Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Let’s finish the job.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

No Justins, No Peace

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Climate Solutions: Happy Earth Day

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Climate Solutions: Happy Earth Day

I attended a training on the Inflation Reduction Act incentives. I’ll share what I took from it over the course of a few posts. One thing that I didn’t realize but was pleased to see is that many of the incentives are geared toward environmental justice:

Advancing Environmental Justice

Through the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA will improve the lives of millions of Americans by reducing pollution in neighborhoods where people live, work, play, and go to school; accelerating environmental justice efforts in communities overburdened by pollution for far too long; and tackling our biggest climate challenges while creating jobs and delivering energy security.

Here’s how the Inflation Reduction Act will advance environmental justice. (read here)

 

Probably the most important talk I listened to was one from Rewiring America.

Guess who is in charge?! This amazing woman:

Climate Solutions: Happy Earth Day 1

Stacey Abrams rewires and inspires

“It has to be about people getting their fair share, having a better life, and having appliances that work. We need to be able to tell people why electrification matters to them.”

We could not be more excited to welcome Stacey Abrams to team Rewiring America.

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WASHINGTON, D.C., Tuesday, March 14, 2023 — Political leader, voting rights activist, and bestselling author Stacey Abrams is joining Rewiring America, the leading nonprofit working to electrify our communities. Abrams will take the role of Senior Counsel, helping launch and scale a national awareness campaign and a network of large and small communities working to help Americans go electric. She will also guide the organization as it builds the tools and capacity to connect Americans and their communities to machines, installers, Inflation Reduction Act incentives, and jobs in the clean energy transition.

I refrained from saying “we’re saved.”  But I expect she’ll bring her ability to light a fire under folks’ asses to get things done.

There is so much information on this website it’s going to take me months to get through it. I suggest if you have questions, you will probably find the answers here:

show full post on front page

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Climate Solutions: Feedback Request

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Climate Solutions: Feedback Request

I’m working on doing – at least monthly, maybe more – Climate Solution posts.  I have some ideas of what I would like to begin with:

New battery technology

Innovations in and expectations of solar panels, wind power, geothermal, and heat pumps (those would probably be 2-3 separate posts).

I guess we should really address the gas stove vs. induction vs. electric stovetops topic.  I have several good resources on that controversy.

EV, PHEVs – what’s available now, what’s coming down the pike, including what’s new in national network of charging stations capabilities.

With a bit more research, an update on the Inflation Reduction Act and how it’s influencing smarter energy choices

And we may have someone coming on board to outline the hows and whys of climate activism.

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I have three folks I follow pretty closely and feel like they provide solid information: David Roberts’ Volts podcast, Matt Ferrell’s Undecided videos, who is in the process of building a net-zero house, and Ricky “Two-bit Da Vinci” videos, who is retrofitting an old house to be net-zero. I also follow Al Gore and Climate Reality for the latest news. And, I’m taking a workshop in April on climate solution innovations.

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Here’s what I’d like to know from you – what other topics would you be interested in? I don’t promise I have the resources to find answers to every topic, but I will do my best.

Also, do we have any experts out there who want to contribute, either through guest posts, Q&As, or helping find answers to various questions?

And finally, anyone you think I should be following on social media for climate solution information?

Thanks in advance.

I’ll leave you with David Roberts’ list of podcasts/transcripts on the Inflation Reduction Act here. 

 

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Good News: Finding Fossils and Climate Activism

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Keeping with my vow to limit my political junky tendencies, I find myself reading more and more non-political stories these days, watching more helpful youtube videos and really diving into Climate Change Solutions these days. I’m going to try and post more on Climate Solutions as time permits.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of stories I read this morning I thought I would share before I dive into my day.

The kids are all right:

Portland's Grant High School senior Danny Cage

A Portland high school student has Oregon governor’s ear on environmental justice

Gosia Wozniacka | The Oregonian/OregonLive

At 6 a.m. on a Tuesday last July, Danny Cage was packing for a camping trip with friends when his cellphone rang. The caller ID flashed “Salem.”

He picked up: The governor’s office was on the line. A staffer for Gov. Kate Brown told Cage, 17 at the time, that he had been nominated to serve on a state board, the just-revamped Environmental Justice Council.

Cage had never heard of the council. The Grant High School student had never even been to Salem.

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Cage, now a senior at Grant, became the state’s youngest environmental justice commissioner – and a fresh voice on a group that advises the governor and the state’s natural resource agencies how to identify and help communities around the state that experience disproportionate environmental harms from such things as wildfires, diesel pollution and nitrate-laced drinking water.

“I was sitting in a room with people who have been the directors of an agency or of a nonprofit, who have their master’s or doctorate degrees, when I’m an 18-year-old high school student who has none of that professional experience,” said Cage. “But I also knew that my voice matters, just as much, if not more, because of my personal experience.”

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His awakening to the climate crisis came gradually. Since he was a child, Cage had heard talk of a warming planet but initially dismissed climate activists as “vegans and hippies,” he said.

That impression changed during his freshman year when he watched Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s short film, which began: “This is not a drill … We are living in the beginning of a mass extinction. Our climate is breaking down. Children like me are giving up their education to protest. But we can still fix this. You can still fix this.”

Read the whole thing here…worth your time

I live in a place where finding fossils is…well if not commonplace, frequent. The big news for us a few years ago was when they found a torosaurus near my old neighborhood. That was fun to drive by and watch them excavate it.

Turns out there are rules for these things and former Florida man did the right thing:

What do you do if you stumble across a significant dinosaur fossil in the woods? Ask this guy.

Colorado Springs rock hunter went out looking for geodes but found a dinosaur’s tibia instead
A woman works with a fossilKate Johnson, a volunteer with the Western Interior Paleontological Society, cleans mud from a tibia bone of a sauropod dinosaur on Jan. 27 in Cañon City. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

His quest for a geode took Chad McCarty into the hills of Fremont County a mere five months after he moved to Colorado.

He was drawn to the state from his native Florida because the geological diversity would allow him to better pursue his passion of rockhounding.

But on this October day something else caught his attention — something that looked like bone. He dug around it a bit, enough to determine that it was a bone. And a large one at that.

“Then I covered it up and continued to look for geodes, because that’s what I was focused on that day,” said McCarty, a 31-year-old Colorado Springs bartender who is working toward pursuing his metal sculpture art full time.

He returned three times to dig around the bone.

Good News: Finding Fossils and Climate Activism

“It was a bonding experience,” he said with a wide smile. “Part of me wanted to keep it. It would look great on my mantle. But my conscience wouldn’t let me do that.”

He called the Bureau of Land Management and reported his discovery.

They worked to keep the dino bones in the county where they were found and it’s been a boon for the small museum and the area:

Acouple dozen children crowded along the roping that held the public about 3 feet from the new lab bench, their eyes laser focused as the technicians cut through the plaster to reveal the bones.

McCarty had been introduced to a loud round of applause, and he was assisting Broussard with the fibula. WIPS volunteers worked on the tibia. When the plaster came off, the wide-eyed youngsters grinned and applauded — along with the hundreds of adults in the room.

For the next few hours the crowd filed between the roping and table, taking photos and asking questions. More people arrived at the museum to take a look. No one rushed and the volunteers were eager to talk about how dinosaur bones are prepared. How to tell the dirt from bone. How to harden the cracks to keep the bone from falling apart.

A woman works to clean a fossil.

Read the entire story about the full find and the reveal here, again worth your time. 

Anyone have any other non-political stories that have inspired them this week?
Otherwise, this is an open thread. I’m off to work, so you’re on your own, try not to trash the place.

 

 

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Climate Solutions: This Seems Like A BFD

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I haven’t been paying attention, but suddenly this is all over the news, and elsewhere, so it must be important, LOL (No seriously, it IS important)

Here’s the live stream, you can rewind to the beginning:

So far above my pay grade, but I’m enjoying learning new things this morning.

And now for something completely different, but here is another fun discovery”

More info on this cute little bird here

This is an open thread

 

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Lula da Silva Wins* – A Good Day For Climate Action

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Brazil’s democratic institutions have long been under siege by President Jair Bolsonaro. As a result, millions of citizens have now questioned the credibility of Brazil’s elections. You’re not alone if you see a pattern closer to home. Bolsonaro is referred to as the “Tropical Trump” for various reasons, this being just one of them.

One of the reasons the world has been missing Brazil is the destruction of the Amazon, the world’s lungs. Lula and Bolsonaro envisioned opposite fates for the Amazon at a crucial moment. If deforestation continues at current rates, as favored by Bolsonaro, the Amazon will pass an irreversible threshold in just a decade or two. Scientists warn that it would transform the rainforest into a savanna that would release billions of greenhouse gases.

As president, Lula demonstrated great success in drastically reducing Amazon rainforest deforestation. Sadly, Bolsonaro has openly supported clear-cutting and burning in the Amazon for agriculture, reversing this trend. Additionally, he undermined current environmental safeguards and legalized unlawful activity. In protected regions and Indigenous territory, illegal mining and logging grew during his watch, leading to pollution, destruction, and violence.  READ the entire article here.  His newsletter is good weekly read.

More on this at a later date when I can read up more on his policies and the impact this will have on the planet’s “lungs”.

*as of the writing of this, Bolsonaro has yet to concede.

Open thread

 

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Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

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This is a Biden Big Fucking Deal. To understand it, I went to the experts I trust to tell it like it is:

Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

David is having some health issues, so instead of blogging, he recorded his thoughts:

 

I hope this is somewhat helpful and at the very least, gets you started on understanding the pros and cons of this legislation. If you have anyone that is your go-to for understanding this bill, post it in the comments.

x-posted at LivingLightly

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Climate Solutions: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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This interactive map will give you details on the number of jobs, traffic, electric savings, lives saved, along with types of jobs created.  Give it a look.

How were these numbers calculated?

All the numbers on this site are estimates. We can’t know exactly how many jobs will be created or deaths will be avoided thirty years in the future. But we do have good data on how many people it takes to install a solar panel, and how pollution affects human health. Using these data, it’s possible to make projections about how moving towards net zero will create benefits for Americans.

The estimates we use are all based on publicly available scientific projections. They’re not always available at a local level, however, so we use various techniques to sort out where in America the benefits are likely to end up. The description below explains how we do that. We’re continuing to improve our methods, so if you have ideas on how we could do a better job, be in touch!

Renewable Job Impacts

Stanford University’s 100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) Project (Jacobson et al. 2022) studies how the U.S. can make the transition to fully renewable power by 2050. As part of their study, they project how many long-term jobs will be created by building and operating new renewable energy infrastructure in every state (a “long-term” job is one that creates 40 years of employment). They also project the total amount of compensation these new jobs will earn in each state. The Jacobson et al. data include separate estimates for different kinds of renewable infrastructure (residential rooftop solar and offshore wind, for example, are likely to generate jobs in different places).

Much more at the link. I’m off for the day.

Consider this an open thread.

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