-- Lloyd Austin, the new Secretary of Defense, came out as a climate hawk in one of his earliest pronouncements last week. "The Department of Defense will also support incorporating climate risk analysis into modeling, simulation, wargaming, analysis, and the next National Defense Strategy," he said. "And by changing how we approach our own carbon footprint, the Department can also be a platform for positive change, spurring the development of climate-friendly technologies at scale."
-- Anand Giridharadas used his newsletter, "The.Ink," for an interview with Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, who served on the climate task force established by Biden and Bernie Sanders after the 2020 Democratic primaries. "Now we are in a full-blown emergency, and we don't have the luxury of time or of watering down any kind of plans that we have," Prakash told Giridharadas. "We will constantly have to push Joe Biden at every step of the way to ensure that he doesn't just meet these goals, but goes beyond them."
-- Writing in Atmos, Whitney Bauck provides one of the deepest accounts I've read of how Pope Francis's remarkable encyclical "Laudato Si' " is slowly diffusing out through the vast world of Catholicism, and proving particularly powerful in the Amazon. In the words of Patricia Gualinga, a Kichwa leader in Ecuador, "The changes have been felt since the moment the pope chose the name 'Francis,' who within the Catholic faith is a saint who loved all creation as a work of God. [Saint Francis] spoke with nature, understood Brother Wind and Sister Rain, and had this connection to communicate with them just like our Indigenous wise men and women.... At that moment, without knowing him, I knew there would be good surprises."
-- James Gustave Speth is among the most important environmentalists of our time. A founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, he went on to serve as the chair of Jimmy Carter's Council on Environmental Quality, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, and the dean of Yale's famous School of the Environment. He's now co-edited "The New Systems Reader," a collection of important visions about how we might rethink our economy. (I first heard him lecture about these ideas in a D.C. jail cell, to a group arrested in the first Keystone XL-pipeline protests; the quiet force of his thoughts cut through the din of that barren place.)
"ï United University Professions, the nation's largest higher-education union, which represents the faculty and the staff of the State University of New York system, is urging T.I.A.A., the giant asset manager that handles most professorial pensions, to divest from fossil fuel.
"ï Last year, for the first time, renewable energy provided more power to the European Union's electrical grid than fossil fuel did. Bloomberg reported, "Wind and solar generation increased about 10% compared to 2019. Coal production fell 20%, to about half the level it was five years ago."
"ï The professional scoreboard keepers at the Washington Post are keeping careful track of how many Trump environmental attacks are being rolled back.
"ï There's been a big victory in the Netherlands, where a court ruled that a Nigerian subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell bears responsibility for the oil that spilled from company pipelines across the Niger Delta for decades. Donald Pols, the head of Friends of the Earth in the Netherlands, said, "This is fantastic news for the environment and people living in developing countries," pointing out that the legal ruling creates grounds to "take on the multinationals who do them harm."
"ï Oh, and General Motors has pledged to stop building passenger cars, vans, and S.U.V.s that run on gasoline by 2035.
Here's the literary voice of the Yaak Valley, Rick Bass, alongside the veteran Montana musician Caroline Keys: words and music from a special place.
Bill McKibben
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