Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a checkered record, at best, as an environmental activist.  It should not be forgotten that he ousted his mentor, the pioneering Hudson River environmentalist, Bob Boyle, from leadership of the group that Boyle founded, Riverkeeper.  Boyle, not incidentally, was not only Kennedy’s boss and mentor, but also, to a certain extent, his savior:  Boyle befriended him after Kennedy’s heroin bust.  The break came as a consequence of Kennedy wanting to hire a convicted felon, a wildlife smuggler, to Riverkeeper.  See the Washington Post on this ugly story.

On another front, Kennedy and another Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer, Jacob Scherr, parachuted into Ecuador to make deals with Conoco, a rampant polluter of the Oriente, the Ecuadorian part of Amazonia.  To quote from a New Yorker article from September, 1993, With Spears from All Sides:  “Confidential notes of the second NRDC meeting with Conoco were leaked to every nonprofit in the world with an interest in the Oriente, and the NRDC quickly found itself under wide attack.  In late May, Kennedy and Scherr again flew to Ecuador, where they were greeted, loudly and rudely, with picket lines supported by La Campaña Amazonia por la Vida, a coalition of thirteen Ecuadorian environmental and human rights groups.  ‘Robert Kennedy and Jacob Scherr are what we call environmental imperialists,’ Esperanza Martinez, who was then a coordinator of  Campaña, told me. ‘They came to Ecuador for five days, and then they went home and sat down with an oil company and decided they knew what was best for us.  What on earth gave them that right?’”

Then there’s the saga of Cape Wind, the offshore wind power project that Bobby Kennedy, Jr. did his utmost to kill, enlisting his powerful uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, to help derail it.  (Teddy: “But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.”)  This was an exercise, at its baldest, in an advanced case of Nimbyism by particularly moneyed and entitled interests, Bill Koch perhaps foremost among them.  (See this from Greenpeace.)  A NY Times book review of the excellent retrospective on the eventual failure of the project, Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound, had this to say: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted environmentalist, makes a bizarre appearance on a radio talk show, lumping the wind power proponents in with ‘polluters.’”  Wind power as pollution!  Sounds more like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump to me.

The IEA’s latest “World Energy Outlook,” out this week, makes what appears to be a bulletproof case for the looming demise not only of oil, but of coal and natural gas.  Dr. Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, is unequivocal:  “The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable. It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better for all of us.” (This echoes what the IEA reported in December of last year in “Renewables 2022.” )

And that’s not all Dr. Birol had to say, speaking directly to the oil industry:  “I have a gentle suggestion to oil executives, they only talk among themselves.  They should talk to car manufacturers, to the heat pump industry, to the renewable industry, to investors — and see what they all think the future of energy looks like.”

Here’s what the IEA is tracking for the immediate future and to 2050:

(see slide #5 here)

These trends are based on what the IEA calls its Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), extrapolating from what is in the pipeline today – as it were – from governments and the private sector.  However, the IEA also has a Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario (NZE) in which we get more ambitious.  In the NZE, there will be significantly more investment in clean energy:

(see slide #8 here)

So, it seems to me that our job is to push, pull, and proselytize in every way we can to make the leap from the STEPS to the NZE scenario.  As the People’s Climate Movement reminds us, “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.”

see note at end of post

I wrote a year ago about what our plans were for the new house we’d bought:  Watching the Meter Run Backwards.  Well, we just completed the plan a few weeks ago:  We picked up our new EV.

The plan was to install solar photovoltaic panels.  We did that in December.  After that the heat pumps went in in January.  Then we went shopping for an electric vehicle and made our choice in May.

So, first, the solar panels.  The work was done by New York Power Solutions.  After the usual back and forth over a couple of months in scoping out the job, arranging the financing, etc., the crew came in December to install 40 panels.  The system has been working like a dream.  My post from last year referenced sending power back to the grid – and “watching the meter run backwards” as a consequence – and that’s been the result.  We have a clock on our power consumption and production from Enphase Energy, as part of the installation of the photovoltaic modules, and it can tell us all sorts of useful information.  To date the PV has produced quite a bit more than we’ve consumed.  We will get credit for the difference which will significantly offset our winter usage when the heat pumps kick in for the winter.  In the meantime, we have been paying our utility, NYSEG, only a nominal amount per month for delivery charges.

Not incidentally, our town, Pound Ridge, is part of the Westchester Power Community Choice Aggregation Program.  As such, we pay a little less than a penny and a half per KWh extra for the wind power that NYSEG has as part of its supply.

It should be noted that our photovoltaic modules were not made in China.  They were made in Singapore by an Indian-owned company, the solar subsidiary of which, REC, is headquartered in Norway.  The microinverters for the system come from an American company, Enphase, which currently has them produced in several countries, including China.  The Inflation Reduction Act, however, is giving a very big boost to Enphase’s domestic production as showcased here at their website.

The power consumption here jumped up in the winter after the heat pumps went in.  We worked with a local company, Bell Mechanical, to buy the system and install it.  We opted for a pair of heat pumps from Carrier, and they say that most of their manufacturing takes place in the US.

Note that I’m not averse to the global supply chain but I am sensitive to the very real concerns relative to how China makes so many of its products for export and the all-too-real nightmare of China’s human rights abuses against Tibetans and Uyghurs, not to mention their own people.

To get back to the heat pumps, there were already ducts for the air conditioning units, so the old units were just pulled out and the heat pumps installed in their place outside, with air handlers to match each of the two units, one in the attic and one in the basement.  The heat pumps were amazingly efficient in the cold weather, displacing all our oil-fired heat except for one day in February when the temperature was near zero.  Yes, the heat pumps use electricity, and our consumption was double our solar power production in January, February, and March, but our oil consumption was negligible.  (We are still using oil heat for hot water.)  All in all, it’s been fantastic to have the heat pumps in place.

Not incidentally, we are not big fans of air conditioning – as ‘twere.  We’ve got lots of windows in the house and good air flow so there is no big need for the AC.  However, there were a good number of guests here one Sunday recently and we did crank it on then – and it worked beautifully.

That brings us to the new electric vehicle.  It’s a Chevrolet Bolt EUV.  Great car!  The EPA/DOT site that gives you insights on fuel economy says it gets the equivalent of 115 miles per gallon, with a range of 247 miles on a full charge.  We took our first road trip recently out to the beach, 130 miles from here.  We went out and back and still had 50+ miles “in the tank.”  So the range was closer, in this case anyway, to just over 300 miles.  What boosts the range are “regenerative braking” and “one-pedal” driving.  We haven’t tried a fast charge on it yet as we haven’t had the need.  GM installed the Level 2 home charger as part of our deal.  Works great.  I won’t get into all the features of the car, but suffice it to say, it’s a nice, smooth ride; quiet; and is quite comfortable inside.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gives it five out of five stars for overall safety.  As to its manufacturing, it has a US/Canadian parts content of 58%, the electric drive unit being made in Korea.  The car thus qualifies for a $7500 federal tax credit plus some from NY State.  (We will similarly get tax credits for the heat pumps as we have already for the solar system.)

This is what it looks like:

The EV revolution is upon us.  This echoes what I heard Amory Lovins say nearly 15 years ago:  “The Renewable Revolution has been won.  Sorry, if you missed it.”  Well, as we can see more and more every year, renewables are powering ahead.  As to transportation, well, some pundits used to wring their hands about “peak oil” and the fact that we’d soon be coming to a future where oil supply would diminish.  Well, guess what?  We are coming very, very soon to peak demand!  The International Energy sees “oil use for transport going into decline after 2026.”  That is down to the global surge in battery electric and fuel-cell electric vehicles, from the US to Europe to China and beyond.  Aviation and shipping are decarbonizing too.  The world is looking newer and newer all the time.  I am extremely happy to be doing my small part with our PV, heat pumps, and EV.

************************

“Maintain” is how much of the world looks for power; “Transform” is how the world should look in order to maximize our economies and minimize our pollution. “Transform” is, for all intents and purposes, our setup in our new home: PV powering our home and going back to the grid, wind power coming in from the grid to our town and our house, heat pumps and an EV powered from our PV and the grid.

Electricity Scenarios from Reinventing Fire: Electricity

Serhii Plokhy is a leading scholar of Ukrainian history and previously published Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe.  The present book zeroes in on six horrific accidents, the first being gross miscalculations by the Americans with a hydrogen bomb test at the Bikini Atoll in 1954.  Then there are the accounts of the fallout from a reactor accident at Kyshtym in the Soviet Union in 1957, and at the Windscale nuclear complex in Britain later in ’57, both of these integral to their countries’ bomb programs.  The power plant accidents at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011) round out the grim history.

Plokhy’s research is deep and penetrating.  His writing is lucid and it has the impact of a thriller, as we are up close and in living color with the events as they unfold.  Hair-raising events, to be sure.  Each of the three power plant fiascos that he recounts has heroes and villains.  The heroes are largely the plant operators and emergency response personnel who risked their lives – and in some cases lost them.  31 men, at least, died fairly soon after the Chernobyl explosions, with 140 cases of severe radiation poisoning for others.  Nearly two hundred Japanese emergency workers were exposed to very high levels of radiation, but none died immediately.  The villains were the nabobs of the government and power industries who looked the other way when safety concerns were raised.  When the accidents happened, the Soviets assiduously suppressed information.  The Americans after the Bikini accident and the British with  Windscale did too.

Sadly, the pressures to expand nuclear power to further the special interests of the industry are still very much present.  France, Russia, and China are all guilty of pushing their technology out for commercial gain.

There are serious concerns about nuclear power beyond the immediate concerns regarding the safety of operations.  Lethal nuclear waste is an omnipresent problem.  How many long-term high-level radioactive waste storage facilities are in operation today?  If you said none, you’d be right.  Finland, to its credit, will have the first one up and running in 2024, according to the timetable now.  Let’s hope it stays secure for the 100,000 years or so it will need to operate until the wastes are safe, and that others build these essential repositories.

Another concern, of course, is cost.  The industry has been largely in remission – pun intended – for decades.  Yes, publics around the world have been increasingly in opposition since Three Mile Island, but the real albatross has been cost.

One argument for promoting nuclear power that has been made in recent years is that it will serve to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.  In an Afterword to his book, Plokhy raises this idea but concludes:  “The risk of increasing dependence on nuclear power is that we might not be able to build enough reactors in time to stop or significantly mitigate climate change, while putting ourselves and the environment in jeopardy.  It is too costly and takes too long to build a reactor, and it is inherently unsafe not only for technological reasons, but also because of the risk of human error.  Investing money in nuclear energy today means reducing the development of renewables, without which even the proponents of nuclear power do not believe we can solve the crisis.”

I quote Amory Lovins in my book from his eloquent essay from 2009, “Four Nuclear Myths.”  He wrote then:  “…expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection.”  That is even more true today than it was 14 years ago.

And I wrote in my Foreign Policy Association blog on climate change (also way back when), “Another tired axiom – or Big Lie if you prefer – from the nuclear power industry, as well as from the coal and oil interests, is that renewables can’t get the job done.  As I have pointed out here on any number of occasions, renewables are blowing the doors down.”  That was 13 years ago and the arc of renewable power production has skyrocketed beyond even what I and many people smarter than me thought possible.

It’s long past time to pull the plug on nukes.  Atoms and Ashes gives us more clear thinking on why this is such an essential task for us.

Nuclear power is a vast topic.  There is no better resource than the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.  I also recommend the video here from the excellent “Just Have A Think” channel.

She touches on the promise of clean tech but neglects one of the key burgeoning areas that is going to help us mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis, namely hydrogen.  I wrote a letter to the magazine and, just for the record, I want to share it here.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been our preeminent environmental journalist for years.  Her breadth and depth of reporting, her clarity and eloquence are showcased in her article, “A Vast Experiment – The Climate Crisis from A to Z.” (Nov. 28, 2022)  But there is a gap in her coverage of clean tech:  the vast potential of the hydrogen economy.  She laments, for example, the limited range and passenger capacity of battery electric planes.  But Airbus is on track to produce three zero-emission aircraft by 2035, one with as much as a 2,000 nautical mile range for 200 passengers.  She also notes the limits for decarbonization of both the steel and concrete industries, major contributors of greenhouse gases.  Swedish steelmakers, however, are forging ahead with hydrogen-based tech that will, in one case, reduce the carbon footprint of commercial steel production to 5% of conventional production methods.  Similarly, a Spanish company, CEMEX, uses hydrogen as part of its fuel mix in all its European facilities and promises a 35% reduction in its carbon footprint by 2030.  Zero-carbon “green” hydrogen is produced by electrolyzing water using renewable power from wind, solar, and hydro.  Both the feedstock and the energy source for this process are inexhaustible, and the costs are coming down quickly.  Surface transportation applications for hydrogen fuel-cells are advancing rapidly and even the maritime industry is on board, having pledged at the latest COP in Egypt to aim for full decarbonization by 2050 using green hydrogen.

Hope is the H in Kolbert’s A to Z list.  Perhaps it should have been hydrogen. 

(Click on the graphic to open it in a new window.)

Here’s a headline for you:  The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20.

Maybe you didn’t see that coming.  Well, Amory Lovins, among others, saw it coming.  I heard him speak at a conference in New York City in the fall of 2009 and he said then:  “The Renewable Revolution has been won.  Sorry, if you missed it.”

The chart above is an indication of the growth over the recent past and projects to 2027.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its Renewables 2022 report last week.  We are accelerating growth in renewables globally because:

1. It’s going to help us save the climate system.
2. Renewables are the ultimate hedge against the vicious, cynical geopolitics of the fossil fuel special interests.
3. Lifting those economies in energy poverty out of that state with renewables boosts well being for billions of people.
4. Minimizing the financial and environmental burdens of fossil fuels is good for everyone’s economic and social health.
5. All of the above.

If you picked “5” you’re on the money.

The IEA report attributes the latest dramatic upward turn in the projections for renewables’ penetration, in large part, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  This is particularly true for Europe.  Growth in capacity in “the 2022-27 period is forecast to be twice as high as in the previous five-year period.”  And that’s not confined to just Europe.  Since only last year’s IEA report, the projections have jumped even more for China than for Europe. See the chart below.

(Click on the graphic to open it in a new window.)

For the US, as anywhere, policy is the main driver.  The Inflation Reduction Act here, which went live this summer, is already generating huge dividends.  As you can see in the chart above, the US is upping the ante by more than 20% for the next five years.

Even without the IRA, the US DOE’s Energy Information Agency projects that this year renewables will have provided 22% of power generation, up from 10% in 2010 – and going to 24% in 2023.  The biggest jump over the past decade has been in the Southwest Power Pool due primarily to wind, with renewables going from 13% in 2013 to 44% in 2022.

As The Beatles reminded us:  It’s getting better all the time.

Here’s a quick look at the big picture from the International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2022 report.

I’ve been documenting much of that progress at this blog, in some of my other writings, and in my classes, particularly the ones on Clean Tech.  I have remained quite in awe of the extraordinary progress that has been made and continues to be made.  The new law that has emerged from the US Congress – somewhat miraculously, given the politics – does represent a “giant leap for mankind.”

You have no doubt read a fair bit of the ton of ink that has been spilled on the subject of the somewhat clunkily titled “Inflation Reduction Act.” (IRA.)  I don’t pretend to have any deep insight into the sausage making that went behind the emergence of this legislation.  Suffice it to say that Joe Manchin – never my favorite political figure going back to his days as West Virginia’s chief proponent of the despicable practice of mountaintop removal mining – came, finally, to the table and allowed this critical legislation to be born.  But Manchin certainly had his pound of flesh in all this.  The unsinkable Betsy Kolbert writes in this week’s New Yorker that Manchin was responsible for the mandate of the federal government auctioning millions of acres for oil and gas drilling.  But notwithstanding Manchin’s foot dragging over nearly a year, history will take full note that the legislation passed with exactly zero Republican votes.  In both houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Shameful is too mild a word.

But the good news is abundant.  Greenhouse gas reductions are, obviously, what so many of us are celebrating.  The chart above shows how improved the outlook is as of yesterday with the bill being signed into law.  Here’s another look at how things are looking on that score:

Some headline numbers include:

• $14,000 in direct consumer rebates for families to buy heat pumps or other energy efficient home appliances, saving families at least $350 per year.
• 7.5 million more families will be able install solar on their roofs with a 30% tax credit, saving families $9,000 over the life of the system or at least $300 per year.
• Up to $7,500 in tax credits for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for used electric vehicles, helping families save $950 per year.
• Power homes, businesses, and communities with much more clean energy by 2030, including:
  • 950 million solar panels
  • 120,000 wind turbines
  • 2,300 grid-scale battery plants
• Advance cost-saving clean energy projects at rural electric cooperatives serving 42 million people.

For a graphic breakdown of the $360B+ in  climate  investment, tax credits and loans, see this.

Jobs?  You bet!  Here’s a look from a comprehensive report from the Zero Lab at Princeton and its partners.  (See page 19 from the report.):

President Biden said at the signing that the new law will ” take the most aggressive action ever — ever, ever, ever — in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic — our energy security.”  That can’t be said enough:  Energy security is economic security.

Health benefits?  It must not be forgotten that there is a direct correlation between fossil-fuel generated GHG emissions and conventional air pollution.  The Zero Lab report also identifies these large health benefits from reduced air pollution. (See page 18 of the report.)

I lauded the Biden Administration in June when it took key steps to not only boost solar power production and deployment but also to use the Defense Production Act to accelerate other key clean tech initiatives.  They’ve been hard at work going after the abundant array of opportunities.

Aside, of course, from the largely positive climate and clean energy aspects of the IRA, there are extraordinary breakthroughs on providing huge health and wellness benefits, to a not-inconsiderable degree for seniors, restoring some tax fairness at the federal level, and, according to all analyses, actually reducing the federal deficit.  Not bad.  For more on the overall impact, see this from Vox.

I continue to think the progress we’re seeing with the breakthrough of the IRA, as well as with many other initiatives around the world, are all signs that the genie is well out of the bottle.  We can have “a newer world.”

Let me cycle back to my book and its closing paragraph:  “Indications are that we have been getting the message on climate change and sustainability, and that forces, perhaps inexorable, are moving to restore the balance and health to our planet and its ecosystems that are a reflection of its natural state and that are our birthright. It is certainly not a done deal and will require, if we are going to be successful, a continued and intensifying focus on making positive change happen, in our neighborhoods and personal lives, in our cities and our nations, and in the global village in which we are all now citizens.”

But I’ve never had the chance until now to apply all the lessons I’ve learned on clean tech, environmental protection, and natural resource conservation into my day-to-day life.  But that’s changed now.  We bought a house in Northern Westchester at the end of June.  We’re moving ahead on making this place an overall low-impact property.

Solar photovoltaics has been a priority.  We’ve been talking to two different companies.  Our roof gets a lot of sunlight and with one proposal, we’d likely have a fair bit more than we’ll need on an ongoing basis.  What to do with that extra juice?  You got it:  Plug in an EV.  And maybe we’ll still have a surplus.  One solar rep said:  “You can watch the meter run backwards.”  I said:  “I’ve been waiting my whole life to do just that.”

Yeah, baby:

We also are moving ahead on removing invasive plants, ditching the doggone perfect American lawn with all its chemicals, and seeing what we can do to propagate wildflowers and native grasses.  We went on a tour given by Healthy Yards in Westchester recently.  The plan is to be part of the Pollinator Pathway.  Not incidentally, one of the joys of living in a woodsy place is the quiet – that is until all the bleeding leaf blowers and lawn mowers kick in.  We’ll be electric on that score.

Furthermore, we’ll be looking seriously at heat pumps, mainly for AC.  (A former student founded a company to do home energy audits and said heat pumps really ought to be called “cold pumps.”)  We’re also going to learn about wood-burning fireplace inserts.  We’ve got some dead trees on our land, you get some cold Northeastern winters, and oil is expensive.

This is all going to be a lot of work but it’s also going to be quite satisfying.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s response to inquiries from Congress was that the Department’s hands were tied.  That certainly did not assuage the SEIA, their president and CEO saying that she was “outraged by some of the things the secretary said.”  Given the nature of the work that is being done in the four countries under investigation, the petition for the investigation should have been immediately dismissed, according to Abby Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO.  Letters from 20 governors, 22 senators, and 85 members of the House of Representatives underscored the high level of discontent at Commerce’s investigation.

The good news today is that cooler heads in the Biden Administration have prevailed.  The tariffs that were threatening to collapse progress on solar photovoltaic deployments in the US are being waived.  In addition, according to this White House release, the President has authorized use of the Defense Production Act to accelerate the manufacture of clean energy components, including PV, and designation of “super preference” status in federal government procurement for domestically produced solar PV components.  Meanwhile, Commerce’s investigation will continue.

SEIA’s Hopper was certainly pleased:  “We applaud President Biden’s thoughtful approach to addressing the current crisis of the paralyzed solar supply chain. The president is providing improved business certainty today while harnessing the power of the Defense Production Act for tomorrow. Today’s actions protect existing solar jobs, will lead to increased employment in the solar industry and foster a robust solar manufacturing base here at home.”

Canary Media has an excellent soup-to-nuts series of articles recounting this entire sage.

So, even though I have written and taught about climate change, energy and the environment, and clean tech for more than 15 years, and worked in public affairs for the NY State environmental agency for a more than a decade before that, and was a Sierra Club activist before that, there is still much I can and should learn about the natural world.

Thor Hanson’s Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid – The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change has been a pot of gold for me.  It brims with insights into how our brothers and sisters in nature have evolved and how they are re-evolving under the pressures of climate change – as if they didn’t have enough to handle given the other depredations of Homo sapiens like habit destruction from mining, farming, ranching, and forestry, not to mention illegal hunting and overfishing, as well as invasive species.  The book, according to the author himself, “is filled with dispatches from the front lines of a rapidly expanding field,” namely biology in the context of climate change.

“Dispatches from the front lines” evokes, of course, one of the seminal books on the climate crisis:  Betsy Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe.  Kolbert, for my money our preeminent environmental journalist, also wrote The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History, covering some of the same ground that Hanson does here.  (She won the Pulitzer for The Sixth Extinction.)

Hanson toggles back and forth in time with stories from his childhood, with his young son now, and from his college, graduate, and post-grad days.  He also covers a fair bit of the earth’s surface, with reporting from Thoreau’s Walden Pond to Hanson’s own backyard in the Pacific Northwest.  He’s looking through his own eyes and through the lenses of fellow scientists at African songbirds, tawny owls in Finland, sea butterflies in Arctic waters, macaws in Central America, lizards in the Caribbean (his “hurricane lizards”), lodgepole pines in Western North America, red oaks and white oaks in Iowa, butterfly fish in the Western Pacific, rockweed off the West Coast of Africa, even extinct Shasta giant ground sloths in the ancient American Southwest and fossil ferns in an alley in his old hometown in the state of Washington.

The book delves into a wide variety of topics beyond climate biology:  history on evolutionary theory, the greenhouse effect, photosynthesis, ocean acidification, and the carbon cycle.  (I love an old book on the carbon cycle by a now-retired NYU professor, Tyler Volk, called CO₂ Rising.  Funny thing too:  I think that Volk and Hanson look a bit alike.)

The research tools he and his colleagues use are as varied as simple census taking and handwritten notes, to high-speed photography, the use of large databases and powerful computers, DNA analysis, artificial intelligence, and even SPRUCE – Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments.  SPRUCE is a large research station with huge open-topped terrariums mimicking the soil temperature, air temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations of various possible climate futures.

For a non-fiction writer and teacher like me and, for that matter, any general reader, there is great value in back matter like the glossary, excellent endnotes and bibliography, and index he provides.  I am also partial to epigraphs which he uses to good effect.  I was particularly taken with this one, from P.G. Wodehouse, for a chapter on the slow, insidious impact of climate stresses on species:  “Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.”

This book, wonderfully entertaining, is also very much a call to action.  He says this in his author’s note at the beginning:  “Shouting from the rooftops carries farther when we all raise our voices together.”  He also makes the point again at the end.  He quotes Gordon Orians, a distinguished biologist.  “When asked what a concerned citizen should do to combat climate change, his response was immediate and concise:  ‘Everything you can.’”  He further quotes Edward Everett Hale, the 19^th Century American author, historian, and minister:  “I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.”

That last quote brings me to the eloquence of the Kenyan social, political, and environmental activist giant, Wangari Maathai.  She was also a Nobel Peace Laureate.  In the marvelous blockbuster documentary Dirt! the Movie, she tells the story of a hummingbird fighting a forest fire.