Archive for the 'General' Category

The Chilling Effect of Trump’s Climate Actions on the Climate Community

February 8th, 2025

The non-governmental organizations and institutions dedicated to climate mitigation and adaptation have long been the backbone of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, develop sustainable technologies, and build resilient communities. However, the chilling effect of Donald Trump’s climate policies has cast a shadow over this critical work, obstructing progress at a time when urgent action is needed more than ever.

Trump’s systematic dismantling of climate policies—ranging from withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to rolling back emissions standards and cutting climate research funding—has created a hostile environment for those working in climate science, renewable energy, and environmental advocacy. With government leadership retreating, NGOs and private organizations face increased challenges in securing funding, influencing policy, and mobilizing public support for meaningful climate action.

Yet reducing global greenhouse gas emissions remains urgent. By reversing its climate policies, the U.S. is not only losing valuable time but actively accelerating the depletion of its remaining carbon budget. As climate models have long predicted, predictable climate-related disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea—level rise—are arriving sooner and with greater intensity.

Recent reports confirm that we have already surpassed the critical 1.5°C warming threshold, and leading climate scientist James Hansen warns that surpassing 2.0°C is now inevitable. As Hansen states, “At the current rate, the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to somewhere between 2.7 degrees and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5-2 degrees Celsius) is pretty much dead.” (Source: [Inside Climate News](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04022025/james-hansen-research-documents-global-warming-acceleration/)).

This stark reality underscores the importance of renewed and intensified efforts within the climate action community. Despite the chilling effect of political backtracking, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and individuals must redouble their commitments to carbon reduction, policy advocacy, and sustainable innovation. The fight for a habitable future cannot be abandoned—regardless of governmental roadblocks.

The challenge now is to rebuild momentum and push forward in the face of obstruction. The scientific consensus is clear: the climate crisis is accelerating, and every fraction of a degree matters. Whether through grassroots activism, corporate sustainability commitments, or local policy initiatives, the climate community must continue to act decisively. The cost of inaction is far too high.

(Originally published at DeadRiverJournal.org)

Can AI Systems Learn to Behave Ethically?

December 24th, 2023

A dialog with ChatGPT — published in Medium and at A World that Works.

Latest Reflections (July 2022)

July 4th, 2022

A momentary pause in the midst of marginally-managed chaos. So much is going on, both good and bad, forward and backward. And yes, it’s still accelerating. The Earth’s population hasn’t leveled off yet; currently, it is estimated to be 7.96 billion (but see https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ for today’s calculated number). The rate of growth has however leveled off, from 2.2% to 1% per year during my lifetime. Eventually, the population will stabilize, but the question is, at what level?

At the moment the burden on the Earth is increasing. The planet is already in “overshoot” on seven of the nine (soon to be ten) ecological boundaries. So in some sense, we are already in the midst of collapse — and in which we are still accelerating, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, degrading the environment, and continuing the loss of biodiversity. These trends need to be reversed, sooner rather than later.

To reach even the modest goals of the cities, states, and the national government, greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2024 and then start a rapid descent from their all-time high, when the temperature is actually expected to reach the 1.5°C level.

So this is the big picture, and indeed this is a large part of what I have been focused on in the process of joining and quickly becoming Earth Regenerators’ fiscal sponsor. Meanwhile, locally, we’ve moved to Rochester, bought a small house in Brighton (an inner-ring suburb), and I’m busy transforming what used to be a quarter acre of lawn into a permagarden — an orchard, a vegetable garden, and a pollinator garden.

Writing this I’m conscious of leaving out much of the narrative and of the context of how we got here, which will have to wait for another time. What’s new, though, is the intention to keep posting reflections on a regular basis, to begin to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for myself, to be able to reconstruct at least the story from here on.

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Recently Discovered News Article on Rooftop Greenhouses

May 25th, 2016

Thanks to Google News, I’ve recently uncovered a 1981 article in which I was featured discussing rooftop greenhouses.

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Diary of the Future

February 22nd, 2014

February 22, 2014: Climate disruption is becoming increasingly evident in our times. As we begin to thaw out from what has been a surprisingly cold and snowy winter, it seems almost comical to have to ask whether this is somehow connected with global warming. It is. The southward migration of the polar vortex, which we’ve all started hearing about, is partly caused by an upwelling of warm air in the Arctic, causing the center of the vortex to rise and the edges to spill outward. This doesn’t mean that global warming causes it, but only that it likely exacerbates it, continuing a changing pattern of weather events that taken together are what we mean by “climate change.”

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

,—,”Of course this is not the first ‘Arctic winter’ to be experienced in the U.S., though it dropped record amounts of snow and broke all of the low temperature records set since the National Weather Service started keeping them in the 1870s. And the disturbance may well be linked to climate change. According to Phil Plait writing in Slate (Feb 2014): “”warming water in the Arctic leads to ice loss which leads to more warm water. Some climate scientists think this may be disrupting the air flow in the polar vortex, which in turn leads to the meanders in the jet stream. This idea is pretty new and not yet verified. But the irony is clear: If these scientists turn out to be right, not only does the cold weather not disprove global warming, it may actually be caused by it.”””
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What We Should Do about Gun Control

March 23rd, 2013

(Full text of blog pitch submitted to Huffington Post)

Although I’m in favor of gun control — for what I think are pretty obvious reasons, like not wanting to get shot by some crazy person at the movie theater — I’ve never spent much time thinking about it. But listening to the current discussions and debates in Congress and in the media has left me thinking that there’s something missing in this conversation.

The argument for people freely owning guns rests, supposedly, on “protecting our Second Amendment rights.” But what if it infringes on my rights to have guns readily available to a small minority of the society, that is seemingly angry, or fearful, or likes to kill animals? Don’t I have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that takes precedence over any other person’s right to carry a gun? And given that the Second Amendment was explicitly intended to refer to “a militia” to ensure that America remains a free state, how does it make sense to let people have guns for any other purpose?

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State of the Sustainability Movement 2011, Part 2

December 20th, 2010

As soon as I wrote the original post, of course, I started discovering new signs of our times that are not adequately reflected in my earlier assessment. Let’s consider a few examples, and see what conclusions we can draw about where we are in the process, and where we might be going from here.

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State of the Sustainability Movement 2011 (Part 1)

December 19th, 2010

In the Spring 1990 issue of In Context — which described itself as “A Quarterly Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture” — Robert Gilman described the state of the sustainability movement in his time, and I thought it would be interesting to review this and reflect on where we are today. (See “Sustainability: The State Of The Movement,” in Sustainability (IC#25), Spring 1990, Page 10.)

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Sustainable Haiti Discussion and Conference Call Sunday, February 28, 6 p.m. EST

February 26th, 2010

The “Working Group for a Sustainable Future for Haiti,” which was convened at the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at Fairleigh Dickinson University, has released “Haiti – A Way Forward,” an 8-page discussion paper intended as the basis for a conference call scheduled for Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 6 p.m. EST, and you are invited to join us.

Conference Dial-in number: (507) 726-4253

Participant Passcode: 100039#

For more details see the Haiti page at http://sustainableleadershipforum.com/?page_id=587 and our latest updates athttp://sustainableleadershipforum.org.

Toward a Sustainable Future for Haiti

February 8th, 2010

The earthquake in Haiti has been many things – including both a wakeup call for Americans, and an opportunity to demonstrate our compassion – but it has above all been a human tragedy that has revealed the weaknesses and deficiencies that were there before. A 7.5 magnitude earthquake will no doubt cause some damage no matter where it occurs, but it does not always need to cause the extent of devastation that has occurred in Haiti, or to leave the population as unaided.

Some colleagues of ours at the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise met last week to discuss what we could do to contribute to a longer-term recovery, that would try to address the social, environmental, and economic challenges facing this troubled nation. We talked about a great many things, including the fact that many of us feel powerless in the face of such catastrophes, especially those that afflict human beings in distant places. We are all “overcommitted” to many worthwhile and challenging tasks already, and taking on such a monumental task as helping to chart the way forward in Haiti clearly seems to require that we steal time and energy from other causes. But if we can make even a small difference, while honoring our other commitments, this seems a compelling goal. Continue Reading »

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