recent debate in twitter's climate community illuminated a schism between those arguing that mitigating climate change is impossible and those exhorting others to continue to "fight" climate change. While the debate yielded no definitive answers, it brought up important questions for those who've focused their life on addressing this issue. What does it mean to “fight” … [Read more...]
The World’s Most Important Policy
How energy transition can help everything
here is one action that can make major strides in many of the world’s greatest challenges. It is generally overlooked, undersold, and ignored. It’s this: transitioning the economy to a distributed, non-carbon energy system. Building an infrastructure of interconnected micro-grids powered by solar, wind, and onsite storage powering electric transport is the single most … [Read more...]
To Win, Build Strong Ingroups
How group loyalty creates both political irrationality and victory
veryone belongs to social groups. Society – cities, counties, countries, churches, companies, art, science, food, sports, entertainment, memes: society – is organized around ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Politics is fueled by ingroup/outgroup conflict. Ingroup cohesion - the strong identification with a defined social group - is the way in which people organize … [Read more...]
Star Wars: A New Trope
May the Discourse Be With You
n Star Wars: The Last Jedi – solid movie by the way – Hope is the central motivation of the Resistance. It is the thing that sent Rey to find Luke so the latter could bring Hope to the beleaguered Resistance fighters, it’s the thing that Poe eventually evolved to value most in calling on Finn to retreat and follow the salt dogs to safety, the thing Leia emphasized … [Read more...]
We need to hit the organizing reset button
I have a confession to make. I’m wildly unhappy with the current ways we're trying to create change. A year ago, on November 8th, I was utterly devastated as the election results came in – and immediately felt that our current models of organizing weren’t good enough anymore. The election was proof. I thought, perhaps naively, that Trump winning the election would be a wake … [Read more...]