REFERENCES

SOURCES BY SECTION

PRELUDE

    • But by the ’80s people had already loved Florida’s marine life to bits.

    • The nearshore reefs were the first to be pummeled by our flippers, polluted by our sewage, and emptied with our hooks and nets.

    • Fish simply can’t make babies as fast as we can catch them. The biggest fish—sharks and mammoth groupers and snappers—are the most prized and therefore the first to disappear.

    • But in 1983, long-spined urchins were wiped out by a mysterious disease.

    • Drowning death rates of Black children are (depending on age group) 2.6 to 7.6 times higher than for White children, the highest disparity between any races.

    • ...as we careen past eight billion people on the planet…

POSSIBILITY

REPLENISH AND RE-GREEN

    • The climate solutions that nature offers can comprise more than one-third of the CO2 mitigation needed to hold global warming to below 2°C… 

    • ...scientists estimate there are 8.7 million (±1.3 million). 

    • Right now, only about 3% of the ocean and 17% of land and inland waters have full legal protection from exploitation. We need to get to something closer to 50%, “half Earth” in the terminology of pioneering biologist E.O. Wilson.

    • Increasing herds of large herbivores in northern high-latitude ecosystems could prevent nearly 40% of all Arctic permafrost soils from thawing, by keeping soil temperature below –4°C (24.8°F).

    • One whale is worth a thousand trees, in terms of carbon. When a whale dies and falls to the ocean floor, that’s an average of 33 tons of carbon sequestered. 

    • Soil holds approximately 75% of all terrestrial carbon.

    • In some healthy ecosystems and areas like the Amazon rainforest, a raindrop may have five or six cycles of staying in the same area before ultimately it moves to another area.

    • Or, as Ciara Nugent wrote in Time, “Growing trees alongside crops is like installing an air conditioner and sprinkler system, or, in the words of one prominent farmer, ‘planting water.’” On a sunny day, a single tree can transpire hundreds of liters of water, representing a cooling power equivalent to running two or more domestic air conditioners.

    • ...beavers could help to manage wildfires in the western United States because their dams help landscapes absorb more water.

    • …biodiverse forests create their own rain, by emitting aerosols, which seed the rain.

    • Globally, 40% of rainfall over land originates from terrestrial evaporation. Destruction of ecosystems is proven to reduce evapotranspiration. (E.g., Deforestation has reduced rainfall around the Panama Canal, greatly reducing its usefulness as a shipping route.)

    • For more than a century rural America has endured a boom-and-bust economy that has supplied wealthy processors with cheap food, timber, and fuel, but has left the countryside impoverished, and nearly deserted. Rural America hasn’t been ‘left behind’ in the march of progress—it has been systematically gutted.

    • In the U.S., there are nearly 5 million fewer farms now than there were in 1935, a 70% decline. And farm size has doubled—large-scale farms account for 4% of the farms but 48% of the value of production…

    • …by the middle of the 19th century, seven or eight generations in, had cleared about three-quarters of the land in central and southern New En­gland.

    • Today, little of New En­gland is still farmland, something like 5%—it used to be more than half—and the region only produces something like 10% of its food. Southern New En­gland—Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts—is now nearly 60%, and northern New En­gland states are 80–90% forested. 

    • New En­gland could grow half the food it needs right here in the region by 2060 by utilizing a little more of the reforested landscape.

    • New En­gland only produces about one-quarter of the lumber it uses, and about two-thirds of its pulp. A region that is about 80% forested is importing a huge amount of wood. Most American wood now comes from the American South, where there’s intensive plantation forestry going on.

    • …a disproportionate part of the Senate comes from rural states with small populations. 

    • Nearly all of the alfalfa, most of the soybeans, and about 40% of corn (three of the four biggest crops by value) go to livestock feed. Irrigating cattle-feed crops accounts for 23% of all water consumption nationally—and 55% along the Colorado River.

    • Global meat production has more than quadrupled since 1965.

    • Deep-rooted perennial grains like Kernza have roots that can extend down ten feet, helping to restore soil carbon and nutrient cycling.

    • About half of the fruits and vegetables for the whole country come from there, and how sustainable is that in a warming world?

    • It’s important to note that most farmers in America are part-time farmers.

    • And if we look at the country as a whole, there are a lot of people of color out in rural areas.

    • According to the Brookings Institute, “24% of rural Americans were people of color in 2020. The median rural county saw its population of color increase by 3.5 percentage points between 2010 and 2020.”

    • Per the nonprofit Green America: “During the victory garden movement of World Wars I and II, Americans planted gardens to feed and support both their local communities and troops overseas. These efforts were wildly successful. By 1944, nearly 20 million victory gardens produced 8 million tons of food—around 40% of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. at the time. This incredible show of grassroots organizing and community efforts are the inspiration for today’s Climate Victory Garden movement.” For tips on how to start your own, see: greenamerica.org/climate-victory-gardening-101

    • Nutrients in some vegetables are over 30% lower compared to the 1950s, because the soil is so depleted. (You have to eat three times as much broccoli to get the same amount of calcium!)

    • This is in part a cultural issue. Compared to people in other rich countries, people in the U.S. spend the least on food (as a percentage of income) and the most on healthcare. 

    • Globally, our food system is the source of 33% of greenhouse gas emissions.

    • We are told it has to be this way, that agriculture has to be super industrial, in order to feed the nearly eight billion people on the planet. But that’s not true.

    • Farmworkers, arguably one of the most important professions in the world, are not protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

    • On the consumer side of things, we live in a system of food apartheid, where your zip code and the color of your skin can determine your life expectancy, your access to fresh food, your disproportionate burden of diet-related illnesses like kidney failure and heart disease. One in four children of color often go to bed hungry.

    • According to the 2022 USDA census of agriculture, over 95% of the agricultural land in this country is White-owned. Which means that every other racial group is sharing less than 5% of the pie, of the land that feeds our nation.

    • Meanwhile, 85% of farmworkers in the U.S. are Hispanic or Latine.

    • This is the reason why the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, of which Soul Fire Farm is a member, is working on a Black agrarian commons to figure out how to reclaim the 16 million acres that were taken from Black people, so we can realize the benefits that come with access to green space and a long-term secure homeland that has eluded our communities for generations.

    • The peak of Black land ownership in this country was in 1910, with 14% of the nation’s farms being under Black control. ......Around 1.5%.

    • But the reason that there’s so little land left now is because of violent backlash to that era of peak land ownership. The Klan, the White Citizens’ Council, the Whitecaps lynched Black land owners, burned down their homes, and drove them off their land for the audacity to leave the plantation. It was a threat to the White Southern way of life, so many Black land owners were murdered, lynched. We know the names of about 4,000 people who were murdered in Southern states between the 1870s and 1950, but there were many more. And that was a push factor for the Great Migration, when 6 million Black people fled the South to urban areas in the North and West.

    • Here I have to shoutout Baba Charles Sherrod, who recently passed away, and Shirley Sherrod. They started the first-ever community land trust in the United States, as Black farmers in the ’60s. They brought together 500 Black families on 6,000 acres to figure out how to hold the land as commons but still have equity to seed intergenerational wealth.

    • The closest we’ve gotten is a provision in the Justice for Black Farmers Act of 2021, introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, that we were able to help draft along with hundreds of other farmers.

    • ...agriculture is responsible for around one-third, 70% of freshwater withdrawals, half the land use, and 78% of the eutrophication.

    • ...if everyone were to farm regeneratively, for every 1% increase in soil organic matter, that would absorb around 8.5 metric tons of atmospheric carbon per acre.

    • There is a bill that has been languishing in Congress for a long time called HR 40 that would authorize studying reparations. We could start by being courageous enough to have the conversation about what it would be like to give back the trillions of dollars of stolen wealth to Black communities.

    • ...HR 40 is named after 40 acres and a mule

    • As Leah relayed it to me, “The post–Civil War idea of 40 acres and a mule originated in the Black community. Reverend Garrison Frazier and other clergy met with Union generals to plan Reconstruction and essentially said, ‘What we need are homes and the land beneath them so we can plant fruit trees and say to our children, these are yours.’ And that became the basis of this idea of 40 acres and a mule, a land reparation. A little bit was given, all was taken back. And in fact, where reparations were given, they went to the so-called masters for so-called loss of their ‘property’ in many states.

IF WE BUILD IT…

    • The world’s building stock is expected to double by the middle of this century.

    • About 75% of the infrastructure that will be in place in 2050 has yet to be built, and 55% of the global population, and growing, currently lives in cities.

    • Mostly due to their buildings, cities consume about 75% of world energy and are responsible for 70% of global carbon emissions.

    • In the U.S. alone, there are 140 million existing homes that will need to be retrofitted

    • Eight of the ten largest cities in the world are coastal. There, gray infrastructure has replaced more than half of the natural shoreline ecosystems, aka green infrastructure. 

    • Twenty percent of Americans, 65 million people, live in coastal cities, and 40% live in coastal counties.

    • The Billion Oyster Project has restored 150 million oysters (and counting!) to New York Harbor—aiming for 1 billion by 2035. For context, in the 1600s the harbor is thought to have contained several trillion oysters—half the world’s oyster population.

    • Right now, the Mississippi River has levees along most of the lower way, and in New York Harbor the 500-­plus miles of shoreline are largely bulkheaded.

    • Close friendships among Americans have declined over the years, from 3% saying they have no close friends in 1990 to 12% in 2021.

    • The harbor is actually an incredible restoration success story—it’s cleaner now than it’s been in a hundred years, and aquatic life is replenishing, thanks largely to the Clean Water Act.

    • Redlining is an illegal practice in which lenders avoid providing services to individuals living in communities of color because of the race or national origin of the people who live in those communities.

    • ...in Italy, there are five bins—for paper, plastic, glass, food waste, and landfill.

    • Italy recycles 51% of the waste it collects, the most of any European country. The U.S. recycles around 32%, and the global average is nearly 20%.

    • For example, per a ProPublica analysis, “black defendants were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher risk of recidivism, while white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be incorrectly flagged as low risk.

    • Per the UN’s 1992 Rio Declaration, “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

    •  But now, per a UN report, we know that between 2020 and 2023, operational emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta rose on average 150% due to the energy demands of artificial intelligence.

    • We also know that data centers in the U.S. consumed about 4.4% of the country’s total electricity in 2023, and it’s expected that could nearly triple, to a whopping 12% by 2028, largely because of the massive growth of AI.

    • A single data center uses about 2 million liters of water per day for cooling.

    • What the AI models have been good at doing is finding the optimal combination of control settings to efficiently use the resources that are available to maintain the target.

    • In 2022, data centers consumed at least 460 terrawatt-hours of electricity, over 1% of the global demand—which could double by 2026

    • ...once we initiated the real-time control set points, we increased the saving from 30% to 40%, which is obviously super significant. And then that got rolled out across all of Google’s data centers, and we saw an average energy savings of 30% across them all.

    • Concrete manufacturing alone accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

    • Recently there was a statement on AI risk from the Center of AI Safety that you signed. And the whole statement is one sentence, which I appreciate: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

    • 63% of voters, across party lines, agree that regulating AI should be a top priority for U.S. lawmakers.

    • There’s now about 5 billion people connected to the web, all of whom can, in various forms, get access to what others are thinking.

    • I think that’s going to do a tremendous amount of good because if you’re motivated, like we were, to make our wind farms more efficient at Google, a project we did in 2018, you are now going to have an intellectual aid that knows everything there is to know about wind turbines—where they sit and how they work and what their tensile strength is and what their weaknesses are and how to place them.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

    • Sea level rise is now expected to displace between 250 and 400 million people globally by 2100.

    • …It’s now arguably the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history—we’re up to about $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have divested, including lots of pension funds, but also lots of educational institutions—Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Princeton and the University of California and on and on and on down a long list.

    • ...the top 60 banks loaned out well over $4 trillion to fossil fuel companies to expand their extraction in the six years since countries around the world signed the Paris Climate Agreement.

    • ...the four biggest American banks—JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America—are responsible for more than a trillion dollars of that. They’re by far the biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry.

    • JPMorgan Chase alone lent nearly $484 billion to the fossil fuel industry from 2016 to 2024.

    • Per Topo Finance, “The largest U.S. banks lend 20%-30%of your cash and investments to the most extractive industries fueling the climate crisis." And, "If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S.”

    • Per the Carbon Bankroll report, “If the largest banks and asset managers in the U.S. were a country, they would be the third-largest emitting country in the world, behind China and the U.S."

    • When that BankFWD analysis factored in these new numbers, Google’s carbon emissions went up 111% overnight.

    • The numbers when they get applied to individual people are remarkable. If you have $125,000 in the bank, and a lot of people my age with their retirement savings and things do have that much in the bank, that’s producing more carbon than all the flying, cooking, heating, cooling, and driving that the average American does in a year.

    • Almost certainly for a city—say, New York City, because it has lots of money in the bank and pension funds—that money is producing more carbon than all the subway trains and police cars and fire trucks and school buses and whatever else New York City runs in the course of a day.

    • We’ve been going a few years now and we’ve got tens of thousands of volunteers across the country and working groups in many, many states and cities.

    • ...banks are saying they’re not even going to come up with their net-zero policies, whatever they’re gonna be, until 2027.

    • …if we had any hope of meeting the targets we’d set in Paris, investment in new oil and gas fields and coal mines had to stop in 2021, period. That did not faze the big banks a bit. They’ve continued to lend hundreds of billions of dollars a year for those purposes.

    • The world needs about $2 trillion a year in new investment, much of it in the Global South, in order to build out renewable energy at the needed pace and cope with climate impacts.

    • And remember, the entire continent of Africa has produced something like 2% or 3% of all the global carbon emissions. Their emissions are, for all intents and purposes, a rounding error in the calculations.

    • Meanwhile, the United States alone has produced about 25% of the excess carbon in the air.

    • A 2022 study shows that Millennials are bucking this trend, instead becoming less conservative as they age.

    • Solar power, wind power, batteries have gotten remarkably cheaper in the last decade; they’ve crossed the line three or four years ago where they’re now the cheapest form of energy on the planet.

    • HSBC, the biggest bank in Europe, announced that it was going to stop lending money for the development of new oil and gas fields.

    • ...they’re the 13th-biggest lender to oil and gas companies in the world. They have $3 trillion in assets. And they’ve been a massive lender to the tune of more than $100 billion to the oil and gas industry.

    • Half of the Arctic is melted now

    • The Inflation Reduction Act, which we all worked to pass, puts close to $400 billion into clean energy.

    • 70% of the wind power in the U.S. is generated in red states, because it’s windy in the middle of the country and the economics just make sense.

    • Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in countries that are net importers of fossil fuel.

    • Because it’s not just that the kind of massive consumer capitalism that we’ve engaged in has managed to wreck the Earth. It’s also, from what we can tell, managed to make us less happy than we would otherwise be.

    • ...when people walked around the farmers market, they were having 10 times more conversations.

    • Corporations are hugely responsible for the mess our planet is in, and we need their help turning things around.

    • Of more than 500 global companies, 69% report higher-than-­ expected financial returns on climate initiatives.

    • McKinsey estimates that getting to net zero is a more than $12 trillion (trillion!) opportunity.

    • While a bunch of large companies have plans to both get off fossil fuels and protect nature, there is woefully inadequate action ­toward reaching their much-hyped targets.

    • More than 50% of corporations (of 2,000 surveyed) do not even have a net-zero pledge.

    • The vast majority of large corporations have quantifiably done almost nothing to reduce their carbon pollution.

    • Shell, Exxon, and BP are retracting their climate promises, expanding drilling and extraction, reducing investments in renewable energy, and raking in record profits.

    • In 2020 and 2021, 80% of Chevron’s advertisements mentioned sustainability, yet only 1.8% of their expenses went to any projects other than fossil fuels.

    • Currently, only 38% of companies that report their emissions include all their scope 3 emissions.

    • Many corporations rely far too heavily on carbon offsets, deferring decisions about deep decarbonization far into the future. We simply can’t plant enough trees to avoid hard choices.

    • Plus, there is increasing evidence that many of the offsets purchased have come from projects that didn’t in fact reduce emissions—like forests that were not at risk of development or, increasingly, are going up in flames.

    • In a 2022 analysis of ten major oil and gas companies, all of them were found to be lobbying against their stated climate goals, and many have pro-oil lobbying budgets far greater than what they’ve pledged ­toward their climate commitments.

    • In a single factory in Vietnam, for instance, you might find five or more brands.

    • In 2022, Patagonia changed its ownership model to make Earth its only shareholder.

    • In 2023, handouts for fossil fuel corporations hit $1.1 trillion globally—the same year Big Oil pulled in $2.7 trillion in profits.

    • Per the Environmental Voter Project, 11.2 million registered voters across the U.S. who have environment/climate as their number one voting issue did not vote in the 2023 election.

    • The richest 10% of the world population owns 76% of the wealth, takes 52% of income, and accounts for 48% of global carbon emissions, while the poorest 50% of the world has only 2% of the wealth and 8.5% of income, and accounts for 12% of emissions. (The proportions are similar in the U.S.)

    • For example, from 2011 to 2020, investments in renewable power generated total returns 7 times higher than fossil fuels (422.7% vs 59%).

    • McKinsey estimates that getting to net zero is a more than $12 trillion opportunity.

    • In 2024 the world hit $2.1 trillion in global investment going­ toward the climate transition, into clean energy and clean mobility….Let’s not forget that $1.1 trillion went into oil and gas that year. 

    • And it’s estimated that it will take at least $119 trillion to do this transition by 2050.

    • With the Inflation Reduction Act, $360 billion went to the DOE loan program.

    • If you look at the marketplace, families represent about $10 trillion globally out of about $500 trillion in capital markets. When we say the transition requires $100 trillion, this is not necessarily $100 trillion of new capital.

    • When I first entered the office, we had about $44 billion of loan authority that we still hadn’t used.

    • This is a multi-trillion-dollar-a-year problem, climate change.

    • When you think about what it would take for the U.S. alone to hit the president’s 2035 decarbonization goals, it’s probably at least $10 trillion. And then more for the 2050 targets of decarbonizing the whole economy.

    • We use 10 million tons of hydrogen a year in the United States.

    • ...the total amount of power stored in the utility-scale batteries we expect to be on the grid by 2030 will be 100 gigawatt-hours in the entire United States.

    • Just one of these caverns will store 150% of everything that we think will be on the grid by 2030 for utility-scale batteries, lithium-­ion batteries.

    • We make a lot of excess solar and wind energy in the spring and the fall because people don’t ­really use air conditioning or heating in the spring and the fall, but a lot of solar and wind energy is still being produced.

    • One is because in many countries around the world—one of which I was born in, India—many people use one one-hundredth of the amount of fossil fuels or emissions that an average American uses.

    • France is largely powered by nuclear plants. In the U.S., about 20% of all of our electricity comes from nuclear power.

    • Even if people totally bungled the way they’re operating the reactor, which doesn’t happen, but even if they did, the reactor is default-set to passively shut down in a way that’s safe…Now we’ve moved to small modular reactors.

    • When I started in the solar industry, solar was 0.01% of all the power in the country. We’re now approaching 4% of our total grid coming from solar, and on track to hitting 20%.

    • Right now we’re at almost 20% of U.S. electricity generated by nuclear. Modeling shows it’s gotta go up to about 30%.

    • 315 of the retired or operating coal plants in the U.S. could potentially be retrofitted with advanced reactors in a coal-to-nuclear transition, generating 263 gigawatts of electricity.

    • Illinois has the largest carbon sequestration, from its ethanol plants. And they’ve been capturing about a million tons a year that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere with their manufacturing, and putting it into a pipeline and sticking it into a Class VI well and trapping it safely for the rest of time.

    • The second approach is carbon removal from natural gas and coal power plant emissions. At natural gas power plants, the exhaust is like 7% or 8% CO2, and for coal about 14%.

    • That first approach, to capture pure streams of CO2 and put it under the ground, probably costs $29 a ton. At the coal plants and natural gas plants, the costs are probably closer to $100 a ton.

    • And then the third approach is direct air capture. … Some people think with big scale-ups, they can get to $350 a ton soon, which is great.

    • Mining for minerals used in clean energy may need to be scaled up from 7 million tons in 2020 to 28 million tons in 2040, but that is 535 times less than the 15 billion tons of mining and extraction required for a fossil-fuel economy.

    • We’ve funded Redwood Materials and ­Li-Cycle, both of which are recycling EV batteries at a 95%-plus level.

    • Look at Europe. In one year, they reduced their use of Russian gas by 80%...

    • 73% of U.S. voters support scaling the production of American-made clean-­ energy technologies (84% of Democrats and 67% of Republicans).

    • Only 4% of rooftops in this country are filled with solar panels. Australia has 30%.

    • Then the third thing is we need a lot more people to choose the trades over college. We are at least a million people short on the trades.

CULTURE IS THE CONTEXT

    • How do we weave compelling narratives about this highest-stakes drama playing out on the planet? Here are a few hints from polling across twenty-three countries that was led by the nonprofit Potential ­Energy: (1) people don’t like bans (e.g., of gas stoves)—instead focus on upgrading to clean technologies; (2) “fear versus hope is the wrong debate” because love for the next generation is far and away the most popular reason for climate action; and (3) the narrative “later is too late” outperformed all alternative messages, including creating jobs, improving health, fighting injustice, and preventing extreme weather.

    • From 2007 to 2023, the films that made their annual shortlist have won a total of 54 Academy Awards from 267 nominations, including 4 Best Pictures and 11 screenwriting Oscars—and generated 90% more revenue at the box office than films not on their list

    • Scripted TV shows and films are a popular source of information on social issues for over 75% of viewers, yet only 25% say they hear about the climate crisis on the screen.

    • On December 25, 2023, only 17.6% of the lower 48 U.S. states had snow cover, the lowest in at least two decades. RIP white Christmas movies being relatably realistic.

    • Well, this is the result of decades of billions of dollars being thrown into our media ecosystem from giant oil companies telling us that we need to be afraid of the solutions, telling us we’re going to be forced to follow new laws, that we won’t be able to drive our wonderful, cool cars.

    • They’re probably going to have to have universal basic income of some sort, because something like 3.5 million people are employed driving trucks around the country. 

    • There’s an analysis by Media Matters about how few minutes of climate coverage there is on mainstream TV news. It’s around 1% of overall news programming.

    • Despite a horrifying parade of extreme weather events fit for an apocalypse film, less than 1% of corporate-news airtime in 2024 was about climate—up from 0.4% in 2020

    • Despite climate being the greatest threat to life on Earth in 65 million years, since the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, it got a combined 13 hours of coverage from major networks in the U.S. over the course of that entire year.

    • As of 2024, 50% of Americans report that they only hear about global warming climate in the media a few times a year, max

    • Shoutout to Lead Locally, supporting climate candidates in local elections across the U.S. See: leadlocally.org

    • There’s a ton of data that when you lose a newsroom in a community, government corruption goes up, there are all sorts of downwind effects.

    • The reality in the United States is that the overwhelming majority of people accept the science. The denialist camp is generally 10% to 14% of the population, so that means most people are either fully or partially on board.

    • Ninety-eight percent of counties in the United States have a majority of people who accept the science of climate change.

    • New Jersey was the first state to require climate to be covered in all subjects, in all grades. New York, Connecticut, and California have since followed suit.

    • In September of 2019, around 300,000 people took to the streets of Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike.

    • It was the largest climate protest in world history, with an estimated 4-million-plus participants.

    • None of the top emitting countries committed to stronger climate targets.

    • I see people being able to organize themselves in a week in Germany to stop expansion of a coal mine.

    • Although Pakistan has historically been one of the top ten nations impacted by climate change, it became a topic of discourse only in 2022 because there was flooding that covered one-third of the country and displaced more than 30 million people.

    • From 2012 to 2021, around 21.6 million people globally were displaced each year, within their countries, due to climate-related disasters. This number is rising dramatically, with 32.6 million people displaced in 2022 alone.

    • What was initially a climate disaster then turned into a healthcare crisis, which turned into a domestic-violence crisis, which has then led to more pain for women and children right now. And now we are experiencing inflation and food insecurity like never before. ... We’re having a grain-shortage crisis.

    • Just for developing countries to meet their NDCs, they will need $1 trillion in external funding. That $1 trillion is available—the world spends like $1.6 trillion annually on the military.

    • 68% of the Global Climate Strike organizers were female.

    • This is an excerpt from the speech I gave at the Global Climate Strike in New York City in September of 2019.

    • In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech against the Vietnam War, and those remarks could not be more apt for this climate context and this moment: We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. . . . Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world.

CHANGING THE RULES

    • We are now nearly thirty years in, and it wasn’t until 2023 that an official COP agreement explicitly acknowledged the need to transition away from fossil fuels.

    • The fortune (one of the world’s largest) that funds the Rockefeller Foundation was amassed largely via John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which later spawned ExxonMobil and Chevron. The foundation divested from fossil fuels in 2021, and now focuses much of its philanthropy on climate.

    • Our Paris Agreement target was to reduce emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

    • The U.S. failed to meet its target, reducing by only about 20%.

    • The harder one is our 2030 target, which is a 50% to 52% reduction just five years later.

    • The 2023 global stocktake estimated that the current NDCs set us up to exceed the planetary carbon budget for keeping warming under 1.5°C by about 20 gigatons of CO2.

    • At COP28, Climate TRACE unveiled data showing that about 5% of total global emissions have gone unreported, much of it from oil and gas operations.

    • Pakistan had record flooding in 2022. A third of the country was under water.

    • The damages have been estimated at more than $40 billion by the World Bank. Nearly 2,000 people died, many more were injured, a lot of children died; it’s totally tragic.

    • There was also severe flooding in Nigeria: 440,000 hectares of land were destroyed, affecting food security.

    • China is super instructive. In the year 2001, when it entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), its economy took off. Over the next twenty years, China cumulatively emitted more than 200 billion tons of greenhouse gases. That’s a lot. I mean, the United States has emitted even more, but in a slower process, over many more years.

    • China has been the biggest annual greenhouse gas emitter since 2006, and accounted for 35% of global emissions in 2023. However, the U.S. still emits more per capita, as do Canada, Australia, Russia, and many other nations.

    • Shoutout to Denmark for being the first to pitch in a few million ­toward a multi-­trillion-dollar problem. The money raised so far is literally in the millions.

    • The economic cost of loss and damage in developing countries is estimated to be up to $1.8 trillion by 2050. Initial contributions to the UN Loss and Damage Fund were $430 million.

    • Joe Biden committed $11 billion in international climate finance that could have gone to any of these funds but has not been able to get Congress to appropriate the funding. And so the U.S. has not honored its climate finance pledges since the Paris Agreement.

    • China presents itself as a paradox. Because on the one hand, China is the biggest aggregate emitter in the world. But on the other hand, China deploys more new renewable energy capacity than any other country on Earth, and has consistently done that for the last five years; it has arguably done as much as or more than most countries to address climate change. Furthermore, it has brought more people out of poverty faster than any other country on Earth.

    • When I first started studying China in the late 1990s, coal accounted for 75% of primary energy supply. As China has grown economically, and started deploying renewable energy in hydro and nuclear, it has brought that proportion down to 60% in 2023.

    • China also has extremely ambitious plans to construct new renewable energy capacity. And, like it or not, it’s constructing more nuclear energy power than any other country on Earth—more than the rest of the world combined. And it is selling more electric vehicles than any other country on Earth.

    • China’s solar PV industry now accounts for 80% of the global market, for example.

    • And beyond what China is doing within its borders, around the world it has been the largest funder and consumer of both renewables and coal power plants.

    • And there are also human rights issues within those industries, like with solar in Xinjiang.

    • 45% of the world’s supply of polysilicon (a key component of solar panels) comes from Xinjiang, produced with forced labor from Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

    • Ocean-climate actions—like scaling offshore renewable energy, decarbonizing shipping, eating low-carbon seafood, and conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems—could comprise 35% of our climate solution.

    • If shipping was a country, it would have the sixth-largest emissions of any nation.”

    • Forests get all the love, but mangroves and wetlands can absorb 3 to 5 times the carbon per area as a tropical forest.

    • Mangroves can reduce wave height by up to 66%. During the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, the presence of mangroves is estimated to have saved more than 11,000 lives.

    • From 1980 to 2003, over 1.1 million hectares of Indonesia’s mangrove forest were destroyed, primarily for conversion to shrimp aquaculture ponds.

    • Oyster reefs can be as effective (and as cost-effective) as constructed breakwaters, dissipating waves and reducing their height by up to 65%, and can even grow and expand to outpace sea level rise.

    • Coral reefs (gravely threatened by climate change) support nutrition and livelihoods for approximately 500 million­ people. Plus they provide coastal protection—reefs reduce wave ­energy by an average of 97%.

    • Coastal wetlands can provide better and cheaper shoreline protection than seawalls. During Superstorm Sandy, although 85% of the wetlands in New York and New Jersey had already been destroyed by development, what little ­remained prevented $625 million of damage.

    • Every $1 spent on reef and wetland restoration achieves more than $7 in direct flood-reduction benefits.

    • The offshore wind industry could create more than 1 million jobs globally by 2025. In the U.S., the industry could support tens of thousands of jobs by 2030 (more than coal mining currently does), including many union jobs and jobs with skills transferable from the oil and gas sector.

    • Regenerative ocean farms growing seaweed and shellfish can support food security, improve water quality, protect shorelines from storms, and create tens of millions of direct jobs globally. Seaweed can absorb hundreds of millions of tons of carbon every year, and help to reduce ocean acidification locally.

    • Within fully protected areas, fish biomass is on average 670% higher than in unprotected areas. At present, less than 3% of the global ocean is fully protected, while scientists recommend protecting at least 30%, even 50%, of land and sea.

    • Tropical, white sandy beaches can be up to 85% parrotfish poop, because parrotfish nibble on and grind up dead coral as they graze on algae. Protect parrotfish to protect sandy beaches.

    • Octopuses have three hearts and nine brains and can make independent decisions with each of their arms..

    • Grist publishes extensively on climate solutions and possible futures. See: grist.org

    • So, in our policy memo, “Seafood, Blue Jobs, and the Green New Deal,” we highlighted two key numbers:

      • The Blue Economy (tourism and recreation, fishing, shipping, and more) supports 3.5 million jobs in the U.S.—considerably more than all the jobs in crop production, telecommunication, and building construction combined.

      • 65% of fishermen believe that climate change could leave them “unable to profit” and ultimately “forced out” of their fishery.

    • Urban Ocean Lab’s mission: Cultivate rigorous, creative, equitable, and practical climate and ocean policy, for the future of coastal cities. For more, see: urbanoceanlab.org

    • Voters support:

      • the construction of new offshore wind farms, by a 48-point margin,

      • speeding up the permitting process for building offshore wind farms, by a 43-point margin, and

      • federal investments in research to improve offshore wind technologies, by a 34-point margin. 

    And here’s the kicker: On all the questions, there was support from a majority (or near majority) of voters across the political spectrum. Gotta love a bipartisan climate solution—too few and too far between.

    • Within the first 100 days (a meaningless milestone that is often given lots of press attention) the administration announced some major ocean-climate action commitments, including the goals of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030; conserving 30% of the ocean by 2030; and reaching zero emissions from international shipping by 2050.

    • The BBB proposal included $6 billion specifically for coastal restoration, which was whittled down to $2.6 billion by the time it made its way through the legislative gauntlet and emerged in August 2022 as the Inflation Reduction Act.

    • The initial BBB proposal included around $555 billion for climate and clean energy, and the final was $370 billion.

    • The IIJA also included $1 billion in funding for coastal restoration and resiliency projects, for a total of $3.6 billion. Unprecedented, and a testament to years of work by the ocean advocacy community.

    • So, 118 organizations and businesses co-signed a letter to President Biden asking his administration to “design and implement an ambitious U.S. ocean-­climate action plan.

    • ...in June 2022 more than ninety organizations sent the White House a detailed list of policy recommendations: the Blueprint for Ocean Climate Action.”

    • So in June 2021, Urban Ocean Lab helped to launch the Ocean Justice Forum (OJF), a collective of eighteen nonprofits committed to putting justice at the heart of U.S. ocean-climate policy.

    • In September 2022, after four convenings and many, many drafts, this collective released our Ocean Justice Platform. Read the full platform here: oceanjusticeforum.info

    • The White House put out the first-ever federal Ocean Climate Action Plan, including more than 200 actions items spanning three goals: create a carbon-neutral future, accelerate nature-based solutions, and enhance community resilience to ocean change.

    • In December 2023, at COP28, the U.S. government announced an official Ocean Justice Strategy, and it includes key elements of our OJF platform.

    • Twenty percent of Americans live in coastal cities, where nearly 60% of those residents are people of color, 51% are renters, 26% are immigrants, and 16% live in poverty—all higher than the national averages.

    • 383 coal plants down, 147 to go!

    • On the first Earth Day, in 1970, something like 10% of Americans were in the streets protesting. 

    • The eighty-five-­mile stretch along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of its concentration of more than 200 petrochemical facilities and associated high rates of cancer.

    • Annually, the U.S. plastics industry produces carbon emissions equivalent to 116 averaged-sized coal-fired power plants.

    • Average life expectancy is 20 to 30 years shorter in some disadvantaged U.S. zip codes

    • The U.S. is the biggest oil and gas producer in the world.

    • And the biggest in history, now producing nearly 14 million barrels of crude oil every day.

COMMUNITY FOREMOST

    • Hurricane Katrina damaged more than one million homes across five states and displaced roughly one million people. Over $120 billion in federal funds was spent on the recovery effort.

    • In 2024, the EMPG funding was about $320 million. 

    • For scale, the 2024 Department of Defense budget was $842 billion. 

    • ...every dollar the federal government spends on mitigation of disasters..., we save $6 on response and recovery.

    • For earthquakes it’s something like for every $1 you spend on retrofits to meet building codes, you save $12 or $13 in response and recovery.

    • The number changes a bit year to year. Last I looked, the most you could get was around $42,500 from FEMA. Total. And only about 1% of the applicants receive that. The average amount people were getting between 2010 and 2019 was actually $3,522.

    • On National Voter Registration Day in 2023, 35,252 new voters registered via Vote.org—and there was a 1,226% jump in registrations within the hour after Taylor Swift shared the link on Instagram.

    • Climate change is already forcing tens of millions of people to relocate every year. Whereas disasters (especially poorly managed ones) cause punctuated increases in migration, increasing sea levels, heat, drought, and crop failures will cause a persistent upward trend.

    • It is critical to note that people of color disproportionately bear climate impacts, from storms to heat waves to pollution. (Although climate change is coming for us all.)

    • Fossil-­fueled power plants and refineries are disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods, where storms and exposure to air pollution and toxins cause great harm to public health.

    • In the U.S., 65% of Black people and of Asians, and 70% of Hispanics are concerned about climate, compared to 47% of White people.

    • Justice40 is the program the Biden-­ Harris administration created to drive 40% of sustainable development and economic benefits into communities that have been overburdened by environmental injustice.

    • In 2022, we saw the worst fire season in New Mexico’s history.

    • The CDC released a report sharing that Indigenous people have more heat-­related deaths than any other population in the U.S.

    • Observed differences in heat-­ related mortality across racial/ethnic groups can also be associated with social vulnerability, which often tracks with factors leading to heat exposure (e.g., less green space and more heat-­ absorbing surfaces), health disparities manifested by lower income, and absence of structural adaptations such as air conditioning.”—­ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020.

TRANSFORMATION

    • As philosopher Joanna Macy has put it: It’s okay not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present . . . ​ And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.

    • So, I encourage you to, in the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “make vows to something deeper than hope.”

    • Rebecca Solnit’s definition: Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal . . . ​ To hope is to give yourself to the future—­ and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

    • As Greta Thunberg challenges us, “Hope is something you have to earn.”

    • And as Katharine Wilkinson and I concluded in All We Can Save, describing our notion of “can” in the book’s title: “Can” speaks to sheer determination. This shit ain’t over yet.Possibility still exists, as documented in data-­ driven analysis of climate solutions and temperature trajectories, and as imprinted in the persistence of life despite all odds. We are a miracle. Our task and our opportunity is to face a seemingly impossible challenge and act in service of what is possible.

ALL PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES
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