Agreed. I'm getting tired of these pencil-pusher reports implying that "the economy" is going to keep chugging along at a reduced rate, as if we can just shuffle around our stock portfolios and weather the storm.

The "Planetary Solvency" report by IFoA is one of the first mainstream papers that's taking a sober look at the climate crisis. If we hit 2°C by 2050, they're seeing a significant likelihood of:

• 2 billion deaths
• High number of climate tipping points triggered, partial tipping cascade.
• Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.
• Major extinction events in multiple geographies.
• Ocean circulation severely impacted.
• Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost.
• Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions.
• Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

I don't even want to think about 3°C and 4°C scenarios.

I'm not a fan of manufacturers continually foisting larger vehicles on us. Improvements in range and charging are always welcome, but the Nissan Leaf was the perfect size for its niche (an affordable urban vehicle). Our local CarShare has a Gen2 Leaf, and I never had an issue hauling work equipment with the seats down. You can't fit sheet plywood or lumber in there, but that was never its intended purpose.

With increases in size come increases in cost (and decreases in MPGe). The Chevy Bolt was another great pocket rocket that recently fell victim to the oversizing trend (in this case being canceled entirely to manufacture e-pickups).

For those who are coming straight to the comments, essentially the Fish & Wildlife Service is proposing culling tens of thousands of Barred Owls in order to prevent them from displacing Spotted Owls. The issue is that landowners can also apply for a culling permit, and the two species are close enough in appearance as to be indistinguishable from each other (especially at night), which means Spotted Owls are just as likely to be killed as Barred Owls.

In short: a good intention, a very bad idea.

Thank you for sharing! I'm a big proponent of the planetary boundaries framework, it's a great way to visualize overshoot. While climate change is a big (perhaps the biggest) issue facing global civilization right now, it's extremely important that we don't get tunnel vision and try to solve for one variable without looking at our biosphere holistically. (That's how we get carbon capture and geoengineering.)

A few more links/resources for those interested:

• This is the Stockholm Resilience Centre's home page for planetary boundaries, showing the change in overshoot from 2009 (when the framework was established) to 2023.
• Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries is the corresponding paper for their 2023 update, which goes more in depth into each boundary and what constitutes a transgression.

I wrote it, sorry you're annoyed 😅 I keep my focus on America as climate resilience is a huge subject, and I don't have the bandwidth to keep tabs on multiple countries. There's also pretty good data availability here, although I expect that'll take a hit during this administration. There are some commercial and open-source platforms which are starting to publish data for Canada & Europe, I just haven't come across insurance-specific info in my trawls.

I think it's important to spend time in wild spaces (backpacking is great for this), but since home is where we spend most of our time, bringing nature into the backyard is huge for daily exposure. I work from home, so whenever I feel like I've been staring at screens for too long, I head out to the pollinator garden for a reset.

It was a no-brainer until fossil fuels! (Although traditionally settlements would have a village surrounded by farmland, not the inverse.)

The level of obstinacy and stupidity in this administration never ceases to amaze me.

Each year the WEF publishes a Global Risk Report, surveying over 300 global experts and leaders from business, government, and academia on what they believe are the most pressing threats facing the world. For the past 3 years, climate change and its associated impacts have consistently ranked #1, #2, and #3 among all quantified threats.

To not only downrank this threat, but pretend that it presents no risk entirely implies that the US doesn't even have object permanence at this point.

it’s kind of hilarious how reckless this is.

I'm also thinking of how reckless it is from a resource perspective. Even if US politics manages to slow the spread of renewables, oil is a finite resource which is becoming harder and more expensive to extract by the year. If your vehicle needs 40 gallons of that stuff every week, you're putting yourself in a very vulnerable position.

Banks trying to take profits buying air conditioner stocks while society and the biosphere is crumbling around them is a perfect encapsulation of this crisis. I'm doing my best to laugh at the absurdity of it all, because the alternative is paralyzing depression.

If you're interested in the more fundamental dynamics at play here, I'd highly recommend giving these a watch:

• William Rees: The Enigma of Climate Inaction
• Daniel Schmachtenberger: Modeling the Drivers of the Metacrisis

2x on local hard drives, 2x in the cloud. Not taking any chances with this.

Amidst all the horrible news about data purges and erasures, this is a glimmer of hope. The real losers (as usual) are the American people, who stood to benefit massively from clear, understandable data on climate risk at a local level. I've been pre-emptively archiving federal climate resources for the past 6 months, as it all seems to be on the chopping block.

The IPCC, FAO (UN), and the World Resources Institute put emissions from (all) agriculture at around 20%-25% of total emissions.

This article cites a single paper in opposition, which claims that emissions from animal agriculture are more than double that number. I don't have the time or expertise to comb through that paper with a critical eye, but the reports of the above organizations cite dozens of studies so it seems the weight of evidence is tilting towards the 20% figure.

This isn't to say that animal agriculture isn't an issue - it's a huge issue, and not just for the climate. But I think it's important to acknowledge that these emissions numbers aren't widely accepted.

According to the IEA, in 2024 renewables accounted for 38% of new energy generation, and 32% of new electricity generation. That's a very big discrepancy from the 92.5% cited in this report, which refers to "renewable power capacity,"defined as:

the maximum net generating capacity of power plants and other installations that use renewable energy sources to produce electricity.

So it seems like that number might be referring to potential, not actual (?) use. But maybe someone more familiar with these terms can weigh in here.

Ignorance, petulance, and a willful dismissal of the truth are the new norms for this "administration." But information wants to be free, and this is a good example of how the internet can be a force for good.

Thank you to Fulton Ring for making the raw data publicly available on their Github. I'll be downloading this data and hosting the risk maps on my website as well; the more copies of this information out there, the better.

It is the stock brokerage division of banks giving their boiler room reps a “hot tip” lead.

"When it gets hot, people will use more air conditioning." Thanks Morgan Stanley, that's some real insider knowledge.

If you look at what Republican leadership is doing (not saying), they absolutely believe climate change is a threat. They're reacting to it with dystopian measures, but it's clear they're just playing dumb.

I've been watching Landman clips on YouTube and I have mixed feelings on it.

I think it does a good job of capturing the futility of this situation, in the sense that every stage of fossil fuel production (and consumption) is populated with folks "just doing their job," providing for their families, following orders, etc. I watch this show and see the banality of evil, oil CEOs who genuinely believe they're doing right by the world rather than burning it down.

But I'm also acutely aware that this is not the take most viewers will be walking away with. We're talking about a general public that idolizes the likes of Tony Montana, Gordon Gekko, Patrick Bateman, Tony Soprano, and Jordan Belfort, despite their films/shows explicitly depicting their downfall as a result of their moral failings.

The vast majority of viewers are going walk away from these films feeling less guilty for their own fossil fuel consumption.

Dishwashers, fridges, laundry machines, vacuums and other basic home appliances are mostly mature technologies; their basic design & function solidified over 70 years ago and there's not much left to improve on now (other than efficiency).

This isn't an issue for consumers or private companies, but public companies need to deliver increasing profits (not just steady profits) year over year. One solution to this is planned obsolescence, but adding a bunch of unnecessary tech "features" kills two birds with one stone by allowing manufacturers to justify higher prices while also building in additional points of failure. It's also a means of harvesting consumer data which can then be sold for additional profit.

Good for shareholders, bad for everyone else.

Is the city just going to fine each building $25 every time an inspector checks?

From the city's website, it looks like a fine of $300 can be assessed for buildings with more than 9 units (and for multiple infractions).

I assume this would incentivize owners to inform their tenants of the policy, and make composting more easily accessible to them. I can think of a dozen loopholes and unforeseen consequences of this law, but however imperfect, I still believe it's a step in the right direction. Food waste is a massive issue, as is nutrient loss from our soils, and ultimately I think that inconvenience is a small price to pay for addressing that. I realize that not everyone feels the same way, which is why incentives are needed.

This law is a negative incentive, so I would hope that some positive incentives could be implemented as well.