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If the whole concept of carbon footprint is a ruse conjured by Big Oil—and if our individual choices correspondingly don’t matter—how do we break that news to people? How can it be part of a message that motivates? That inspires us to put our collective footprint up Big Oil’s collective ass?

The answer is not obvious. When it comes to the importance of our individual climate footprint, a ton of people on Team Climate—regular folks but also activists, entrepreneurs, investors—are entrenched. And academics, too. Here’s a bit from the conclusion of a recent-ish paper called Individual Responsibility for Collective Climate Change Harms. Don’t worry, it’s only three sentences:

This work has shown that even on collectivist grounds, individuals can be assigned primary duties to reduce their GHG emissions. Following Cripps (Citation2013), this work held the unstructured group of GHG emitters weakly collectively responsible for harm resulting from the predictable aggregation of their individual acts. However, it argued against Cripps that what follows from this is a corresponding collective duty to act qua group to bring about an end to the harm and a derivative duty for each emitter to promote the required organization of a group capable of such a collective action.

That was only three sentences? It’s true. Also true: reading crazy long academic sentences with no periods is torture but also oddly almost fun in its own perverse linguistic way? No? Just me? But don’t bail on me just yet. This next bit drills down on the climate footprint concept (albeit without using the term):

Instead, it was argued that acts of GHG emission, to the extent that they are avoidable and performed with requisite knowledge, make one into a member of a group that is morally responsible for climate-related harm. Individual emitters who can do otherwise (i.e. not emit at reasonable cost to themselves) should recognize themselves as members of a group that collectively harms.

That bold at the end there was added by me, obvs. Because it’s the central conclusion of the paper, and I don’t disagree with it. Yes, let’s recognize ourselves as members of a group—but a group that’s collectively trapped in a dirty system. The genius of carbon footprint is self-evident in climate circles. It’s worked to such an extent that an overwhelming amount of outreach by climate orgs leads with how you can get involved by changing your energy consumption habits.

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Here’s the thing about individual choices within the climate framework. Your choices, my choices, the choices of everyone we have known and will ever know: they don’t matter. They are not meaningful. You are not special. I am not special. In terms of bending the climate curve, our personal decisions just don’t register.

Should you buy an EV? Should I g…

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Before we embark on a very short and incredibly partial tour of the DOE’s Endangerment Finding review comment circus, let’s get our bearings with an actual quote from the paper itself:

“The world’s several dozen global climate models offer little guidance o…

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You may well have seen headlines about the Trump administration’s attempt to erase the Endangerment Finding—the 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health. That ruling is the spine of U.S. climate law, and gutting it would unravel emissions limits for cars, power plants, and oil and gas. It would also, in plain English, redefine CO2—aka the overwhelmingly most important form of air pollution in the world—as a not-pollutant.

Reuters: US reversal on key climate finding spells uncertainty for business

To justify the move, Trump’s Department of Energy cooked up a glossy new report called A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.

(This is a side note, but stand by for a near-future post about the multitude of ways the term greenhouse gas emissions is both a scientific misnomer and a messaging catastrophe. Greenhouse makes the proverbial average person think of gardening, gas of liquid fuel, and emissions of silent farts. So why do we insist on using terms that cut the balls off our point before we’re done making it? Sorry. I get pretty easily pissed off about this stuff. Don’t even get me started on natural gas, that fossil-methane makeover that makes a gas well sound like a spa day.)

Care to wager if “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” is underpinned by good science? Before you slap down cash, here’s a hint:

Carbon Brief: Factcheck: Trump’s climate report includes more than 100 false or misleading claims

The Carbon Brief piece is a thorough and visually oriented and well-sourced callout of the bullshit embedded throughout. From the intro:

Compiled in just two months by five “independent” researchers hand-selected by the climate-sceptic US secretary of energy Chris Wright, the document has sparked fierce criticism from climate scientists, who have pointed to factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? The report aimed at undoing the EPA finding that underpins virtually all its ability to regulate climate was written by randos hand-picked by the CEO of a fracking company who now runs the Department of Energy.

Meanwhile, over at the EPA, the thinking appears to be, hey guys, why wait around for the DOE to assassinate our authority when we can just do it ourselves?

Bloomberg News: EPA Unveils Plan to Kill US Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases

In a dark alley, EPA steps into the moonlight, brim pulled low, and pulls from its sheath a knife engraved with the words Kill the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Regulations that I Myself Wrote and Am in Charge of. Except now it’s a longsword, because that’s way too much to get on a knife…

For all the suspense embedded in the Bloomberg headline, let’s pick one to focus on that’s working hard to be objective but ultimately not doing as well as it thinks:

AP: Scientists give harsh grades to Trump administration work aimed at undoing a key climate finding

But to get us started, let’s take a peek at the DOE report itself.

A critical review of the Critical Review

Spoiler: it’s not a review in any recognizably valuable sense. And it’s critical not in the scientific sense but rather in the older-sister-being-critical-of-your-wardrobe-choices sense. Ocean acidification is spontaneously rebranded as ocean neutralization. That’s not science—that’s marketing. Ocean life is dissolving in acidic carbon-soaked water, and DOE’s answer is to change the name tag.

And seriously: “neutralization”? Let’s call this out for what it really is: a gag-reflex rewrite. At Global Ocean Health (my home base), accounting for and addressing the effects of ocean acidification was our launchpad. We know what it means: CO₂ dissolves into seawater, shedding acid that chips away at calcium-carbonate skeletons—from pteropods to corals and oysters—with catastrophic effects up and down the ocean food chain.

Here’s what the numbers say: global surface ocean pH has dropped enough since 1985 that acidity has increased by about 15% since then—and roughly 40% since pre-industrial levels.

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“Storyteller” has become so hopelessly overused in marcom that it’s been stripped of all the campfire-bard connotation it once carried. Now it means “I am a precocious child” or “I work in …

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The more conversations I have, the more convinced I become that the biggest hurdle in getting a critical mass of people to engage with climate comes down to …

Sorry—Editor Mark jumping in here to say how much Writer Mark sucks for using the word engage (in the first freaking sentence, no less). What a tired marketing cliché. My bad. Let’s try again:

… the…

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Happy is upset because the ball is “unwinding” climate legislation.

Not long ago, I joined the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub. It’s nifty—bit of a trek to get somewhere you’re not required to be, but worth it. Popping with interesting people who want to connect—professionals who are all on Team Climate. You could be an engineer, or a go-to-market strateg…

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If you’re an educator or profesh communicator, depending on what age levels you’re interested in reaching, the Yale program on clima…

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When we put people in charge who spout conspiracy theories, sooner or later they’re going govern via conspiracy theory.

Thanks to an onslaught of profoundly uninteresting technical difficulties, this week’s planned post has been bumped to next week. But I don’t want to leave you with nothing, so allow me, if you w…

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Stephen Markley’s climate epic The Deluge doesn’t open with a wildfire or a flood or a politician giving a speech about a 2050 net-zero pledge. It opens with a closeup of lattice-like structures on the ocean floor: methane hydrates. Crystalline cages of frozen water holding ancient methane gas under intense pressure.

The first character we meet is Tony P…

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"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

—Donald Trump, “a climate-skeptic [who] has promised to take the US out of the Paris Agreement once again.” (Le Monde)

The general term for one section of the general audience we need to convert is “climate skeptic.” So, in service of be…

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Question for the guys: Have you started the new season of Reacher yet?

Question for the ladies: Have you left the room while your guy was watching Reacher yet?

The current third season is the best one yet, imho. Thing is, I can’t exactly tell you why. I mean, it’s better than season 2—which was definitively terrible—but beyond that? It’s actually pretty d…

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Quick note: After a pair of warmup posts, CHAMP curled up and went into hibernation. But now the long winter is over, and we’re back with an arsenal of posts ready to be fired off on the weekly—along with bonus lighter fare here and there.

Let’s start by acknowledging that this edition of CHAMP—which is dedicated to determining the best possible shade to…

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Know how every so often you’ll encounter a comedy short that seems to find new ways to make you laugh no matter how many times you rewatch it? For me, the SNL sketch currently occupying that rare air is Washington’s Dream, which was given a sequel in this season’s opener when standup Nate Bargatze hosted for the second time. In both iterations, he plays…

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There’s this line I think about on the reg but have been unable to attribute. It’s short and sweet:

“The future is a policy decision.”

It’s one of those aphorisms that get more true the more you think about it. And it can be applied to a range of topics: all you need do is add “about ______” to the end of the sentence, then fill in the blank.

Football: The…

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