ways that they came to new light. But I think of my work as comics poetry. And so I think, coming back to my work and seeing it in conversation with other pieces, it feels kind of like how I experience poems.
At least for me, unlike other pieces of writing, where maybe you are sort of consciously crafting every part of it, and designing it to work a certain way for the reader, there's just a lot of my process that feels very intuitive and I'm trying to distill a specific feeling or draw out a certain image or metaphor. And so, because of that, a lot of the time when I come back to them, they can feel completely different. And I think that's true when I'm looking back at past work, generally. But that's especially true in the book, seeing them in conversation with these other pieces.
Yeah, definitely. I was looking over the Warmer anthology that you co-edited. And it was striking to me how most of those entries were similar to that. Like you could imagine climate change comics being more like Joe Sacco’s work, where it's journalistic or explanatory. But it was interesting how in your anthology, most of them were very abstract or open to interpretation. I'm not sure what the question is there, but is there something about comics and art that is more fitting when trying to understand climate change in an emotional sense versus, say, facts and figures?
That's interesting that you say that. So the reason that all the comics in Warmer are really poetic is specifically because my co-editor and I Andrew White, we're both in sort of the poetry comics world. And we specifically wanted to make an anthology of poetry comics about climate. Since then, there's been a few lovely memoir comics that touch on climate, like Sophie Yanow’s What is a Glacier? and Sarah Glidden’s diary comics about climate and her reflections on raising a child. And I'm sure there have been others.
But at the time, I think a lot of the climate-related comics that I saw were people using comics in this very explicitly, sort of pedagogical way, where it's using comics to be like, here's science for you to understand. And something that I felt really strongly then and I feel strongly now, is this need and this hunger for work that looks at the climate crisis in a way that is more fully human and invites the spiritual and human and emotional parts of ourselves to be present with it in a way that the more pedagogical works don't.
I do think that text only poetry can definitely do that, as well. But I love the way that comics can be powerful and sort of irresistible. I think comics are very difficult to resist and easy to read. And very beautiful. Those are all things that I like a lot about them.
Yeah, that's a great point. I love the inclusion of poetry in All We Can Save because climate change is a really hard thing to wrap your head around, I guess, in linear sort of terms. But with poetry, it evokes these thoughts or emotions that can help you understand it in ways that you might not be able to by reading a book, because we don't have the right words to really describe it, you know? So I love that point about how they're irresistible, because poems can sometimes intimidate people or people feel like they don't understand it. Whereas a comic is very inviting.
Yeah, I think there's a way in which text only poetry still feels for a lot of people like something that you read in school that is either inaccessible or your ability to understand it means that you're very good and smart. And I think that media that fulfills the function of poetry, like music or comics, can fulfill that need in a way that's less tied to people's experiences with reading poetry in school or whatever.
You mentioned that you're a fan of contributors to the book. I wonder, what was your response to the concept of the book in general?
So the concept, I was just very psyched about. Part of why I wanted to make Warmer initially, was just a thirst for climate work that felt more human. Hearing about All We Can Save, and then being asked to have my work in it was just, I was super psyched. Like, this is a book that I wish I had had, I wish everyone had had, like 10 years ago. And I think it would have helped me a lot as I, in the last five years or so, have been exploring how to make work about climate and how to think about it and how to think about my place in the work. I'm very glad it exists, and yeah, I wish I had had it five years ago.
What was it about the sort of mainstream conversation about climate that you felt was unsatisfying?
I think something that was tough for me, and this might be just me, having been socialized as a woman to feel tentative about my abilities in science or something. But when things are framed as, alright, here's the science and anyone who wants to engage in this conversation, you have to be like a scientist, it’s super alienating for me, and I think everyone. And I think it's become clear that that's a framing that comes from the fossil fuel industry. Not framing it as, “What do we do to preserve our common home and our common good,” but rather, “Is climate change real?”
So one way of describing it is that a lot of art that I was seeing about it was around that question of, is climate change real? Which I think is a framing that benefits the fossil fuel industry, and is not a question that I think anyone's really asking.
So maybe another way to answer that is, I feel like All We Can Save, and works like it, and stuff that I want to answer in my own work, move away from that question. And I don't want to overcorrect here; obviously, questions of what is happening in the natural world and how do we know and what should we do are obviously incredibly important. But I'm also interested in questions of: How do we process this? How do we conceptualize ourselves in relationship to the natural world and in relationship to each other? And what does this mean for how we understand our lives? All of those sorts of questions.
Well, I would like to talk a little bit about how you got into comics and your approach to them. I'm a huge comics fan, I should point that out. So I'm curious, what were your big influences? What made you want to get into the field?
I grew up reading Sunday comics, like Sunday strips. I I grew up with a lot of Calvin and Hobbes collections around the house. I really loved them. Then I was in high school during this sort of golden age of web comics. And I was a huge fan of Dinosaur Comics and Kate Beaton's work especially, and A Softer World. Those are some of the big ones. And then in high school, I read Persepolis for the first time. So I think Kate Beaton's work and Marjane Satrapi’s work and Allison Bechtel's work, those are sort of where I started making comics. In high school, I was very interested in the ways that autobiographical comics just made everyday life so magical. Life under capitalism can be so horrible and feel so meaningless, and there's a way in which autobio comics, and making autobio comics about your own life sort of imbues magic. Maybe this is also true about writing about yourself, but there’s something special about drawing about yourself, too. So that is sort of one part of that lineage. And then, when I was in college, I read a lot of Chris Ware and I then found people like Aidan Koch, and Andrew White, who is now my friend and was co-editor of Warmer, and Alyssa Berg who is also in Warmer.
Did you ever do any autobio comics?
I did when I was in high school, but I haven't really since then. I'm very tentative about sharing my life with the world. My work, I think, is very emotionally intimate, and sort of spiritually intimate. And I think there's a way in which sharing that depth but not sharing, you know, like, hey, here's my family and here's what I do every day. I think that has felt like a good balance to me.
Yeah that's understandable. How did you arrive at your current style and the four panel format that you typically use now?
So I started using the four-panel set up I think in 2014, which was the first year I did 30 days of comics. I picked it because I needed a format that I could easily complete in one day and four panels is long enough that you can do some interesting things with rhythm and symmetry, but it's short enough that you can do it in a day. And I really love playing with radial symmetry and the four-panel frame allows for that in an interesting way. So yeah, I chose it as a constraint then and I really loved it and kept using it.
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of King Cat and John Porcellino’s comics where they're very simple and pared down in a way that allows these special moments of beauty to come through.
I love that. My friend Andrew White interviewed me for The Comics Journal a couple months ago, and he referenced this article about a sort of Midwestern school of cartooning, which includes definitely John Porcellino, Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga, and some other people. Basically a bunch of white guys in the Midwest. And they describe some of the characteristics of that as a deep simplicity and interest in the mundane as sort of revelatory. And I fully identify with that (laughs). So that's very interesting. And I think John Porcellino lives very close to where I grew up [in Rockford, Illinois].
Another person I might put in that category is Maggie Umber, who is also in the Midwest.
She's also in Warmer!
I love her comics so much.
I'm very honored by even just the association. I love her work so much.
I feel like both of you use color in similar ways. It’s a very emotional use of color. And there's also a quietness to it, for lack of a better term. Kind of a calm to it, like a meditative quality.
Thank you. Those are definitely all qualities I see and love in her work. Yeah, I am only complimented by that comparison. Have you read Sound of Snow Falling?
Yeah, I love that book.
That is just one of the most beautiful comics of all time. It's just so perfectly paced. It's so beautiful. It's so poetic and intensely emotional without having any words or humans. It's such a beautiful piece.
And the way that she uses sequence, it's just a very powerful use of time passing. I totally agree, it’s amazing. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of color in your work and how you use it?
Yeah, I think it varies from piece to piece. There are definitely some pieces like you mentioned, What the body is for. That was the product of a daily practice during Lent in 2018. So I originally drew that with the final form of risograph printing in mind, which the zine that you have is risograph, printed beautifully by Perfectly Acceptable in Chicago. Riso is an old-fashioned way of printing, where you just print one color at a time. It's very cheap, but it results in colors that are very vibrant. It's a lot cheaper and I think more beautiful than just printing digitally. So it's something that a lot of cartoonists and small artists like. So with that piece, the book starts out just blue and then as I was moving through Lent, and moving towards Easter and springtime, some of the reds that I was using came in. So sometimes color is this symbolic thing.
I also did that with another book, House Fires, again, with red and blue. But I think with my 30 days of comics work, it's often less overtly symbolic in that way. I'll often start a piece trying to get at a specific feeling or a specific mood. And I'll pick colors at the beginning that feel like they relate to that. And I think maybe another element is that I'm always trying to be as succinct as possible, visually, especially. So whenever I can pare things down, I try to do that.
I strongly believe that constraints are often the most fruitful thing for comics in particular and probably with lots of kinds of art. So I think sticking to a really constrained palette—I mean it's also cheap, in terms of the indie comic scene. Most mini comics are in black and white just because it's way, way cheaper than printing in digital full color. But I also think it can lead to some really fruitful stuff.
You know, another thing that really strikes me in your comics is the use of the passage of time, sometimes long periods of time in a small space. Which, it seems like that lends itself to some of the challenges in understanding climate change. Some of the challenge is wrapping your head around this very large time scale. There are some comics in All We Can Save that are almost like a time-lapse of change happening. I wonder how you think about time in your comics?
Wow, that's such a good question. So in comics, and I think maybe in film, too, there's this thing called a beat. And certain cartoonists will use it more often than others. As an off topic example, in Doonesbury, the punchline will often be that there's a beat panel where one character says something and then there's a panel where they're just like looking at each other, and then someone says something back. I've always felt so drawn to beats in comics, to empty spaces. And maybe part of it is just that it feels dramatic. But there's something about the way that it creates a pocket of stillness, it just feels very good. I feel very drawn to it and I'm not sure why.
It gets back to what you were saying about how the purpose of poetry and comics in All We Can Save is that you are providing a beat between these essays. It's that breathing space you were talking about.
Yeah, totally.
And I think that's so useful in discussion of climate change, because it's such a chaotic space and sometimes you just need to like, sit and be quiet for a second. Just think about it.
I did want to talk to you about how climate change became a focus of your comics. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about how you first approached the topic in a big way and how it became a bigger part of your life and your art.
My background is, I'm from rural Northern Illinois and I'm a white woman. And I think for me, and I think this is true for a lot of people, my sort of interest in environmental things broadly just came from childhood where a lot of the most beautiful spaces I was in were the woods, or the outdoors. As I've reflected on it more, being in the woods or being outside, those are some of the only spaces that weren't sort of late-capitalist horrors. The town I grew up in, Rockford, there aren't really sidewalks. There aren't really any sort of common spaces besides stores and a mall. And so I think natural spaces, like when I went to summer camp, and when I was able to be in the woods, those are some of the places that I felt most human, because I think those are some of the few places that are not built in an inhuman capitalist way in the region where I'm from.
And so I think from a young age, I had this idea of like, oh, I like the woods. I like the environment. A thing that people who like those things do is they care about the environment, they want to protect it. And then I think in college, I learned a lot and had some awakenings, sort of spiritually, and I became a Christian in a new way. And I also had some revelations politically and as a leftist. And all of that sort of converged into the conviction that the climate crisis was extremely important and something that needed to be talked about, and something that I—especially as a Christian, and as a person sharing this common home with others—this is something that is among the most important things of my life. And among the most important things that we are called to respond to.
You had mentioned your faith and your spirituality a couple of times and this is totally up to you if you feel comfortable talking about it more, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about how your faith and spirituality show up in your art and your politics? Seems like it's a big influence.
This is always a tricky question. Because for me, it kind of feels like a question of, how does your faith show up in your making breakfast and making food for your family? And it's just, it's the whole thing. I think there's a way in which everything I do, and especially everything in the realm of ethics and meaning, is all very deeply shaped by the Christian tradition and my understanding of myself in it. So it feels, to me, like my comics are just 100% my faith. But I'm very comfortable, and I want people who aren't Christian or in any sort of faith tradition to be able to interact with my work. So it feels like 100% of what my work is. But I also am grateful and want people to be able to interact with it, even if that's not where they are, or if that's not a dimension that they read it with.
I definitely feel like that's the case. But it's one of those things where, when you know about it, you notice some themes like redemption and rebirth that show up in the four-panel structure. I wonder if there any themes or ideas in Christianity that you feel come through in your work.
One thing that I have landed on as something that I really want to continue to make work about, and that I've been making work about for a few years, that sort of intersects with my faith and my thoughts about the climate crisis, is how we understand the material world.
I think there's a way in which some parts of American Christianity have an understanding of the material world, that it is sort of secondary, and that it is disposable, or it will disappear, or it doesn't matter. And I believe that that is very much not aligned with the Christian tradition. I think the fact of Christ having a body and the idea of physical resurrection, and the promise of renewed heaven and Earth, I think all speaks to me that the material world is not something that's like a first draft that will be discarded, but is deeply sacred and deeply beloved by God, and is of extreme importance.
And I think that has a lot of implications for just about everything. But I think one part of it is that—obviously the climate crisis is something that hurts other people and so I think Christians are called to respond and stand in solidarity with others and with the people who will come after us—but I also think that the way that capitalism has extracted from and harmed and destroyed the material world is desecration of the sacred, in a way that I don't think people always talk about. So I don't know, that was a little meandering. But that's definitely a theme that I've been thinking about a lot.
No, that's so important. It underscores the tragedy of it all, you know? The darkness of it, I think that sometimes gets maybe glossed over because we're talking about like electric cars and stuff.
I’m curious, was there a point where you were like, “I’m going to be like a climate change comics person, I'm going to do climate change comics”? Was it an intentional thing, or just something you were interested in?
I don't know if there was a point where I was like, "I want to be a climate cartoonist." Obviously, I would love to not be a climate cartoonist (laughing) because I would love to not ever think about the climate crisis again.
But I think it was around 2016 or 2017, I was thinking a lot about it and feeling a gap between what I was feeling and processing and the implications for human life and our common existence, and the art that I was seeing about it. And so I think there was a way in which I was like, oh, I actually think that maybe I have a way of speaking and drawing about this that might be able to provide some of that.
Well, first, actually, I made Warmer, because I just wanted to see it. And sometimes I think there's a part of me that just wanted that work to exist, but was a little scared of just going for it myself. And it felt really good to do it with others. And then after that, I think I felt a little more confident in pursuing it myself.
We've talked a little bit about this already, but I wonder if you had more to say about what comics can do that maybe other mediums can’t.
I think one of the one of the things I love most about comics is they're profoundly accessible, so accessible that a lot of people write them off as lowbrow. And plenty of the comics that have existed over the years have been lowbrow. But I think if I were to name something across all genres, it's that comics are just deeply engaging. And you can't not read a comic. If there's just text in front of you, you can ignore it. But if there's some little boxes with images and words, you're gonna read it, because it looks interesting.
So I think from that perspective, I continue to be really excited about the ways that comics can continue to be engaging, and can sort of speak to people. And I mean, within it, there are so many different genres. I would love to see book-length comics memoirs about climate. I don't think that'll be me. Maybe that'll be like, Sophie Yanow or Sarah Glidden, who started to do that a little bit, but I'd love to see memoirs. I would love to see more essay comics or explainer comics that take a more justice angle and less of a pure, explaining science angle.
I would love to see that too. That would be great. Well, I want to get toward wrapping up, but is there anything you’re working on these days you wanted to mention, whether that’s your art or other work related to climate justice?
So my current work is that I am the creative director and operations lead of the All We Can Save Project, which is an organization co-founded by doctors Wilkinson and Johnson, that serves to continue the mission of what the anthology started. So that's where a lot of my focus has been in the last few months.
Is there anything you can say about the type of work that you’re doing there, or if people should keep an eye out for anything?
Yeah, so one thing that I am feeling excited about is, I have been curating our social media and also an organizational newsletter that includes poetry and art. As we've talked about a lot in this conversation, I very much feel that art and poetry are necessary and helpful for navigating the climate crisis. I've been curating stuff that I think is helpful there. So yeah, so I guess a plug for our organizational newsletter. [there’s a signup box at https://www.allwecansave.earth/]
Okay, awesome. Well, I kept you longer than I said I was going to I really appreciate you taking the time it’s been great to talk about your work. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me!
Yeah, this was super fun. Thanks so much.
OK fam, thanks for reading as always. If you liked this one, maybe send it to someone who would also like it or share on whatever tik toks or clubhouses you’re into these days. I’m going to skip the links and usual bitlets and wrap things up.
One housekeeping note following up from last week, I am planning to move off of Substack because of some of its editorial practices, specifically who they recruit and pay to write for them. No ill will at all toward people using it, I’ve just been feeling gross about it. This will not affect you at all it should be a seamless switch once I pick a new platform.
Also I know this was another gutwrenching week in America, with news of more mass shootings, more police murdering people, more trials about police murdering people. I hope everyone is OK out there. Defund. Abolish. End it.
A great anthology takes a bundle of seemingly divergent works and assembles them together to represent a coherent form of their own—a creation greater than the sum of its parts. In their excellent 2019 collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction, editors Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta take special care to explore not just the content of the submissions within, but also the form their prose takes—the way of telling. “To speak only about the contents of these vessels would be to ignore how their significance is shaped by the vessels that hold them,” they write in the introduction. To reflect that interest, they structured the book’s contents around the form of a basket, with sections organized as different components of Native basket weaving, like coiling, plaiting, and twining.
“We have understood this project as a way to hold—to hold together and to hold in place.… we see the basket not as a metaphor, but rather as a structure (form) through which to understand how the pieces included here come together in this space.”
I was thinking about this while reading the 2020 anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis because, while the material it delivers is very powerful on its own, it’s the way these essays and poems come together that makes the book even more resonant than what is conveyed in its individual entries. But instead of a basket, All We Can Save takes on a form that is like a rich soil, supporting an ecosystem of voices and ideas that are distinctive, but support and interact with each other to encourage further growth.
It’s a book that, in both overall form and individual arguments, challenges the industrial monocultures of the Anthropocene—undercutting gatekeepers, hierarchies, dominance over nature and each other. Instead, it flattens and diversifies the ways in which we might approach this topic, opting for a chorus of complementary voices. It’s for this reason that I think All We Can Save is more than just a collection of essays about climate change—it serves as an important primer that can help people find their place within a changing world that demands the best from all of us.
I guess I have read quite a few books about climate change I do not care to add them up, and some have been kind of boring and many of them have been very useful and eye-opening. But as I’ve mentioned before, you kind of take what you need from each, as every author brings a very different perspective to a problem that can viewed from near-infinite angles. So I’ve found David Wallace-Wells, for example, to be one of the most effective writers when it comes to portraying the devastating scope of the problem—how climate is now the box within which all other problems fit inside. Elizabeth Kolbert is a master at pulling together researchers’ insights and presenting coherent and compelling snapshots of the field. Cristina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac offer a view from inside global negotiations, and the relentless optimism it requires to keep working against the odds.
But reading All We Can Save made me think that the anthology is maybe the perfect format for a climate change book. Because coming to grips with this problem is something that can’t be done by tapping into any one expert’s insights or even one journalist’s analysis of many insights (except for me my analysis is flawless like subscribe and share). Climate change is not so much a topic as it is a hyperobject, massively distributed across time and space such that you can’t see or hold it in front of you, even though you know it is there. Viewing it is more like looking through a kaleidoscope than a telescope.
That said, All We Can Save does bring a certain perspective of its own, what you could call a climate justice lens, although not strictly so. Climate justice is an accurate way to describe the book’s themes but it also feels insufficient, as it accurately brings to mind the efforts of people who are most impacted by climate change, for example, communities in coastal Louisiana or Indigenous water and land protectors fighting polluting oil and gas infrastructure. Such stories are present in All We Can Save, but the book’s portrayal of climate justice feels broader. It’s a way of thinking about climate change that centers human experience in both its harms and solutions, bearing the full emotional weight that comes with it—devastation, hope, anger, love, mourning.
While men certainly do carry this perspective, inviting only women authors to contribute was an intentional course correction in a field that for decades has been embodied by a white guy in a fleece vest or a suit and tie. As the issue takes center stage, that dynamic threatens to get worse, not better, as billionaires, corporate CEOs, politicians, and mainstream journalists can no longer ignore the problem, so they anoint themselves its leading voices. As I constantly complain about, such voices tend to cast the climate problem as one primarily of top-down expertise, engineering solutions, and bloodless economic policy, which has cordoned off the topic from mass participation.
There is no shortage of policy, expertise, or solutions in this book—it is bursting with all three—but always rooted firmly in human lives and experiences, from all walks of life, making the messages within accessible and familiar, regardless of your own base of knowledge. That’s the rich soil I’m referring to—a diversity of voices speaking with an emotional honesty often lacking in climate discourse, but critical to creating a flourishing movement.
Of course, there’s also a lot of writing in this book about actual soil, which are some of my favorite entries. In “Reciprocity,” by biologist Janine Benyus, she writes about her work in forestry, and how, often reflecting changing political winds, the cooperative community theory of ecology—that species thrive by sharing mutual benefits—has fallen out and back into favor. “One of the fallouts of our fifty-year focus on competition is that we came to view all organisms as consumers and competitors first, including ourselves. Now we’re decades into a different understanding.”
Leah Penniman, a Black Kreyol farmer who started Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, writes powerfully about the work it took to restore biodiversity to the nutrient-stripped soils its founders inherited. “As Larisa Jacobson, codirector of Soul Fire Farm, explains, ‘Our duty as earthkeepers is to call the exiled carbon back into the land and to bring the soil life home.’” The farm simultaneously works to heal and restore Black Americans’ connection to the land, which was poisoned by slavery as a means of enriching the country through cash crops. Land use and the repair of soil are an underrated and critical climate change solution, as Project Drawdown outlines, but here again, we’re talking about the human bond with our surroundings, regenerative over industrial growth, literally and figuratively. As a Terry Tempest-Williams poem featured in the book states, “Soul and soil are not separate.”
Some other favorite essays:
Rihanna Gunn-Wright’s explainer on what the Green New Deal really is. “The best policy proposals—that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them—present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it.”
Kate Marvel’s cutting take on the hubris of solar geoengineering, in which we “mask the hangover but continue the bender.”
Mary Annaïse Heglar on privileged gatekeepers, both nihilists and optimists.
Emily Atkin’s journey to casting aside neutrality as a climate journalist.
Kate Knuth’s formulation of climate citizenship, and the “sacred trust between the individual and the collective.”
Katharine Hayhoe’s stories of talking about climate change in front of oil and gas executives, Rotary Clubs in West Texas, a Successful Canadian Women’s Dinner, even her husband, a former climate skeptic. “To care about a changing climate we don’t have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are a human alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need.”
The most gut-wrenchingly honest thing I’ve read about climate change and being a parent, by Amy Westervelt. “It’s a constant choice between me, my kids, and the greater good. And I almost never feel like I’m making the right decision.”
And so many more. I already knew I was going to like All We Can Save, because I like the work of so many of its contributors. But the way in which the anthology format weaves together all of these voices to make individual points, while building this larger, interactive philosophy on how to interact with climate change, makes it, for my money, one of the best books on climate change you can read. Not only that, I think it’s the perfect book for someone who maybe grasps the idea of climate change and cares about it, but has struggled to find where their own lives fit into the larger, profoundly overwhelming topic. It’s a book that provides fertile ground in which readers can find their own roots in the climate fight, to understand how their own stories and lives fit into this ecosystem, and how their contribution can make it more diverse and resilient.
Nice things, cont.
This week I listened to an interview with Heather McGhee (yes it was on Ezra Klein), whose new book The Sum of Us is getting a lot of attention. I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds amazing I can’t wait, and I gather she starts her argument with the framing of “why we can’t have nice things” which was the theme of last issue’s newsletter about why our infrastructure is so terrible. McGhee’s premise is that for centuries, Americans have all been sold this false zero-sum story (like the the “one-up/one-down” world view bell hooks describes) that’s prevented everyone in America from having better lives through widely available public goods.
She uses the devastating example of public swimming pools, which were these thriving community resources all over the country until integration, when municipalities shut them down and literally paved them over rather than allowing people of color to also have access. She extends that metaphor to resources like affordable public education, home ownership, and health care coverage, where in all cases white Americans have drastically cut back their own access to protect where they sit in social hierarchies. While the zero-sum story has bled beyond racial divides, McGhee argues that a racial analysis is the only way to understand and dismantle it. From the interview:
It’s really important to not ignore how profoundly racialized the story of the American economy and government is and has been for all of our history. So if you try to bring color blind tools to convince people about their economic self interest while ignoring just how profoundly racialized the economic story is, you just won’t succeed.
Links
A savage takedown of corporate sustainability efforts, from a former staffer at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “Sustainable business practices haven’t just been a distraction (bad), nor a dodge of hard, controversial work (sinister), nor even intentionally duplicitous (corrupt). The approach has been evil because it represents complicity. Complicity with the fossil fuel industry and the structure it created…”
Less than one percent of Phoenix’s population, the “water one-percenters,” consume 7.5% of all water delivered by the Salt River Project. Here are some other gross factoids. In metro Phoenix, which receives an average of 8 inches of rainfall a year, water prices are among the lowest in the nation. The average resident uses 115 gallons a day, while US average is 83 gallons. Tucsonans average 85 gallons.
Four years ago, California emerged from a record breaking drought emergency. Now it’s on the brink of another one.
Isaac Chotiner has been doing some incisive interviews about the humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The latest unpacks the “interlocking set of failures” in the American immigration system that got us to this point.
Cape Cod is a COVID hot spot right now, but it’s also bracing to be flooded with tourists and doesn’t have enough workers to handle them due to foreign travel restrictions and also service jobs not paying enough for people to risk their lives.
This massive federal funeral assistance program is a grim reminder of just how much we’ve lost in the past year.
Amid a unionization effort that Amazon juuuuust now defeated, the company’s official twitter account heckled a congressman who pointed out that its workers have to pee in bottles. The Amazon account said that is not true, then later had to apologize and clarify that yes, in fact its workers do have to pee in bottles.
Following multiple audits that found no voter fraud in the 2020 election, Arizona’s Senate president is still desperately trying to find evidence of voter fraud. She recently hired a Florida cybersecurity firm called Cyber Ninjas to crack the case.
Want to read yet another article about how we are hitting the pandemic wall? Of course you do. “Things take longer to get done, she said, in part because she doesn’t want to do them.”
I endorse
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so let’s plug Hecho con Ganas, the project of LA-based artist Ernesto Yerena Montejano, who you may know from his protest art and collaborations with Shepard Fairey and others. All of his work is beautiful and he has a very active Instagram. But he also has a store where you can buy prints, stickers, and sometimes shirts. I recently bought this awesome Day of the Dead themed shirt, which sent a portion of sales to Covid relief in Yaqui communities. Go buy his stuff!
Listening
Looks like emo winter has become emo spring. Here’s a fave from Restorations, Civil Inattention.
Watching
I recently watched Godzilla vs. Kong, which is an emotional film about how patriarchy and capitalism are bringing pain and suffering to a very large gorilla and all of the people he loves and the only thing that can save him is finding the will to change so he can live a life that is not driven by violence and domination but only after he defeats Mechagodzilla.
As an honest and mostly healthy middle-aged adult, I am finally eligible to get the covid vaccine as the state opened it up to people who have one of a number of mild health complications, of which I have a couple that are frankly none of your business.
It has been fun to discover that the dystopian process of finding a vaccine appointment is a remarkably similar to when I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch online, including having to create a Walmart.com account and regularly refreshing different company websites at odd hours of the day. I hope that emerging from the pandemic is as good as Zelda Breath of the Wild, but honestly, that is a pretty high bar I’m skeptical.
I probably need to wait on the vaccine anyway as I finish up a short prescription of prednisone for a fucked up nerve in my neck. It’s doing the job but have you guys taken this stuff it is like raaaaah manic. Doctors say oh you should probably not take it at night but they should really say this stuff is going to make you vibrate and also you should avoid any online shopping. I keep wanting to shave my head again but seems like I should probably hold off I think it might be a side effect.
I hope that this newsletter, for you reader, is a lot like a short prescription of prednisone, in that it eases any aches and pains you may be having and fills you with an uncontrollable surge of energy for a little while.
Back when the pandemic was first really getting fired up, I did a little communications work on the need to ensure that public transit doesn’t waste away as people flee to their cars, because specifically in Boston, that would actually be the end of the city we would all just have to live inside of our cars for the rest of our lives moving one inch in traffic per year. But it would also be the end of our chances to keep the planet under 2 degrees of warming, as some 30% of this country’s GHG emissions come from transportation.
I was thinking of what it would actually look like for some much larger, necessary percentage of the population to have confidence in public transit such that they would rely on it even in a time of heightened public health threat, or for that matter, extreme weather as a result of climate change.
I think we can acknowledge that it would have to look very different than what we have now. It would require frequent high speed rail and rapid bus service you could set your watch to, constantly cleaned facilities, filtered or fresh air, enough capacity to be efficient but with much more personal space for each rider. From a broader transportation standpoint, you’d need to add a web of protected bike lanes and shaded pedestrian greenways.
What luxury compared to infrastructure in most of the country, right? And there’s need for improvement far beyond city commutes. Imagine visiting friends and family one city over via a cheap, fast train ride instead of a carbon-spewing flight. Reliable, community-owned energy in rural towns that residents can sell back to the grid. Affordable electric cars and trucks with enough charging stations you never have to think about it, regardless of where you live. Roll the tape on some future documentary where the voiceover is like, it wasn’t always like this things used be real shitty around here, but in the year 20XX, Americans made a change…
That is a nice little fantasy, but if I’m being honest, sometimes when I think about this kind of thing, I will ultimately conclude, you know what, this country would just never, ever do that stuff. Too much of our identity is caught up in personal possession over common good, it would just never happen. And this is, as they say, why we cannot have nice things.
That has been kind of a running thread around here for the past couple of months. We talked about bell hooks’ observation that patriarchy serves everyone poorly, that “well-being…is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others,” though the latter is seductive and celebrated. We talked at length during the pandemic about how people are so terrified of losing certain freedoms in the form of infringement, that they sacrifice the positive freedom that comes with being able to live a life that is healthy, safe, and full of opportunity. So we end up perpetually in this state of crumbling public goods, these janky versions of basic necessities that countries with far less wealth don’t think twice about having.
But I am starting to get more dare I say optimistic that maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Last week we talked about the misguided fixation on free ridership and collective action theory as the barrier to climate action, and how, in fact, actions that benefit the whole also offer clear benefits for individuals—if we can overcome the power imbalances that keep them from happening.
Now this week, look what rolls up but a shiny $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, in which climate action is central, that seems to be politically hinged on the argument that doing what is necessary to avert global catastrophe will also make our individual lives better along the way. It’s a policy package with its share of flaws, and climate people seem to agree it is far too small. It remains a giant open question as to whether it has a chance of making it through the Senate or if whatever does emerge will produce equitable outcomes. But it is without a doubt a big infrastructure thingy, and since we are feeling optimistic, we might view it as a crack in the door into that future country where we can in fact have nice things.
Biden’s bet
The Biden administration’s new infrastructure plan is big—five times what Obama spent on climate in the ARRA—but it is still not nearly big enough. That’s been the take home message from climate justice, housing, and transportation advocates alike. Keep in mind that those trying to sell the package to progressives are emphasizing that it’s just the beginning, but part of the issue is that eye-popping figure is spread out over eight years, which would end up equalling around 1% of annual GDP. Analysts from varying political ideologies have pegged the necessary spending toward decarbonization at more like 5% of GDP. The competing THRIVE Act, which you will not be surprised to learn that I prefer, floats $10 trillion in spending over 10 years. (Check out a line item comparison between the two here).
If you are thinking jfc is no amount of government taxing and spending enough for these people, the answer you will get from me when it comes to climate change is basically no. Any concerns about running the economy too hot or running up the deficit just make very little sense at this stage in the game. That’s because we are far behind and, as David Wallace-Wells points out in The Uninhabitable Earth, “Every degree of warming, it’s been estimated, costs a temperate country like the United States about one percentage point of GDP.” We’re currently on pace for something like 3 degrees of warming, and if we hit 3.7 degrees, which is on the higher end but still absolutely on the table, we can expect “$551 trillion in damages, according to at least one estimate—almost double the amount of wealth that exists in the world today.” So let’s not nickel and dime this thing OK.
But the plan is still a bfd, and it has a lot of stuff in it, which has kept advocates working overtime to sort it all out since it dropped Wednesday. There is also a lot of stuff to like (see Julian Brave NoiseCat’s collection of tweets, a thread, if you will, for his reactions). As T4America says, “We have never seen this much money for public transportation and passenger rail included in a presidential infrastructure proposal.” That includes billions to modernize transit, get Amtrak up to speed, and a line item to repair some of the violence done to communities of color and low income neighborhoods by racist city freeway projects. Transit people have their share of concerns, including that there’s an opening for highway expansion which would be virtual insanity. There’s a big investment in electric cars, which some people will not like, but that includes a national network of 500,000 chargers, which could have powerful network effects and expand where it makes sense to own an EV.
It includes plans for 2 million affordable homes which is good, but far less than competing housing bills.It does, however, call to eliminate exclusionary zoning laws that block development of multifamily and affordable housing.
In other words, it’s a big old spending bill, with a lot of promise and some great features, but also kind of centrist in some ways. It also seems to have a 2-to-1 margin of support, although sadly, the Senate is so skewed to the right, even a bill that popular could very likely get not a single Republican vote.
A wind in the door
There’s a ton to say about this package of policies and whether it could pass, but what I find hopeful about it is the fact that it is sending a particular message—that the U.S. government is going to do big things, and we’re going to pay for it with some of the obscene wealth that our economy has been hoarding at the top. The plan would reverse some Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and raise corporate taxes to pay for itself.
Just as activists during the election referred to a Biden administration as a doorway and not a destination, this proposal might be seen as opening that doorway a bit wider, raising the stakes of what government is willing to do to address several converging crises. A lot of people said that was the message of the latest COVID stimulus, which was similar in size, but that was an emergency response effort. This, in theory, is about making things better.
That’s a message that is not always prominent in pleas for climate action, because, frankly, there is without a doubt a lot of sacrifice and suffering on the horizon. But the Biden administration seems to understand the power in pointing out the ways in which climate action makes our lives better, focusing in particular on jobs, as he likes to do. There’s this engineer Saul Griffith who has been beating a similar drum for years now, citing the economic and labor benefits of decarbonizing by electrification. “I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination,” he says. “We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great.”
While I’m no techo-optimist, I really do believe there is truth in what he is saying, that we’re talking about more than just narrowly averting a doomed world. Shady trees make us happy. When we don’t burn fossil fuels we breathe better, our kids are healthier, we live longer. Just this week I was reading about how we could cover the world’s canals with solar panels, which takes up no additional land, makes the panels work better, and conserves water. Or how putting them over agriculture and grazing fields make for happier livestock, in many cases more productive crops, and more effective solar panels. It’s those little glimpses that make you think we really we will figure this thing out.
The Jackpot
The big P Problem that you knew was coming is whether we can make this transition soon enough that it won’t cause mass suffering, disproportionately distributed, and whether that transition leads to this better world for all. Or if it continues moving us toward increasing accumulation of wealth and comfort at the top and increasing tolerance of societal pain everywhere else. The techno-optimists and the eco-modernists are wrong, not because technology isn’t necessary to solving these problems, but because on its own, it just never gets the solutions into the hands of the people who need them the most.
I don’t know if old Scranton Diamond Uncle Joe’s plan is up to the task. Climate justice activists are both impressed by some features and skeptical of others. A statement from the It Takes Roots Alliance acknowledged the package as a good first step, but implored Biden to do more, and do it better. They called for a doubling of spending on affordable housing, greater support for caregivers, funding for community and tribal-owned energy infrastructure, and more direct funding to frontline and Indigenous communities. The THRIVE Act, for comparison, would create a board of representatives from impacted communities, tribes, and unions to direct funding decisions, and build in community benefit agreements and wage and benefit guarantees.
Biden is leaning heavily on the idea that union labor will benefit from clean energy jobs, which is possible but not a given. It’s tempting to brush aside fossil fuel workers’ resistance, but what’s going to ensure that wind and solar and electrification jobs will not amount to a significant pay cut?
Another way to think of this is, given the starkly unequal economy we have now, what happens when you shovel a bunch of government money into the machine? Can you do it in such a way that benefits the working class? Will it actually tip the balance of power or just turbocharge the status quo? I don’t know!
Last year I wrote about the novel The Peripheral by William Gibson, in which half of the narrative takes place something like 100 years in the future in London, and it’s a seemingly hopeful place, resurfaced with flowing rivers and covered almost entirely in greenery, punctuated with gleaming high-rise towers. There are also notably few people walking the streets and eventually ~spoilers~ we learn that this future is the product of a slow-moving, multifaceted global collapse called “The Jackpot,” which over 40 years wiped out some 80% of the population. Along the way, there was a leap in technology, but the people remaining are ruled by plutocrats and democracy has been eradicated, leaving behind a hard, vacant world stripped of any social contracts. Like I wrote at the time, “Humanity figured it out. But it was too late, and it cost us everything.”
So that is an awfully dark version of what is on the other side of that doorway to another world. So much for my optimistic post. Don’t worry, I’m like 99% certain that will be not the product of this infrastructure package. On balance, passing a huge spending bill funded by corporate taxes would be a hell of a good step in the right direction. But even in this fantasy about a better country in which we can have nice things, the trains are clean and spacious and they run on time, but the destination is not always clear.
Links
The infrastructure plan is the kind of government spending that is popular among voters in both parties, so Republicans have already begun spreading bullshit to convince people it is a bad idea.
Emily Atkin has been covering the water protectors in Minnesota fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline. “The ripples grow larger. We are protecting your water too.”
“At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits.”
More research on the disproportionate emissions from “super emitting” frequent flyers. In the United States, 12% of people took 66% of all flights. Almost 90% of the world’s population does not fly at all.
Super Link
Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins has been intentionally not prosecuting crimes by non-violent offenders, an agenda she ran on. Cops and judges have fought her every step of the way, in some cases illegally. Rollins opened up the county’s data for an independent study on the approach, done by NYU, Rutgers, and Texas A&M.
Rollins granted the researchers’ request for unprecedented access to the data in February 2019, a month after taking office. She vowed it would be a real-time test of her public policy positions, and committed to using the research findings to shape her future policies, even if the findings turned out to be contrary to her efforts.
Researchers found that not prosecuting low-level crimes was more successful in directing nonviolent offenders away from the criminal justice system.
“Keeping these individuals out of the criminal justice system seems to have an effect; it seems to stop the path of criminal activity from escalating, and that’s the takeaway from this study.”
Watching
More of The Americans. Season 5 slows down a bit but still good. Anybody want to go in with me on a revival of EST? I think we could help a lot of people.
I love this quote she references from Bruce Sterling, “The future is about old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”
Not doing a ton of traveling by car or train or anything lately, but in my mind I’m on a bullet train to Lameham or West Lameham or Hamham where we are all going to meet up for maybe like a nice concert in the park. I can’t wait. Bring a sweater in case it gets chilly see you there.