Guys, we've crossed the marsh and the Enbridge crossing point of the Mississipi is now occupied. I think this camp will last until Line 3 is stopped.#StopLine3
The scene here is solemn and joyful. Treaty rights need respecting and so do the laws of physics. Instead of 800,000 barrels of oil crossing this wetland there are thousands of people.
Indigenous leaders welcoming visitors now, and reminding them to go back to their communities and spread the word. #StopLine3@IENearth
"This is the most beautiful thing I've witnessed since Standing Rock and George Floyd," leader Dawn Goodwin explains
The police stood back today, at least so far. Too many people and too much good energy. And since Enbridge built a giant boardwalk through a marsh there's now a perfect tent platform on each bank of the Mississippi
Adding, this is what the Mississipi looks line here. Imagine a spill.#StopLine3
Elders now making tobacco offerings in the river
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Walloping Wolverines!! Huge divestment news out of Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan--as heartland a school as you can imagine--announces plans to stop investing in fossil fuels! record.umich.edu/articles/u-m-s…
This is crucial because a) it's a big big endowment b) it's arguably, along with the already divested UC system, America's foremost public university and c) most of all, it's a huge reversal, won by courageous students. Here's what I mean:
When UMich refused to divest in 2015, the oil industry celebrated--indeed, they blazoned the words of its president, Mark Schlissel, across the front of their anti-divestment website, and they've been there ever since.
So Biden's climate/energy/environment team is mostly complete, and on balance there's never been anything like it in U.S. history. With people like @RepDebHaaland and @GinaNRDC and @JohnKerry and @JenGranholm, there's high profile and seriousness of purpose
There are weaknesses (Vilsack at Ag strikes me as the only downright dud, a wasted pick that shows no understanding farming must change), and questions (Regan at EPA was a fan of burning wood pellets when he was in NC.) And they have to overcome Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell.
But there now seems the real possibility of concerted action across the federal government to make sweeping change--if, of course, there are movements prodding, and opening up space, and cheering accomplishments to build momentum. That's the work of the rest of us.
So, every once in a while by pure chance, one knows something about something in the news. Today that's me--it's about a guy named Brian Deese who is up for an econ job in the Biden administration. But it's a longish story.
I've spent most of my life living in rural America, much of it in a remote, poor, red, and exceptionally beautiful corner of upstate New York. Among other things, I taught Sunday School in the basement of the Methodist church in our town of 300
Four sisters were in that class, beginning when they were very small; my wife and I got to know them all well, and their parents. All four managed to make it out to college in Middlebury VT, which was exceptional for our community. (I followed them there some years later).
This feels like the most serious announcement from a =n oil major: after years of pressure from activists, BP to cut oil and gas production 40% by 2030. Far from perfect, but far from normal cnn.com/2020/08/04/bus…
Right before Xmas New Yorker editor David Remnick called to ask if I'd do a weekly climate newsletter under the magazine's auspices. My 1st reaction was yes: it was where I'd begun writing about all this in my early 20s and now I was...older if not wiser newyorker.com/home/newslette…
But my 2nd reaction was, what about this newsletter HEATED that @emorwee had just launched, and that I was very much enjoying. Would it damage her effort? So I asked, and she graciously said she thought not: "there's plenty of space out there for more newsletters...Hell yeah!"
So I decided to proceed--I'm not competing with HEATED, which you can sign up for here: heated.world And since mine is free, you will have money to subscribe to hers, and since mine is weekly you will have time to read her daily output
Went out for a long ski in the woods this morning, and thought about why the @nytimes editorial rankled me so much. It had nothing to do with their picks, and everything to do with the depiction of @klobuchar as 'realist' and @SenWarren as 'radical.' (i.e., 'unrealistic')
In the field I know best, climate change, the 'adversary' is physics. Because we have waited (thanks to the fossil fuel industry) so long to get started, physics leaves us no choice but to move very swiftly. Say, at the speed envisioned by people like @warren or @SenSanders
That doesn't make her radical--it makes her far more realistic, in any meaningful sense of the word, than those who think we still have room for politically easier, less robust approaches. That's not 'realism,' that's the opposite: a kind of pleasant fantasy