The day after the US election I was reminded of some sage advice from someone who was cranky, prone to depression, drank too much, felt compelled to get things off his chest, and was arrogant enough to think that he could make a difference. Hard guy to like1, also hard not to respect.
Not gonna lie. Tough week. Not helped by picking up a bit of a bug.
Here’s the thing. You may not think that what you do now matters. But there are people counting on you. You will likely never meet them, never even know their names. They are too numerous to count. Because they are the people living and as yet unborn in places that are going to become more or less uninhabitable within the average lifespan of someone born in 2025. Whether you work in policy and advocacy, or a climate tech startup, or an energy company, or in finance, if you’re in a place of greater safety like here in These Islands, because you have privilege you also inherit the obligation to get up and keep working.
That is what I imagine Churchill meant.
Which is not to say we should look away from what a bunch of evil lunatics in the ascendancy are in the process of doing. As I write the good folks of Davos/Klosters are a couple of hours away from the Orange God-King bestowing his virtual presence upon them at WEF. Which is like The Olympics for Pretending Everything is Fine. Even - especially - people who know better self-censor at Davos, because the only thing worse than being world-historically-wrong is being the awkward guest at the party. Like the broligarchy sat in places of honour on Monday in Washington, many forelocks will be tugged (while stealing a sneaky glance and coveting thy neighbour’s wife).
Instead, we try to speak to the smartest people we can, who have some thoughts about how not to give up while also being in the stare-reality-in-the-face-and-stop-pretending business.
Laurie Laybourn and James Dyke are two of the smartest folks thinking and writing about that reality, and what to do about it if you accept giving up is not an option. They’ve written persuasively in academic papers and on websites like The Conversation about the climate “doom loop”, aka “derailment risk” - the idea that we are knocked off course from the things we know we need to do to prevent the worst outcomes, and find it difficult to get back on track. A cycle of greenhouse emissions → warming temps → escalating climate shocks → economic harm from climate shocks (like food price inflation) → political (usually right-wing-populist) backlash → policy outcomes that don’t stop emissions → lather, rinse, repeat.
They also have some pretty smart things to say about ways to break that cycle. If I hear them right, it starts by a decision to stop pretending and prepare for the adaptations that are going to be necessary everywhere. But are most acute for those 3 billion souls living in what is likely to be those parts of Earth made uninhabitable by the end of the century. All of us - but particularly they - are going to need access to innovations that are made cheap and plentiful that make us more resilient to the shocks to come.
Have a listen.
Learning is Resistance
George Monbiot, who I found insufferable when I was several degrees to the right 20 years ago, posted an excellent valedictory on departing X. One still might say the lady doth protest too much. But I think he wound up in the right place:
Hat-tip to Ember’s Dave Jones, who put that out on BlueSky. Or I wouldn’t have seen it.
More important than whether any particular person chooses to use a social platform was this observation, I reckon:
Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I learnt that the military dictatorship had actively sought to suppress educational levels in schools, as it saw a well-informed population as a political threat. A confused, distracted and ignorant population is easy to manipulate. Now this counter-educational model is being rolled out worldwide, and Elon Musk is its primary sponsor.
So for this week I can think of no call to action more likely to stiffen the spine and summon up the blood, ironically, than to encourage anyone reading this to follow the advice given by Merlin to Arthur in TH White’s Once and Future King:
The best thing for being sad … is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
Sorry - not sorry - if that sounds mawkish and you think (as some of you have written to me) that we’ve gone off the res at Wicked Problems. While we have said from the jump that our mission is to look at the intersection of science, tech, politics, people, law, and finance that we bundle up as “Climate Tech”, we’re conscious that there’s been a lot (really a lot) of political content, and that may not be what you signed up for if there’s not enough tech, or finance.
Don’t you worry, dear friend. We’ve plenty in the hopper - whether the audacious plan to link the electricity grids of Europe and North America in our next episode, people trying to figure out solar geoengineering that doesn’t have to suck, algorithms that use game theory to prioritise justice, and climate and nature data that can inform better decisions, we are compelled to go deep on these things. To learn. Because in times like these, that’s a no-regrets act of resistance in our book.
Outro
Today’s outro track is brought to you by John Spillane, the Corkonian crooner who by choosing will definitely lose me some cred with my cooler Irish friends. But it seemed right.
If you’re enjoying our eclectic mix of outros, you can find them all here:
PS - That hat. Yeah it’s a stupid hat. No it’s not from the Hoover FBI Building. It’s from the Ferryboat Inn in Shaldon, Devon. Which is a fine adult beverage emporium run by some fine people and if you’re ever down that way and up for a kayak workout playing in the outgoing tidal flow, followed by some excellent local ale at FBI, let me know.
We may all prefer the Gary Oldman version but the John Lithgow portrayal is, I suspect, sadly more on point. In either case, surely we can agree Mrs. Churchill put up with quite a lot and whatever good he did in the world can fairly be credited as least as much to her.
Share this post