Now comes the heat

Iam (mostly) going to take a break from writing about the war for a day, because big though it is, it’s not quite the biggest thing happening on our planet. Or rather, its widespread destruction is taking place inside a larger context. Trump’s endless folly (first tariffs, now a desperately stupid war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz) has caused what everyone is beginning to understand is widespread economic damage. As the Times reported today, “this is the big one,” and “the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe.”

On a stable planet, though, the damage might be contained and repaired; someone as incompetent as Trump (who is now describing his war as a “short excursion” and insisting that the Strait is in “very good shape”) will eventually (please God) burn himself out. Our bigger problem, as we’re about to be reminded, is that the planet is the furthest thing from stable. The backdrop is about to become the foreground, and with that the drama will shift once more.

It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental U.S., and that’s because the West broke every possible record, usually by a mile.

Several cities can now claim winter 2025-26 as their warmest on record, including locations with over a century of data, like Salt Lake City (152 years of data), Tucson (130 years of data) and Rapid City, South Dakota (114 years of data).

Phoenix, Arizona, obliterated its previous record (a record that was only a year old, mind you) by almost 3 degrees, a pummeling of a record in the realm of three-month temperature data.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, clobbered its previous record warmest winter by 3 degrees, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Helena, Montana, Las Vegas and Lubbock, Texas, were among the other cities record warm this winter.

I don’t want to brush by those numbers. Phoenix and Albuquerque have temperature records going back more than a century. If they were going to beat the old record for a three-month stretch, something that shouldn’t happen very often, it should be by a tenth of a degree. That’s how statistics work on a set that large—or it’s how they did work on a stable planet. Three degrees is insane. And if that’s insane, then what’s going to happen in the next week is truly bonkers. A giant heat dome is set to settle in over the Southwest, bringing new temperature records. As the Washington Post reported today, Palm Springs California is projected to reach 104 degrees on Monday; the old record for the date is 95 degrees. Again, that’s statistically bizarre in a way that makes my head hurt.

This record-breaking heat dome will contribute to worsening drought conditions across the Intermountain West.

In Utah, snowpack remains at record low levels according to Meyer. He said that it would take a foot of snow in Salt Lake City for the season to catch up with even the second-lowest seasonal snowfall total — and that a storm of that magnitude isn’t expected to come.

“The knockout punch comes in the form of Utah’s reservoirs, which are only at 40 percent of capacity right now,” Meyer said. “All this means we are likely going to see some very tangible water supply cuts and conservation efforts by the state this year.”

The weather forecast and climate outlook community in Utah was “filled with trepidation” because drought relief looked unlikely, added Meyer, stressing that much more meaningful impacts were possible for agricultural communities as water conservation efforts grow.

“Right now, every drop is going to count this year,” he said.

Across the region, New Mexico was also reporting its lowest snowpack on record and Colorado was in a similar situation.

Here’s how Daniel Swain and the good folks at Weather West described the heat dome that is forming as of this morning

In fact: the strongest mid-tropospheric ridge ever observed in the southwestern U.S. in March is expected to develop by Friday, and then will probably go on to break that new record (set this week) when it re-organizes into an even broader and stronger ridge next week.

In case you’re wondering, this heat is in no way confined to land. The oceans, which have soaked up most of the planet’s excess warmth, are crazily warm right now too.

Sea surface temperatures off the coast of Southern California have risen as much as five degrees above average for the time of year, causing a strong, Category 2 marine heat wave to develop.

These unusually warm waters will provide a boost to air temperatures near the coast, especially at night, preventing them from dropping off as much as they otherwise would.

“A strong to severe marine heatwave is ongoing off the coast of California,” wrote Colin McCarthy, a storm chaser affiliated with the University of California at Davis.

In early March, ocean temperatures reached the mid- to upper 60s at Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.

“That’s the average ocean temperature for mid-June,” McCarthy said.

And here’s the kicker. All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast this afternoon, and it was a doozy.

I’ve collected 11 different models that have been updated since the beginning of March. Each of these in turn features a number of ensemble members, so that we end up with 433 total ENSO forecasts…

These clearly show that a strong El Niño is indeed likely to develop later in the year. While I’d probably discount some of the higher values (much above 3C) as outliers here, the median and mean across all the models still gives an estimate around 2.5C, which would put it notably stronger than the 2023/2024 El Niño and close to if not matching what we saw back in 2015/2016.

So what does this mean for global temperatures this year and in 2027? All things being equal, the lag between peak El Niño conditions and the global surface temperature response would result in the largest impacts on 2027 temperatures (as El Niño events generally peak between November and January). It would still boost 2026, but probably not enough to set a new record this year.

However, I have to be a bit cautious here. Long time readers may remember my post in May 2023 where I deemed it unlikely that 2023 would set a new record (given this historical lag in global temperature response to El Niño) and argued that 2024 would instead. I was partially wrong – 2023 was weird, and the heat came much earlier than expected. We think the extended triple-dip La Niña event between 2020 and 2023 may have primed the system for more rapid heating, something absent this time around. But we don’t know for sure. Fool me once, and all that.

Either way, this means that 2027 looks increasingly likely to set a new record, perhaps by a sizable margin if we end up on the high end of the range of El Niño forecasts.

That Hausfather and the brasher Jim Hansen are in basic agreement here should terrify us. We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before. If you think this is some kind of lefty enviro fantasy, check out this source: “Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again,” Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb said.

Therefore, a super El Niño in 2026-27 would disperse more heat than other very strong events in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

And were not going to know what hit us, in several ways. The substack Future Earth Catalog published an interview today with veteran Florida weatherman John Morales which was the best account I’ve seen yet of what the Trump cuts to our scientific system mean in real time.

The cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have been devastating. If you look at the statistics of forecast accuracy for tropical cyclone tracks and intensities from the National Hurricane Center, they were off in 2025. And anecdotally, I’m not the only meteorologist who will tell you that day-to-day forecasting has become more challenging. The weather models are flip-flopping from one solution to the next.

Think about how many times TV meteorologists in the fall of 2025 had to show you two or three models with different solutions and say, “Well, this is what this model says, but yesterday it was saying something different.” That leads to more confusion among the public — and it makes our job of saving life and property more difficult.

We’ve been missing 15 to 20 percent of our weather balloon data. And those missing balloons are upstream — out West, in the Plains, in the Intermountain West, and especially in Alaska. That’s where our weather comes from. We’re no longer able to really know what’s going on out there. And nothing provides the detail weather balloons can: every 15 feet, all the way up to 100,000 feet.

So we may not know what’s coming, but we can guess it’s going to be bad. For instance, I noted before that the western snowpack is at record low levels. Even in California, which, due to a couple of record-level atmospheric rivers off the warm Pacific saw lots of midwinter snow, the early heat in the Sierras has already led to widespread melt. I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.

And what’s happening in the U.S. will be paralleled in places around the planet as El Niño takes us up the escalator. A new study just found that rising temperatures are already taking many humans past the point where they can live with any kind of comfort. As Todd Woody reports, " the number of days where extreme heat makes it too dangerously hot to walk the dog, sweep the porch and engage in other ordinary pursuits has doubled around the world over the past 75 years, according to new research."

Scientists determined that on average, those 65 and older experience a month a year when heat prevents them from routine activities. Parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and North America are becoming unlivable for senior citizens, the researchers said. Younger adults also are losing time as climate-driven heat restricts their lives for 50 hours a year.

Overall, more than a third of the global population resides in regions where heat severely affects daily life, according to the peer-reviewed paper published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research: Health.

But it may be getting too hot for some key physical systems too. It seems likely that this is the year the Colorado River system may finally have to deal with the fact that it simply can’t provide the water people have been counting on. A new study last week found clear signs that the Gulf Stream is beginning to drift northward, a “clear sign” that worries about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) are no mere phantasm.

The findings indicate that the movement of the Gulf Stream could be a “canary in the coal mine” for the AMOC’s collapse. According to their analysis of satellite data, the Gulf Stream has already been nudged northwards from the coast near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, since the early 1990s. This is likely to be the result of the AMOC dwindling and losing its grip.

We don’t know for sure how the Iran war will play out, nor the El Niño; at the moment, though, things look ominous. All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures. And what do you know, we have a midterm exam coming up on November 3.

A grinding, pivotal year ahead

Fonte

I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the past few days in part because the Trump administration did yet another indefensible thing—they shut down all work on five offshore wind farms off the eastern seaboard. As the Times put it, the move

essentially gutted the country’s nascent offshore wind industry in a sharp escalation of President Trump’s crusade against the renewable energy source.

The decision injected uncertainty into $25 billion worth of projects that were expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses across the Eastern United States, according to Turn Forward, an offshore wind advocacy group. The five wind farms were projected together to create together about 10,000 jobs.

The administration said there were “national security” reasons for the shutdown that they couldn’t explain but that had something to do with radar. You are forgiven your skepticism about this rationale. Retired naval commander Kirk Lippold said the Department of Defense had fully vetted the projects, and added “ironically, these projects will actually benefit our national security by diversifying America’s energy supplies, providing much-needed reliable power for the grid and helping our economy.” If you want more on this aspect, check out Peter Gleick’s fine essay. Or maybe just look at a map of Asian wind installations, offshore and on; the Chinese coast, by Trumpian logic, is apparently the most vulnerable place on planet earth.

No, everyone knows that this decision, like so many in 2025, results from a combination of two obvious things. One is the president’s detestation of windpower, because you can see turbines from the 18th hole of his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, a sight he has described as “disgusting.” (By the way, it’s a prejudice he shares with his sidekick Bobby “Measles” Kennedy—here’s the letter some of us wrote to him 20 years ago next week pointing out that he was being an ass for trying to protect the view from his Cape Cod compound). The second thing, of course, is Trump’s efforts to pay off his fossil fuel donors—they gave him half a billion in campaign help, and they are now reaping the largest return on investment in recorded history.

But there’s a third reason too, I think, and one that reminds us of the politics inherent in all of this. For New England, New York, and Virginia those now-halted windfarms offer something like a first stab at energy independence. And that’s anathema to the fascist mind, which values centralization and control above all. California has already begun to escape that control—it has so much solar and wind energy that it could, if it had to, increasingly make do on its own (and the hydro-charged northwest as well). But the northeast is the other center of resistance to Trump’s ugly project; it’s currently tied to the end of the gas pipelines stretching back to the Gulf, and Trump et al are determined to keep it that way.

And for now there’s nothing we can do about it (except go to court, which actually worked when Trump tried to shut down one wind farm in the fall). Without control of either the House or Senate, Democrats have no way to stand up to even something as egregiously stupid as this windpower ban. Getting a majority in either chamber would not rein in the MAGA project, but it would allow questions to be publicly asked, and it would allow at least a budget fight about such venality. It’s nowhere near what we need, but it’s not nothing. And nothing is what we have right now, which is why the last year has been so hard—those of us who care about, say, science and economics (or justice) have had to stand there and take it, our hands essentially tied behind our backs.

We’ve done our best in the circumstances—the No Kings Day protests, for instance, have been crucial in sapping support for what seemed at first like a juggernaut. But the reason to drive down Trump’s popularity is to make it harder for him to win elections (and harder to rig elections—the refusal of the Indiana GOP to go along with the president’s redistricting plan this month was a good reminder that Trump at 38 percent approval is less effective than Trump at 55 percent).

The elections will, of course, be a hard fight. Hard because MAGA has all the advantages of incumbency (including an ever-more-compliant media—the fact that the White House now controls CBS is a particular blow to those of us old enough to remember Murrow and Cronkite). And hard because in many places the Democrats we will need to support won’t be precisely the champions we’d most like. Prepare for a lot of tap-dancing around “climate,” for instance—what we need to hope for is that these candidates are sensible enough at least to seize on the popularity of solar and windpower and make a decent argument for energy both cheap and clean. Some Mamdanis will emerge, and we’ll treasure them, but the basic job is straightforward: beat MAGA everywhere we can, hopefully with margins sufficient to start reorienting our hideous politics.

I’ll obviously keep covering the energy marvels appearing in the rest of the world—reporting on the ongoing sunpower revolution keeps me optimistic enough to stagger on. But I think my main job over the next ten months is to do all I can to help the elections on Nov. 3 come out the right way; I’ll be writing, and through Third Act I’ll be organizing (look for the next rounds of the Silver Wave tour). Those hoped-for victories are the necessary first step to preserving both some of our democracy and some of our climate system. And remember how good it felt to take home some preliminary wins last month in New York, New Jersey, Virginia. Wiping more of the smirk off the presidential mug is our potential reward—that and a future.

In other energy and climate news:

+As they shut down wind farms, America’s energy czars are pledging billions on a particularly absurd scheme: big gas pipelines in Alaska designed for an export LNG market that almost certainly won’t exist by the time they’re built. Lois Parshley has some fine reporting in Grist

The cost is staggering: Official estimates put it at $44 billion, though independent analysts suggest it could top $70 billion. Experts say it has required substantial government support to develop and will require “a mix of public and private capital to move forward.”

The pipeline’s backers are already eyeing additional federal support, including $30 billion in loan guarantees. That backstop would leave the public on the hook if the endeavor falters, an outcome that has plagued previous state megaprojects. “Every taxpayer should be furious that the federal government is chasing this project,” said Cooper Freeman, the state director for The Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing the federal government over the proposed pipeline’s threat to endangered species.

Meanwhile, a wave of liquified natural gas development is expected to flood global supply by 2030, including from export projects in British Columbia that are closer to completion and share Alaska’s proximity to Asian markets. In a blunt assessment, independent energy market firm Rapidan Energy Group warned that investors “could incur substantial financial losses” and said the Alaska project is what happens when “politics overrides commercial logic.”

Prediction: the federal government won’t be able to find private parties to put up serious money for this project. It will be a taxpayer-financed boondoggle if it happens at all—which is the same dynamic affecting plans for Canadian tarsands pipelines. Perhaps Trump has the political muscle to make all of us pay for this folly; or perhaps the upcoming elections will provide a stumbling block (see above). By the way, a widely predicted the EU seems not to be living up to its pledges to buy more LNG in return for reducing its tariffs.

+Don’t miss David Roberts’ Volts interview with Saul Griffith from earlier today. Readers of this newsletter will be long acquainted with his basic arguments about how to make solar cheaper, but his comparison of putting solar on the roof of his home in Sydney and his office in San Francisco is truly breathtaking. (Spoiler: five times cheaper down under). Here’s how he describes the Aussie process:

You have to remember, this is a first world country where 40% of people have rooftop solar. At 40% of households having it, it’s pretty hard to commute home from work without seeing a truck that says on the side of it, “Hot Electric” or “Solar Hub Electric” or “Joe’s Mom and Her Dog’s Electric Solar and Water Heater Service.” You can probably call one of those on your commute. They will probably show up the next morning before 7 am and have a look at your roof. Depending upon their backlog, they’ll be on your roof within 48 hours. Or maybe it’ll be a week

+Robert Rosner has a comprehensive rundown on the prospects for nuclear power in the decades ahead from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Though I’m going to put in bold the question I think may actually turn out to be most decisive.

Whether a nuclear renaissance actually occurs in the coming decade or two will depend, to a significant degree, on the answers to three fundamental questions: Are these new designs safer than their predecessors? Do the new designs lead to changes in how one will have to deal with the inevitable waste products (including the “spent” fuel)? And do thee new designs raise additional (or new) questions regarding nuclear weapons proliferation? In posing these questions, I am willfully excluding from my analysis additional key questions that actually determine whether a true “nuclear renaissance” is now likely to arrive in the United States: Will the strong increase in assured 24/7-always available electricity demand continue? Will the cost of electricity from the new generation of nuclear reactors be competitive with that obtained from alternate electricity-generation technologies? And will we finally succeed in dealing responsibly with our high-level nuclear waste and move this material into permanent repositories?

+Kentucky is the absolute heart of coal country, of course—but a new study finds that if you started retiring aging coal-fired power plants and replacing them with renewable energy, Kentuckians would save immense amounts of money. As Liam Niemeyer explains,

“Here in Kentucky, coal was the least-cost way to produce electricity, but as our coal plants age and as the cost of renewable energy continues to fall, that’s simply no longer the case,” the head of the group that commissioned the report, said. “Continuing to rely on aging, uneconomic power plants simply leads us to less stable, less dependable and higher-cost electricity when compared to the other pathways that are modeled in our report.”

Using an open source electricity planning model, the report analyzes four pathways that Kentucky utilities could take. The analysis considered pending proposals to build new power plants and other planning documents filed by utilities. It found the least-cost pathway creates up to $2.6 billion in savings for ratepayers through 2050 by replacing coal-fired power with “clean energy resources,” primarily solar power paired with batteries to store the power.

+Americans have some company in our political misery. Czechia has a new environment minister, from the rightwing Motorists for Themselves party (admittedly, a great name that pretty much sums up all the forces wrecking the earth), and he is vowing that “green blood will run” as he makes policy changes. On assuming office, the new guy announced "the climate crisis is over today."

+Sadly, “enhanced rock weathering” does not seem to be as useful a carbon removal technology as some had hoped, a new study finds. “Integrating the pore water results with model analyses, we estimated that the average CO2 removal rate was 100 ± 30 kg CO2 ha–1 yr–1, which is 10 to 30 times lower than the upper rates reported in some previous modeling and experimental studies.”

+In much better news, check out these numbers: E-bike (and trike and rickshaw) sales are soaring across the planet, and doing far more than EVs to drive down oil demand. From Muhammad Rizwan Azhar and Waqas Uzair:

On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans, and trucks.

But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day—about 1 percent of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

As they point out, it comes down to money: far more humans can afford to buy these vehicles. And to operate them.

If you commute on an e-bike 20 km a day, five days a week, your charging cost would be about $20—annually.

+And one other delightful note on which to end the year. A new study is showing that growing crops in solar farms is not just good for the crops, it’s good for the farmworkers.

Agrivoltaics creates coveted shaded areas for farmworkers. That’s critical when you consider they are 35 times more likely to suffer fatal heat-related illnesses than nonagricultural workers.

Scientific data backed the workers’ instincts on the shade. Solar panels reduced the wet bulb globe temperature, a heat-measuring system, by up to 10 degrees.

Here’s an image from Shandong province, China.

The researcher, Talitha Neesham-McTiernan at the University of Arizona, interviewed lots of farmworkers. One of them confessed they found it hard to imagine ever going back to work on traditional full-sun farms — where, they added, their favorite crops had always been tomatoes, because of the shade the tall plants offered.

“By 9 a.m., in the summer, you’re just cooking,” Neesham-McTiernan said. “Being able to take that direct heat load off makes such a difference.”

Shade keeps drinking water cool too, the workers noted — a crucial benefit, given water’s role in mitigating heat stress. “They can pop their bottles under the panels and they stay cool all day,” Neesham-McTiernan said, “rather than it being, as one of the farmworkers described it, like drinking tea.”

Another worker said these benefits helped them feel less exhausted by day’s end, leaving more energy for social life and allowing a faster recovery for the next day’s work. Others said simply knowing shade was nearby reduced their mental stress.

On that note, I wish you too a week with reduced mental stress, the better to prepare for the important work ahead. See you in 2026!

Pouring Literal Gasoline on the Flames of Hate

It’s a mug’s game to try and figure out the lowest point of the Trump presidency, because he’s certain to go lower still, often in a matter of hours.

Still, yesterday for me can’t pass without comment, because it so perfectly reflects the hideousness of our moment. The picture above shows a circle of white people gathered around the president, listening to him rant about Somali-Americans. The day before he had called them “garbage,” and he was taking up the theme again, with vigor. Somalis had “destroyed Minnesota” and “destroyed our country.” The “Somalians should be out of here,” he said. I have tried to go back and at least as far as Woodrow Wilson and I don’t think any president has said any thing as clearly racist while in office, and I was not alone. Alvin Tillery, at Northwestern, told Reuters yesterday that Trump is “absolutely unique” among modern presidents in his racism—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan made “thinly veiled” racial attacks but Trump has no interest in veils, nor do his supporters. His press secretary Karoline Leavitt called his remarks “amazing” and an “epic moment;” J.D. Vance, when the president was ranting about garbage the day before, banged the cabinet table to show his raucous appreciation. Let me say plainly—this is piggish behavior. One of my my most beloved colleagues is a Somali-American from Minnesota; she has more love, compassion and character in her little finger than our president has in his bloated sack of a body. He is simply a bad man, who—feeling a little cornered—heads for the hate that feeds his soul.

But what about those people gathered around him in the Oval Office? Therein lies a tale.

As it turns out, they were automobile executives, joining Trump for a happy moment where he told them that gasoline would be the fuel of the future. As he explained in his usual thoughtful manner

The greatest scam in American history, the Green New Scam, is a quest to end the gasoline powered car. This is what they wanted to do even though we have more gasoline than any other country by far.

It should surprise no one that these auto executives stood there simpering while the president launched into his racist diatribe. Black workers have, of course, been central to Detroit’s success. They faced discrimination from the start—among other things they were often sent to work in the fume-filled paint rooms of the big plants—but still they persevered. Detroit was eventually home to the country’s biggest branch of the NAACP; Dr. King previewed his I Have a Dream speech in a wild June day in Detroit in 1963, with Rev. C.L. Franklin, best known now as Aretha’s dad, presiding over much of the action. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the chairman and CEO of Ford issued a statement saying “we cannot turn a blind eye” to racism, but that’s just what current Ford CEO Jim Farley, and all the other executives in that room, did yesterday.

But perhaps it might surprise some that they were standing there applauding as Trump rolled back fuel economy standards, from 50 miles to the gallon by 2035 under the old rules to about 35 miles a gallon. Those higher mileage standards were the tool the Biden administration was using to help nudge Detroit towards electric vehicles; without them, it will almost certainly backslide towards irrelevance. That’s because they will slow down their process of innovation; as the Times put it, the new policy

“frees automakers to sell more pickups and sport utility vehicles, which are usually much more profitable than smaller cars. It will be difficult for carmakers to resist pressure to sell these gas guzzlers.”

Here’s Lenny LaRocca, who leads the automotive practice at consulting firm KPMG:

“I would anticipate that more focus would be on the larger S.U.V.s and pickup trucks.”

So—more gas for consumers to buy (the cost of owning an EV is far lower than the cost of owning an internal combustion car), more carbon and particulates in the air, more people being run over by absurdly sized vehicles.

And much less chance that Detroit will ever be a leading force in the auto industry again. That was already seeming unlikely: China’s carmakers grow more dominant by the quarter. But the IRA support for EVs was the last real possibility, an infusion of funds to help underwrite the retooling for the world to come. But instead of fighting for that, these executives have truckled to the president, and sold the future of their companies for a few more years of turning out Escalades.

At some level these guys know what they should be doing. Jim Farley , the Ford guy who was making jokes with the president yesterday? In the fall of 2024 he said he’d been driving a Xiaomi Speed Ultra 7 for six months, and that it was “fantastic.” “I don’t want to give it up,” he added. Fourteen months ago he told the Journal that the Chinese automakers were an “existential threat” because their cars were so good. “Executing to a Chinese standard is going to be the most important priority,” Farley said.

But now that won’t happen, because these guys were more cowed by a racist president than by their Chinese competition. By the time another president with more sense makes it to the White House, the Chinese “juggernaut” (Farley’s word) will have had three more years to build up its lead; Detroit will be choking on its dust.

Hey, but at least we can tell ourselves that we’re cool in a retro kind of way. Let’s bring in another man in that picture, Sean Duffy, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, the guy right behind Trump who looks like he’s dressing for his part in Mad Men. (Gotta love the razor thin pocket square). Last month was admonishing airline passengers who dressed too comfortably; the result was the #pajamaresistance movement. Yesterday he was celebrating the new extra-pollution rules with this notion:

“This rule will actually allow you to bring back the 1970s station wagon. Maybe a little wood paneling on the side.”

Duffy’s eager to return to the 70s; Bobby Kennedy wants us back in the pre-vaccine 1940s; Trump wants to talk like a 19th century slave-trader.

The rest of us, who would like to participate in the future with the balance of planet earth, have a lot of work to do in the year ahead. Let us look on the abased truckling of the auto executives and resolve to not stay silent ourselves; we’ve got eleven months to win the midterms and break the political back of this retrograde ugliness. If you’re looking for some ways to join in, check out the work we’re doing at Third Act.

In other energy and climate news:

+ New reporting from Europe on “how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises has worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).” As David Ollivier de Leth reports

The companies, most of which are headquartered in the US and operate in the fossil fuel sector, aimed to “divide and conquer in the Council”, sideline “stubborn” European Commission departments, and push the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible”.

Chevron and ExxonMobil were in charge of mobilising pressure against the CSDDD from non-EU countries. The Roundtable companies endeavoured to get the CSDDD high on the agenda of the US-EU trade negotiations and also worked on mobilising other countries against the CSDDD, in order to disguise the US influence.

Roundtable companies paid the TEHA Group – a think tank – to write a research report and organise an event on EU competitiveness, which echoed the Roundtable’s position and cast doubt on the European Commission’s assessment of the economic impact of the CSDDD.

Vandalism, with a plan

Figuring out what the thugs are up to so we can stand up to them

It would be tempting to dismiss Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting FEMA director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:

"The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Governor Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else"

But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.

For example, the administration last week announced it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.

“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the E.P.A. Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.

This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for the Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut

The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992 — $14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.

But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.

Or take yesterday’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,

The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023

Meanwhile, energy secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News today, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to…the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.

Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about forty percent. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90 percent more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.

That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: it became increasingly clear this week that the Republican Congressional majority is all too willing to gut the IRA, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.

And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch towards spending on clean energuy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97 percent were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that

Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork and delays investment.

That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register yesterday: their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.

So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating. Courtesy of Johann Saether in Norway, here’s the Sun of the Week, from the global gallery at Sunday.earth, where I hope you’re planning your event for September 21

In other energy and climate news:

+Well, we’re finding out what doesn’t work. The giant “direct air capture” plant in Iceland, designed to filter co2 out of the air, has always been hopelessly expensive. But it also is failing to capture enough carbon dioxide to cover its own emissions—that is, it’s making the problem worse. Reykjavik’s weekly newspaper Heimildin had the data and also the reactions from good people around the world who had signed up to reduce their carbon footprints

“I’m 65 years old and retired when I was 60. One of the things I wanted to do in my later years was reduce my carbon footprint,” says Michael de Podesta, who worked for the UK’s National Physical Laboratory for most of his life, where he studied cold fusion, including debunking it. Michael is one of 21,000 subscribers to Climeworks, but after paying his subscription dutifully for about two years, he began to have doubts. Finally, he wrote on his widely read blog and asked a simple question: Am I a gullible idiot?

“I paid £40 [around 7,000 ISK] a month for fifty kilograms of CO2. I was supposed to get around 600 kilograms a year. I paid them right up until October last year and by then I had paid them to dispose of almost 2.2 tonnes of CO2 and got the tonne for around £800 [135 thousand ISK],” says Michael. He says the project seemed promising at first. He saw coverage of the project in the scientific journal Nature, one of the most prestigious in the world. The science was certainly there: CO2 can be sucked out of the atmosphere and Climeworks’ plans were ambitious.

However, Michael quickly noticed that no matter how much he paid, no CO2 had been captured and disposed of in his name. The math didn’t add up when the energy requirements were examined more closely.

Meanwhile, the project’s Swiss sponsor, Climeworks, told Zurich media yesterday that they were laying off many of their employees, arguing that the problems in Iceland were due to “ice and snow causing certain mechanisms to freeze.”

Pope Francis and the Sun

Solar panels atop Pope Francis’ audience hall in the Vatican

Just in case I thought one couldn’t feel more forlorn right now, the word came this morning of the death of Pope Francis. It hit me hard—not because I’m a Catholic (I’m a Methodist) but because I had always felt buoyed by his remarkable spirit. If he could bring new hope and energy to an institution as hidebound as the Vatican, there was reason for all of us to go on working on our own hidebound institutions—and if he could stand so completely in solidarity with the world’s poor and vulnerable, then it gave the rest of us something to aim for.

I thought this from the start, when he became the first pope to choose the name of Francis,—that countercultural blaze of possibility in a dark time—and when he showed his mastery of the art of gesture, washing the feet of women, of prisoners, of Muslim refugees. (Only Greta Thunberg, with her school strike, has so mastered the power of gesture in modern politics).

But he brought that moral resolve to the question of climate change, making it the subject of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, the most important document of his papacy and arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium. I spent several weeks living with that book-length epistle in order to write about it for the New York Review of Books, and though I briefly met the man himself in Rome, it is that encounter with his mind that really lives with me. Laudato Si is a truly remarkable document—yes, it exists as a response to the climate crisis (and it was absolutely crucial in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, consolidating elite opinion behind the idea that some kind of deal was required). But it uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.

The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” Men and women, he writes, have from the start intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.

In our world, however, “human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.

The deterioration of the environment, he says, is just one sign of this “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.”

I think Francis’s project for the earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time. But it will take time—obviously for the moment we’ve chosen the opposite path, as exemplified by the fact that J.D. Vance, scourge of the refugee, darkened his last day on earth.

In the meantime, Francis was very much a pragmatist, and one advised by excellent scientists and engineers. As a result, he had a clear technological preference: the rapid spread of solar power everywhere. He favored it because it was clean, and because it was liberating—the best short-term hope of bringing power to those without it, and leaving that power in their hands, not the hands of some oligarch somewhere.

As a result, he followed up Laudato Si with a letter last summer, Fratello Sole, which reminds everyone that the climate crisis is powered by fossil fuel, and which goes on to say

There is a need to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality. Mankind has the technological means to deal with this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic and political consequences, and, among these, solar energy plays a key role.

As a result, he ordered the Vatican to begin construction of a field of solar panels on land it owned near Rome—an agrivoltaic project that would produce not just food but enough solar power to entirely power the city-state that is the Vatican. It is designed, in his words, to provide “the complete energy sustenance of Vatican City State.” That is to say, this will soon be the first nation powered entirely by the sun.

The level of emotion—of love—in this decision is notable. The pope named “Laudato Si” (“Praised be”) after the first two words of his namesake’s Canticle to the Sun, and Fratello Sole was even more closely tied—those are the words that the first Francis used to address Brother Sun. I reprint the opening of the Canticle here, in homage to both men, and to their sense of humble communion with the glorious world around us.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,

And first my lord Brother Sun,

Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.

How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!

Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

The world is a poorer place this morning. But far richer for his having lived.

+Steve Chapple has an important interview with Ralph Keeling, whose father Dave set up the instrument on Mauna Loa that monitors co2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Ralph, on the faculty of Scripps Oceanographic, helps keep up that work, and also oversees a variety of other atmospheric monitoring projects. There’s no one alive better positioned to understand the risks that come with the slashing in government funding for climate science

I guess I'd also say that, you know, the US really has led in this in the past, and what's basically underpinned our prosperity and our stature in the world in the last few decades is the US investment in science in general and our investment in the climate, the science of climate and weather and environmental change puts us also in the forefront of understanding these things. So we have been leaders. We're a magnet for talent or have been and that's that's served us well.

+The cement industry puts a lot of carbon into the air. There are ways to fix that…all of which just got harder thanks to Trump.

The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association also got word earlier this year that it lost its EPA funding. The association was planning to use its $9.6 million grant to help concrete producers develop “environmental product declarations” so government agencies and other customers could identify which products have a low-carbon footprint.

The grant would have boosted demand for low-carbon products, Lemay said. But the Trump administration’s EPA canceled it along with 48 others.

“That just means that we're not going to have the benefit of the federal government accelerating our progress,” Lemay said. “That would have helped. Clearly.”

+We need something beautiful, and here it is. Listen to Bach’s Trio Sonata #5 for organ, set against 60 photos from astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who just returned from their extended stay on the ISS. Such thanks to the people at Earth Music Theater for this ongoing work—this is literally what we’re fighting for, folks.

Dr David Boyd UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment on the Rights of Nature

O Dr. David R. Boyd é o Relator Especial da ONU para os direitos humanos e o ambiente (2018-2024) e professor de Direito, Políticas Públicas e Sustentabilidade na Universidade da Colúmbia Britânica, com nomeação conjunta no Instituto de Recursos, Ambiente e Sustentabilidade e na Escola de Políticas Públicas e Assuntos Globais. Boyd é também autor de dez livros e de mais de 100 relatórios e artigos sobre direito e políticas ambientais, direitos humanos e direito constitucional. Os seus livros incluem Os Direitos da Natureza (ECW Press, 2017), O Ambientalista Otimista (ECW Press, 2015), O Direito a um Ambiente Saudável (UBC Press, 2012) e A Revolução dos Direitos Ambientais (UBC Press, 2011). FORUM 2023 A Democracia da Terra e os Direitos da NaturezaApresentado online na quinta-feira, 12 de outubro de 2023Com o Chefe Arvol Looking Horse, Sua Santidade o Sakya Trichen, a Dra. Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, Matthew Fox e oradores da ONU, da Casa Branca, do Centro para os Direitos Democráticos e Ambientais, do Movimento do Naturalismo Religioso e mensagens de líderes indígenas sobre os Direitos da Natureza de todo o mundo.

Emergência Climática

  Fonte: Our World In Data   

As alterações climáticas estão aí. As cheias atingiram fortemente a região de Lisboa e Alto Alentejo. Se bem que habitualmente os cépticos climáticos tendencialmente sejam conservadores e da ala direita, o aquecimento global não tem cor política. Estamos mais ou menos 30 anos atrasados na mitigação e correcção de erros urbanísticos e turísticos por causa deste desgaste esquerda/direita. Fim aos combustíveis fósseis e transição agrícola mais ecológica, esse é o caminho.

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Dahr Jamail - The End of Ice (livro, resenhas e entrevistas)

Acclaimed on its hardcover publication, a global journey that reminds us “of how magical the planet we’re about to lose really is” (Bill McKibben)

“Assiduously researched, profoundly affecting, and filled with vivid evocations of the natural world. Jamail’s deep love of nature blazes through his crisp, elegant prose.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Finalist, 2020 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.

In The End of Ice, we follow Jamail as he scales Alaska’s Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the warm crystal waters of the Coral Sea only to find bleached coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its collapsing food web.

Accompanied along the way by climate scientists and people whose families for centuries have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet’s wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.

The End of Ice offers an essential firsthand chronicle of the catastrophic reality of our situation and the incalculable necessity of relishing this vulnerable, fragile planet while we still can.

Dahr Jamail [wiki]

Dahr Jamail [site]

Livro - "Our Synthetic Enviroment", 60 anos depois

Fonte: Jacobin, 20/07/2021

Murray Bookchin passou cinquenta anos articulando um novo projeto emancipatório, um que colocaria a ecologia e a criatividade humana no centro de uma nova visão de socialismo.

Eis um pensador que, no início dos anos 60, declarou as mudanças climáticas como sendo um dos problemas definidores da época. Bookchin via a crise ambiental como sendo o coveiro do capitalismo.

Mas ele também insistiu que devemos continuar alertas a possibilidades de pós-capitalismo, que podem surgir de dentro do capitalismo. De “tecnologias liberatórias” de renováveis a desenvolvimentos em “miniaturização” e automação, combinadas com formas mais amplas de reorganização social e política, podem abrir possibilidades sem precedentes para a autogestão e abundância sustentável.

Nos anos 70 e 80, Bookchin sugeriu que, um ambientalismo obcecado com a escassez, austeridade e a defesa da “natureza pura”, não chegaria a lugar algum. O futuro se encontrava em uma ecologia urbana social, que leva em conta a preocupação das pessoas em ter uma vida melhor, e podemos articular isso na forma de uma nova visão republicana de política e uma nova visão ecológica das cidades.

Nos anos 90, no ápice do pós modernismo, Bookchin argumentou que uma Esquerda que reduz a modernidade e o humanismo a uma caricatura se tornaria ativamente reacionária.

Ele morreu em 2006, politicamente isolado e resignado com a falha de seu projeto.

Uma década depois, Bookchin parece estar em todo lugar, desde a revista The New York Times, até a Financial Times. De repente, a citação desse esquerdista revolucionário está na moda na maioria das publicações convencionais. Por que isso?

Caos no Oriente Médio, particularmente a defesa da zona autônoma em Bakur, Rojava, e as regiões no sudeste da Turquia, por parte dos lutadores Curdos, é particularmente responsável pela atual onda de atenção da mídia convencional.

Abdulah Öcalan, o líder do Partido dos Trabalhadores do Curdistão (PKK), rompeu com o marxismo-leninismo em 2004 e se declarou um seguidor de Bookchin. Öcalan, argumentou que, o sistema de confederação de democracias participativas, proposto por Bookchin, fornecia a base de um novo modelo de modernidade democrática para além das Nações-Estado: não somente para os Curdos, mas para toda a região.

O aumento na popularidade de Bookchin, no entanto, precede Öcalan e os Curdos.

É o “Bookchin ecologista social” que retornou às discussões ambientais, particularmente a luz de debates sobre “o antropoceno”.

Bookchin antecipou muito dessa discussão há 30 anos atrás. Num debate ingrato que ele teve com vários “ecologistas”, argumentou que nós devemos reconhecer o quanto a história social e a história natural se tornaram profundamente emaranhadas.

Ele também sustentava que, a tendência generalizada de se culpar um “anthros” genérico, por causa de uma crise ambiental gerada pelo capitalismo era completamente enganadora. Uma ecologia social deve rejeitar a visão misantrópica de que, os humanos são “degradadores ambientais” inerentes, e afirmar o nosso papel como administradores criativos da Terra.

Talvez o mais surpreendente, tenha sido a maneira com a qual Bookchin surgiu como um ponto de referência chave, na tentativa contínua de se tentar entender o cenário político do pós Occupy.

A visão de Bookchin, que a democracia urbana deve ser revitalizada através do modelo de assembléia popular, levou seus apoiadores anarquistas a declarar que ele quase antecipou as formas políticas que o Occupy procurava defender.

Em contrapartida, um crescente números de devotos marxistas argumentam que foi “Bookchin, o ex-anarquista” que dá uma boa ideia do porque o Occupy se desmantelou e sumiu. Eles observaram que seus últimos escritos são crescentemente críticos às tomadas de decisões orientadas por consenso. Bookchin acreditava na construção de assembleias populares, mas, contra muitos dos anarquistas do Occupy, ele também acreditava em liderança política e em mobilizar o público através de um número claro de demandas.

Então, qual é o Bookchin que poderia ser mais útil para o nosso momento político atual? Existem quaisquer fundamentos para se acreditar que seus textos podem realmente oferecer maneiras de pensar, para além dos “vermelhos”, “pretos” e “verdes”?

Ecology Or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Ecologia ou Catástrofe: A Vida de Murray Bookchin), uma nova biografia por Janet Biehl (colaboradora, co-escritora, editora e parceira de 20 anos de Bookchin), fornece um ponto de partida produtivo para avaliar o legado de Bookchin.

Vermelho, preto e verde

Em seu livro meticuloso e frequentemente tocante, Biehl demonstra que uma das razões pelas quais Bookchin atraiu e perdeu tantas audiências diferentes ao longo de sua longa vida acadêmica, é porque a sua história política teve seu apogeu e queda juntamente com a esquerda política do século XX: ele participou da “velha esquerda”, da nova esquerda, da esquerda verde e no impasse final do socialismo no século XX.

Murray Bookchin nasceu em 1921, de imigrantes russos judeus, forçados a emigrar para o Bronx por causa do fracasso da revolução de 1905. Sua avó mais radical, que fora membro do Social Revolucionários na Rússia, teve um importante papel em sua criação.

Criado em uma casa onde retratos dos assassinos de Rosa Luxemburgo e do Czar Alexandre adornavam as paredes, Bookchin se lembrava de que, quando criança, sabia mais sobre os revolucionários russos do que sobre Robin Hood. Ele perdeu sua amada avó quando tinha 10 anos, seu pai o abandonara, deixando somente ele e sua mãe que, conta Biehl, era desorientada na maior parte do tempo. A vida havia ficado dura.

Biehl pinta uma vívida imagem da era da Depressão em Nova York. Bookchin e sua mãe eram quase indigentes por um período, dependiam das sopas das cozinhas públicas, enquanto alternavam entre apartamentos alugados e as ruas. As vizinhanças de imigrantes do Bronx, ricamente articuladas e profundamente politizadas, juntamente com o Partido Comunista, salvaram o jovem Bookchin.

A organização de jovens, CPUSA, lhe deu estrutura, foco, uma educação política e uma sustentação em um mundo caótico. Enquanto adolescente, ele vendia o jornal Daily Worker nas esquinas do Bronx, falava em reuniões abertas em Crotona Park e participou das greves contra o aluguel.

Depois do ensino médio, Bookchin encontrou trabalho nas indústrias de fundição e automobilísticas. Ele também era um ativista do sindicato dos trabalhadores, participando como chefe de informações e organizando passeatas.

Mas a Frente Popular, os julgamentos de Moscou e o pacto Nazi-Soviético, combinados com o que ele percebia como sendo uma falta de consciência revolucionária entre os trabalhadores americanos, o desiludiu. Como muitos na esquerda intelectual, Bookchin deixou o CPUSA pelo trotskismo e pelo Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores.

Foi lá que Bookchin conheceu o imigrante alemão e intelectual socialista, Josef Weber. Weber tinha se alistado no Partido Comunista Alemão enquanto Rosa Luxemburgo ainda estava viva e trabalhava para um jornal parisiense que Trotsky elogiava. Ele apareceu na cidade de Nova York no início dos anos 40 com uma maleta de livros sobre Marx, Hegel, teoria crítica e idealismo alemão, além da crença de que o capitalismo estava em declínio terminal.

Bookchin rapidamente se tornou seu estudante, pesquisador e por fim, seu protegido. Juntos, eles romperam com o Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores no final dos anos 40, e formaram o jornal Contemporary Issues (Problemas Contemporâneos) com outros esquerdistas.

O Contemporary Issues estava comprometido em repensar o projeto socialista ao longo de “linhas democráticas”. Como resultado, ele foi afiadamente crítico tanto com os Estados Unidos quanto com a União Soviética. O jornal procurava mapear um socialismo independente e humanista. Bookchin escreveu para o jornal ao longo dos anos 50, sobre todos os tipos de temas políticos.

Foi no “The problems of Chemicals in Food” (o problema dos químicos na comida), um artigo escrito por Bookchin e publicado em 1952, onde ele primeiro argumentou que os problemas ambientais, podem agora constituir o lugar onde as contradições fundamentais do capitalismo estão se apresentando.

Contracultura ecológica

Os anos 60 viram Bookchin surgir como o advogado de uma ecologia social. Our Synthetic Environment (Nosso Ambiente Sintético, livro lançado por Bookchin seis meses antes do revolucionário Silent Spring, de Rachel Carson, de 1962), apontou que a abundância do pós guerra estava sendo sustentada pela degradação ambiental generalizada.

Crisis in Our Cities (Crises em Nossas Cidades, de 1965) sugeriu que as crises do ambiente urbano estavam intimamente relacionadas com as crises do ambiente natural. Ambos livros argumentam que sem uma reorganização fundamental da sociedade, nenhum desses problemas seria resolvido.

Esses projetos não inflaram a atenção do público ou a aclamação acadêmica que livros como o One Dimensional Man, de Marcuse. Mas os ensaios chave – como o “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964) e “Towards a Liberatory Technology” (1965) – circularam amplamente através da imprensa alternativa dos Estados Unidos.

Em outros lugares, essas intervenções eram recebidas ocasionalmente com completa incompreensão; os situacionistas jocosamente se referiram a Bookchin como “Smokey the Bear” (personagem estadunidense que conscientiza as crianças sobre o perigo de incêndios nas florestas) quando se encontravam na Europa. No entanto, ele gradualmente encontrou uma audiência no lado mais radical da contracultura.

As políticas da nova esquerda fervilhavam no final dos anos 60. Mas Bookchin continuava escrevendo livros e artigos, e o corpo de seu trabalho atraíra atenção suficiente para lhe garantir uma posição acadêmica. Como observa Biehl, ele ascendeu a cadeira de professor sem ter tido um diploma do ensino médio. Esse “trabalho mundano” deu a ele estabilidade para perseguir projetos fora da academia.

Bookchin fundou o Instituto pela Ecologia Social (IES) no início dos anos 70, em Vermont, com o antropologista Dan Chordokoff. Como Biehl sublinha, no que é provavelmente a parte mais viva e otimista do livro, que o IES era mantido com quase nada, mas se tornou um eixo central para todo tipo de professores carismáticos e sonhadores utópicos.

No seu auge, aproximadamente 300 intelectuais radicais, ativistas, artistas e tecnólogos vinham estudar com Bookchin e participar do programa de verão de 3 meses da escola.

O IES ofereceu alguns dos primeiros cursos no país sobre urbanismo e ecologia, tecnologia radical, ecologia e feminismo, arte ativista e comunidade. Realmente não havia nada como aquilo. Os estudantes liam teorias críticas, estudavam a história das assembléias populares e experimentavam sobre a aquacultura urbana ou coletores solares.

O IES também se tornou o centro de uma onda de ativismo político que varreu o país nos anos 70 e 80: John e Nancy Todd faziam experiências com máquinas vivas e sistemas de produção de ciclo fechado, no New Alchemy Institute em Massachusetts (antecipando programas de pesquisas subsequentes na Ecologia Industrial); Karl Hess e David Morris testaram a democracia de bairros e autogestão em DC; Ynestra King e Chiah Heller fizeram muito para instigar o debate em torno dos contornos de um ecofeminismo social.

Tudo ensinado na IES em pontos diferentes. Relações longevas também foram construídas entre o IES e militantes radicais de Porto Rico em Nova York. Chino Garcia e seu grupo de CHARAS eram visitantes regulares em Vermont, enquanto eles exploravam várias estratégias de desenvolvimento comunitário de baixo para cima, e organizações socioecológicos em suas vizinhanças no Lower East Side.

Mas enquanto os panoramas políticos são variados e efervescentes nos primeiros três quartos Ecology or Catastrophe, é chocante como eles se contraem na reta final do livro.

Desencanto

No final dos anos 80, e durante os anos 90, Bookchin e Biehl se dedicaram a apoiar uma política confederada municipalista, focada na assembléia popular. Panfletos e livros jorraram de sua pequena casa em Burlington, Vermont, que procuravam convencer os não iniciados e a fazer uma verdadeira batalha de ideias com os céticos.

Ecology or Catastrophe, detalha numerosos momentos críticos, quando esse projeto político pareceu ganhar alguma força. O advento de movimentos urbanos, como o Movimento dos Cidadãos de Montreal, no Canadá; movimentos pela democracia de bairro na Espanha, Grécia e Noruega; e o socialismo municipal na Grã Bretanha, todos pareceram ter algum potencial em diferentes pontos da linha do tempo.

Biehl documentou como Bookchin passou um bom tempo nos anos 80 dialogando com as alas de esquerda dos Verdes alemães. Ele tentou convencê-los, sem sucesso, que o caminho parlamentar era uma rua sem saída, e que seria melhor se eles perseguissem uma alternativa municipal confederada.

De volta a casa, em Burlington, ele bateu boca com Bernie Sanders. Ambos tentaram construir um tipo de força política que teria algum poder latente: the Left Green Network, the Burlington Greens, the Social Ecology project, The Communalist Project (A rede da Esquerda Verde, Os Verdes de Burlington, o projeto Ecologia Social, o projeto Comunalista)…

Cada momento cintilou e depois desapareceu. Os tempos estavam fora de sincronia. Biehl também reconhece que nunca foi muito fácil de se trabalhar com Bookchin. Ele tinha uma visão singular e não podia comprometê-la.

Em seus últimos anos, doença, derrotas políticas, polêmicas sem fim, e batalhas com uma crescente lista de inimigos políticos, deixaram Bookchin exausto. O dinheiro estava apertado, mas mais do que qualquer coisa, Bookchin estava profundamente desapontado com o retrocesso político que via ao seu redor.

A popularidade de um pós modernismo irracional na academia era uma coisa, mas a explosão de formas completamente irracionais de ecologia e anarquismo, partiu seu coração. Ele rompeu com o anarquismo em 2002 e começou a referir a si mesmo com um comunalista ou um socialista.

Bookchin e Biehl, em seu projeto final juntos, embarcaram em uma releitura de quatro volumes das tradições revolucionárias, que pretendia retornar as lutas por democracia popular, para seu lugar central na história das revoluções. Isso o manteve vivo, deu a eles um projeto comum para se trabalhar; mas política e pessoalmente eles estavam se afastando.

Bookchin manteve um comprometimento militante com as tradições revolucionárias e com o municipalismo confederado até o final. Biehl revela que ela, ao menos, abandonou a esperança. Ela voltou a ser uma “social democrata”, a visão política que ela defendia antes de conhecer Bookchin.

Uma nova audiência

O que a esquerda do século XXI pode aprender com Bookchin?

Bookchin acertou em muitas coisas. Seus escritos sobre crise capitalista e ecologia, a promessa de eco tecnologias liberatórias, as novas formas de prazer e lazer que uma reorganização racional, social e ecológica poderiam fornecer, foram importantes e trouxeram epifanias.

Socialistas com viés ecológico ainda podem aprender deste chamado por uma ecologia urbana, que expande os reinados da liberdade, autogestão e mudança técnico-social.

Nós precisamos de formas de urbanismo ecológico e reestruturação eco tecnológica que visem mais do que resultados tecnocráticos de baixo carbono. Como Bookchin dizia, nós devemos aspirar a formas sócio técnicas que, na medida do possível, retornem um senso de “senso de si mesmo e competência” para uma “cidadania ativa”.

Ecology Or Catastrophe, de Biehl, também é importante no sentido de que, sublinha como o Instituto de Ecologia Social, no seu ápice, colocou em prática uma política ecológica e criativa, que se mostrou um desafio direto às pressuposições ideológicas do ambientalismo malthusiano.

Artes públicas, experimentos coletivos em ecodesign e tecnologia; tentativas de se cultivar sistemas participativos de inovação social, urbana, cultural e comunitária; uma política ecológica de prazer, podem ser ridicularizados pelos puristas. Mas é impressionante o quanto a política apocalíptica da esquerda ecológica contemporânea está distante desse projeto. A ideia de que não podemos aspirar a simplesmente diminuir nosso rastro ecológico, mas a criar um rastro ecológico melhor, parece ter desaparecido completamente.

Mas a biografia de Biehl também serve como lembrete de que o projeto de Bookchin vem com muitos problemas não resolvidos.

Social e trabalhista

O desejo de Bookchin de evitar o reducionismo de classe era importante, assim como sua ênfase em uma política que alcance as pessoas fora de seus ambientes de trabalho. Mas seu desejo de evitar o trabalhismo vulgar era muito radical – a questão do trabalho desaparece da sua ecologia social.

Nós podemos, ou não, estar indo em direção a uma nova onda de automação pós-industrial, nas economias avançadas. Ninguém realmente sabe. O que nós sabemos é que, no aqui e agora, o local de trabalho continua sendo um local crítico de exploração, vigilância e enorme falta de liberdade.

Como a mobilização Fight for US$ 15 nos lembrou, o ambiente de trabalho continua sendo um local chave para mobilizar pessoas, por melhores termos e condições, que podem então, levar a futuras lutas por mais autonomia e autogestão tanto dentro, como fora do ambiente de trabalho. (O Fight for $15, ou lute por US$ 15, é um movimento estadunidense que se iniciou em 2012, quando 200 trabalhadores do ramo de fast food saíram de seus postos de trabalho para exigir um salário mínimo de US$ 15 por hora, além de direitos trabalhistas, na cidade de Nova York.)

O modelo de assembleia popular tem uma longa e nobre história dentro da esquerda. Ele continua a inspirar mobilizações políticas da Argentina à Rojava. Mas permanecem questões críticas a respeito de quanto uma estratégia focada na assembleia de bairro sozinha pode ser realizada e como essas formas vão se relacionar com outros locais e níveis de atividade política.

O dilema é bastante simples. Se as assembleias de bairro fazem muito pouco, tornam-se impotentes e inúteis, mas se prometem muito, é uma receita para disfunção e impasse político.

Bookchin favorecia uma visão maximalista e ele achava que uma estrutura de governo confederada poderia “passar quaisquer amarrotados”. Há razões para acreditar que, a menos que os projetos de reconstrução de democracias urbanas robustas sejam mais diferenciados, multifacetada – e claramente conectados a projetos para construir a democracia industrial no local de trabalho, a democracia cultural na vida cotidiana e as contínuas batalhas políticas para defender, expandir e transformar o Estado administrativo – a política municipal poderia facilmente fracassar.

Sem uma política complexa que avance em muitas frentes, assembleias de bairros podem facilmente se tornar políticas que são ocupadas por descompromissados que tem tempo de sobra. Pessoas que estão trabalhando 50 horas por semana e têm que equilibrar o cuidado de crianças e idosos não terão voz.

A mudança do foco na ecologia social, de produção da “comunidade” também levanta sérias preocupações. Se atentar a preocupações locais sobre o social e o ambiental, tem seu valor. Experiências comunitárias, para desenvolver diferentes formas de ecologias sociais participativas locais, podem construir solidariedade cívica e competências.

Mas nós também sabemos que todos esses projetos vêm com políticas complicadas de classe, gênero e questões raciais. Também é justo apontar que soluções comunitárias para problemas complexos, tanto locais, quanto globais – desde a produção de comida até a manufatura de bens – podem rapidamente atingir limites.

Mais uma vez, tratando do trabalho como local crítico para se entender o metabolismo entre “sociedade” e “natureza”, se torna criticamente importante aqui. O processo de produção é um local onde contradições sócio-ecológicas, de local a global, se põem em evidência, e onde as tendências universalizantes de conectar as pessoas, materiais, não-humanos e múltiplas ecologias diversas, em vastas cadeias de mantimentos, se tornam mais aparentes.

O trabalho também é um local crítico onde, alianças trabalhista-ambientais alternativas possam ser reconstruídas, que impulsionem trabalhos verdes, de propriedade dos trabalhadores, cooperativas sustentáveis, reestruturação eco-industrial e “simples transições”, ao redor do globo.

É através da construção dessas cadeias trabalhista-ambientais, coalizões e solidariedades que, a geografia espacial de uma visão mais multifacetada e diferenciada, de um futuro sustentável, possa vir mais claramente à tona.

Tecnologia e ecologia urbana

Questões sobre a política de escalas também cercam a visão de Bookchin sobre o futuro do urbanismo e da tecnologia.

As possibilidades de construir uma política de “tecnologias libertadoras” que têm o potencial de contribuir para a autogestão popular claramente se expandiram muito além do palete de energias renováveis distribuídas, minaturação mecânica e automação que empolgou Bookchin na década de 1960.

Produção de pessoa para pessoa, softwares abertos, fabricação digital, propostas para plataformas cooperativas, economias circulares, ecologias industriais, e por aí vai, podem todos contribuir para a visão de uma tecnocultura sustentável alternativa do futuro.

No entanto, muitas dessas mesmas tecnologias que proclamam aumentar as possibilidade de autonomia e auto organização, em dada escala espacial, podem muito bem ser dependentes de infraestruturas centralizadas, instituições de pesquisas, formas de especialidades, e uma complexa divisão de trabalho, em outra escala espacial.

Além disso, o material para se fazer painéis fotovoltaicos e celulares, turbinas e sistemas de armazenamento de energia, não crescem em árvores. São cavados do solo em alguns lugares e despejados fora das vistas em outros lugares.

Nesse quesito Bookchin está certo. Nós vamos precisar ecologizar e democratizar nossos mundos urbanos. Estratégias para construir um futuro urbanista equitativo e participativo, marcado por moradias públicas luxuosas e sustentáveis, requintados parques e jardins públicos, novas maneiras de mobilidade sustentável e espaços e bens públicos compartilhados de alta qualidade, quase certamente terão de combinar estratégias de baixo para cima e de cima para baixo. Assembleias de bairros de baixo para cima podem ser vitais, mas ganhar o poder público para direcionar investimentos, decisões e demandas por bancos de investimentos populares, regionais ou nacionais, também é central.

Assegurando o que Mumford chamou de “a arte de se fazer cidades”, seja uma arte pública, ao invés de um segredo privado, também pode requerer algo a mais do que chamadas de democracia urbana tete-a-tete, ou um retorno da tecnocracia da esquerda, fundamentada no “mamãe sabe o que é melhor”.

Nós precisamos construir diversos fóruns, onde “experts em se fazer cidades” (planejadores, paisagistas, arquitetos, designers, etc.), são colocados em diálogos constantes com “experts em se viver em cidades” (ou seja, públicos com sabedoria para lidar com a difícil tarefa de projetar futuros urbanos alternativos). Disso, poderiam surtir meios muito mais frutíferos de se pensar sobre o design democrático das cidades.

As escalas liberatórias mais amplas, de nossa futura paisagem urbana e rural, vão ser mais bagunçadas, complicadas, e pobremente capturada pela binária visão de “descentralização = bom” e “centralização = ruim”. Em muitos casos, a densificação de nossas cidades, subúrbios e ex-centros existentes será muito mais importante para os futuros de baixo carbono do que encorajar os tipos de paisagens descentralizadas previstas por Bookchin.

Redução e aumento de escala

É a mudança climática que apresenta a questão mais politicamente urgente em relação às formas de ecologia social que podem construir um futuro socialmente justo e ecologicamente lógico.

Bookchin, merece um crédito enorme por ter sido uma das primeiras vozes radicais a insistir que a esquerda deve se mobilizar em torno da mudança climática. Hoje devemos cortar a emissão de gases estufa em até 90%, em talvez 50 anos, garantindo que mais do que 9 bilhões de pessoas tenham acesso à uma vida decente.

A tarefa é monumental. A resposta liberal tecnocrática padrão a esse desafio focou toda a atenção na importância de se descarbonizar nossas fontes de energia. Mas isso não é o suficiente.

Nós devemos construir uma nova infraestrutura de energias pós-carbono, eletrificar e diversificar os transportes, encontrar novas maneiras de se viajar e enviar bens, e desenvolver materiais de construção vastamente mais eficientes, em escalas continentais.

Áreas costeiras, em muitos lugares, terão de ser mais resilientes e robustas, reposicionadas, e talvez deslocada para outro lugar ou mesmo abandonadas. Padrões de consumo, com premissas em um modelo de consumo do “berço ao túmulo”, terão de ser superadas por ecologias sociais justas e sustentáveis, que vão nos levar da quantidade para a qualidade, de propriedade à acessibilidade, da obsolescência programada para bens duráveis de alta qualidade, que poderão facilmente ser desmontados e reutilizados.

Isso tudo é verdade, mas, essa reflexão raramente divaga em considerar, como esse projeto pode requerer também, a desmilitarização, a democratização da criação de valores e poder econômico, ou a necessidade de democratizar nossas decrépitas instituições políticas.

Então, como fica o legado de Bookchin?

Forças curdas, atualmente tentando sustentar sua democracia comunalista contra os ataques militares do presidente Turco, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, e do Estado Islâmico, têm de ser apoiadas. O que elas alcançaram até hoje, estando nas condições brutais em que se encontram, não é nada senão excepcional.

Em termos de políticas de gênero, eles parecem já ter ultrapassado Bookchin. Nós deveríamos aprender com a tentativa extraordinária de enfraquecer o patriarcado e institucionalizar a democracia popular, e esperamos que isso os mantenha em um caminho geralmente progressista.

Mas deveríamos tomar cuidado com generalização da relevância desse experimento para outros lugares e problemas.

Em termos de problemas climáticos, nós hoje sabemos que os gases estufa que já foram liberados na atmosfera, já “colocaram no forno” do nosso sistema um certo nível de aquecimento e aumento no nível do mar, que vai durar por séculos. Isso quer dizer que, nós agora estamos lidando com um sistema muito mais dinâmico e não linear do que qualquer coisa imaginada pelos radicais dos anos 60, que – amplamente desenvolvendo ideias a partir da comunidade ecológica de sua época – estavam focados em construir um futuro marcado por um “equilíbrio natural” e holístico.

A visão da contracultura de uma sociedade ecológica descentralizada “confortavelmente aninhada” em seu lugar, terá de dar lugar a uma visão mais dinâmica das paisagens democráticas urbanas e rurais, pós-capitalistas, que estão se fazendo e desfazendo, e constantemente se ajustando, às ecologias sociais aos seus arredores.

Ao invés de fetichizarmos uma rota meramente municipalista para mudança social, teremos envolver o recrutamento de muitos aliados em diferentes escalas espaciais de política para facilitar as transformações sociais, tecnológicas e ecológicas. Mais criticamente, o Estado – onde ele já existe, e onde ele ainda está relativamente aberto a influências de forças progressistas – terá um papel central nessa transição.

A sensibilidade terá de ser experimental e interativa, ao invés de institucionalmente dogmática e inflexível. As escalas humanas, de um futuro urbano ecológico e democrático, serão múltiplas e variadas.

Qualquer solução que não englobe essas questões, falha em entender o tamanho do problema em que estamos.

Biografia: 

Murray Bookchin