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I’m very glad to see the clean energy and climate leadership being provided by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, especially since she’s my governor and I voted for her and supported her campaign. It’s a welcome change from the previous pathetic pro-pollution Administration of Glen Youngkin.

But the honest truth is, it’s not enough. Being better than her pro-pollution predecessor is not enough. Youngkin doesn’t set the bar for Gov. Spanberger.

Nor does current law in the form of the Virginia Clean Economy Act that passed in 2020. That’s not the bar she must clear in her governorship.

We can take some hope from her current leadership. We can take more from our own. Combine them and we can create even more hope from what Gov. Spanberger could become with our support.

The Challenge

The figure below shows electric generation by source in Virginia. As you can see, in 2024 solar only makes up a small portion, with natural gas and out of state coal producing the largest shares. (Most of the “imports” from other states are from coal.1)

But 2024 is the past, and so is that energy mix dominated by the fossils. While we’ve got a lot of work to do, the future is clean. And we must clean out the old.

Gov. Spanberger’s Leadership Thus Far

In her first year Gov. Spanberger has already begun to change things in the right direction. Here are highlights from Gov. Spanberger’s leadership to date.

+ Rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). This 10-state program reduces climate pollution and funds Virginia programs in energy efficiency for low-income households, climate resilience, and flood protection.

+ Signed a slew of climate-friendly bills to:

• streamline permitting for rooftop solar;

• allow plug-in/balcony solar;

• expand shared solar programs and small-scale solar projects on schools, churches, parking lots, landfills, and brownfields;

• increase energy storage to lower peak pricing;

• reduce energy bills for vulnerable Virginians; and

• require utilities to develop demand flexibility programs for large users.

+ Issued the Virginia Data Center Accountability Framework as an Executive Order (EO). It lays out five accountability “pillars”:

• Engage transparently with communities.

• Protect our Environment.

• Improve Affordability.

• Advance clean energy and grid reliability.

• Deliver a better deal for our workforce.

I hope there will be forthcoming legislation that codifies this into law, but in the mean time this EO provides help to local communities in how to deal with data center proposals and says to those proposing data centers that they need to achieve these goals if they want to do business in Virginia.

+ Just released the Virginia Energy Plan. Now this one I want to dig into a bit.

The Virginia Energy Plan: Net-Zero Is The Standard

Every four years the state of Virginia is required by law to issue an energy plan. This Virginia Energy Plan fulfills that requirement.

But instead of putting together something that aligns with the common understanding of a plan (what they call a “prescriptive” approach) where one lays out how to achieve the goals, her Administration instead put forward four modeling scenarios, creating something of a plan/scenarios hybrid that, frankly, doesn’t quite cohere.

Oy vey. I wish they hadn’t done that.

In general, there are a ton of problems with modeling scenarios and climate action, and this post is not the time for me to lay that out. So I’m punting on that for now. Here I’m focusing on what the scenarios have in common.

One of the scenarios is current policies only — which includes some good stuff, the Clean Economy Act of 2020 and RGGI — but not any new proposals.

The other three scenarios with new stuff have a good deal of commonality and achieve shared major goals, as pictured in the chart below. Note that this isn’t what all electric generation will look like. It is only picturing what the new stuff could look like. Current generation isn’t pictured.

As you can see below in their “Summary of All Policy Cases Results” figure, distributed tech dominates — which they define as “distributed solar … battery storage, smart appliances … and managed EV charging” (p. 33). It’s such a major factor they label the three scenarios that have new policies as “Distributed Flexibility Scenarios.”

To let them sum things up, here’s a quote from the “Executive Brief” document of the Plan.

Virginia can meet rising electricity demand, protect affordability, and stay on a path towards net zero by building a more flexible, reliable, and locally beneficial electric system. The Plan’s Clean-First, Least-Cost approach starts with solutions that can be deployed relatively quickly and cost-effectively—energy efficiency, solar, storage, distributed energy resources, virtual power plants, demand flexibility, and better use of the existing grid—while advancing the transmission and clean firm resources, including advanced nuclear, nuclear fusion, offshore wind, and long-duration energy storage, that Virginia will need for the decades ahead. … Virginia can reduce land impacts by prioritizing solar and storage on rooftops, brownfields, agrivoltaics, parking canopies, and other dual-use sites. These investments can strengthen local economies, modernize infrastructure, and create significant jobs in every region of the Commonwealth (p. 12).

So there’s lots of good stuff in there. Net-zero is the meta goal.

Big Boost for Distributed Energy

As the chart above shows and my fellow Substacker Elisa Wood pointed out in an excellent post, distributed energy like rooftop solar — i.e., not centralized power plant energy — plays a major role.

“Positioning distributed energy as a key piece of the answer to Virginia’s power supply crunch — rather than a niche resource — it calls for scaling customer-sited solar, batteries and flexible load.”

Wood supplies a positive quote from Mary Rafferty, executive director of Common Charge, a pro-local energy group

“For the first time in Virginia history, a governor is leading with the benefits of a more distributed, local energy system in the Commonwealth’s energy plan.”

This emphasis in distributed is absolutely terrific. The problem is, we need more, faster.

To sum up: basically, this plan/scenarios hybrid is saying to Virginia’s legislative branch and interested stakeholders: Here’s some ways we can go about achieving a Virginia energy system that is reliable, affordable, flexible, locally beneficial, and on a net zero path.

The biggest problem for overcoming climate change? Net-zero isn’t good enough.

From Good to Great

Here’s the deal for those of us in The Climate Movement and others who want climate action, i.e., our Climate Action Supporters. We can no longer simply elect good leaders and then think we’ve checked the Climate Action Box.

Nope.

We must continue to grow The Climate Movement so we can both support and push good leaders to become great ones: from good to great.

Gov. Spanberger is good. We must help her become great. She mustn’t settle for good enough. Good enough just ain’t good enough.

The plan/scenarios are all shooting for “Net-Zero” by 2050, which is required by current law, the Clean Economy Act of 2020.

Well, net-zero isn’t good enough because not every state and nation is committed to achieving it in a timely manner. Others game the system by mouthing the rhetoric of net-zero while their plans have questionable actions or push any serious action to 2045 or later, cooking the planet in the process. Net-zero commitments are supposed to give us a good shot at keeping warming to 1.5C. But right now we’re not on track for 1.5.

The truth is, good must be better. Good must be great. Our champions like Gov. Spanberger must set their sights higher and achieve real results faster. They must show others that being forward-leaning isn’t just the right thing to do. It reaps rewards.

Gov. Spanberger should be aiming to be better than current law. This isn’t some strange request to make of a governor. It’s why new laws are passed and signed. Changed circumstances require changed policies.

It’s not 2020 when net-zero became the goal. It’s 2026 and we need more.

For The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters, we’re no longer settling for (net) zero. We must do better, and we must do better faster.

For Virginia, and all other states and nations, net-zero is not the finish line. It’s the starting line.

It’s Up To Us To Push For More

Every time someone friendly to our cause, an erstwhile ally, says we’re asking for too much, what they’re really saying is, “When you change the political dynamic to make this possible, get back to us.”

We must take it as a kick in the pants to grow our movement into the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. That’s our destiny.

You see, it’s our job to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster.

So when friendlies say “That’s not possible,” our response is simple: “No worries. We make the impossible possible.”

And that’s exactly why we need you. Join us!

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Ok, yea, sure, China is adding renewables. But they’re just adding it to their #1 polluter fossil stuff. Right?

Fossil flacks and climate action opponents just don’t want to give up their “Oh, but China!” dodge.

I guess we’ll have to throw them a pity party.

China Has Turned The Corner On The Clean Energy Transition: It’s Clean-Up Time

This is the year China has turned the corner. They’ve been saying what they are doing for years. In 2021 China’s leader, Xi Jinping announced the principle to guide their transition from dirty to clean: “build before breaking”.

Basically it’s the idea that before we ditch the old stuff let’s get the new stuff online; build the clean stuff before breaking with the dirty stuff.

Now do we need China to move faster? Sure. But they’re now doing a hell of a lot better than the US, and many other countries, for that matter.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read all about it in Ember’s latest “Emberiffic!” report on China.

So at what point is China’s transition? Ember’s response:

“So where does China stand in this [build before breaking] process today? Is it still primarily expanding the new system alongside the old, or has the new system begun to put more direct pressure on the fossil-fuel system it is intended to replace?

Developments in 2025 and early-to-mid 2026 point to a deeper shift. The new system is beginning to take over functions long performed by fossil fuels — across power generation, system balancing and the wider economy” (emphasis added).

The report articulates six takeaways that point to this deeper shift towards clean and green and away from dirty old fossils.

1. Clean Up, Coal Down. A Trend, Not a One-Off

“Clean power met all demand growth in 2025, and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade. … coal generation has been flat … since early 2024, following years of continuous expansion.”

As the report shows, this is a realignment away from the fossils, not a one-off. It’s clean-up time. Coal’s day is done.

2. Energy Storage Is Becoming Baseload, Filling the Generation Gaps

When clean can’t meet demand, energy storage from batteries and other tech is stepping in and filling the generation gaps, beginning to displace coal. New replacing old. New displacing old. China now makes up 60% the world’s battery market, and its installed storage capacity for electricity grew 84% in 2025.

But other storage tech is also advancing rapidly, as seen in the graph on the right, below.

3. Industry Is Electrifying The Hard Stuff

As seen below, industry continues to electrify the lower-hanging fruit and now supplies a large majority of the energy for light manufacturing of machinery (78%), equipment (72%), and textiles (71%). But the hard nuts are starting to crack as well, such as metals smelting and non-metallic minerals.

While electrotech is much more efficient, needing less power, we want that power to be clean. We want both clean and efficient.

4. Trucks, Too, Not Just Cars: Keep On EV Truckin’

Passenger EV sales continue to go like gangbusters, making up over 65% this year. But that’s not the only good news. They are starting to take off in the more difficult terrain of trucks. Sales doubled in 2024 and again in 2025, with their share reaching 26%, as pictured below (modified by me). This year the upward trend continues. In June this year EV trucks reached nearly 45%.

Ember explains why this is so impressive:

Trucks are more difficult to electrify because of tighter requirements around payload, range, charging time, route reliability and operating cost.

So, China, keep on truckin’ — EV truckin’, that is.

5. The Fossils Are Flat-Lining & Declining Across Most of China

As seen below, coal power generation is declining or flattening in half of the provincial regions or divisions in China, representing about half of coal use. In the rest of the economy, the fossils have declined significantly in the easier to switch sectors, ranging from 26% to 71%. In the harder ones, e.g., metals smelting and processing, there are signs that the plateauing process may have begun.

6. Clean is Making China’s $Growth$ Green, Strengthening Its Energy, Economic, & National Security

EVs are putting a big dent in one of China’s largest threats to its economic and national security — its oil dependence. Currently over 1.5 million barrels of oil a day are being displaced by EVs. This is helping China not only go green, but also helping it to be weaned off foreign oil and easily weather the Iran War storm: green; weaned; strong; clean.

But this has wider international ripples as well. As the NYT reports, this, along with its oil reserves and refining capacity, has

allowed the country to slash oil purchases by 23 percent in the first six months of the war with Iran compared with the same period the year before … China’s ability to throttle oil imports caught nearly everyone in the oil industry by surprise. And it’s a big reason crude oil prices have not risen nearly as much as most energy executives and analysts thought they would once Iran severely restricted the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. As of late August, crude oil cost roughly $10 a barrel less than it would have had China continued buying at prewar levels, according to Daan Struyven, who leads oil research for Goldman Sachs.

“This is a power that nobody thought China had,” said Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

So who’s the big “winner” in the Iran War thus far? China. All of this has tremendous geopolitical ramifications we have not begun to fathom.

Ok, reducing dependence-inducing, insecure, destabilizing imports: CHECK.

Now what about exports? For China, more good news.

As you can see below, clean tech exports have gone from 2.7% of the total in 2020 to 6.6% in 2026. Clean tech is now greater than clothing, appliances, and furniture, and is closing in on being more than these “old three” combined.

More broadly, clean energy is now a major contributor to China’s economic growth and wellbeing overall, when looking with a wide lens at investments, manufacturing, and supply chains. As you can see below, combined it is larger than real estate and construction, and is greater than all of the three largest coal-producing provinces put together.

China’s clean energy economy has been “on the road” for years and has now made it to Broadway, so to speak; it’s hit the big time.

It’s Clean-Up Time. This is good for China, good for the climate, and good for clean growth around the world. But this is bad news for the fossils. It’s twilight for them. We must have no illusions. They’re going to fight this every step of the way. But at least with the world’s biggest emitter we’ve turned a corner and we’re now at the intersection of Clean Street & Broadway heading for a better future.

China is creating a future where the fossils can’t jerk them around. That’s good for us.

Our Response: Bigger, Faster, Juster, Now

So what’s our response? As The Climate Movement, it’s our job to push all governments, including China, to go faster. It’s Clean-Up time. Time to sweep the dirty old fossils into the dustbin of history.

We want more, and we want it today. Impatient? No. We’ve waited far too long already, thanks to the fossils trying to hang on to their profits and power. That’s why we need to bring to bear our three forms of power, our P³: (1) moral power; (2) people power; (3) staying power. The time for patience has been over for over a decade or more. It’s well past time for justice.

We’re still living with the 20th Century energy systems powered by the fossils. Even without the active resistance of the fossils, there is a ton of bureaucratic and legal and even cultural inertia that must be overcome. We’ve got a lot of work to do. That’s why growing and improving The Climate movement is the most important thing all of us can be doing right now. We make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster.

Bigger, faster, juster, now. Join us!

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Climate Week in NYC and the run-up to the international climate negotiations (COP) are helping to push out lots of reports.

One of the best is an update on the where things stand with the goals agreed to in December 2023 at COP 28 in the UAE to triple renewable energy (3XRE) and double energy efficiency by 2030 (2XEE). (You can see the text of the goal in the image below in the white call out box.)

The report is a continuing joint project by three entities: the International Renewable Energy Agency or IRENA, the Global Renewables Alliance, and those heading up the upcoming COP 31 in Antalya, Turkiye. Basically, it takes the findings from IRENA, plus a few other sources like Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), and uses them to help us see where things stand on 3XRE & 2XEE.

3XRE

The bottom line: We’re within striking distance of being on track with renewables, as the graph above shows. We had 15.5% growth in capacity in 2025. We need that to be 16.7% (the green dotted line in the graph) over the next four years.

As Ben Blackwell, Chair of the Global Renewables Alliance puts it:

“To meet the 3X target, we must double annual additions of renewable technologies over the next four years. This is achievable: the manufacturing capacity exists and the economics are irrefutable; but deployment must accelerate now, particularly in emerging markets and developing economies, where financing costs and policy barriers remain stubborn obstacles” (emphasis added).

2xEE

On the energy efficiency front, we’re not doing as well.

As you can see in their graph above, modified by me, EE progress has been anemic to say the least: about 1% improvement in 2023 and 2024 and a slight increase to 1.7 % last year. For all three years it should have been 4%. So now, this year and through 2030 it needs to be 5.7%.

The key way we’re going to improve efficiency is by electrifying everything, or as much as we possibly can. Why? Because electric tech is much more efficient. As their report notes:

Electric vehicles convert over 77% of electricity into power at the wheels, compared with internal combustion engines that convert 12-30% of the energy contained in gasoline … Modern heat pumps can reduce electricity consumption by more than 50% compared to traditional heating systems and achieve efficiency gains exceeding 300% by moving heat rather than generating it (p. 41).

Their Table below shows what we need to do. As you can see, the total electrification rate needs to go from 24% in 2024 to 30% in 2030. EVs need to go from 78 million to 360 million, and heat pumps from 1,500 GW to 8,937 GW.

Summing Up

To achieve 3XRE & 2XEE by 2030 will require investments in 2026-2030 of:

Our Response

Here’s the deal. These 3XRE & 2XEE by 2030 goals that most of the nations of the world have endorsed are good ones. But as the International Energy Agency (IEA) noted when these goals were affirmed in 2023, they represent “only around 30% of the emissions gap that needs to be bridged to get the world on a pathway compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 C.”

As The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters we must push for better than this. The international negotiations set the floor (and sometimes the basement!) for climate efforts. Our Ten Movement Values (see below) and our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability for everyone and everything — are calling us to do better, including improving on 3XRE & 2XEE by 2030.

And the only way we’re going to do better is by becoming our destiny: to be the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

We must grow our worldwide Climate Movement to 400 million strong by 2030. In doing so we will be able to bring our three forms of power — our P³ — to bear: (1) moral power; (2) people power, and; (3) staying power. Only then can we push our societies, especially our political leaders, to achieve the speed and scale of transformation that’s needed.

But not just speed and scale. Justice, too. We’re throwing around lots of big numbers, a trillion here, a trillion there, which are abstractions. We must never forget that people and places and other creatures are behind all of these numbers. All of this has consequences for people — particular individuals and families and communities. It impacts the rest of nature — particular species and places and ecological communities.

Who is helped and who is left behind and forgotten and ignored? Who gets clean energy and less pollution that kills people, and who is stuck with old fossil dirty hand-me-downs or no energy at all?

We can’t just let our societies forget those around the world with less power or no power, the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized, future generations. It’s our job to work with them and add our voices to theirs. It’s also our job to speak for the other creatures and the rest of nature.

As Murat Kurum, President-Designate of the upcoming COP in Antalya, Turkiye, highlights in his preface to the report:

“Progress remains unequal … the high cost of capital in emerging and developing markets is still stifling investment.”

In the body of the report we find this:

“The geographic deployment of renewables remains highly uneven, with Asia [mainly China], Europe and North America accounting for 86% of installed renewable power capacity at end-2025. The remaining 14% was shared by Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, South America, Eurasia, the Middle East and Oceania” (p. 29).

Their Figure below visualizes the disparities.

So we’re behind on 3XRE & 2XEE by 2030, we’re behind on making sure the poor benefit, and we must push the world to do even better. The good news is, we can — because we are the hope we’ve been waiting for. So let’s grow our people power and make this happen. Join us!

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For those of us who are or will be a part of The Climate Movement, it is our destiny to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

Here’s the rub. We’ve got to pull our destiny into the present, start to make our destiny in the here and now, make our future come faster.

That’s definitely true when it comes to the midterm elections in the United States. Time for us to make a difference! We have the power to win. How we do so is very clear.

How We Must Vote In The Midterms

From the very beginning of this Substack I have made my views known in no uncertain terms. In July 2025 Republicans crossed a red line when they voted for the grotesque Orwellian/Trumpian “Big Beautiful Bill,” which rolled back as much of the Biden-era climate policies as they could. Here’s what I said the day of the vote:

Henceforth we must assume that we must defeat all Republicans.

Until this immoral opposition to climate action, this denial of reality, this attack on truth and democracy and the rule of law, is completely and utterly exercised from the Republican Party, our working assumption must be that all of its elected officials and future candidates must be defeated. They simply cannot be trusted with political power. This includes those who simply went along with what Trump/MAGA has done. Obviously they can’t be trusted to stand up and do what’s right.

Our Choice Is Clear

In the future new Republican candidates strong on climate action, democracy, and the rule of law, should be given serious consideration — if they’re better than their Democratic opponent on climate and clean energy.

But not now. Not in these Midterms.

If it’s a choice between a wish-washy Democrat and any Republican, the choice is clear in our present circumstances. Vote for the Democrat (and then primary them next time).

We must flip both chambers of Congress, the Senate and the House, to stop these insane Republican attacks on climate and clean energy.

I’m an Independent, and as astounding as this may sound to diehard Republicans, I don’t consider this a partisan stance. It’s the Republicans who have currently ruled themselves out with their poisonous, anti-climate, anti-democratic partisanship. With all the enabling of the Trumpian corruption, cruelty, lawlessness, vindictiveness, and reckless stupidity, they are toxic to the body politic.

They have squandered any benefit of the doubt, and their cowardice shows they can’t be trusted with power. They are as bad a bunch of politicians as I hope we’ll ever see on climate action. Not only does climate action trump partisan labels and past partisan loyalty. Patriotism in defense of democracy and the rule of law, does as well. Time to put patriotism over partisanship. Time to vote out all Republicans. That’s the patriotic thing to do.

In earlier posts I have also argued we must defeat fossil-Democrats and fair-weather-Democrats. That’s what the speed and scale of transformation requires. We must have climate champions, not climate wimps.

But, guided by our values of pragmatism and success, the circumstances of our opposition to these wimpy Democrats must be as follows. Their defeat:

• must be in the primaries;

• or in a general election where there’s a better Republican or Independent and defeating such a Democrat won’t hand Republicans a majority.

So again, what this means for the midterms is we must vote out all Republicans, even if that means holding our nose and voting for a less than stellar Democrat.

Time to Use Our Power

We have three forms of power or P³: (1) moral power; (2) people power; (3) staying power. We must bring our P³ to bear on the midterms.

We have moral power because what we’re doing — overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — is the right thing to do.

Who we vote for is determined by this moral vision and our Ten Movement Values. Together they give us our moral power.

When it comes to people power, we’ve got work to do not only in growing our Climate Movement in the US to our goal of 16 million people by 2030.

We also need to get those in The Climate Movement to vote, as well as all Climate Action Supporters.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that we’re leaving a lot of votes on the table.

The Environmental Voter Project has determined that “11.2 million environmentalists skipped the 2024 presidential election according to EVP voterfile analysis and projections.”

As you can see below, if these non-voting enviros would have showed up in swing states Trump would have been defeated.

As for our staying power, it’s crucial that politicians know about it, that our midterm votes are just a one-off deal. They need to know that we are here for the long haul.

We Must Frikkin’ Show Up: Volunteer Opportunities

It’s quite simple. We can’t win if we’re not on the field. While we must continue to grow, we already have the people power needed to defeat enough Republicans to take back the Senate and House.

Now we need to realize that power.

The folks at the Environmental Voter Project are doing an excellent job helping all of us do that.

“Since 2015, we have contacted 12.8 million non-voting and seldom-voting environmentalists and helped convert over 2.2 million of them into ‘super voters’ who now consistently vote their values in every federal, state, and local election.”

They know how to reach non/seldom-voting enviros in key races, and have an excellent get out the vote or GOTV operation with plenty of volunteer opportunities that I strongly encourage you to consider.

Other groups are also helping with getting out the vote, like Y.E.C.A or Young Evangelicals For Climate Action. They have their own resources and volunteer efforts.

If young evangelicals are this organized and committed, can the rest of us sit in the stands? No! We’ve got to get out on the field with them!

(BTW, If you know of other good efforts, let everyone know in a Comment!)

If you have been one of the non/seldom voters, it’s time to get past whatever has kept you from voting. Your ability to vote is a gift. It is part of your power, and thus is also your responsibility. It is part of our people power.

The organized GOTV efforts are crucial and strategic — especially for key races.

But personally your most effective efforts will be with those you love, your friends, and everyone in your circles of influence, whether that’s done in person or through personal communications or through social media or all of the above. So talk with them; communicate with them.

The only way we are going to achieve the speed and scale of transformation needed, the only way we are going to create a just and prosperous sustainability in the process, is through our P³ creating political power. When we are the deciding factor in electing champions and friendlies and defeating opponents, then politicians will want to make us happy.

Ours is a time for regular folk to become heroes together. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for. Nothing less than greatness is our calling. That’s because we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster.

Now let’s go out there and win the midterms for all those we love. Let’s do this.

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Fiona, Aaron, and Pepper’s Dream House Up in Smoke

Friday November 8, 2019, Fiona, her partner Aaron, and their two year old daughter Pepper, had to quickly flee their home New South Wales, Australia, that they had built with their own hands.

“We had recently finished building our daughter’s first bedroom. The light switch was really low so the little one could reach it. It was purple and she loved it.”

But the climate-intensified bushfire didn’t care about Pepper’s new purple room with a light switch made just for her.

Fiona — or Fi — tells us their story in her own words:

About midday, as the wind whipped up, we saw black plumes of smoke funnel directly over our heads and cover the sun. Burnt leaves started falling in our yard. Our family, including my partner and 2 year old child knew it was time to leave. …

There were no helicopters, water bombers, or fire trucks in sight.

The speed and ferocity at which the fire came took everyone by surprise. …

There, at ‘reception bend’ we tried to get in touch with Aaron’s parents to tell them they needed to get out. We couldn’t reach them. …

My daughter and I stayed with a friend. Aaron went back to the fire to find his parents.

Many harrowing hours ensued as the emergency fires raged all around the town and overtook outlying communities. …

It was after midnight when Aaron called. Disorientated, in a dark alien moonscape, he climbed the steep and flaming hill past the burning piles of rubble that were our home, gardens, car, studio, shed and tanks.

Over a fuzzy and broken phone line I heard him simply say “It’s all gone.”

Fire and Protest

Just two days later Fi and Aaron and Pepper were protesting climate inaction in front of parliament with a bucket of ash from their burned down dream home.

The Deputy Prime Minister said that anyone linking climate and the bushfires were the “ravings of pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies.” What victims needed were “thoughts and prayers.”

A day after the protest, three days after the fire took their home, Fi was interviewed and was asked about politicians trying to silence people talking about climate impacts and the need for action.

“Now the evidence that we’re in a climate catastrophe is right in front of our face.”

She didn’t mince words about the attacks from politicians: “They’re slandering, and it’s nonsensical.”

“I am on the front lines of the climate crisis. I’m a bushfire survivor. It’s important for the country and politicians particularly to hear from people like me to really understand what it’s like, because there’s going to be so many more people in our situation.”

Fire, Art, & Activism: No More Trying To Put Out Climate Fires With a Garden Hose

Out of the ashes of denial and gaslighting and slander, out of the ashes of her dream home, there arose a phoenix of climate action in the form of art.

Fiona has created several exhibits, including one titled “Unpreparable.” The images and words below tell the story.

Fighting climate change with a garden hose is a good metaphor for where things stand and the need for speed and scale in response to the “speed and ferocity” of all the different types of climate fires out there. In this sense, time to overcome fire with fire, the fire of our collective energy.

Fiona explained another of her exhibits, called CARBON TAX, with these words:

Fiona’s art and activism have already made a difference. As one of her bios informs us:

With over two decades of involvement in grassroots organisations, her most significant achievement came in 2021 when she was a part of a landmark court victory with Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action which compelled the NSW [New South Wales] Environment Protection Authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, establishing a groundbreaking precedent in Australia.

Alone with her garden hose Fi has no chance. But joining with others, in this case the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, Fiona was part of a major victory.

Fiona knows first hand how empowering taking action can be:

“It’s so cathartic to be able to communicate what I’m thinking … For actually having done something to try and change things is the most empowering and relieving thing. I don’t think there’s anything better …”

When faced with tragedy, Fiona didn’t retreat. She moved forward. She didn’t quit. She got busy. And climate action released and rechanneled energy devoted to loss into overcoming what took her home to help save the homes of others.

We’re All Artist-Athletes

The world is still trying to put out all the various climate flames with a garden hose.

Ain’t gonna happen.

The only way we’re going to overcome climate change is by having The Climate Movement become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world, which is our destiny. And the only way for us to become our destiny is for each of us to play our part as the Artist-Athletes we have the potential to be.

Artist-Athletes?

Athletes because my primary metaphor for us is the Olympic Games. We are all Athletes on our particular Olympian Fields of Action based on the gifts, knowledge, and passions we have. And just like the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games, we all come together on two fields of action: (1) growing and improving The Climate Movement, and; (2) engaging policymakers.

But we are also Artists.

Now much of what we do may not appear to be beautiful or even creative on the surface. But living out our Movement Values of love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success is always beautiful and creative. That’s why we are all Artists.

Not all art is aesthetically pleasing on the surface, such as the charred remains of Fiona Lee’s hand-built home made with love. But resurrecting that love through her art to overcome the destructive fires of climate consequences is beautiful. Fiona’s creativity and activism are beautiful.

And so can ours be. No one can create the beauty and artistry you can through your climate activism. Only you can do that. As I’ve often said, our job together is to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our just future come faster. We need you to play your unique role to make it happen.

So join us, and let’s create beauty together as Artist-Athletes on our Fields of Action!

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Back to our regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday!

Jim

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People + Place => Protection: Where Climate Action Begins

When Yolanda Waters was young she was “terrified” of the ocean and didn’t like being on the beach with all the sand, salt, and seaweed — yuk!

During college she studied biology and environmental science — but, again nothing having to do with the ocean.

Today she looks as natural as a fish in water and is the Founder and CEO of Divers For Climate.

So what changed her?

Climate change changed her. Divers changed her. Diving changed her. A very special place changed her.

It was when I got to my Honours year when the coral reef restoration program was just starting on the Great Barrier Reef. I found that interesting, so I went up to interview the people in that program, asking them if the program was going to save coral reefs.

Every single person I interviewed said that restoration is a great tool that we can use, but we know that it won’t work unless we solve climate change. When I asked, “okay, well what are we doing about climate change?” They all said, “well that’s not really our space or where we work.” So I realised there was a gap there.

After I finished my degree I felt lost, I didn’t know what to do or where to work. My stepmother at the time suggested I work in Cairns for a year, get my divemaster, work on the reef, and see what happens! So I went and the experience really changed my life. Working on the reef, meeting people, spending days and days doing dives I’d never done before was what really changed everything for me (emphasis added).

When she began working on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) she would interact with hundreds of tourists every day, many asking her about climate change and whether the GBR was dead.

“I found those conversations really hard, because I didn’t actually know the answers … and felt like I could give people more. How do I have those conversations and answer these questions in a way that actually makes a difference? I had no idea, so I started to ask questions and ask for support. The more people that I asked, the more I found that it was a common experience for people to avoid that conversation … all I’d heard was ‘it’s not our job’ and ‘we don’t talk about it.’ So this is where I started my journey. … I thought, ‘Well if we’re not talking about it then how are we going to protect this place that is so special?’ Indeed, the place was special, and the community was special (emphasis added).”

For Yolanda Waters — as is the case for many of us — it’s all about people and place and how to protect them.

Ok, so she hated the ocean; she felt lost; she felt frustrated and inadequate and didn’t like the answers she was getting.

So of course she gets a Ph.D.

But she wasn’t getting one just to analyze and talk about what others are doing. She got it to be on the applied side of things, to protect people and places from climate consequences. For Dr. Waters what this means is helping people see how climate change makes an impact on the people and places and experiences they love, and then leading them to protect their people and places from this global problem.

“That’s what my PhD was about, psychologically, how do we talk about climate change in a way that leads to action and engagement?”

Dr. Waters saw a problem and saw a climate action niche no one was filling.

I sit in this weird space in marine conservation where I don’t study fish, I study humans, and how we think, feel and connect to nature and how we act to protect it. …

I love when people ask me fish questions because I have terrible, terrible answers because my fish ID is shocking. It’s the yellow stripey fish, I don’t really know. But then I can come and talk about the psychology of climate change communication. Everything’s got its place (emphasis added).

One of the most powerful ways Dr. Waters knows to communicate is through photography.

People can’t protect what they don’t know, they can’t know what they don’t see. And so, you know, photography is a way of bringing those things to the surface and making the ocean more accessible. And it’s an amazing mechanism for storytelling. …

It’s that beauty, that art, that emotional piece. It definitely connects people to something bigger. I think underwater photographers all contribute in that way. …

[It’s also] how you sell things and get through to media. That’s how you get the attention of politicians.

And incredible photos, they talk, right? So, I think that’s obviously a really big one for campaigning and making changes within the system.

Divers For Climate

So as a Climate Action Artist-Athlete, why did she found Divers For Climate, her particular Olympian Field of Action? Because she wanted to help people become Climate Action Artist-Athletes, too, especially those experiencing the beauty and wonder and awe of nature through diving.

I think diving is a great way to do that, and I think most divers know that but haven’t had the tools so far to talk about it. I think with my communication skills this is what I can do to help. It’s my way of contributing to how we protect reefs in the future, and it’s just one of many (emphasis added).

She wants to help folks protect people and places they love from climate impacts.

Dr. Waters not only communicates to tourists and divers. She also communicates to other audiences by giving talks and lectures, and through Social Media and mainstream media. She conducts research published in peer-reviewed journals that garners attention on both Social Media and earned mainstream media, further cementing her reputation not only as an advocate and CEO but as an expert.

All of this helps with a key target audience, policymakers, with whom she also communicates directly through testimony and conversations.

In the end Dr. Waters knows that it comes down to people working together.

At the end of the day a lot of the problems facing our marine environment are people problems, and how we fix them comes down to how people think, feel and act and make decisions. Because no matter how much technical science we have it’s going to come down to people working together and making things happen (emphasis added).

Dr. Waters is such an inspiration. Even in photos, her passion and joy is infectious. Indeed, she and Divers for Climate embody all of our seven Climate Movement characteristics/imperatives/goals:

1. Big and Broad and Active Enough

2. Passionate Enough

3. Deep Enough

4. Dynamic Enough

5. Organic and Strategic Enough

6. Together Enough

7. Long Enough.

This is a tremendous accomplishment and an example to us all.

Now it’s your turn. Think of the people and places you want to protect. Think of the gifts and knowledge and experiences and values you have to offer. Just like Yolanda Waters found her niche, it’s time for you to find yours, your particular Olympian Field of Action, and become the Artist-Athlete we all need you to be. We aren’t complete without you. Join us!

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Kim Loo has been a medical doctor for 36 years, but she also practices “chicken diplomacy,” her highly specialized Field of Action for overcoming climate change.

“As a small kid all I wanted was chickens,” (or “chooks” as they call them in Australia). Once she was able to transform her backyard into a garden, including lots of fruit trees that also help keep things much cooler, she added chickens as an integral part of her backyard garden ecosystem, providing the fertilizer.

When she goes to parties and dinners she brings a bucket with her to put the food waste in to feed to her chickens. “I go to these really formal dinners and I walk around with this chook bucket. … It’s chook advocacy because it reminds people that food waste and the methane it produces is a significant contributor to climate change.”

In her climate action work, Dr. Loo also developed another subspecialty: “cooking diplomacy.” So how did she get into these two distinctive Fields of Action?

As Dr. Loo discusses in her recent Energy & Stuff interview, she was nurtured into climate leadership. Her parents are Buddhists, which led the family to live lightly on the Earth. Her dad was a civil engineer. Her mom (or “mum” in Australian) was a music teacher who became a social worker, which impacted how Dr. Loo viewed the world through a social justice lens.

Loo graduated with her MD in 1989 and started practicing medicine in a low-income, underdeveloped area where many of her patients were homeless with no one to help care for them as they recovered. To top it off, the area kept getting hotter. This drove home a basic lesson: where people live is a huge determinate in their health.

While her mum provided the social justice side, her dad’s civil engineering background may have influenced her interest in technology. She became an avid reader of Renew Economy, an up-to-the-minute source for all things related to creating a zero carbon economy. This led her to be one of the first in Australia to get a Tesla Powerwall for her home, and she fully electrified in 2016.

Where she lives is quite conservative politically. As she states in an oped in 2019: “People I have known and loved for years did not accept the science of climate change.”

Instead of retreating into a climate clique,

“I decided to embrace everyone regardless of their political views.

There were several things that were clear to me:

• Everyone cares about the future of their children.

• Everyone wants air and water that is not contaminated.

• No one wants to have endless days of heat.

• Everybody wants reliable, cheap, and secure energy.

• Very few people, including politicians, were aware of the health implications of climate change.”

Her first step in creating change for the climate came in 2016 when, on her own initiative, she invited local politicians for tea and to tour her home and see how much money she was saving. Only one showed up.

“I discussed all the bullet points with her at an informal chat in my garden in front of my chicken house.”

This personal outreach led to an article in The Daily Telegraph that put her personal climate activism on the map.

Loo also inherited something else from her mum: a love of cooking. This led to another organizer innovation — cooking classes and climate-friendly kitchen tech demonstrations.

“When people can smell the food and you’re talking to them, I think it engages their brain to take on more information.”

As she said, “I’m standing on my mum’s shoulders when I’m doing the cooking stuff.” Her mum led classes in her home on Chinese cooking, and Loo has continued the tradition. But she’s added her own twist to this social recipe — fitting in her message points when the time is right.

This includes how her induction burners save money over gas and heat up your kitchen about 50% less to boot, which also saves $$ for not needing to run the AC as much.

She regularly has people to her home to do induction cooking demonstrations, and is also doing them around Australia. She’s even done one for restaurant chefs.

Dr. Loo started her climate activism by doing great things on her own. But she’s now involved with a whole plethora of climate-related groups. Here are just some of them: Doctors For The Environment Australia (Board Member), Citizens Climate Lobby Australia, Healthy Futures, Parents for Climate, and the Climate Council.

Loo’s climate activism is spurred by her being a medical doctor and concern for her current and future patients.

“More people will be sick and die if we don’t do something about adaptation and mitigation.”

Because air pollution, including wildfire smoke, impacts every organ in the body, and because heat impacts every organ system, Loo and other doctors have ensured that this is now a part of medical school training.

For Dr. Loo, this climate health lens itself is viewed through her mum’s social justice lens:

“The environmental determinants of health are clean air, clean water, healthy soils, a safe climate and a healthy ecosystem. Climate change impacts you from the point of conception, depending on where you live, on your home, your education, your work…with the impacts felt most by the vulnerable and disadvantaged.”

While her chook diplomacy and her cooking diplomacy are person-to-person retail, she works with organizations doing policy advocacy because she understands there must be systemic change:

“There is inertia in our political system. We need policies at a Federal level to give markets the ability to confidently invest. We need to support clean fuels: it’s the low hanging fruit. We need to transition our transport, electrify the transport system, make it easy for people to buy electric cars, encourage locally generated electricity. The key is leaving no-one behind. … If any of us are marginalised during this transition, we will not succeed.”

Leaving no one behind not only includes the less fortunate. It also includes those not yet convinced of the need for action.

“I continue to love my family and friends who are on the other side of the political divide. They are very slowly shifting. …

We need to use every strategy that we can.

Why not love and respect?”

Finally, for Dr. Loo, her mum’s social justice glasses keep her focused on what our vision, purpose, and Major Goal are calling us to: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

That’s what those of us in The Climate Movement are about. Join us!

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For nearly a decade Grace Vegesana has been a climate action leader as part of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) — the country’s largest climate justice organization run by young people, and the oldest youth-led climate organization in the world, established in 2006.

Although she’s only 26 years old, Vegesana is already a seasoned veteran and AYCC’s National Director, and along the way has completed degrees in Law and also in Environmental & Climate Science. She is also a graduate of the Democracy in Colour’s “Thriving in Colour” Program. She’s on the Boards of the Foundation for Young Australians and the Australian Conservation Foundation. Vegesana also previously worked “with Future Super, Australia’s first fossil fuel free superfund, to instigate the Not Business as Usual Alliance where 3000+ Australian businesses striked for the September 20, 2019 Climate Strike.”

Vegesana grew up in a loving family, but one she describes as right-wing climate deniers.

She tells how the death of one of her neighbors from the heat awakened her to climate justice.

“It was growing up in my community of Western Sydney — where summers get up to almost 49C [120F] on the ground — that I discovered who I was in the context of the climate crisis. I have personally witnessed my neighbor dying from heat stroke in Western Sydney, simply because she was older and couldn’t afford to turn on her air conditioning.”

This led her to see the connection between climate and justice:

“Climate justice is naturally intertwined with gender justice because of who is disproportionately impacted, but also because those closest to the problem are also closest to the solutions.”

Vegesana saw the injustice quite early when she was around 14, but it took time to make sense of it through sheer force of will. A profile in Australian Geographic tells the tale:

High school did little to answer her questions. Climate change appeared only once in her curriculum – a 20-minute aside in Year 9 science class that left her unsettled. The silence that followed pushed her to dig deeper, learning from books and online communities. Slowly, she pieced together an understanding that would guide her adult life: the people most vulnerable to climate change are rarely those responsible for it. …

“My science teacher was like, ‘There’s this thing called global warming. It’s caused by greenhouse gases and it’s pretty bad.’ And then we moved swiftly along.

“And I was like, ‘Wait, what do – what do you mean?’ I’ve just heard this 20-minute end-of-the-world segment from my science teacher, and then we never talked about it again.”

She found the AYCC when Googling climate change looking for answers.

“I remember the first thing I saw was the [AYCC] About page, and it was talking about climate justice. And I was like, I have no idea what those words are, but it’s like a bit of an explainer of climate justice being about the people who are affected the worst have done the least to cause the problem.”

She signed up immediately to attend one of AYCC’s weekend Training Camps in 2017. It changed her life.

“It was genuinely the first opportunity I’d ever had to be in a room full of young people where you can be yourself, bring your own experiences, be in a space of learning and unlearning the climate crisis and what we know about the world. That was my introduction to social movements and theories of change that revolve around collective power, and I’ve never really looked back” (emphasis added).

When the problem of climate refugees came up in the training, Vegesana could relate it to her own family:

“I was like thinking of my family back in Botswana and the forced desertification that happens and the way that animals and water actually migrates when the climate is changing, and weather patterns change and people can’t live on the places that they originally called home. I was thinking about my family in the coast of India and the way that banana farming is not actually super viable because the way that environmental conditions have actually shifted across the country means that our family’s ancestral farming practices aren’t actually relevant anymore.”

This was almost too much for her to take in, and she thought hard about quitting and not going to the next day’s training. But she stuck it out and learned how young people in Australia could make a major difference worldwide:

“I remember hearing about how Newcastle Coal Port was like one of the biggest coal ports in the world and was literally a two-hour drive from where we were. And it was the concept of Australia actually fueling all of this damage that is happening all across the world. And our role in stopping that was something that I think really stuck with me and really transformed my ability to recognise that we really need to take our role in what we’re doing, in exporting, in burning fossil fuels and producing it in this endless cycle of destruction to make sure that actually we can stop those problems here right now. And it has such a huge global impact.”

By 2019 Vegesana was participating in a Parliament sit-in:

“I remember feeling scared at first and worried about what this looked like. I’d seen photos on social media of actions like these, and I thought they were so incredibly powerful, but I couldn’t ever imagine myself doing that. That’s not me,” Grace says. “But I went along and we staged what would be one of the longest ever Parliament House sit-ins. … “I met some of my best friends and even my bridesmaids through that action. It solidified so many of the beliefs I had in who should be leading, and what leadership looks like,” Grace says (emphasis added).

In a few years, when she turns 30, Vegesana will age out of AYCC. Soon to become a lawyer, I can’t wait to see what’s next for her as she continues with her leadership in The Climate Movement.

How about following Grace’s lead? Join The Climate Movement!

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The ARTC AI Series

1. AI: Friend or Foe of Climate Action

I began my ARTC AI series with this subheading for my first post:

Help and Hurt — that pretty much sums up the current AI-Climate Action conundrum. AI has the capacity to do both, but today folks are rightly up in arms about the Tech Bros running roughshod over communities and the climate.

It’s our job as The Climate Movement to maximize the help and eliminate the hurt.

In this first post I asked several questions.

• Can we stop AI? No.

• Should we support or oppose AI? Yes.

• Is AI friend or foe? Yes.

• Should we believe the Tech Bro AI-climate hype? No.

A “Just Say No” response to AI simply won’t work. It’s moving forward whether we like it or not. So let’s make it work for us, not against us.

We need to oppose the stupid and hurtful way AI data centers are happening. They should be off-grid and completely self-sufficient, powered 100% by renewables + storage. They should be kept cool without impacting local water supplies and should create local good-paying permanent jobs.

Right now AI is both friend and foe, something I discuss more fully in the fourth post of this Series. As I said, our job is to maximize the help and eliminate the hurt.

From the beginning we must be clear-eyed and realistic about AI’s ability to help with climate action. Even as we maximize the help, we must not allow AI Tech Bro fantasies to bamboozle anyone, especially those in power.

2. AI & Climate Action: Get Serious

In the second post I review the AI-Climate Action nexus — or how AI can help climate action with the needed speed and scale — and find the current situation woefully inadequate. We can’t look to the private sector for leadership. It must come through the public sector — and that means The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters pushing governments to make this a reality. The Catalytic-4 must work together to get this done.

3. AI & Climate Action: The Future Is Now

While not yet living up to its potential for helping with speed and scale of transformation, in this post I try to whet all of our appetites with what’s happening now. I began with this opportunity: “According to one recent study, current, proven, off-the-shelf AI can reduce climate pollution by 5-10% by 2030.”

Here are examples:

• The Google company Tapestry is helping PJM, the largest grid operator in North America with 67 million customers, speed up the application and interconnection process for renewables.

• Husk Power Systems in India and Africa provides “‘pay-as-you-go’ 100% renewable power to off-grid and weak-grid communities that is 30% cheaper than the alternative: diesel generation. Husk estimates that its AI model enables it to predict user demand with 80% accuracy across its microgrids, thereby improving capacity utilization, reducing costs, delivering lower prices, and guiding capital investment in additional capacity.”

• Seattle and other major cities around the world are partnering with Google’s Green Light program to use AI to optimize traffic lights, reducing climate pollution by 10% and stops by 30%.

• A recent study from a partnership between American Airlines and Google AI found that having jets fly in less humid air resulted in 69% less global warming from these flights. How? By reducing contrails.

• AI helped a global health care company find 50 times more climate pollution reduction potential from its supply chains than its original 20% goal.

• Mineral, an Alphabet company, has designed an AI-powered system, recently purchased by Driscoll’s, the world’s leading berry company, that includes a solar-powered “rover” equipped with sophisticated cameras and AI perception tools to help deliver info on yield predictions, plant ripeness, disease risk, and weed presence.

4. Big Tech AI & Big Oil Fueling Climate Impacts

So What’s Worse than AI Data Centers for Climate Change? Something called AI Enabled Emissions.

AI is helping Big Oil find more fossil fuels, like a demented fossil dating site whose offspring are misery and death, thanatos on steriods. They are enabling emissions that might not have occurred otherwise. One company touted that its AI could help Big Oil yield an additional trillion barrels from existing fields, securing “every last drop.”

When we compare Big Oil and renewables, the latter is far behind in utilizing AI. Our folks must be 4-5 times better just to break even, but many are not even out of the starting blocks while the AI-fossils are half way around the track already.

The Climate Movement cannot let AI-fossils prevail.

5. Must Go Faster: Self-Driving Labs & Climate Action

To get going in a big way on reducing climate pollution we don’t need to wait for some future tech-savior solution to magically appear. We’ve got the tech right now to do so. But for the full scope of speed and scale to become a reality we can be helped immensely by continual tech invention and innovation and strategic-ARTC. One way to speed things up significantly is through a combination of AI and robotics in systems called self-driving labs that do autonomous experimentation.

Self-driving labs form hypotheses, run the experiments, analyze the results, and run it over again until obtaining the desired outcome. They can run millions of simulated experiments in cyberspace before doing so in the real world, and then run them more precisely and without stopping until the task is done. What would have taken years now takes weeks. And it’s only going to get faster.

Problem: there aren’t enough self-driving labs, especially ones focused on stuff that can help with climate action. We must push governments to fund them.

6. The Climate Movement’s AI-Climate Action Team

In my sixth post in this initial AI-Climate Action Series I put a well-deserved spotlight on a group of volunteers who have created a non-profit organization called Climate Change AI (CCAI). They exist to catalyze AI-climate action. CCAI does so through networking, published research, training, and, when funding is available, grants. They are a diverse group, including “researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs.”

CCAI is a terrific example of individuals coming together as a team of Artist-Athletes upon their particular Olympian Field of Action to exercise their gifts, knowledge, passion, wisdom, and values.

However, as I say in the post, “the CCAIers are under no illusions, and neither should we be. These valiant AI-Climate Action Heroes and others on this particular Field of Action need our help.” CCAI cannot match the deadly AI duo of Big Tech and Big Oil. As I discussed in post #2, time to get serious about having AI work for us and not against us.

As CCAIers push forward, we must have their backs.

This means that the rest of us in The Climate Movement must play our parts on both our own particular Fields of Action as well as the two larger Fields of Action all of us are participants on: (1) growing and improving The Climate Movement, and (2) engaging on policy action. Combined with Climate Action Supporters, we must push policy makers to continue all efforts towards speed and scale. In other words, The Catalytic-4 must do their job.

Conclusion

My fellow Artist-Athletes in The Climate Movement and all of you who are Climate Action Supporters, we’ve got our work cut out for us when it comes to AI and climate action. “Just say No” to AI isn’t an option. It’s exactly what the Big Tech/Big Oil deadly duo wants. But neither can we accept all the bad crap associated with AI data centers. So we must push for them to be off-grid and self-sufficient via renewable energy with zero impact on local water, while also creating good permanent full-time jobs. And we must support scrappy groups like CCAI while simultaneously pushing for public R&D funding focused on AI-climate action, made faster by additional support for self-driving labs.

We must maximize the help and eliminate the hurt.

And you know what? We can do it all. Join us!

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The Climate Movement’s AI Climate Action Team

I thought I would close out this initial Series on AI and Climate Action with a positive effort called Climate Change AI (CCAI). Their stated mission is:

To catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning [a form of AI].

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Climate Change AI (CCAI) is an organization composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action, in which machine learning can play an impactful role. Since it was founded in June 2019 (and established as a US domestic non-profit on June 14, 2021), CCAI has led the creation of a global movement in climate change and machine learning, encompassing researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs.

Given that they have devoted time and energy as volunteers to create CCAI, and that “tackling climate change requires concerted societal action,” I consider them a part of The Climate Movement — those of us who have made a sustained commitment to collective action over time to overcome climate change.

More importantly, they consider themselves “a global movement in climate change and machine learning …”.

CCAI is a terrific example of individuals coming together as a team of Artist-Athletes upon their particular Olympian Field of Action to exercise their gifts, knowledge, passion, wisdom, and values. They are helping The Climate Movement with our seven characteristics/imperatives/goals.

1. Big and broad and active enough — CCAI is helping us to be broad enough by their particular focus on AI and their bringing together into The Climate Movement “researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs.” CCAI is helping us to be active enough through all they are doing.

2. Passionate enough — As volunteers their passion is self-evident and serves as an inspiration to all of us.

3. Deep enough — They are driven by their stated values and their commitment to creating the Common Good; particularly evident is their commitment to justice in their desire for “equity” and their recognition of disproportionate impacts on “the world’s most disadvantaged populations”.

4. Dynamic enough — CCAI is being dynamic enough in their combination of (1) the tried and true (e.g., machine learning itself!); (2) discipline; (3) freedom, and; (4) creativity.

5. Organic and strategic enough — Organic change flows from the coming together of these individuals in common cause, the combination of their values, gifts, and personalities, resulting in new creative outcomes; CCAI’s mission, “To catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning,” makes them strategic. On a strategic Field of Action they are doing things the rest of us can’t do that has the potential to maximize society’s ability to deliver the needed speed and scale of transformation.

6. Together enough — By establishing the CCAI itself, these individuals have created a structure through which they can regularly come together and do more than they could alone, supporting one another and others in strategically applying their particular gifts and knowledge; for CCAI, creating a community “of diverse stakeholders” is one of their major goals, and the only way to create community is to be together enough.

7. Long enough — How long will CCAI last? Who knows? But just look above at the people who are involved. Consider the fact that having started in 2019 they already have 60 individuals who they list as “Former Core Team Members.” This is actually a sign of strength that CCAI is replenishing itself as folks rotate in and out. From what I can tell, CCAI isn’t going away any time soon.

A CCAI Snapshot

Through the community they have created, CCAI is a facilitator and supporter of efforts to apply AI to climate action, as is clear from their four stated goals:

• Community: To build a community of diverse stakeholders.

• Education: To guide impactful work through educational resources and programs.

• Infrastructure: To fill gaps in essential infrastructure such as funding, tools, and datasets.

• Discourse: To advance discourse and advise relevant players.

In short, echoing their mission statement, they exist to catalyze AI-Climate action.

» A Roadmap of Paths One Might Choose

Fairly early in their existence these Artist-Athletes created a roadmap that was published as a peer-reviewed journal article showing the many paths one could take to combine AI and climate action.

Here’s their summary:

In the fight against climate change, ML [machine learning] has significant contributions to offer across domain areas. ML can enable automatic monitoring through remote sensing (e.g., by pinpointing deforestation, gathering data on buildings, and assessing damage after disasters). It can accelerate the process of scientific discovery (e.g., by suggesting new materials for batteries, construction, and carbon capture). ML can optimize systems to improve efficiency (e.g., by consolidating freight, designing carbonmarkets, and reducing food waste). And it can accelerate computationally expensive physical simulations through hybrid modeling (e.g., climate models and energy scheduling models).

And here’s a visual summary using a good number of their diagrams.

These diagrams from their article illustrate opportunities in electricity, transportation, industry, land use, and adaptation.

At the end of their article these Artist-Athletes offer some sound advice to those thinking about using AI for climate action:

• Learn — Identify how your skills may be useful. … Remember that often the most impactful work lies in solving well-defined, domain-specific bottlenecks, and is not always flashy.

• Collaborate — Find collaborators, who may be researchers, entrepreneurs, established companies, or policy makers. Every domain … has experts who understand its opportunities and pitfalls, even if they are not experts in ML.

• Listen — Listen to what your collaborators and other stakeholders say is needed for addressing the problem effectively. Keep in mind that complex methodologies are not always needed.

• Deploy — Work with deployment partners to ensure a pathway to impact for your work, and incorporate deployment-related considerations during development.

» Funding for Grants

There’s an old saying in fundraising. If you want funding, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for funding.

Well, CCAI offers not only advice, but through 2025 had offered funding, too. (For anyone out there who wants to fund their grant program, be in touch with them via partnerships@climatechange.ai.)

Here’s just a few of their grants (I’ve penciled in the amounts):

» Educating Others

For the past four years CCAI has organized and implemented what they call their “Climate Change AI Virtual Summer School” involving 32 lecturers and 56 tutorial creators from all over the world.

As they describe it,

participants will

• Gain essential grounding in AI, climate, and their intersection,

• Engage with important frameworks for doing responsible, ethical, and impactful work in this space,

• Gain exposure to a diverse range of AI-for-climate applications,

• Gain hands-on practice in employing AI techniques for climate-relevant problems.

The program is designed for a global audience from across sectors and career stages, including researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, and students across academia, industry, entrepreneurship, civil society, and the public sector.

For a group of volunteer Artist-Athletes on their particular Field of Action, CCAI is doing some remarkable things for all of us.

How The Rest of The Climate Movement Can Help

I’m profoundly grateful for everyone working through CCAI, as well as others trying to have AI work for us. Their efforts are truly inspiring. They are all Climate Action Heroes!

But the CCAIers are under no illusions, and neither should we be. These valiant AI-Climate Action Heroes and others on this particular Field of Action need our help.

So how can we play our part to have AI be for us and not against us? The CCAIers are in our corner as we face not just one Goliath, but two. We’ve got lots of work to do.

I’ve discussed previously how Big Tech has teamed up with Big Oil creating what is now called AI enabled emissions — i.e., stuff that kills people that wouldn’t have happened otherwise without AI’s help.

But for the corporations themselves, profits are winning out over the planet.

Corporations choosing profits should surprise absolutely no one. That is the destructive deadly demented logic of an unchecked market.

The only way we have a shot at AI working more for us than against us is by The Catalytic Four striving to make it so. And within The Catalytic-4 the broader Climate Movement must lead the way. In other words, our fellow Artist-Athletes at CCAI are counting on us.

CCAI is the harnessing of strategic ARTC (the accelerating rate of tech change), our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation. To overcome the power of the two Goliath’s, Big Oil and Big Tech, and their use of AI, our First and Second Sources of Transformation, i.e., the broader Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters, must push governments to:

• fund strategic targeted AI-enhanced R&D that bolsters the creation of new inventions in the AI and self-driving labs space as well as the innovation of existing tech, and bar the fossils from using it;

• fund the use of AI to help with adaptation and the more efficient structuring of human societies;

• reign in — or even make illegal — this Big Oil/Big Tech death duo to make sure markets are working for us and not against us.

In other words, The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters must push our Fourth Catalytic Source of Transformation, Governments-&-Markets to play its role in protecting society from unregulated markets while also channeling its strengths towards creating the common good.

The rest of us can help CCAI and similar efforts by following their example and doing what we can on our particular Fields of Action that fit our gifts, abilities, and knowledge. While they play their specific part, we play ours.

More broadly, we can help to make this Big Tech/Big Oil partnership less impactful by all of our efforts to reduce and eliminate climate pollution. We must make it so it doesn’t matter what the deadly duo of Big Oil and Big Tech do together.

How?

We must:

• continue to push to make renewables and other clean tech cheap and make the fossils pay for the damage from their products; profits and price are already with us, but speed and scale of the needed transformation means we must make it even more so;

• transform our energy infrastructure and laws to favor climate action, such as removing roadblocks to clean distributed energy; in other words, we must transform our old 20th Century energy systems into ones fit for the 21st Century;

• continue the various “Keep It In The Ground” efforts and campaigns that target shutting down specific fossil infrastructure, e.g., a refinery, a coal-burning power plant, etc.

In short, We must put the fossils out of business; fossils are the past; their time has come and gone.

It’s our time now. Join us!

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Drexler Has a Vision

In 2013 Eric Drexler, dubbed by some “the godfather of nanotechnology,” wrote a short piece titled “Is Climate Change a Manufacturing Problem?” It was basically taking a distillation of his book published that year, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, and then applying it to climate change. This book, in turn, was an update and refinement of his first one in 1986, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, that helped launch the field of nanotechnology.

As his book titles suggest, Drexler doesn’t mind swinging for the fences.

What got Drexler interested as a young man in engineering more broadly were environmental problems.

“It was the early environmental movement that infused me with a sense of mission. … Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring … This kind of reading had its effect and in April 1970 I joined others (in a minor, high-school way) in boosting the first Earth Day.

Two years later I encountered a book that changed my view of the world more profoundly: Limits to Growth. …

[Trying to think about solutions led him ] to explore the potential of technologies in the nanoscale world” (Radical Abundance).

So, for Drexler, applying his mature work to climate change was coming back to home base 40 years later.

The key driving concept in Radical Abundance is Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM), and in his short piece he sketches how it can be a solution to climate change.

APM will provide the ability to make atomically precise structures that range from billion-processor tablet computers, consumer goods, and aerospace components, to high-performance thin film photovoltaics, delivered in rolls of tough material suitable for resurfacing roads and rooftops.

Global material economic development is in the end a problem of making things, a problem of manufacturing. The scope, resource frugality, and cost structure of APM can make global wealth accessible within the constraints of Earth’s limits [italics added, harkening back to Limits to Growth].

To reverse (not merely slow) the rise in atmospheric CO2 is an immense task that seems beyond the capabilities of the industrial technologies that created the problem. The productive capacity of APM, however — access to terawatts of low-cost solar power and means for efficient CO2 capture — could eventually enable draw-down of excess greenhouse gas levels on a decadal time scale. …

The path to APM-level technologies will not be short, but can be seen as a natural outgrowth of progress in atomically precise fabrication

So, via APM we’ll be able to make stuff much better, faster, and cheaper to boot — stuff that can eliminate and suck up climate pollution.

However, that last statement, that the creation of APM “will not be short,” is an important clue for how we should approach its possibilities.

Some of the reviews of the time for Radical Abundance were not kind, effectively implying Drexler was off his meds:

“Delusions Of Grandeur: Author insists ‘atomically precise manufacturing’ will transform civilization, but he’s not dealing with reality. … He just doesn’t understand that his conception of nanotechnology is a fantasy.”

Drexler is casting a vision, and visions are indeed fantasies if no one tries to make them a reality.

Should we try? My answer is Yes.

Atomically Precise Manufacturing — What Is It?

But before we continue we must describe what Atomically Precise Manufacturing is supposed to be.

At its simplest, it is creating products at the atomic level by precisely arranging atoms so that there are no gaps, missing atoms, defects, or impurities, leading to zero structural defects for resulting products.

In other words, if you want a chair, an APM chair will be a righteous chair.

It’s as if Plato said, “Make me an ideal chair.” And, poof, APM obliges. You actually get to sit on the essence of chairness. APM is the matchmaker between the ideal world and the material world, the incarnation of the essence of things.

David Forrest, a leader in the field since the mid-1990s, including award-winning stints at the Department of Energy (DOE) with a focus on APM, was recently asked in an interview what difference precision makes.

“Because that extra amount of precision changes the performance of materials by something like a factor of 50.”

Ok, atomically precise, great.

Manufacturing? How’s that going to happen?

Here again is Drexler casting the vision:

Imagine replacing an enormous automobile factory and all of its multi-million dollar equipment with a garage-sized facility that can assemble cars from inexpensive, microscopic parts, with production times measured in minutes (emphasis added). Then imagine that the technologies that can make these visions real are emerging—under many names, behind the scenes, with a long road still ahead, yet moving surprisingly fast (Radical Abundance).

This comes about via manufacturing at the atomic level, “manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices.”

“The key is to apply atomically precise nanotechnologies to build the machines we use to make things. Large scale, high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing is the heart of advanced nanotechnology, and in the coming years it has the potential to transform our world.

APM is a kind of manufacturing, but it isn’t industrial manufacturing. The differences run from bottom to top and involve replacing enormous, polluting factories with clean, compact machines that can make better products with more frugal use of energy and material resources” (Radical Abundance).

As Forrest puts it:

If you want to make cars and laptops and skyscrapers to atomic precision you need nanofactories with assembly lines that have trillions of molecular machines. That’s how life on earth works, too, by the way. Our biosphere grows and is sustained by vast numbers of molecular machines.

So nano-machines and nano-factories making righteous stuff, the essence of its stuffness in a useable product.

Doable? Hmmm …

So APM sounds good!

How? That’s the trillion dollar question.

Ok, the basic idea of atomic precision is fairly straight forward, and, as such, seems doable to a layperson like me.

It’s the nano-manufacturing part, the “molecular assemblers” part, where it gets a bit vague and incredibly complicated.

But peer-reviewed journal articles report on specific progress in certain areas, such as: “Frontiers in Atomic-level Manufacturing: Atomic-scale Electrochemical Deposition (2025); “Enabling Novel Device Designs, Scalable Manufacturing, and Rapid Prototyping with Direct Atomic Layer Processing (DALP™)” (2025); “Machine Learning-Assisted Precision Manufacturing of Atom Qubits in Silicon” (2024); Atomically Precise Manufacturing of Silicon Electronics“ (2024); and “A Molecular Assembler that Produces Polymers” (2020).

A good summing up is provided by a key federal agency, NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology): Atom-scale Devices: Engineering, Metrology and Manufacturability. And several scholars in the field have produced a fairly recent take of where they think things stand: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Future of Atomically Precise Manufacturing (2024).

All a bit head-spinning. What the rest of us need is an “APM For Dummies.”

Tim Ventura, who, admittedly is a bit of a booster, recently wrote a 40-year retrospective on Drexler’s vision, first articulated in Engines of Creation in 1986.

As Ventura summarizes at the beginning:

Nanofactories remain a long-term goal, but molecular machines, DNA origami, atomic-scale fabrication, and AI-designed proteins show how far the science has advanced.

Later Ventura compares progress to date to rungs on a ladder:

Science has learned to observe individual atoms, reposition them, pattern surfaces, program molecular self-assembly, construct artificial motors, guide sequence-specific synthesis, predict protein structures, generate new molecular designs, and automate experimental feedback. The higher rungs — continuous operation, broad chemistry, integrated control, error correction, massive parallelism, and multiscale production — remain ahead. But the lower and middle rungs are no longer imaginary. The path hasn’t been completed, yet considerably more of it is visible than it was in 1986.

As for the next 10 years, Forrest was asked what he would like to point to as a contribution from APM. His answer:

“Atomically precise membranes. Because they could be used for cleaning toxins from water, cleaning blood to eliminate kidney dialysis, mining valuable minerals from seawater, and cheaply removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.”

Always on the Horizon? The Ultimate Techno-Magic Dodge?

Ok, in 2013 Drexler says “The path … will not be short.” Just a couple of weeks ago Ventura says “Nanofactories remain a long-term goal,” and “The path hasn’t been completed …”

Will it ever? Is APM always on the horizon, a vision that never quite makes it in reality? I don’t think anyone can really say.

But there has been progress that in and of itself is worthwhile, and I believe it’s a vision that continues to be worth pursuing.

Bottom line: it should be getting more public R&D funding.

But could this be a trap? Not by Drexler, but used as one by others? A diversion, despite Drexler’s climate concern and his concern for Earthly limits more broadly?

For decades politicians and others who didn’t want to do serious action on climate change have employed what I call the markets-and-techno-magic dodge: we don’t need to do serious climate policies because just at the right time markets and techno-magic will create the solutions we need. Poof! Society just needs to continue to support basic science and the market will take it from there.

Total BS.

Is Drexler’s vision the ultimate in techno-magic? If all we did was put all our eggs in the APM basket, or even R&D more broadly, then yea, it would be.

But that’s not what we’re doing. It’s not what we’re going to do. It’s not some binary either/or situation. It’s a both/and.

APM could really help us — or not. But it’s worth supporting, even as we push to employ today’s helpful tech as big and as fast as possible. We must take some big risks to mitigate climate risks. We must take risks to overcome risks.

For some of you, APM is your specific Field of Action. Great!

But for APM and other promising tech like self-driving labs to get the public funding they need, for strategic ARTC of both kinds, broad-based and targeted, to come into its own as our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, all of us in The Climate Movement must continue to grow and improve our movement so that our three forms of power — Moral Power, People Power, and Staying Power — are enough to get the job done. Join us!

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Some Context

Let me back way up here and start wide — big picture.

As we’ve discussed before, technological progress hasn’t been some gradual progression in human history. Once we hit the Industrial Revolution it shot up like a rocket, and with it economic growth and many things that have improved human wellbeing.

The graphs above help to illustrate this because tech progress is responsible for 85-90% of economic growth, and so charting such growth also tracks the tech change behind it.

Of course, there was a big problem, a big cost. The fuels we used, fossil fuels, created deathly pollution and climate change.

So the fuel brought wealth and death and the greatest threat humanity now faces.

So how do we get ourselves out of this conundrum? We chuck the bad and keep the good. It’s just that the bad makes lots of money, has lots of power, and is intwined in our economies and cultures.

So how do we create the transformation? It’s already well underway, obviously, and as I’ve argued previously, we don’t need to wait to get going in a big way with the tech we already have. But to overcome climate change we need both to happen much faster. We need speed and scale.

Tech progress has been fueled by the fossils. But it has come about due to the production of what Nobel prize winner Joel Mokyr calls “useful knowledge.” It’s knowledge that is, well, useful.

Its production isn’t powered by the fossils. It is powered by the human brain. And useful knowledge and the tech change driving economic growth that it spawns continue to go up like a rocket because of what I call the ARTC-combo:

• specialization;

• the non-rival nature of knowledge (ideas are easily copyable and useable);

• competition.

Our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation for overcoming climate change is ARTC, the accelerating rate of tech change. For those of us who want to do something about climate change, our job is to create and support strategic ARTC, ARTC that helps us with speed and scale.

But given the nature of useful knowledge, strategic doesn’t mean narrow.

This won’t just come about with today’s “clean tech.” We must not be trapped in a clean tech silo.

Thus, there are two kinds of strategic-ARTC: (1) broad-based, and (2) targeted.

We don’t know what we don’t know. By that I mean solutions can come from many fields of scientific and technological knowledge, which form a symbiosis. That’s why we must be all in on basic science R&D. This is broad-based strategic-ARTC.

Mokyr points out that throughout history, tech progress like the steam engine can happen without scientific understanding of why the tech works (which, by the way, is happening with AI, where its creators don’t exactly know how some of it is working). Tech progress can also spur scientific advances, especially with the creation of instruments like the microscope, or, on our case, AI and robotics. So it’s not a one-way street, science-to-tech. It’s also tech-to-science.

But, eventually, tech progress runs out of steam without new scientific advances, which, again, is why we must support basic science, or broad-based strategic-ARTC and not just targeted strategic ARTC, or, more narrowly, clean tech R&D.

At the same time, there’s plenty we do know, and pushing for targeted strategic ARTC is crucial for speed and scale. When we see an area of discovery that can help, we must give it all the help it needs to become strategic for us.

Autonomous Experimentation

When we’re talking about Self-Driving Labs or Autonomous Experimentation, what do we mean?

It’s the scientific method performed without humans, made possible by AI + robotics. Their human creators, on the outside of this process, call this a “closed-loop,” as pictured with 1-4 below.

In other words, a closed-loop system doesn’t need intervention from humans from the outside. It’s beyond the “driver-permit” stage, has passed its driver’s test, and now has its driver’s license and can drive on its own. Kinda scary, but also liberating.

Self-driving labs form hypotheses, run the experiments, analyze the results, and run it over again until obtaining the desired outcome (e.g., #5 in the loop pictured above).

So how are AI and robotics doing this? Here’s a good description from some Korean friends:

Two technologies converged to make this possible. The first is physical AI — robotic systems precise enough to handle microliter volumes, computer vision that monitors reactions in real time, and LLMs capable of reading scientific literature and generating experimental protocols. The second is digital twins — virtual replicas of the lab environment that let the AI run millions of simulated experiments before touching a single reagent. Where these two meet, the experiment cycle compresses from years to weeks (emphasis added).

AI gulping down data to find a grain of sand, labs in cyberspace running millions of experiments before one is done in our reality where robotics that can be delicate and more precise than any human are aided by super-duper cameras. This ain’t the future. It’s now.

Must Go Faster: ARTC on Steroids

So to overcome climate change what do we need? Speed and scale.

We’ve got a need for speed.

In human history tech progress shot up like a rocket when we had more human brains thinking about both science and technology (examples of the specialization part of the ARTC-combo). Brains hooked on science and tech. Brains thinking like scientists and technologists and engineers. The results? The Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

Now we have artificial “brains” (AI) who can do certain things much faster than we can.

So we’ve got both human brains and artificial brains on the job, complementing one another.

One of the pioneers of self-driving labs is Ross King from Great Britain, who began thinking about autonomous experimentation in the late 1990s. His first journal article on the topic (with numerous colleagues) was in Nature in 2004, “Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist.”

King was interviewed recently where he offered this reflection:

In my mind, science is still at the pre-industrial level. A PI [Principal Investigator] with some post-docs and a few students is like a cottage industry, as opposed to a factory of science.

So when it comes into its own the self-driving autonomous experimentation juggernaut will not just be about speed, but also scale, both together pushing one another to become bigger and faster. Not just science labs, but science factories.

And when that happens, when such science factories take discoveries and then produce products for human wellbeing all under one roof — well, science fiction will be transformed into science fact. Indeed, not too long from now many of these scientific factories with far more advanced 3-D printers, or dare I say, replicators, won’t be in the cookie-cutter mass production business, they’ll be in the made-to-order customer-designed business. The volume may be big, but each will be tailor-made.

Right now there are tremendous benefits from combining the strengths of artificial brains with human brains. An artificial brain, or AI, is not just a human brain that’s an artificial one. It works differently. It’s both dumb and a genius simultaneously. As King points out:

They can’t see deep analogies or connections, but they are brilliant at other parts of science. They can literally read everything – they have read every paper in the world 1000 times. If you have a small amount of data, machine learning systems can analyze it better than humans would. In this sense, they have superhuman powers.

With such “superhuman powers” they can quickly chew through a gazillion tons of data and find connections that lead to drugs that can help cure malaria. It’s why we were able find what was needed to develop the COVID vaccine so quickly.

Now autonomous experimentation has created a “super-antigen,” which “marks a pivotal leap forward in our ability to deliver broad, lasting viral protection.” Once perfected, such vaccines will help train the human immune system to provide protection from whole families of virus’s. No more annual flu or COVID shots!

As for targeted strategic-ARTC, King comments:

Areas with low-hanging fruit include materials science, as we need better battery materials, better solar panels, and lots more. There’s something of a gold rush happening there right now … (emphasis added).

A self-driving lab called “Ada” is focused on materials science. It’s development is headed up by another of the leaders in this field, Alan Aspuru-Guzik at the University of Toronto. Here’s a taste of what Ada is doing:

Starting with perovskite solar cell candidates, Ada now autonomously navigates broad swaths of chemical space. Its throughput matches what a multi-person research team could accomplish in several weeks — compressed into a single day (emphasis added).

Aspuru-Guzik is motivated by climate change and the need for speed:

“What I personally am driven [by] is the slow pace of science and technology discovery.”

To speed things up, Aspuru-Guzik has also created a collaboration called the Acceleration Consortium, which they describe as:

a global community of government, academia, and industry that uses AI and automation to accelerate the discovery of materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future—such as life-saving medications, biodegradable plastics, and renewable energy.

Another self-driving lab is run by the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, with an explicit focus on clean tech:

Targeting battery electrolytes, catalysts, and energy storage materials, the system sequences X-ray diffraction, fluorescence spectroscopy, and electrochemical characterization under AI control — continuously. Argonne frames this explicitly as part of the DOE’s clean energy mission: autonomous labs can accelerate materials discovery for grid-scale storage and next-generation solar at a pace that conventional research cannot match (emphasis added).

King also makes a potent observation. Once we really get going on self-driving labs it’s going to make science really cheap to do.

The big picture is that the economic cost of science is dropping. A lot of the actual thinking involved in science can now be done by AI systems, and the experimental work can be done very well by lab automation. You don’t need to employ people to move things around, and people aren’t as accurate and don’t record things as well as automation does. So that’s the big picture: what can we do if we can make science much cheaper?

With cheap can come speed and scale. With cheap can come science not held back by lack of funding. With cheap we can go from science labs to science factories inventing and innovating and producing products we need to fulfill the Better Future Covenant.

Turning Potential Into The Reality We Desire

So how do we make the potential of self-driving labs become the reality we desire?

First, as an incredible example of targeted strategic-ARTC, we need significantly more public funding. Right now there are too few self-driving labs around the world. We need to create a ton more! We need to drive down the cost to democratize this self-driving lab product so that it becomes cheap enough for garage start-ups and science factories to pop up everywhere, pushing the ARTC-combo to new heights.

Second, vision and values.

How do we make autonomous experimentation work for the common good of humanity more broadly? And how, more specifically, do we ensure that it helps us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything?

Don’t be lulled into a sugar-high from confectionary tech optimism spun autonomously by a smart machine or tech-bro manifestos.

Justice won’t come from a self-driving lab, or a scientific factory. Indeed, the opposite can be the case. We must work for justice in this realm like any other.

As Bill Gates recently warned about AI more broadly: “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental.”

Thankfully, many of the scientific leaders in this space like Alan Aspuru-Guzik and others are motivated by climate action and sustainability more broadly.

But as I covered in my last post, AI is being used by the fossils. Big Tech and Big Oil have teamed up together and they are way ahead of the volunteers seeking to use AI for climate action. Right now, as I put it, “Our folks must be 4-5 times better just to break even, but many are not even out of the starting blocks while the AI-fossils are half way around the track already.” There’s absolutely no reason our opposition can’t tap into the potential for speed and scale from self-driving labs to help them torch the planet.

This is where our first two Catalytic Sources of Transformation come in, The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters. It’s our job to see that our vision and values become a reality, that the other two Catalytic Sources, ARTC and Governments-&-Markets, play their parts. The Catalytic-4 must work together for justice.

The AI race is happening so fast right now it’s running past the meager human safeguards that currently exist and pushing data centers onto communities so quickly Big Tech isn’t taking the time to do them right, creating a well-deserved backlash. Instead of the unconstrained rush job we have now, data centers should be showcases of our values: off-grid and completely powered by clean energy they produce on site, zero impact on local water supplies, full-time local good-paying jobs, excellent relations with the community.

We need speed of transformation to implement our vision and values, not to empower the Big Tech Broligarchy and Big Oil and authoritarian regimes, none of which give a damn about our freedom, one of our Ten Movement Values.

It’s our job to see that speed is for us and not against us, not at the expense of freedom but in service to it and justice.

For some of us, creating the speed we need through self-driving labs is your Field of Action. For others, it is making sure the speed creates justice and prosperous sustainability as we overcome climate change. Thankfully, folks like Alan Aspuru-Guzik are combining both.

For all of this we need our three forms of power — Moral Power, People Power, Staying Power. That’s why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most strategic thing we can all do together. Join us!

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I’ve already mentioned some of the downsides to AI, and I’ll be writing more on the potential upsides.

But in this post we are traveling deeper, from AI’s downsides to its dark side. AI’s climate dark side is significantly worse than what we’ve already covered. It has the potential to do much more damage than any good AI could do for climate. It’s way out of balance in the wrong direction.

Man, does this suck.

The answer is not to say “Pull the plug on AI!” That’s impossible. The answer is to get it right.

Climate Movement Heroes vs Big Tech’s Grim Reapers

Thankfully, there’s a group that’s working on this to help the rest of us in The Climate Movement stay abreast of this dark turn and how we can challenge it.

This campaign was founded by two Climate Movement Heroes, Holly and Will Alpine, who left Microsoft once they saw that much more needed to be done. So they created the Enabled Emissions Campaign.

As Holly put it:

I painfully quit a job I loved … I could no longer reconcile Microsoft’s strong public environmental sustainability stance with its assistance to the oil and gas industry—a partnership that was dramatically increasing global emissions. I realized that internal pressure alone wasn’t going to shift the incentives; the public and shareholders needed to know what was happening (emphasis added).

It’s not just Microsoft, as Holly Alpine explains in an interview with Emily Atkin for her Substack, Heated:

There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry ... There are engineers writing code explicitly in partnerships with oil majors to expand production (emphasis added).

Big Tech teams working with and writing code for Big Oil and the other fossils, actively selling these death products, and those in leadership cutting and approving and championing these deals — they are intensifying the last big hurrah of the fossils before clean energy finally turns out their lights. Given that air pollution kills millions and climate change that is not overcome will harm billions and kill millions, these programs are The Grim Reapers of Big Tech.

This is what the Enabled Emissions Campaign is striving to defeat. In other words, it’s Climate Movement Heroes vs. The Grim Reapers of Big Tech and their allies, Big Oil.

Enabled Emissions

Now what the heck are “enabled emissions.” Well, don’t let anybody try to fool you by telling you it’s laughter-induced flatulence. Because it’s not. At least as far as we’re concerned.

But these emissions do stink to high heaven because they are turning something we’re trying to keep on the straight and narrow, AI, into a potent tool for our opposition. In this case, AI is helping the fossils find more fossil fuels, like a demented fossil dating site whose offspring are misery and death, thanatos on steriods. They are enabling emissions that might not have occurred otherwise.

As the campaign says on its website:

Enabled emissions are the additional greenhouse gases released when advanced technologies (AI, IoT, and high-performance/cloud computing) make fossil fuel production economically viable. … Across exploration, extraction, refining, and logistics, AI applications are lowering costs and sustaining the economic viability of otherwise marginal resources.

Microsoft and other Big Tech companies and their allies are making billions of dollars helping Big Oil cook the planet. Microsoft tries to hide this even as they trumpet sustainability. The Enabled Emissions Campaign is putting a big search light on these death deals in the dark.

A Trillion Barrels of Oil

Another of Big Oil’s allies, Wood Mackenzie, a research and consultancy firm, also trumpets sustainability. But as you can see below, they aren’t trying to hide their AI abilities to help Big Oil squeeze profits from every last drop. We’re talking an additional trillion barrels they can help the fossils capture.

They state:

Wood Mackenzie’s proprietary Synoptic AI-powered analysis of oilfield performance shows existing fields are far from exhausted. … better recovery from producing fields could yield an additional 470 billion to over 1,000 billion barrels. This potential only requires the application of established best practices already deployed successfully across the industry, not unproven technologies.

Proprietary AI — They built a Frankenstein, utilizing science and technology to help bring a trillion barrels of fossilized dead matter back to life only to bring death like a plague. Their every-last-drop gluttonous glee is, frankly, pitiful.

The Really Bad News: Model Suggests AI-Fossils Trounce AI-Renewables

So to figure out how big a problem we’re dealing with, Holly and Will Alpine teamed up with a couple of researchers and used a computer model to get a handle on this question. Their results have recently been published in a peer-reviewed journal article.

Here’s the bottom line: “Renewables gains must exceed fossil gains by 4–5× to reach breakeven.”

So our AI-renewables teams must be 4 to 5 times better just to score a tie.

Below is their graph visualizing this catastrophe.

To get the net or purple color on the right you subtract the blue from the red. (Notice, too that avoided pollution from renewables helped by AI doesn’t even equal those from AI data centers, the grey bar on the left.)

AI-fossils increase climate pollution equivalent to Mexico on the low end, and Russia on the high end (who is the fourth largest polluter).

While their study conservatively estimated that the fossils and the renewable industry would take up AI at the same pace, that’s not what’s happening on the ground.

As Holly Alpine told The Guardian:

“Fossil fuel applications are already happening at scale today – real contracts, real deployment, with evidence from industry operators and financial analysts,” she said. “Renewables applications are still largely at the pilot or academic-study stage – more speculative, more dependent on deployment barriers like permitting and interconnection getting resolved.”

In other words, things are even worse than their study suggests. Our folks must be 4-5 times better just to break even, but many are not even out of the starting blocks while the AI-fossils are half way around the track already.

We’re Facing Two Goliath’s, Not Just One

When we’re talking about facing Big Oil and Big Tech together, we’re talking about the biggest and richest corporations in the world.

And what have we got?

We’ve got the P³ — Moral Power, People Power, and Staying Power. If you’re wondering where the hope is for meeting the challenge of these Goliath’s, it comes when we join together. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for.

Our moral power is a constant: our cause is just. Climate impacts are a wrong that must be made right. With AI-fossils, Big Tech is on the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of humanity’s most basic values, the wrong side of history. To change course they must do the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better. Truth is, there are many people in Big Tech who want to do the right thing, who want to be on the right side. We must find a way to tap into that.

Our people power must grow significantly — 16 million in the US and 400 million worldwide. We must become big and broad and active enough to become our destiny: the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in history. The more we grow, the better our chances become to transform this situation. Another reason why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most strategic thing we can do right now.

Our staying power is crucial. We cannot fade as has happened over the last few years. We must get strong, stay strong, and get stronger still.

The Destructive Alliance of Big Tech and Big Oil Must Be Ended Immediately

Back in 2024, the year she resigned, Holly Alpine wrote this in Fortune:

While we were at Microsoft, my colleagues and I never advocated for the company to sever its ties with the fossil fuel industry; we understood we were still operating in a world dependent on oil.

Dependent? That’s just it. We don’t have to be. We’ve got the tech now to do the transformation. And a positive use of AI can make it better and faster. Big Tech has absolutely no excuse.

I hope her view has changed since leaving Microsoft. Her own peer-reviewed study about AI’s potential shows that the only way to have AI-fossils pollution start to be reduced is for AI-renewables to stay on the field while AI-fossils are taken completely off it. As their “plain language” summary of their study puts it:

Across every adoption scenario tested, net emissions fall only when AI’s fossil fuel gains are zero.

In other words, the bottom line is this:

This is what the position of The Climate Movement should be ( and I hope this is now the stance of the Enabled Emissions Campaign).

I would encourage others to consider the following actions against Microsoft, etc, until this is accomplished:

• constant public protests at their offices and other strategic locations;

• boycotts;

• related earned media and social media efforts;

• lawsuits;

• state laws making it illegal.

We will need legal mandates in the end, because left to themselves in a market system some company or companies will always take the dirty money from the fossils.

Is AI-fossils your Field of Action? If so, we need you on it! I strongly encourage you to create CATS (or Climate Action Teams) to support one another.

Others of us must keep going on the various Keep It In The Ground efforts. And we must continue the EV and renewables transformations at break neck speed, so that in the end no one will want their death product.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get going!

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Today’s post is on Biden’s climate legacy focused primarily on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but also briefly on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of the death of Biden’s climate legacy have been greatly exaggerated!”

In my previous post I reviewed how I went along with most of the inside-the-beltway climate policy intelligentsia that championed pricing carbon as the foundational solution to climate change, and how this failed the second of pragmatism's two goals: what can pass.

So how do you get major climate pollution reduction legislation passed? The IRA, still the most consequential piece of climate legislation ever signed into law by far, shows us how.

Instead of making the bad stuff cost more via pricing carbon with a tax or a cap-and-trade system — the intelligentsia’s approach — we make the good stuff cost less.

The IRA Formula That Keeps Winning

The make-good-stuff-cost-less approach, combined with a common-sense strategy to have results generate political support, was the winning combo to get the IRA to become law. You want to have what you’re trying to pass attract the needed votes, and you want those who voted for it to reap political rewards in the form of voter support in their next election. So, votes for policy create votes for reelection — that’s the formula.

Most folks see both electoral campaigns and public policy efforts as politics. From this perspective we have two kinds of politics: electoral-politics and policy-politics.

But it’s important to recognize key differences. Electoral-politics are about getting people elected. Policy-politics are about creating and modifying laws and regulations. Many who are involved in policy-politics don’t get involved in electoral-politics. They are two different skill-sets, and there are laws that differentiate between spending on “express advocacy” (electoral-politics) and “issue advocacy” (policy-politics) and how you can’t mix the two come election time.

Of course, if you don’t win elections, you don’t get to implement your policies. And if you don’t design policies to help you win elections, you may not win the next one. So there can be a delicate dance between these two forms of politics requiring participants to be crafty for good.

So the IRA, Biden’s premier climate law, was designed both to make the good stuff cheap and to generate political support for those responsible for its enactment.

The climate legislation battle between Biden/Harris/Democrats and Trump/MAGA is about as pure a political case study as there ever has been. On one side, it’s Biden’s signature achievement.

On the other side, Trump ran in 2024 vowing to destroy Biden’s “green energy scam.” Once elected, Trump & Co and his MAGA Congress unleashed the fiercest anti-climate effort in the history of humanity against the greatest climate law in US history.

(Go here for a chart of what was kept or modified from the IRA and what was repealed.)

As described below, there are clear lessons learned from what was lost and what survived the Trump/MAGA-Congress onslaught.

To help us see this, Prof. Leah Stokes, one of the key designers of the IRA approach, has done some great analysis in a piece for The Atlantic, on her Substack, and in a working paper with a colleague, Denis Lomov.

Here are my takeaways:

• Biden’s IRA climate law earned votes at the ballot box for those who voted for it, especially in cases where voters could connect it to manufacturing plants and jobs in their communities.

• This is in contrast to pricing-carbon-make-the-bad-stuff-cost-more approaches; those have resulted in political backlash and repeal.

• The stuff in the IRA that created tangible benefits people could see — jobs, manufacturing facilities — has survived the subsequent vicious, stupid attack by Trump/MAGA-Congress. Indeed, Republicans who benefitted helped to protect them.

• The funding that hadn’t yet been spent was really easy to ax because its political benefits hadn’t been realized. Benefits on paper got torched — primarily those for consumers.

• Benefits for clean energy companies were less threatened than the consumer stuff because they were on Capitol Hill fighting for them. Stokes: “The investment tax credit for solar and wind survived, albeit wounded. Battery storage made it out relatively unscathed. And so did the manufacturing tax credits.”

• The benefits for the consumer tax credits (for cars, heat pumps, etc) “were much more diffuse, going to a wide range of households across the country, making it harder to organize and ensure the credits survived.”

Lessons learned:

• Tax credits like those for manufacturing resulting in clear benefits voters could connect to a politician’s vote, i.e., benefits that happened quickly before the next election, will generate electoral support and will be protected from the fiercest opposition.

• In warfare speed kills. For policy implementation, speed saves. Stokes and Lomov: “The clear lesson for future climate policy is that tax credits move dollars and projects faster than grants, and getting dollars out the door is essential” for politicians to reap electoral rewards.

Stokes provides some numbers through an election lens (emphasis in original):

The law [IRA] helped drive $185 billion in private investment into building factories that make solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. And here’s the amazing thing most people don’t know: nine in ten of those facilities are still getting built, under a president who promised to kill them.

Those factories moved votes. We find they lifted Democratic vote share by roughly 1.5 percentage points in 2024 — a swing of 2.5 million votes, in an election where Trump won the popular vote by just 2.3 million.

So the IRA did its job politically, and in keeping with “speed saves” would have done even more if more of its funding was made tangible to voters. As it was, the IRA’s 2.5 million vote swing kept Trump under 50%, and thus from achieving a simple majority of the popular vote, a modest moral victory for our democracy.

Finally, in a quote that warms my ARTC heart, Prof. Stokes provides some wise words:

Perhaps the IRA’s deepest legacy is one Trump cannot easily reverse: it helped make clean energy cheaper. Cost declines work like a ratchet — every factory built and every panel installed pushes prices down the learning curve, and once they fall, they do not climb back up. Since the IRA passed, battery prices have dropped by a third, hitting another record low last year. A tax credit can be repealed. A price decline cannot — the learning is permanent.

What’s Missing From This IRA Analysis?

We should really take to heart all of these valuable lessons Dr. Stokes is helping us see.

But what’s missing? What aren’t we seeing?

Well, how about the elephant in the living room.

We’re missing! The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters are what’s missing.

The Climate Movement, together with Climate Action Supporters, were essential to the production of then-candidate Biden’s climate plan in 2020, and for pushing Democrats to create and pass the IRA once they were in power.

Unfortunately climate all but disappeared from the 2024 election, “climate hushing” and climate cowardice have become a thing for fair-weather Democrats, and The Climate Movement was dispirited and in disarray when Trump and the MAGA Congress launched their rollback efforts in 2025.

We are the solution and we have the potential. But we are not yet what our first characteristic/imperative/goal is calling us to be: big and broad and active enough so that our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — can help us play our part.

For example, we needed to be there with enough tangible political support to protect those benefits that were too diffuse like the consumer tax credits, or the grants that hadn’t gotten out the door and then were frozen by Trump & Co like the “Green Bank” grants for loan programs to help poorer neighborhoods with renewable energy, electric vehicles and net-zero buildings. (The latter may still survive if the “Supreme” Court doesn’t screw our country once again.)

As I’ve said before, it’s time to get our climate action Mojo back — and we can!

Biden’s Climate Legacy More Broadly: IRA + BIL

Finally, a recent Politico analysis also shows that if you look at the two major laws making up Biden’s climate legacy, the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), a huge chunk of funding — $600 billion — hasn’t been torched and is still available.

Out of nearly $1 trillion in grants, contracts and other direct federal outlays provided by Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws, POLITICO found approximately $600 billion dollars remains available for recipients to spend or for federal agencies to award. Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that total $1 trillion — about $60 billion — though many of those cuts are still wrapped up in court challenges.

So $400 billion spent, $600 billion available, and just $60 billion targeted by Trump & Co.

Politico’s graph below breaks down what has been spent and canceled and what remains available. As you can see, 37% has been canceled.

But a hefty majority — 63% — remains. In other words, the reports of the death of Biden’s climate legacy are greatly exaggerated!

The Catalytic-4 Is The Key

The IRA is an example of how each of The Catalytic-4 must work together: (1) The Climate Movement; (2) Climate Action Supporters; (3) ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change, and; (4) Governments-And-Markets. Each are indispensable. But without a Climate Movement that is big and broad and active enough the other Catalytic Sources of Transformation simply will not get the job done, a job that requires speed and scale and a quest for justice.

We must push for victories, defend them, and push for even more. Speed and scale with justice. No rest for the victorious.

But before the victories comes the building of our cause. That’s why the most strategic thing all of us can be doing right now is growing and improving The Climate Movement.

Join us!

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The Fine Art of Not Listening

Beginning in 1997, I spent over two decades in the DC climate/environment/clean energy scene. Over those years I attended many briefings at think tanks and on Capitol Hill (and organized a few myself).

There’s only one of the briefings I attended whose message stood out, that I remember to this day. That’s because it made sense, and no one else was talking abou it.

This briefing wasn’t at one of the marquee think tanks whose events drew hundreds. Nor was it a star studded briefing on Capitol Hill. It was a small little affair for an informal network of those trying to entice Republicans on climate and clean energy. As I recall, there were only about six of us in attendance.

Back in the olden days during my 20+ years in the beltway orbit, all the serious people were in agreement when it came to climate pollution. The most important policy approach was to put an economy-wide price on carbon, whether through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. This was argued by serious economists, and, well, lots of very serious people.

Did I mention how very serious they were?

So, to be taken seriously, you went along with this group-think. And the most serious, the serious-ist of the serious, the High Priests of Serious, were the neoclassical economists. They strode forth as if they had the secrets of the universe at their beck and call, especially through the black boxes of their computer models, whose pronouncements no fool dare question.

Naturally their favorite approach was, of course, the best — a carbon tax, the most efficient and simplest of policy instruments.

But in a teeny tiny bow to political expedience we could do cap-and-trade if we really had to, another way to price carbon (though theoretically less efficient). The expedience part, a mirage, really, was that we might be able to hide that this was going to cost people money, because it didn’t literally have the odious word “tax” in it, a political poison pill if there ever was one.

We described these two pricing carbon approaches as “market-based mechanisms” to hopefully appeal to Republicans and misdirect them away from that poison pill word, tax.

And so we all confessed what the High Priests of Serious intoned: the best approach is to make bad stuff cost more. Never mind that at the time there was hardly any way the average person was going to be able to extricate themselves from the systemic ways fossil fuels made their lives possible.

The bad stuff is, well, bad. So people should feel bad about their pollution. “Are you sure you feel bad enough? Maybe you should feel more bad.” And after feeling bad they should pay for it with our you’ve-been-bad tax. Time to take your punishment for your evil behavior destroying the planet and your children’s future.

Talk about a winning message!

I confess I was swept up in it, because, well, I’m a serious person, very serious.

A price on carbon. That’s the way to go.

Well, I was wrong.

But there were a few folks who got it right back then who were part of a small, new DC think tank that wasn’t completely caught up in groupthink: ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

They were focused on the price part, but they flipped the script. Instead of making the bad stuff cost more, let’s make the good stuff cost less.

That was the pitch one of their young staffers, Matthew Stepp, made at a briefing I attended for a small number of center-right groups at the newly formed R Street Institute in 2012.

In January of that year Steep wrote:

We have to invest every public dollar wisely and use our limited public tolerance for subsidy or higher energy prices to maximum effect. The best way to do that is to invest in ways that drive down the real, unsubsidized cost of clean energy as rapidly as possible. In other words, we need to leverage each public dollar we spend to make clean energy cheap.

Two years later, in an oped in The Christian Science Monitor, Steep and Megan Nicholson continued their little drumbeat on the insufficiency of pricing carbon.

They wrote words that today sound prophetic:

The fixation on carbon pricing within the climate debate has distracted the world from adopting a more effective and comprehensive set of climate policies that make economic sense. The debate needs to change for more viable, pragmatic, and high-impact solutions to emerge (emphasis added).

The debate did need to change, but the rest of us beltway types were captured by groupthink’s fine art of not listening.

Pragmatism’s Two Goals

Steep and Nicholson had said the magic word: pragmatism.

I told Steep at the end of the briefing that, while we wouldn’t give up on pricing carbon because it had beltway momentum, we were certainly open to their approach if it gained traction. So I did listen a little bit. I listened enough to remember, but not enough to act.

Truth is, I was never inextricably wed to a carbon tax or even cap-and-trade. I’m too pragmatic for that. And when it comes to legislation, our value of pragmatism has two goals: what works, and what can pass.

Unfortunately, at the time, all of us serious beltway types didn’t listen fully to pragmatism’s wisdom. We heard the first goal, but, amazingly for serious smart beltway people, not the second: what can pass. Given all the complex neoclassical mathematical formulas run by the computerized black boxes, given the math fetish of policy types, you think we could do the simplest of equations: 50 + 1.

I mean, isn’t that our frikkin’ job, what can pass?

I even had the wisdom of regular folk outside the beltway trying to get me to listen. A few years earlier we had conducted focus groups asking evangelicals what would it take for them to purchase clean energy. Their response: make it cheaper than the polluting stuff.

At the time I was disappointed. Why wasn’t their children’s health, why wasn’t the climate threat, enough of a reason to pay more? Well, they wanted those benefits, too. But they still wanted clean energy to cost less. They wanted both. And why not?

Unfortunately, my pragmatism didn’t push me to see that pricing carbon only achieved the first goal, what works (and, as we all knew but chose to ignore, not that well).

But that goal is worse than worthless if you can’t achieve the second goal — what can pass. Why worse? Because we wasted over a decade’s worth of time, effort, and money to push the unpassable.

Just because it works doesn’t mean it will pass. Politically we built our own Potemkin Village, and only fooled ourselves.

Here’s the irony to the story. Renewables, especially solar, did get much cheaper, as seen above.

But it wasn’t the US that made renewables cheaper. It was China. And they did it not only through innovation. They did it with massive government investment in production because it was in their national interest to manufacture their way out of fossil dependence and the pollution causing societal unrest. They did it through cut-throat domestic competition between Chinese solar companies and supplying the world with the results. But that’s a story for another day.

As for those of us in The Climate Movement, we are not simply guided by what can be achieved, what can pass today. In the policy-political sausage-making process we must push for more and then take what we can get (what can pass), even as we simultaneously use our moral power to build the people power and the staying power (P³) to demand what our other values of justice and love and sustainability require of us. Our pragmatism must always be combined with our other values.

With our P³ we must work to change the art of what’s possible so it becomes bold enough to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. We must make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our just future come faster. Join us!

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In earlier posts I’ve discussed how AI can be a problem, what types of AI could help society with the speed and scale needed to overcome climate change, and how AI’s potential to help is not being matched with the needed investments and strategic direction by society through our governments.

In this post I want to give a taste of how AI is already helping to overcome climate change, but not yet at speed and scale.

The Future Is Already Here

AI is already being deployed in useful ways. We don’t have to wait to get started in a big way with AI. According to one recent study, current, proven, off-the-shelf AI can reduce climate pollution by 5-10% by 2030.

Here’s a sampling of illustrative examples of how AI can help now.

» Electricity

• Improve electrical grids, integrate renewables into smart grids, and better predict user demand.

One example is how AI via the Google company Tapestry is helping PJM, the largest grid operator in North America with 67 million customers, speed up the application and interconnection process for renewables:

By automating and improving the data verification process for things like land rights, equipment, and grid impacts, we aim to reduce the burden on energy developers and PJM planners, and significantly reduce the time it takes to process new project applications.

With the application of Tapestry’s tools and insights, the time it takes to process new project applications will significantly reduce, allowing new capacity to come online far faster. And with solar, wind, and storage project capacity making up ~ 97% of the PJM interconnection queue, we will also support the rapid and reliable integration of more carbon-free energy sources onto the grid.

Husk Power Systems offers a non-US example of how AI helps microgrids:

In Africa and India, Husk Power Systems provides “pay-as-you-go” 100% renewable power to off-grid and weak-grid communities that is 30% cheaper than the alternative: diesel generation. Husk estimates that its AI model enables it to predict user demand with 80% accuracy across its microgrids, thereby improving capacity utilization, reducing costs, delivering lower prices, and guiding capital investment in additional capacity (emphasis added).

» Transportation

• AI optimization of traffic light timing to reduce pollution from idling.

Seattle and other major cities around the world are partnering with Google’s Green Light program to use AI to optimize traffic lights, reducing climate pollution by 10% and stops by 30%.

• AI optimization of the transportation of goods via improved freight shipping.

A recent study found climate pollution from freight shipping could be cut 10-15% from the three changes pictured below:

• AI helping to reduce global warming from air flights.

Condensation trails from jets or “contrails” form when water crystallizes around soot from jet exhaust. Such contrails produce 35% of global warming from air flights. But a recent study from a partnership between American Airlines and Google AI found that having jets fly in less humid air resulted in 62% fewer contrails and 69% less global warming from these flights.

While this solution to contrails sounds simple, implementation is incredibly complex involving AI sifting huge datasets utilizing sophisticated customized algorithms.

» Business and Manufacturing

• Helping businesses map and reduce their pollution, including in their supply chains and providing better demand forecasting so retailers can optimize inventory levels and manufacturers can avoid overproduction.

One company assisting businesses is CO2 AI. According to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group, a global health care company seeking to reduce climate pollution in its supply chain by 20% began working with CO2 AI, which identified “50 times more factors” that would help it significantly exceed its goal.

Concerning inventory and production, a recent paper highlights the benefits of AI in the retail, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors:

In the retail sector, AI-driven demand forecasting helps businesses optimize inventory levels, prevent stockouts, and reduce excess inventory costs (Sánchez-Partida et al., 2018). For example, major retailers leverage AI algorithms to predict demand fluctuations during seasonal sales, adjusting procurement and distribution strategies accordingly. Similarly, in manufacturing, AI assists in production planning by forecasting raw material requirements and reducing lead times, ultimately improving operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness (Sboui et al., 2002; Khan et al., 2024). In the healthcare industry, AI-driven forecasting has proven instrumental in managing pharmaceutical supply chains, predicting demand for critical medications, and optimizing hospital inventory (Sharifmousavi et al., 2024).

» Agriculture

• Improve agriculture production and efficiency, such as combining AI with robotics, drones, cameras, satellites, and weather data to inform yield forecasting, disease risk, quality inspections, and food waste reduction.

Mineral, an Alphabet company, has designed an AI-powered system, recently purchased by Driscoll’s, the world’s leading berry company, that includes a solar-powered “rover” equipped with sophisticated cameras and AI perception tools to help deliver info on yield predictions, plant ripeness, disease risk, and weed presence.

Another company, Taranis, offers similar capabilities. They have recently partnered with Syngenta, a global leader in agricultural innovation, to “equip agricultural retailers with AI-powered crop management solutions.” As Syngenta’s head of Digital Agriculture and Sustainable Solutions, Paul Blackman, put it:

“Instead of going out and scouting every field, you can sit behind your computer and, within 24 hours, see the report from what that drone captured.”

With ultra-high-resolution capabilities,

the platform’s generative AI agronomy agent, AgAssistant, translates imagery into prioritized recommendations, including severity scoring, economic impact, and suggested interventions.

We Must Make This Future Come Faster

The business case for these examples of AI-Climate Action can sell themselves. But on its own the market won’t take up this tech fast enough or at the level needed. Speed and scale requires The Catalytic-4 working together — The Climate Movement, Climate Action Supporters, ARTC, and Government-&-Markets.

The Climate Movement in particular must push the other three, especially governments, to create policies and incentives for adoption of promising AI-Climate Action tech at scale as fast as humanly possible.

But to have our people power be strong enough we must continue to grow our movement to 400 million worldwide and 16 million in the US. Join us!

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This is a continuation of our AI & Climate discussion, begun with our earlier post discussing various pitfalls to the AI & Climate Action relationship.

Bottom Line Up Front

To overcome climate change we need speed and scale of transformation the likes of which the world has never seen. AI, properly and safely utilized, can help. While we don’t need it and mustn’t wait for it to get going in a big way, with AI we can make our future come faster and help ensure we create speed and scale in time.

But speed and scale must also create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything, and we must ensure that AI helps bring this about as we overcome climate change.

Combining Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence to Turbocharge Strategic ARTC

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, ARTC, the accelerating rate of tech change, part of The Catalytic-4 as our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, is powered by the continual production of useful knowledge generated by the ARTC-combo: (1) specialization; (2) nonrivalry of knowledge, i.e., its endlessly copyable and useable nature, and; (3) market competition. All of this is responsible for 85-90% of economic growth, which provides the resources for more people to participate in the ARTC-combo via their particular forms of specialization.

Underlying all of this is the human brain and human intelligence. The more brains we have working and collaborating on it, and the more people communicating about it, the more chances we have to increase the production of useful knowledge leading to inventions and innovations that keep ARTC and prosperity humming along.

So now we have the possibility of supplementing human intelligence with various kinds of artificial intelligence, including machine-learning, agentic-AI, and artificial general intelligence or AGI. These can help us turbocharge strategic climate action.

What is machine learning?

Let’s let IBM explain it:

Machine learning is the subset of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on algorithms that can “learn” the patterns of training data and, subsequently, make accurate inferences about new data. This pattern recognition ability enables machine learning models to make decisions or predictions without explicit, hard-coded instructions.

Even if all we did was take advantage of this basic form of machine learning it could be a tremendous help for climate action.

What is agentic-AI?

Again, IBM:

Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.

Unlike traditional AI models, which operate within predefined constraints and require human intervention, agentic AI exhibits autonomy, goal-driven behavior and adaptability. The term “agentic” refers to these models’ agency, or, their capacity to act independently and purposefully.

So agentic-AI is a more advanced form of machine learning that is autonomous, proactive, specialized, and adaptable.

Agentic-AI can really help us speed things up even more, help us make our future come faster.

What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

Ok, so what is AGI? Once again, IBM:

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical stage in the development of machine learning (ML) in which an artificial intelligence (AI) system can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task.

One crucial aspect needs to be added. AGI is “unaided,” meaning it can go about its business without any help from humans.

AGI doesn’t exist yet. But it will within our climate action timeframe, which extends throughout the remainder of this Century. We must take advantage, with proper safeguards, of each step along the way to AGI and apply such advances to climate action as they become available.

Again, to be crystal clear, all of this presupposes everything is being done safely. Safety first. And, as discussed in my earlier post, AI data centers must be powered by their own clean power and cooled in ways that don’t harm local water supply.

Not Just Clean Tech

One thing we must not do is have our thinking about how AI can help captured in a clean tech silo, as if that’s the only way we can overcome climate change.

First, broadly, we must support government R&D in basic science to help ensure that new possibilities don’t run dry. We can’t predict unpredictable scientific advances. We must work to find them.

But we must not just support basic R&D spending as we’ve done in the past, we also must push for the use of AI in advancing basic science.

Second, anything that uses energy must be improved so it uses less or even creates its own.

But efficiency doesn’t necessarily equate to significant pollution reductions and less environmental impacts. That’s because any efficiency gains can be offset by what’s called the rebound effect. This can happen when people use more of something because efficiency gains have made it cheaper, given that it takes less energy and/or less stuff to achieve the same result.

What we must do is drive efficiency to a point where it completely overwhelms the rebound effect. Even more, we should strive to have the amount of energy and stuff needed to create prosperous sustainability for everyone be 10% or less than what we use today.

AI can make a major contribution by helping drive the needed invention and innovation across just about the entire spectrum of processes and products our economies produce.

AI can also help improve ways our societies function, such as improving traffic and travel patterns, and how we adapt to climate impacts and build resilience to withstand them.

Finally, AI can help us better manage our relationship with the rest of nature, including natural climate solutions and helping to create balance and harmony between human civilization and nature as prosperous sustainability requires.

What’s Happening? Nowhere To Go But Up

Let me start with this caveat: for all I know there could be many efforts going on with the human intelligence-AI-climate action nexus that aren’t being written about and shared publicly (including in China).

Be that as it may, from what I’ve learned so far there are some valiant efforts by volunteers that are absolutely needed, and the specifics will be covered in the sixth post of this AI-Climate Action Series.

But my overall response to what I’ve been able to discover is this: are you frikkin’ kidding me.

It’s absolutely great that we have folks volunteering. Volunteers are the only way The Climate Movement will become big and broad and active enough. And I’m so grateful folks have created this particular climate/AI Field of Action where their gifts, abilities, knowledge, and experience can be brought to bear together in overcoming climate change.

And I’m also grateful to well meaning philanthropists providing funds for small research grants.

Lots of needed learning can take place.

A standing ovation to all participating in these efforts! Thank you! You are helping lay a foundation that the rest of us must build upon.

But from the perspective of society’s response to climate change, this is woefully inadequate. These valiant volunteers and supporting philanthropists can’t create the speed and scale needed in this particular Field of Action.

Businesses also have an important role to play. They may be footing much of the bill for advances in machine learning, agentic-AI, and AGI. That’s because they see profits in their future.

But we can’t expect those in a market system where profits rule the roost to do anything other than seek those profits. If they are going to help with this particular climate action partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence they must get paid or achieve some other form of compensation or consideration or see future profits (e.g. products customers want).

Governments exist to create and/or facilitate the Common Good. Businesses may indirectly create some Common Good as they seek profits (the old Invisible Hand). Volunteers are crucial to the Common Good, as is the case with The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters. But much of our job is to push governments to do their job, including structuring markets to create the Common Good that volunteers and the Invisible Hand cannot.

Governments must lead for this partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence to fulfill its potential in overcoming climate change. They should be funding this work in a major way. And, again, The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters should push and support politicians to do so.

Some of us in The Climate Movement — elected and appointed officials, their staffs, relevant businesses and NGOs, etc — need to propose and enact legislation; this is one of your Fields of Action. And the rest of us need to support them. This should happen at both the state and federal levels in the US and in countries all over the world.

Finally, nations should create collaborations to further speed up and enhance these capabilities.

When it comes to the human-intelligence-artificial-intelligence-climate-action nexus, it’s time for societies to get serious, and for them to find ways to work together. While each of The Catalytic-4 has a vital role to play, The Climate Movement must lead the way in creating the popular support necessary. Join us!

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Hope for achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — comes from the Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation, or The Catalytic Four.

They are:

1. The Climate Movement

2. Climate Action Supporters

3. ARTC or the accelerating rate of technological change, and

4. Governments-and-Markets

All are indispensable. They must be interrelated.

I haven’t yet written a ton on our Third Catalytic Source, ARTC, so I thought it was about time to start the discussion of one way ARTC can contribute: AI.

But first, a quick ARTC review.

ARTC Recap

Today’s accelerating rate of tech change wasn’t inevitable. Nor was it the result of some gradual historical process. As the graphs below suggest, tech change, the major driver of economic growth (responsible for about 85-90%) shot up like a rocket during the Industrial Revolution and continues its path straight up.

ARTC happened and keeps going due to the continual production of useful knowledge generated by what I call the “ARTC-Combo”: (1) specialization; (2) nonrivalry of knowledge, i.e., its endlessly copyable and useable nature, and; (3) market competition.

This combo isn’t stopping, isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up, and AI will send it into hyperdrive.

What The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters need to do is push the ARTC-Combo to create strategic ARTC, i.e., ARTC that helps us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

AI: Friend or Foe? Support or Oppose? Believe the Hype?

Let me get a few things out of the way first.

» Stop AI?

For those who oppose AI, is there a way to stop it, to put the genie back in the bottle?

NO.

There’s way too much $$ invested. For example, AI data center investment by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle in the US will top $1 trillion next year, about 20% of total US business investment.

Even if AI advancement were to stop in the rest of the world, China would continue to go along its merry way. Given that its rapid advances, now rivaling Western counterparts, has taken place via open source software, if everyone else stopped it would slow them down. But it wouldn’t stop them. Their leader, Xi Jinping, has an expansive vision for AI.

There’s no stopping AI.

» Support or Oppose?

YES.

We should oppose:

• AI data centers that suck up scarce water, drive up electricity bills, and turn on fossil generated electricity, both old coal-burning power plants and new natural gas plants, as I discussed earlier; they must generate and store their own energy with renewables plus storage — not natural gas! — and find ways to keep their hardware cool without draining local water supplies;

• so-called techno-fascism and the current inherent tendencies with AI that make it amenable to fascism and authoritarianism;

• AI development without safeguards that ensure autonomous AI acts within appropriate ethical boundaries, as should artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI) once they exist.

But we should actively support efforts to have AI help us overcome climate change.

» Friend or Foe?

So is AI a friend or foe to The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters, the first and second Catalytic Sources of Transformation?

YES.

Our job is to help make sure that all types of AI are friends and not foes. For some of us, this is our Field of Action, our role, our calling, within The Climate Movement.

» Believe the AI/Climate Hype?

So, how much help should we expect from AI? Should we believe the AI hype about solving climate change?

NO.

As Ramesh Srinivasan and Emily Jacobi recently put it:

We’ve heard repeated promises from leaders like Sam Altman, who says AI will solve climate and affordability crises, if only we feed it enough water, energy and minerals. As technologists who have worked on machine learning tools, we know this to be a fantasy. Machine learning and language models can be helpful tools, but they cannot rewrite the basic facts of material reality.

The AI/Climate hype is just the latest version of what I call the markets-and-techno-magic BS that’s been around for decades: we don’t have to do anything really because the magic of the markets and unknown future tech miracles will swoop in and solve climate right at the last minute when we most need it. This markets-and-techno-magic dodge has been pushed primarily by politicians who didn’t want to do the early heavy lifting on climate action.

Now it’s being deployed by the tech bros, the broligarchy, to justify whatever they need to run the world. They tell us the tech miracle is almost here in the form of AI. Don’t worry, be happy. AI and the broligarchy will save our butts.

We need to make one thing crystal clear: we aren’t looking for AI and the tech bros to save us.

We Just Can’t Wait to Create Speed and Scale

Why isn’t climate being overcome right now at speed and scale? It’s not because we don’t have the tech to do so today. We do. We already have the tech we need.

Even though helpful tech is getting better every day, we don’t need to wait for better tech and cheaper tech to get going in a big way. We already have profits and price working in our favor — an absolutely huge accomplishment decades in the making! This means market dynamics can work for us.

But the fossils and their political lackeys and the physical, political, regulatory, and bureaucratic infrastructure of the 20th Century energy systems are holding us back. The fossils will do everything they can to wring out every last drop of profit from their death products, such as over $93 billion in windfall profits from the Iran War, almost doubling their profits from the previous year as climate impacts heat up. So we’ve got lots of work to do to have markets working for us like they should. This won’t happen without The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters pushing the fourth Catalytic Sources of Transformation, Governments-and-Markets, to do so.

We can’t wait for AI’s help with new and better solutions before we get going in a big way on speed and scale — and we don’t have to.

At the same time, we also must push for our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, ARTC, to play its part and help us achieve speed and scale: strategic ARTC, focused-climate-action ARTC.

Real Justice, Not Technoblesse Oblige From the Broligarchy

And not just speed and scale. We can’t be for big and fast and unjust. We are to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. As we achieve speed and scale we must do so in ways that also achieve the three actions of justice: stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better. We must bring our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — to bear on our quest for justice. We won’t accept crumbs from the broligarchy, no faux technoblesse oblige.

AI & Climate Action

So with all these caveats, all these potential dangers, can AI help us?

Not if we passively sit around waiting for it to. Not if we simply say No because it’s easier to simplistically oppose stuff.

Thankfully, there are some who see the realistic possibilities for AI to help us with climate action and are working to make them happen.

We should actively help scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs working for better approaches vi AI, including those who are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes striving upon this, their Field of Action.

And what are these efforts? Stay tuned!

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In the US there’s a climate cowardice that is infecting Democratic candidates, driven by political elites, talking heads, and party pooh-bahs. These climate cowardice vectors, these climate silencers, just want candidates to shut the ____ up about climate change.

Unfortunately, the infection from these climate cowardice vectors has spread. Communication by congressional Democrats about climate has decreased 80% since 2021 as measured by their press releases.

I can hear the climate cowardice vectors now, telling us all not to worry our pretty little heads: “Oh, once they get into power candidates can do some stuff on climate change as long as it’s below the radar.”

So how do we do speed and scale below the radar?

These guys like short answers, so here’s one: we don’t.

Anyone impeding speed and scale thwarts our vision, purpose, and Major Goal to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

In other words, they’re working for the wrong team, whether they recognize it or not.

Climate Action Is For Winners, Climate Cowardice For Losers

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s 2035 Initiative tested the climate cowardice claims.

First, the 2035 Initiative found what Yale/GM and others have found (and what I’ve already written about), that climate action is a low priority overall right now. So while the climate cowardice vectors get this one right, their response is all wrong.

When support for action on the greatest moral cause of our time lacks intensity for most voters, a leader doesn’t act like a coward and run away from it. A leader finds a way to lead, to generate support for what’s right.

Furthermore, and importantly, that it is a low priority overall doesn’t mean it’s not a top priority for some, or worse, that it costs support.

This is where the climate cowardice vectors, the climate silencers are dead wrong.

Instead, talking in favor of climate action increases support much more than it drives opposition in voting. In other words, it will net votes.

People open to voting for a Democrat:

• for 66% their vote is based on who supports government climate action;

• 8% oppose.

Even Republican candidates can win on climate action. In their potential pool of voters:

• 52% support climate action and vote on it;

• 14% oppose.

Further, as seen below, being stronger is better. Voters are ready to reward climate champions. When asked whether they would support candidates that make it a top priority in comparison to just a priority, being a champion wins each relevant category:

“committed Democrats“ +9.5 (versus +8.4)

“open to voting for a Democrat” +7.2 (versus +5.9)

“open to voting Republican” +1.7 (versus -0.1)

Of course, even committed Democrats may not show up. Being a climate champion no doubt can increase turnout, make sure this +9.5 of committed Ds are motivated to show up, and get the +7.2 open to voting Democratic excited enough to do so as well. These numbers win elections.

So the climate cowardice vectors infecting candidates are setting Democrats up for defeat, whereas being a climate champion can lead to victory.

“But We Need to be Talking About ___________!”

The climate cowardice vectors want candidates to talk about affordability and healthcare. These are the top two issues by far for the midterms.

Should candidates talk about affordability?

Duh.

Should candidates talk about health care?

More duh.

Nobody’s talking about not talking about affordability and healthcare. We’re talking about both/and, not either/or.

So let’s talk about affordability and climate action!

Cue the fantastic Leah Stokes:

We can all see our electricity bills are too high. And Trump is pushing them higher by forcing families to bankroll expensive coal plants past their planned retirements. The tab so far: more than $300 million, tacked onto power bills across the country. One Michigan plant alone costs families $615,000 a day. Ratepayers could end up paying $6 billion a year to keep dirty, overpriced energy on life support.

Trump’s war in the Middle East has already cost the average family more than $525 at the pump. Add higher electricity and gas bills, and the Trump energy tax is on track to reach roughly $1,500 per household this year.

So Trump/MAGA are raising costs by forcing Americans to give corporate welfare to Big Producers of Polluting Products. They’re raising costs at the gas pump with their criminal, unnecessary war.

By contrast, in most situations clean energy is the lowest cost option for new electricity generation. And electrifying transportation via EVs, etc, is the way we’re going to ditch our oil dependence and stop US involvement in Middle East wars. That’s what real leadership looks like.

Let’s talk about health and climate!

Trump/MAGA are attacking health care coverage and increasing the uninsured, they are attacking clean energy and giving corporate welfare to big polluters, increasing pollution that sends kids to the hospital, they are attacking climate action as deadly heat and wildfires ravage our neighborhoods and pollute our skies.

Take away healthcare coverage as you help send us to the Emergency Room — that’s the Trump/MAGA healthcare plan.

Democrats can be healthcare champions and climate champions at the same time and connect the dots on how they are related.

In a nutshell: Democrats can be smart, courageous, and victorious — or not. They can be leaders with guts and win, or wimps and lose.

Our Part

We need to be electing climate champions, not climate cowards. But we can’t expect them to be champions all on their own. We must also play our part by growing The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters to provide them the political support they need to get the job done. We are in this together.

And how do we do this? We break the Climate Talk Taboo and actually talk to people.

As I posted previously, a Yale/GM poll found that if someone a person likes and respects asks them to volunteer for climate action, the numbers go up significantly across the political spectrum.

Here are the numbers for Democrats:

• Liberal Ds +43

• Moderate Ds +32

As for voting, my fellow Substacker Antonia Scatton has recently reminded us of what’s been known for decades: word-of-mouth recommendations from people we know and respect is the most powerful influencer of all, given that historically 9 out of 10 voters make their decision based on conversations with people they know.

In other words, we have the moral power and we are growing our people power to put climate champions in office. And our staying power will guarantee that our people will rule the roost for the rest of our lives, knowing we’ve got their backs.

So let’s get going. Join us!

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