State Climate Policy Network national call
Want to learn about how climate advocacy campaigns are developing in states across the country – from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to Connecticut to Hawaii? Have an exciting climate policy update or development to share with a network of like-minded individuals?
Join us for our monthly State Climate Policy Network national call! This one-hour, once-a-month call is the perfect opportunity to learn about the different legislation and movements going on in states across the U.S. Legislators, advocates, and experts will join us and inform the network of what is going on in their state, and what you might be able to do to help.
For those of you joining us for the first time, the SCPN call is also an opportunity simply listen to other states’ updates and challenges. We typically have campaign leaders in 15-20 states calling in and providing updates, and dozens of people listening and asking questions on the line. You can read more about the SCPN here.
Feel free to contact Kristen Soares, our SCPN Manager, at [email protected] with any questions.
Please register and spread the word to others interested in pushing forward climate policy in their state.
Toxic Money: Wall Street’s Trillion Dollar Gamble With our Economy and Planet
- Sharon Lavigne, Founder of RISE St. James and 2021 Goldman Prize Recipient North America
- Lisa Anne Hamilton, Attorney and Climate Law and Policy Consultant and former Adaptation Program Director for the Georgetown Climate Center
- Tracey Lewis, Policy Counsel at Public Citizen (moderator)
This event was organized by Action Center on Race and the Economy, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Positive Money US, Public Citizen, Stop the Money Pipeline, and The Sunrise Project.
Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Environmental Policy Making: The Role of Environmental Organizations and Grantmaking Foundations
- Keya Chatterjee, Executive Director, US Climate Action Network
- Abdul Dosunmu, Campaign Manager, Climate Funders Justice Pledge, Donors of Color Network
- Mark A. Freeland, Navajo Nation Council Delegate, Crownpoint/Tse’li’Ahi/Nahodishgish/Becenti/WhiteRock/Lake Valley/Huerfano/Nageezi Chapters
- Peter Forbes, Co-founder, First Light
Fueling the Climate Crisis: Examining Big Oil’s Climate Pledges
On Tuesday, February 8, 2022, at 10:00 a.m. ET, the Committee on Oversight and Reform will hold a hybrid hearing in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building and on the Zoom video platform to examine the adequacy of climate pledges made by fossil fuel companies to reduce carbon emissions and curb global warming.
The hearing is part of the Committee’s investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s long-running campaign to spread disinformation about climate change and greenwash its role in causing global warming. The Committee will hear from climate experts and environmental advocates who will testify to the urgent need for fossil fuel companies to fundamentally alter their operations and reduce emissions, and assess whether the companies’ climate pledges will meet that goal, or are instead just the latest example of climate disinformation.
Following testimony from the climate experts, the Committee will hold a hearing next month with members of the Boards of Directors of four fossil fuel companies.
Witnesses:- Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Pennsylvania State University
- Mark van Baal, Founder, Follow This
- Tracey Lewis, Policy Counsel, Public Citizen
- Katie Tubb, Senior Policy Analyst, The Heritage Foundation
A Spine for Biden: Healthy Communities, Healthy Climate, Healthy Democracy
Arm In Arm, with SPACEs In Action, Shutdown DC, Code Pink, CCAN Action, Sunrise, and many other organizations are planning an action to call out Senators who need a spine and Biden for not passing Build Back Better who needs a backbone. We will also take on No Labels and the lobbyists trying to kill BBB.
We will be elevating the need for climate justice, transit equity, the need for child care, the child tax credit, a peace economy over wasting all our money on war, and so much more.
Join us to have your voice and story heard. We, the people, demand healthy communities, a healthy climate, and a healthy democracy.
We will meet at Black Lives Matter Plaza on Mon. Jan 31 between 6:30 am and 7:30 am (on the NE corner of 16th and K St NW). Register here or on Facebook. We will be there to welcome you. Dress WARMLY.
A Review of Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock
“People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.” — Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock
One of my favorite techniques in science fiction is taking pop-culture jokes seriously, expanding upon their ramifications with character, setting and story. Bruce Sterling’s 1998 gem Distraction opens with members of a local Air Force base holding a shake-down bake sale.
Neal Stephenson’s 2021 stratospheric-geoengineering treatise Termination Shock launches with an attack by “30-50 feral hogs,” inspired by a tweet that launched a memetic debate over whether and how much the threat of backyard feral hogs are “legit” or ridiculous.
Stephenson convincingly demonstrates that the feral hogs overrunning Texas are a demonic scourge, in an extended opening sequence in which the hereditary queen of the Netherlands, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, barely survives a plane crash caused by a roving herd.
The herd is led by a Moby-Dick-esque beast known as Snout, who killed the young daughter of one of the other main protagonists, Rufus “Red” Grant, in his yard in rural Texas. Having tracked Snout’s herd for years, Grant saves the queen and kills his nemesis. He then helps her make her rendezvous with the cornpone oil billionaire T.R. “McHooligan” Schmidt, who has begun secretly launching sulfur rockets into the stratosphere to dim the sun. This rogue effort is a cheap way to simulate the effects of nuclear winter enough to counteract the deadly buildup of greenhouse pollution, as long as the rockets keep going.
If that sounds like an enjoyable start to a novel, then you probably have read other books by Stephenson. Unfortunately, it’s by far the most dynamic sequence of the book. The beginning thrill ride is pretty much a headfake, as the book switches erratically to its main topic of geoengineering and becomes, even by Stephenson’s standards, boring and talky.3
The vast majority of the rest of the 720-page tome offers an extremely good sense of what it would be like to hang out with techno-billionaires like Nathan Myhrvold and Jeff Bezos, offering several practical tips on how to stay on their good side (he’s worked for both).
In interviews, Stephenson has said that Termination Shock is meant to describe “the geopolitical reaction” to global warming and the potential decision to engage in geoengineering. His goal was to have “realistic characters having realistic arguments” about geoengineering, in order to “make it a topic of conversation.”
I do think this is a helpful entry in spurring that needed conversation. But on its own, the book is less a serious investigation of the geopolitical ramifications of geoengineering than a monologue from a globe-trotting techno-enthusiast. I do wish his characters had any real psychological differences. It’s great to be reminded that gender, race, and wealth are irrelevant to whether you are a reliable, hyper-competent, semi-horny techno-enthusiast MacGyver, but it’s genuinely difficult to tell the characters apart when they’re talking.
So while it goes into remarkable detail on the mechanisms of the sulfur-launcher and the Netherlands’ movable seawalls, Shock’s political analysis doesn’t go much deeper than: it’s hard to cut carbon pollution, Greens don’t want us to do anything, geoengineering might benefit some regions and might harm others.
For example: by necessity of making the rogue billionaire geoengineer something of a good-guy protagonist, Termination Shock is blithely optimistic about the reliability of climate-model downscaling of the impacts of stratospheric sulfur injection. There’s the repeated implication that there would be clear regional winners and losers, as opposed to new and different forms of anthropogenic climate chaos.
As a novel, _Termination Shock_—whose truly global scope may be its strongest attraction— feels a bit too much like a collection of magazine-length travelogues; the stitching still shows. That said, the up-to-the-minute references to COVID and QAnon and the January 6 insurrection imply that awkwardness may be deliberate. Stephenson is okay with breaking the fourth wall, reminding the reader that the novel’s characters don’t exist but that the real world very much does. Set vaguely in the future, Shock is fundamentally a 700-page essay of Stephenson’s opinions at and about the moment of writing (June 2021).
As explicitly-of-the-moment climate-politics tracts go, I greatly preferred Swedish author Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, written and published a year earlier. It too has great cover art, punchy writing, and covers our global climate politics with greater insight and depth in less than a third as many pages.
However, I enjoyed Termination Shock much more than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a 560-page assemblage which has been heralded as a serious work of climate fiction. I won’t go into my feelings about Ministry here (if you’re deeply interested, here’s a thread), but one element of comparison is worth raising. Robinson has India do stratospheric sulfur injection without sparking World War III, whereas Stephenson has the U.S. (technically, a rogue American) do it. So, I guess they’re both optimists. Unlike Ministry, though, Shock doesn’t even try to imagine turning off the fossil-fuel spigot.
So far, of the three white western-American-male climate SF novels I’ve read recently —_Termination Shock_, Ministry for the Future, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Water Knife, written in 2016—I feel that only Water Knife fully worked as a novel and an analysis of politics and society under global warming.
Some of that may simply be because Bacigalupi didn’t make technocrats, royalty, or billionaires his protagonists. They certainly exist in his narrative and shape it, but their stories are, in the end, kind of boring. Like Ministry and Shock, Water Knife begins with heart-stopping action, but then doesn’t let up. It’s a much more harrowing read, but I think it would be a mistake to think of it as dystopic and the others as optimistic—they’re stories focusing at different moments of different people’s lives on one functionally equivalent near-future hothouse Earth.
I’ve been an admirer and enthusiast of Stephenson since reading Snow Crash when it came out in 1992. It was a particular delight to discover his earlier books, The Big U and Zodiac, were thinly fictionalized depictions of his and his friends’ adventures in my hometown of Boston. He was literally one of those cool weird environmentalist techno-geeks I admired as a teenager.
Termination Shock has been described as Stephenson’s first global-warming book, but Zodiac was a roman à clef about a Greenpeace activist, Snow Crash depicts hordes of climate refugees swarming a newly temperate Alaska, Diamond Age a post-21st-century-World-War-III global society, Seveneves the apocalypse. So it would be better to say this is the first time Stephenson’s work has been branded as climate fiction.
The books also track Stephenson’s progress in society, from the scrappy dirtbag protagonists of the Big U, Zodiac, and Snow Crash to the scrappy dirtbags, billionaires, and queens of Reamde, Fall, and Termination Shock. He writes what he knows!
It is fun to read T.R. Schmidt’s plot-driving actions, magpie personality, and love for explanatory bloviation as a stand-in for the author as he constructed this novel. This, for example, could be authorial self-description: “T.R. was the living embodiment of what was now denoted ADHD. He went off on tangents, a small percentage of which made money.”
The tangent-prone Stephenson really can write action sequences! And depictions of complex machinery! He and his characters have a great sense of humor and a deep appreciation for cool. And every so often he turns out a gem of a sentence like this:
“It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.”
To return this to where I started: Termination Shock shares a good amount of plot geography with Sterling’s Distraction, which also primarily takes place in the fetid Texas-Louisiana zone of a broken-empire America and gives the Netherlands a starring role in weird war. I believe that the quarter-century-old Distraction is still one of the strongest climate-politics SF novels extant, and re-read it about once a year. Each sentence crackles, the ideas come fast and furious, the politics are meaningful, the characters compelling, the plot tight and satisfying. I’d love to read more like that.
Climate Policy Network National Call
Want to learn about how climate policy campaigns are developing in states across the country – from Vermont to Nebraska to Montana to Hawaii? Have exciting climate policy developments to share with a network of like-minded individuals?
Join us for our monthly State Climate Policy Network national call! This one-hour, once-a-month call is the perfect opportunity to learn about the different legislation and movements going on in states across the US. Legislators, advocates, and experts will join us and inform the network of what is going on in their state as it relates to climate policy, and what you might be able to do to help.
For those of you joining us for the first time, the SCPN call is also an opportunity to simply listen to other states’ updates and challenges. We typically have campaign leaders and policymakers in 15-20 states calling in and providing updates, and dozens of people listening and asking questions on the line. The call is a great information-sharing and networking opportunity. Feel free to contact Kristen Soares, our SCPN Manager, at [email protected] with any questions, or if you are interested in speaking on an upcoming call.
Democratizing the Grid: New Citizen Initiatives Challenge Monopoly Electric Utilities
Many Americans have grown concerned about the monopoly power that Big Tech corporations wield. But few people realize that the problem of concentrated private power also infects the electricity sector. In most regions, electricity is controlled by a single investor-owned utility with a government-granted monopoly. Across the country, powerful utilities are actively blocking decentralized solar energy, degrading the reliability of the power lines even as they raise prices, and failing to make the grid investments needed for a clean, carbon-free future.
Join the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for an inspiring conversation with advocates who are taking on electric utility monopolies with the aim of accelerating the shift to clean energy and winning democratic community control.
Oversight of the Smithsonian Institution: Protecting Smithsonian Facilities and Collections Against Climate Change
- “Saving History With Sandbags: Climate Change Threatens the Smithsonian” – New York Times
- “Smithsonian says its treasures are threatened by floods, storms, and climate change – as Congress hears more alarms” – WUSA9
- Nancy J. Bechtol, Facilities Director, The Smithsonian Institution
- Cathy Helm, Inspector General, The Smithsonian Institution
- Phetmano Phannavong, Senior Project Manager, Atkins North America
ABC News and Climate Emergency: A Public Forum
The climate emergency is here. Has ABC News been reporting like it?
For years, the country’s most-watched TV news outlet stayed mostly silent on climate change. And when it did break its silence, it ran lackluster, incomplete coverage.
However, ABC News recently created a dedicated climate unit and committed to tell a variety of climate stories this November as COP26 got underway. Has it been enough to undo the ignorance and confusion caused by its past silence? Is ABC News now treating the climate crisis like the biggest national and global emergency of our times?
Join our virtual public forum for a discussion on ABC News’ climate coverage. We will dive into what is needed from media organizations at the 11th hour of this climate emergency, and how we can push organizations to report on climate with more accountability, with our featured panelists:
- David Fenton, founder of Fenton: The Social Change Agency (one of the country’s leading progressive communications firms)
- Hanna E. Morris, PhD, researcher of media, culture, and the climate crisis and current postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
- Ben Franta, PhD, JD, researcher of climate accountability and current PhD student at Stanford
- Amy Westervelt, founder and executive producer of the Critical Frequency podcast network and the Drilled podcast, and co-host/co-author of the Hot Take podcast and newsletter
We have also invited executives and producers from ABC News and Disney (ABC News’ parent company) to our speaker line-up. We hope that they can join us and present their perspectives and plans on climate coverage.