Andy McIlwain

“This morning I saw an incredible sky. I was driving so couldn’t photograph it, but it was the most amazing pale salmon with golden lemon tones. There was a heavy mist lying on the fields and wrapping the trees like a comfort blanket. The rising sun lit up the drops of dew on the grass like fairy lights. Everything was distilled but diffuse and shining. I wanted to keep it safe.”

— Morning sky (bsag)

An example of the sort of stuff you can find on Micro.blog. It’s an ad-free, community-centric alternative to Twitter. Less noise. More personal. It feels like a throwback to the early web. From their About page:

“Tweeting is one form of microblogging. But when you use Twitter, your content stays at Twitter. At Micro.blog, you can write short posts that appear in the Micro.blog timeline, as well as on your own blog that you control.”

It’s free to join and connect your own blog, but hosted plans start at $5/mo.

“All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response. The climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change thirty years ago. Since then, carbon emissions have increased with each year except 2009 (the height of the global recession) and the newest data show that 2018 will set another record.

[…]

“We can plan now and retreat in a strategic and calculated fashion, or we can worry about it later and retreat in tactical disarray in response to devastating storms. In other words, we can walk away methodically, or we can flee in panic.“

— How extreme weather is shrinking the planet (New Yorker)

I’m sharing excerpts from this piece again because it’s worth emphasizing. Things are happening faster than expected.

How will we cope as a society, as a civilization, as a species?

“Last year, Hawaiian researchers projected that the share of the world’s population exposed to deadly heat for at least 20 days a year will increase from 30% now to 74% by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to grow. (It will rise to 48% with “drastic reductions”.) They concluded that “an increasing threat to human life from excess heat now seems almost inevitable”.”

— Heat: the next big inequality issue (The Guardian)

“We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind turbines are now among the least expensive ways to produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose to, but we’d need to opt for solidarity and coördination on a global scale. The chances of that look slim.”

— How extreme weather is shrinking the planet (New Yorker)

…and yet Ontario’s provincial government will spend hundreds of millions to scrap green energy projects. (Kicker? They also lied about it not costing taxpayers.)

“Premier Doug Ford said Thursday he is “proud” of his decision to tear up hundreds of renewable energy deals, a move that his government acknowledges could cost taxpayers more than $230 million.”

— Doug Ford ‘proud’ of tearing up hundreds of green energy contracts (CBC)

Proponents say it’ll save Ontario millions more in the long run, but here’s the thing: we need to invest in alternative energy sources.

Scrapping the investment now, and wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to do it, doesn’t change that fact.

Now we’ll need to spend hundreds of millions more in the future to get us to the point we were already at before the Ontario PC party threw everything out.

Climate change isn’t avoidable. It’s happening. It’s here. The questions are how do we adapt? and how do we keep from making it worse?