New year, same old emissions.
As year’s often do, this one started reflectively and hopefully. Krista Kurth Ph.D. and Nima Raychaudhuri considered the year just gone, and mulled over their New Year’s Resolutions in Climate Wrapped: 2023 and 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Climate Action (I particularly liked the suggestion to “Tend the trees in my community and worldwide. Since the county in which I live has a dearth of new trees, I plan on planting trees locally.”)
Any article from Stephen Kamugasa is a reason to be cheerful too — I value his quality over quantity approach, and considered writing style — so I was delighted to publish Why A Great Teacher Is Critical In A Climate Crisis early on in the new year. The question as to how best “to break down the ‘Climate Crisis’ into manageable portions with realistic and achievable goals” is surely the biggest of our age, and deserves all of our attention.
Perhaps there’s something about a New Year, and January in particular, that lends itself to considering bigger picture topics before we get our heads down and tread our usual paths. New writer Benshreadhewitt asks us to consider What are Climate ‘Derailment Risks’? “We need a rapid transition to avoid climate breakdown — but how do we protect our ability to do so from climate change itself?” Are we, he asks “focusing on the symptoms whilst the underlying cause worsens”?
But then came an article that you more typically have to wait all year for — one that really lit up the internet, and the imaginations of Medium readers (both climate advocates and those of a more Trumpian mindset). New writers Sílvia PM, PhD 🍂and Dr. Sean Pine reached out to me (via this Newsletter, in fact) to say that The New Climate. was the publication they’d been looking for, and could they submit a piece. The result was Why Don’t People Trust Climate Scientists? — an even handed, sober but gripping explanation as to how the scientific process works, and why ‘global consensus’ means just what it says. It riled some, but their words are hard to argue with — and may just have opened up some minds. In fact of the 71 comments (to date!), one said just that: “Wow. Great job putting this together. Scales fall from my eyes as I read your words. Thank you for opening my eyes and my mind.” How’s that for some Monday Morning motivation?!
Their follow-up, Why We Don’t Need To ‘Trust’ Climate Scientists, is not half bad either.
For this month’s One From The Archive, as it’s mid-winter and heating bills are high for those in the Northern Hemisphere, my piece from this time last year on a UK experiment to incentivise energy efficiency at peak times: Households Are Being Paid To Use Less Electricity: Will it Work? Not only did it work, but it is now being repeated at a larger scale, and this time with a new twist: access (entirely opt-in only) via smart meters to people’s battery pack storage. It’s a topic I hope to return to in an upcoming article.
I know it’s far too late to say, but a Happy New Year and all the best for 2024.
Tim Smedley, Editor, The New Climate.
