It's Fixin Time

So, three days in DC at the NCSE did not leave me feeling all doom and gloom. I mean, it goes to reason that days and days of "hockey stick" graphs would leave you in a serious funk. A hockey stick graph is, if you haven't heard this clever lingo, is like the one below that shows global temperature cruising along steadily for hundreds or even thousands of years and then BANG shooting up over the last 200 or so. (The particular one I've shown via a paper by Micheal Mann, et al).

But I didn't leave feeling horrifically depressed.

And, yeah, I saw a hell of a lot of "yikes" figures. Like pictures of the appalling record arctic ice melt. Or stats like unchecked we could see 50% of the species on this planet become extinct. But as much as my feeling on climate change is now even more that we are at an incredibly crucial tipping point, I'm also full of hope. Because public opinion is changing incredibly rapidly on this issue. Because even though it will be incredibly hard work, we can have the strength. Because so many climate change solutions are win-win for our country and our economy.

I'd like everyone to gear up with me for Focus the Nation. Make a plan for 8PM on Jan 30 to watch the 2% solution. I'll add more on this later, but first I do want to say that it gives me hope that it's my generation who is tasked with this effort. I know that we are oft-maligned as the "me generation" or whathave you, but this is the generation that I know. And I trust my fellows to be the ones to rewire this nation and every city on the planet. Because I know us better than I could know any other generation, I do believe that we will fight free of the fossil fuel economy and work out a new food system.

Martin Luther King Day, for which I'm sad to say the SLAC did not release me from its clutches, is a day for hoping high and believing the the world we ought to have. It is a day for acknowledging the immense complexity of that which blights the ways we treat one another and because it is often so similar, the way we treat or environments.