August: the month of ripe tomatoes, glorious wildflowers, and buzzing anxiety about the start of a new school year. Even after thirty years of teaching, I still feel both anticipation and anxiety as students return to campus. I’m teaching environmental literature this semester, so sixteen lucky students will be reading (among other things) a few climate dystopia novels with me. Fun!

Just goes to show: you can pretend you’re going to neatly trellis a Yakteen gourd and a couple bean plants. But neglect them for one day and the plants develop other ideas.

The pollinators continue to lose their little minds over the banquet we lay out before them.

Quick reminder to join us, if you can, on August 25 for a Third Act Faith event featuring Will Howard of Potential Energy Coalition. Learn what the research says about how best to talk to people about climate change and climate solutions. There are traps to avoid and strategies that actually move people to action. Click on the image to register—it’s free!

I’m also delighted to share with you a recent episode of the Green Lectionary Podcast, in which host Derrick Weston and I have a marvelous time discussing the story of Jesus walking on the water in Matthew 14. The Green Lectionary Podcast is a terrific resource for preachers or anyone else who wants to learn how to read scripture through the lens of climate justice. I’m recording another episode with Derrick next week, this one featuring the manna-n-quail story in Exodus 10. I’ll let you know when that one releases.

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This Week in Climate News

Another couple weeks of the usual climate news mix we face in these difficult days: dystopia-level extreme weather events, nefarious deeds from the usual corporate suspects, lots of clean energy wins, and good people doing good things. We press on, friends.

First, a brief summation of extreme weather news. You’ve probably seen these stories in some form already, but let’s get the global picture a minute. The predicted “super El Niño” cycle has arrived, with the recent devastation of Hurricane Lala in Hawai‘i as exhibit A.

In case you find the whole El Niño cycle confusing—as I do—you might appreciate this excellent explainer from Carbon Brief. Here comes the science—with wonderful graphics, region-by-region analysis, and a careful assessment of prediction models.

From Carbon Brief: “El Niño impacts temperatures and rainfall around the world, raising the risk of extreme weather events in many regions.”

In an already hotter, wetter, less predictable global weather system, this super El Niño cycle will be more disruptive than ever. The models are nearly unanimous on this point:

Carbon Brief analysis of forecasts from 14 different modelling groups that track El Niño globally – updated with the latest data – finds that 96% of runs predict that this event will be the strongest in the modern observational record.

Meanwhile, the American Meteorological Society released their annual peer-reviewed State of the Climate report this month for 2025. It is, unsurprisingly, grim. Bob Berwyn for Inside Climate News summarizes:

As global warming continued to reshape Earth’s climate, the planet’s oceans reached record high temperatures for the third year in a row in 2025. Some northern forests and tundra released more carbon dioxide than they absorbed. And the Greenland Ice Sheet lost about 129 gigatons of ice, enough to form a cube of ice about three miles wide on each side. …

The report identified continued burning of fossil fuels as the primary source of record-high greenhouse gas levels, which are raising global temperatures and intensifying extreme weather. In Europe, for example, average temperatures have risen about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s, while extreme high temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

None of the report’s findings are surprising, of course. (Also, for another good summation of where we stand on global climate disruption, see Bill McKibben’s newsletter from last week.) The only possible silver lining here is that devastating events like floods, droughts, extreme heat, and wildfires have become so obvious, it’s harder and harder for people to persist in denial—or accept the lie that “it’s all a hoax.”

One more entry in the “this is terrible” category, all right? We’re going to have to talk about every academic’s favorite topic: AI. As we all wring our hands over what AI is doing to our minds, the big tech companies continue to try to foist their data centers on us and tell us AI is inevitable and amazing. This week, my feed was packed with more reasons to resist an unregulated AI invasion in every way we can.

First, please read Bill McKibben’s newsletter from this week, which summarizes the “environmental plague” of data centers, among other problems. He outlines five reasons to resist the incursion of AI data centers and tools:

1. Data centers are trying to build out fast by building “bespoke” gas power plants, making sweetheart deals with Big Oil. The emissions increases that these plants threaten would be unimaginable in scale.

2. The frenzied AI expansion is built on sheer greed.

3. AI capabilities are not well controlled or regulated.

4. Most of us hate what it’s doing to our daily experience and our minds. (This is, I can assure you, especially true for educators—and our students, too.)

5. The philosophical issues here are profound and unexamined by the perpetrators.

(Note: that little summary was not built with AI. I never use AI for this newsletter or for anything I write or develop. I’m not a total purist—AI is helpful for crunching large amounts of data and for modeling—but when it comes to language generation or analysis, you can imagine I’m not a fan.)

It gets worse. As McKibben notes, there is “an unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Fossil.” Emily Atkin of Heated exposed another aspect of this alliance by explaining a new peer-reviewed study in npj Climate Action. After noting how much fossil fuel energy data centers plan to use, Atkin explains the even yuckier part:

And yet, this is only the tip of the AI climate iceberg. Because AI is not only consuming fossil fuels to generate electricity—it is also helping the world’s biggest oil companies produce more fossil fuels quicker, cheaper, and for greater profit.

Over the last few years, AI has become a powerful tool for oil and gas companies, helping them locate new deposits, drill wells faster, and extract more from existing fields. [some bold original]

I wish my university had considered all this before they rolled out their brand new AI policy, which calls for “discernment” and then announces the new AI aggregation tool available to all students, staff, and faculty. Sigh.

Want to help? You might start by listening in on the Third Act general meeting on August 26. It’s free. They’ll be discussing how the growing data center backlash can be leveraged this election cycle.

All right. That’s the bad stuff for this week. Let’s move on to some cheerful clean energy wins, shall we?

New Mexico is now a clean energy powerhouse. Karin Kirk writes for Yale Climate Communications:

The state’s electricity supply flipped from majority climate-warming fossil fuels to majority renewables in just five years. Spurred by an ambitious clean energy law called the Energy Transition Act, utilities have been busy building solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and transmission lines. A major coal plant was retired and demolished. Solar panels proliferated on homes, schools, and businesses.

And even while New Mexico was building out its clean energy future, electricity prices remained cheaper than average.

Sure, you need some solar and wind farms. But you can also put solar panels on top of already-built structures, like airport parking garages. In fact, put ’em everywhere! Image credit: City of Albuquerque via AP, File/via Yale Climate Communications.

See? States can do it if they want to. The secret to getting “firm” energy, even in the most energy-draining heat of July, is to combine solar, wind, and batteries. In New Mexico, solar panels soak up loads of sun during the day, store it in batteries, and discharge the stored energy at night. Wind helps with evening and overnight, too.

Even in high-demand July, Kirk writes, New Mexico is now getting 62% of their electricity from clean energy. Most months they do even better:

It’s worth noting that July’s heat drives the highest rates of fossil fuel use for PNM. About half the days in the past year saw renewables generating 70% or more of the daily electricity need, and in late spring of this year, renewables routinely met more than 80% of demand.

EV sales continue to rise. If you’ve been gagging every time you have to fill up your tank with $4+/gallon gas, you might be eyeing an EV. Don’t get too discouraged by news that EV sales are down, etc. Overall, globally, EV sales keeping moving up as the industry matures and people realize that EVs are superior to ICEs (internal combustion engines) in every way. Unless you like pollution and noise and lots of moving parts to fix, I guess. (Yes, I’m biased because I’m speaking from experience. The acceleration, people! The acceleration!)

A recent report from the International Energy Agency (which tends to offer cautious estimates) predicts continued growth in 2026, despite the US auto industry’s backsliding on EV ambitions:

Electric car sales are now expected to reach 29% of total car sales worldwide in 2026. In Australia, Brazil, India, Korea and Viet Nam – all sizeable electric car markets – sales have roughly doubled since the beginning of the energy crisis [i.e., since the Iran war], compared with the same period (March-June) in 2025. Together with strong second-quarter market momentum and policy support for EVs in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe, these trends support the expectation that electric car sales will grow around 10% this year, compared to 2025. The pace of recovery of the Chinese car market remains the main constraint on global sales growth. Electric car sales in the country are expected to reach similar levels as in 2025, though the EV sales share is expected to grow to more than 60% in 2026. [some bold original]

See that purple line? That’s the growth in new EV sales worldwide since 2000.

There’s lots more good clean energy news, but let’s move on to deep dives.

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Deeper Dive

Two good essays to recommend to you today.

First, rumors of the IRA’s death are greatly exaggerated. As much as the current federal regime has attempted to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, a great deal of it remains intact.

Leah Stokes, a policy wonk and researcher who was involved in passing the IRA, explains in The Atlantic (free link) just what has and hasn’t endured. She begins by examining whether IRA benefits helped win votes for Democrats in the 2024 election. In fact, they did, despite the conventional wisdom on that question. She details how and when “policy feedback” works—and doesn’t. It all comes down to moving fast so people feel the benefits, which the IRA rollout both did and didn’t quite do.

As for clean energy buildout, the IRA actually continues to help enormously. When examining the results of manufacturing tax credits, for instance, Stokes and her team found that “of the 523 projects we looked at, only 37 had been canceled as of April, when we did our study.”

There’s more:

Even after the passage of [the One Big Beautiful Bill], U.S. solar capacity is expected to double over the next five years. Wind installations will surge this year, too, despite Trump doing his best to kill them. The long-term picture is murkier, but history suggests that these kinds of credits have a way of coming back from the dead. Congress has extended earlier rounds of clean-energy credits when they’ve expired, in some cases on a bipartisan basis, and has even applied some of them retroactively.

And more:

Meanwhile, the commercial-battery tax credits are still around. With these policies in place, America is on track this year for its biggest build-out of power generation in history, 93 percent of it clean. This is happening because of the IRA’s deepest legacy: It helped make clean energy cheaper.

Finally, Stokes acknowledges the real damage the current regime has done, dragging our progress and relegating the US to the status of laggard rather than leader. But she concludes:

Under Trump, we have fallen further behind, and time is not on our side. But a day will come when Trump is no longer the president, when passing another climate bill is a real possibility. When that time comes, lawmakers should remember the lesson of the IRA: Voters respond to benefits that they can actually see. Politicians should make sure those benefits materialize quickly—and that voters know who delivered them.

Fires in Utah in July. Image credit: Theo Maynard via kslnewsradio.com.

The deep dive second essay is more philosophical. Rebecca Solnit reflects on her recent time in New Mexico—yes, the same state now full of clean energy—where she experienced horrible air quality from wildfire smoke. This leads her to a philosophical, and indeed religious reflection on our human ability to feel when something is deeply off about the world. In my tradition, we call that sin, but Solnit reflects on the Buddhist concept of duhkha, often rendered as suffering. She writes that duhkha might mean

less pure suffering in the usual sense than the sense that things are out of tune, that something is broken, out of harmony or alignment, discordant. The smoky mornings brought that sense back to me. Maybe the right word is wrongness. If kha in the etymology above means sky, among other things, then we have a discordant, damaged sky.

The next question is how we respond to this feeling. Solnit wants to urge that we not merely descend into gloom, but—as all religious traditions urge—respond to suffering/duhkha/sin/wrongness with active care:

And these crises call for our active care for the thirsty deer, the burning trees, for those beings and places going up in smoke, those beings breathing smoke. For righting the wobbly wheel, truing the axle, fixing the sky.

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Refugia Sighting

Let’s look for those active care-taking folks next. These first two sightings are not about living ecosystems, but about financial ecosystems. They need restoration, too. So congrats to friend and reader Dan Terpstra, who has worked long and hard to make something rather enormous happen in his denomination: The Presbyterian Church (USA) has finally agreed to divest from fossil fuels.

Jane Ellen Nickel writes for the Third Act Faith newsletter:

After 12 years of effort by thousands of faithful Presbyterians on overtures calling for the removal of fossil fuel investments and Presbyteries voting to support it 147 times, the PC(USA) General Assembly recently approved overture CLJ-02, “Changing Course for a Green Future.” On the consent agenda, the PC(USA) approved the overture to remove the majority of its investments from the fossil fuel industry by 2030, or as soon as “prudent management” permits.

Another interesting financial ecosystem story: A guy in New York state who works for a company called Thermo-Fisher is suing the company (with the help of ClientEarth) on the grounds that by not bothering to create a fossil-free retirement fund as an option for employees, they are violating his religious beliefs.

Dr. Andrew Hartley, a statistical science director, has asked repeatedly that the company offer a fossil-fuel-free option in their retirement fund benefits portfolio. They have ignored his request. The most maddening part of the story:

Thermo Fisher’s stated mission is to make the world ‘healthier, cleaner, and safer.’ It has publicly acknowledged that ‘urgent action is needed to avoid the worst aspects of climate change.’

Yet every equity investment option in Thermo Fisher’s 401(k) plan puts money into companies that extract and burn oil, coal, and gas. That means Dr. Hartley faces a choice: compromise his faith or forfeit a meaningful part of his compensation.

I don’t know if this lawsuit will work, of course, but it’s an intriguing use of the 2023 religious accommodation ruling, Groff v. DeJoy. As the ClientEarth website observes:

A win in this case could establish the legal precedent that workers across the U.S. have a right to demand fossil-free retirement options that align with their beliefs — turning a single accommodation request into a nationwide pathway for cutting off one of the quietest but most significant financial lifelines to the fossil fuel industry.

Back to the world of land, water, plants—and cities. Dutch cities in particular. I enjoyed this lovely video about the city of Utrecht, Netherlands, where they have been working for seventeen years to make the city center greener, more pedestrian-and-bike friendly, and more beautiful. The knock-on effects include better water management (the Dutch are total pros at this, of course), healthier air, safer traffic patterns, and an overall nicer place to be. Good urban planning is a refugia strategy and a climate solution!

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One more beautiful story today. I love the stories in which ruined land becomes a refugia space, full of life and beauty again. This story comes from Portugal, where a place called Paul de Toirões has been revitalized in only a few years. According to the Rewilding Europe website:

A decade ago, this former quarry in Portugal’s Greater Côa Valley was an industrial wasteland — a ravaged landscape of shafts, pits, and scars carved by man and machine. Today, from the air, the 300-hectare rewilding site reveals a vibrant mosaic of lakes, ponds, ditches, and wetlands, as birds, dragonflies, turtles, otters, and a host of other species return to recolonise newly formed habitats. Around the water bodies, native forest is regenerating, strengthening resilience and further boosting biodiversity.

So many great refugia elements to this story. Nature provided most of what was needed to rewild the place, either with remnant seeds and species or with rapid natural recovery. Rewilding Portugal partnered with nature by making some strategic adjustments, including softening water body edges, removing artificial drainage, and removing invasives.

Now people can enjoy the area as a wildlife refuge, and researchers continue to monitor and care for it. Best of all, the area is becoming part of a refugia corridor system:

The revival of Paul de Toirões boosts ecological connectivity across the Greater Côa Valley, creating a new ecological stepping stone for species moving through the landscape. Its expanding wetlands and regenerating forests complement other rewilding sites in the valley, advancing Rewilding Portugal’s efforts to build a large-scale wildlife corridor.

Paul de Toirões in Portugal, a former quarry, now rapidly recovering. Image credit: Marcus Westberg via rewildingeurope.com.

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Extra Fun

My friends over at BioLogos have released their new resource for groups who want to try outdoor worship, sometimes called Wild Church. Called “Worship with the Wild,” the resource would be a great first option for groups who want to stick closer to familiar worship expressions, but still want to try deepening their relationship with the more-than-human creation.

Worship with the Wild helps people encounter God outdoors through guided worship and reflection. This free, ready-to-use resource equips lay leaders to bring their small groups into God’s world, where participants can praise the Creator and grow closer to one another.

I’ll send you off with this sharply funny and somehow also melancholy song from the inimitable Elle Cordova. If you’re feeling a sense of dread as Big Tech looms over you and your community, you need to hear this one.

OK, that’s it for this week! Whatever you’re feeling as the seasons turn, I hope you will find joy and strength in community and in practicing care for all that is good and beloved. Thanks for reading. Till next time, be well.

I’m coming to you this week from the beautiful state of Minnesota, where our family is gathered for an annual week of fun together. We spent a few days in the Twin Cities and a few more hiking and goofing off on Lake Superior’s North Shore. I’ll report on highlights below. Also, yesterday was my birthday. I am now [mumble mumble] years old and grateful that I can still more or less keep up on moderate hiking trails with my super-fit adult children. Whew!

The view out our window at Cove Point Lodge. I’m a Lake Michigan fan forever, but I gotta admit: Lake Superior is gorgeous.

Meanwhile, super exciting news! I am delighted to unveil to you the cover design for Refugia Church! You saw it here first, friends! Isn’t it beautiful?

Some tweaks to be made yet, but this is pretty close to final. Who could possibly resist a book that looks like that??

We’re looking at a spring release date—details to come. Right now we’re still in copyediting/galley stage, but I’ll let you know when preorder is ready to go. This book is for churches and Christian faith groups ready to dive into climate justice and creation care but unsure quite how or why or where to begin. The book is full of stories about people doing amazing work, and the refugia theme is threaded throughout in—I hope—inspiring and galvanizing ways.

A few other quick things to share with you: For a thought-provoking discussion on how people with faith/spiritual commitments can work to save the integrity of our democracy this fall, check out this recording of a great conversation between Rev. Adam Russell Taylor and Rev. Jim Antal, as part of the Third Act Faith general meeting on July 28.

And do join us on August 25 for the next meeting in this series. Learn what the research says about how best to talk to people about climate change and climate solutions. There are traps to avoid and strategies that actually move people to action. Click on the image to register—it’s free!

And if you want to see me look ridiculous trying to wax eloquent about my own backyard native planting projects, enjoy this little film about my university’s restoration ecology group, the Plaster Creek Stewards. The Plaster Creek folks are brilliant in the film; I’m just awkward. And unfortunately, we filmed early in the spring, so our native gardens are not exactly looking spectacular yet, but oh well—use your imagination. (The film was a partnership between the Good Faith podcast and A Rocha USA.)

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This Week in Climate News

Fires rage on in Europe, Canada, and the US West, as you know. I hope none of you have lost homes or property or beloved places, but chances are good that someone in this readership has. I heard yesterday from friends in Oregon who are OK, but who know people who have lost everything. This is a time for shared grief. It’s also a time to make the connection out loud: climate chaos is making natural fire patterns far more grievous. Modelers also continue to warn of a severe El Niño cycle in the next 12 months. Climate change is exacerbating that, too.

August 6 map from NASA. Source: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/usfs/map/#d:24hrs;@-100.0,40.0,4.0z

It’s important to acknowledge shared griefs and make clear connections, but it’s also crucial to expose the cynical forces at work: entities that persist in nihilistically destructive and deceptive practices in the name of profits. I don’t mind using such strong language. A few examples of cynical forces come to us this week from the legal sphere, where we observe that latest in an age-old epic battle: destructive corporate interests vs. protecting ecosystem health.

Skirmish number 1 for today is the latest attempt by the current EPA to water down the Endangered Species Act, first passed in 1973. The original legislation not only specifies that you can’t go around shooting threatened or endangered species, but you also can’t destroy their habitat. You can’t cause “harm.” The Act states that any entity (e.g., a corporation) who wants to cut down trees or pump for oil or whatever, even on private land, can be required to modify their plans, or prevented altogether, if their proposed actions will cause harm to a threatened or endangered species.

If you’re old enough, you might remember a scuffle in the 1990s wherein the courts had to rule over whether or not a lumber company could destroy the habitat of the spotted owl. At the time, many people scorned the idea that the spotted owl could be more important than Jobs and Profits. But as Kiley Price explained in an article for Inside Climate News/Mother Jones, the Supreme Court affirmed in 1995 that yes, Endangered Species Act protections for threatened species do indeed include “any significant habitat modification or degradation that kills or injures wildlife.”

The spotted owl is adorable, but that’s not the point. The Endangered Species Act seeks to protect threatened/endangered creatures, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the ecosystems that support many creatures, endangered or not. Image credit: National Park Service, nps.gov.

Now, the current EPA is trying to argue that the 1995 court got it wrong, and that the habitat-destruction-counts interpretation of the Endangered Species Act amounts to “unlawful regulatory intrusion that interfered with private property rights.” So they have proposed a new rule that neuters the definition of harm. As you know, for the current administration, regulations always = bad bad bad—because regulations can sometimes force extraction industries to think up less harmful ways to make profits for their shareholders.

So, here we go again. The current regime proposes some destructive policy, we all gasp in outrage, and then it goes into litigation. Rest assured, environmental groups and tribes are suing over the EPA’s new version of the harm rule. And the public has weighed in, too. Price writes: “Approximately 358,000 public comments were filed on the proposed rule, many condemning the action as extinction fodder.”

If you want to help in this fight, you might consider supporting Earthjustice, a nonprofit spearheading this and many other efforts to protect protections, as it were. (Earthjustice’s motto: “Because the earth needs a good lawyer.”)

Skirmish number 2 today: the Line 5 battle in Michigan. As a Great Lakes girlie, I follow this one fairly closely, but I don’t write about it often in the newsletter. However, this week, we had some actual good news: an important breakthrough. Enbridge, the company that owns Line 5, has been running a gas/oil pipeline on the bottomlands of the Straits of Mackinac since 1953. Yes, that thing is 73 years old, creaky and dangerous, and really, really needs to be retired. Gov. Whitmer revoked and terminated the 1953 easement for Line 5 back in 2020, but Enbridge refused to shut it down—aaannnnd thus it all went to court.

Meanwhile, Enbridge proposed a replacement tunnel: they would drill a big huge hole under the straits and run a new pipeline through that. That proposal led to numerous fights over permitting the tunnel. Recently, Enbridge received a couple key permits for this tunnel project, including from the Michigan Public Service Commission (grrrr). However, on July 31, the Michigan Supreme Court rescinded the permits.

This terrific article by David Holtz of The Current explains the whole fight beautifully. Holtz points out that the court’s new ruling rests on three key principles. Most importantly, the ruling reaffirms the public trust doctrine embedded in Michigan’s 1970 Environmental Protection Act. Holtz writes:

MEPA requires independent review of the public trust doctrine, separate from ordinary environmental harm. The statute protects “the air, water, or other natural resources, or the public trust in these resources.” The PSC said public trust wasn’t its job. The Court of Appeals agreed. The Supreme Court reversed and vacated the PSC’s approval.

Public trust is the key idea here. This is a legal principle that essentially honors the public’s rights to defend the protections of air, water, land that benefits all of us. Holtz explains that this idea of public trust acknowledges that neither corporations nor public agencies always act in good faith:

As the Court put it again Friday, the Legislature “left to the courts the important task of giving substance to the standard by developing a common law of environmental quality.” That was a deliberate judgment about which institutions to trust. As the Court wrote in 1975, “Not every public agency proved to be diligent and dedicated defenders of the environment.”

One more installment in “let’s name the perpetrators,” OK? In case you don’t get the New York Times, I’ll share this article by Claire Brown (free link) explaining exactly who is making bank on the Iran war. You guessed it. Here’s the article lede:

Top U.S. oil and gas executives have sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock in their own companies since the Iran war triggered a supply crunch that sent energy prices soaring, according to a new analysis shared with The New York Times.

Another age-old story: the already-wealthy find a way to make money off of war. In this case, fossil fuel executives, writes Brown, are “using Trump’s war to mint dynastic wealth for themselves.” Sigh.

Let’s have some good energy transition news to cleanse our palates, shall we?

Fix the News from July 30 lists several milestones in the clean energy transition (see that link for sources, too).

Australia: “Across the main grid, average power prices dropped 47% year-on-year in the June quarter, as renewables hit a record 42% seasonal share, coal output slipped and gas generation sank to its lowest level in 23 years.”

Germany: “Across the whole of 2025, wind and solar produced 44% of Germany’s electricity, edging past the 43% from coal and gas.”

California: ”In May 2026, solar supplied 51% of California’s electricity across the whole month, the first power system of its size anywhere in the world to cross 50% solar, with batteries shifting midday sun into the evening peak.”

And then there’s plug-in solar, which I have been touting regularly in this newsletter. Here’s a New York Times article—also by Claire Brown along with Ivan Penn (free link)—whose theme is “here come all those plug-in solar panels!”

People keep asking me, “So… how does plug-in solar work??” Rather than try to explain (I’m not an electrical engineer!), I found this helpful explainer page. Just enough technical detail, a good FAQ, and more. The magic ingredient: a microinverter, of course.

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Deeper Dive

We’ll keep the Deeper Dive fairly simple this week and talk about: batteries. If you have been reading this newsletter, you know that batteries are the crucial ingredient for making clean energy “firm” and reliable around the clock. So it’s important to understand them. Thankfully, we’ve got the informative and entertaining Climate Adam to help us out. I highly recommend these two short-ish (15 minutes or so) and excellent videos.

The first goes over the basics of why battery tech is key to round-the-clock renewables.

And this one explains batteries in more depth, including the very latest developments in sodium-ion battery tech, which promises to make batteries even cheaper and the materials far easier to obtain.

Now some psychology. If you are wondering what to do with your climate grief and/or rage, and wondering why everyone else isn’t feeling the same grief and/or rage that you feel, well, first of all: they probably are. However, as this piece by Anne Therese Gennari explains, the psychology of living in crisis times is complicated. A lot of us kinda get stuck on the “what can I do?” question. I appreciate her ideas for getting unstuck, especially her recommendation to consider the wisdom of the steady-and-determined turtle:

So instead of panicking about all that needs to happen, find your turtle game. Find the thing you will keep showing up for that will (inevitably) win the race in the long run.

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Refugia Sighting

I had heard of this before, but I was reminded again this week of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. This is classic refugia work: not only protecting areas where life is persisting, but connecting them. That’s the key to ecosystem conservation and renewal, especially with larger species that need space. The initiative’s website describes their mission and methods:

The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative uses a partnership-based approach to collaborate with hundreds of community partners, including conservation groups, local landowners, businesses, government agencies, Indigenous governments, scientists, people and organizations, and others to protect habitat along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. …

Spanning 3,400 km (2,100 miles) from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the south to the Yukon Territory in the north, we strive to connect and protect enough space for a wide range of species — including grizzly bears, elk, wolves, caribou, wolverines and more — to roam, feed, and reproduce.

Our vision is an interconnected system of wild lands and waters stretching along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, harmonizing the needs of people with those of nature.

This article by Jane Palmer in Mongabay highlights more about the project and emphasizes one of the best and most hopeful aspects of it: all kinds of people working together, experimenting, learning, drawing on indigenous wisdom, and basically figuring out a new way to help people and creatures live together safely in the modern world.

Wildlife corridors that cross over (or go under) highways are a key part of the refugia-connection strategy. Image credit: Jane Palmer in Mongabay.

We are talking about a LOT of territory here. Of course, wild creatures are not terribly interested in state or national borders. That’s why cooperation between governments and private entities is key.

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Postcards from Minnesota

I’ll end with some fun little tidbits from my family’s visit to Minnesota.

First, a stroke of genius in Minneapolis. What better way to meet the love of your life than by yanking out invasive species together? You can join the Minneapolis Buckthorn Removal Singles Club. I’m not even kidding. Their mission emphasizes in-person community-building:

With online dating accounting for over 50% of new relationships (2025) and all other methods of meeting people in quick decline, it can begin to feel taboo to get friends to set you up on a date or ask out a stranger in public. The aim of this group is to bring people together in community over shared values and provide an alternative to the monoculture of online dating, where friendships and relationships can grow rooted in the nourishing soil of community care.

No reason you couldn’t start a group like this near you! If your area isn’t overrun with buckthorn, surely there’s some other problematic invasive you could yank out with like-minded folk.

Common buckthorn. Doesn’t it make you feel romantic?

Also in Minneapolis, last Sunday we worshiped with our friends at Mount Olive Lutheran Church. Mount Olive might appear on the surface as your regular, mild-mannered church, but they are in fact a mighty refugia space in their neighborhood. The story of their geothermal project will be featured in Refugia Church, so it was sweet to make a quick visit and see how they’re doing. Happily, the sanctuary felt perfectly cool on a hot day, thanks to their ground-source heat pump system. And the native gardens in their parking lot—underneath which geothermal boreholes do their work—seem to be thriving.

Underneath this parking lot: geothermal boreholes that help heat and cool the church. On the surface of the parking lot: native plantings!

At the Bell Natural History Museum, a charming prehistoric beaver. Such a big boi! I figured she and the mammoth behind her, being extinct megafauna, would surely appreciate my t-shirt, which depicts, reading from left to right, climate doom.

I mostly take photos of water and clouds. This is a Lake Superior beach in Gooseberry Falls State Park. We found a few agates, which is evidently a common obsession up here.

Yeah, Lake Superior is all right.

That’s all I can squeeze in for this week. I hope you can stay safe, stay connected, and remember that every good thing we do in the world counts. Refugia principle number one: small is not insignificant. Till next time, be well.

This time of the summer normally feels to me somewhat dreamy, as if time itself pauses to sigh in summer delight. Instead, in the past two weeks, we’ve had apocalyptic skies from wildfire smoke, more nasty shenanigans from our federal government, and two—count ‘em two!—yellowjacket nests in the woodpile right outside my back door!

I attempted to deal with the nests myself, and got decent results after a harrowing nighttime stealth operation with some insecticide powder. The next day, when I discovered a second nest in a cardboard box full of newspaper, I nervously suited up for more night ops, this time with the spray-from-a-distance stuff. Kinda worked, but not really. So I called in a professional. Chris was very nice and deftly removed both nests in about 30 minutes. Whew!

The carnage. Photos by Chris Monroe of Grand Rapids Pest Control. Thank you, Chris!!

We’ve learned our lesson: don’t leave a bunch of boxes of kindling and newspaper and other crap right outside the back door, you dummies! Fine. We’ll clean it all up and probably cover this spot in gravel. Or maybe steel.

In the insect department elsewhere on our tiny estate, we have lovelier things happening, such as this:

A monarch and a bee politely sharing the zinnias in one of our pollinator gardens. Image credit: Ron Rienstra.

Nothing much happening in refugia-related gigs in the last two weeks. Just working on plans for fall engagements. I did record another episode for the Green Lectionary podcast—I’ll let you know when that one is released.

Next week, I hope you’ll consider joining us for yet another great Third Act Faith event, this one with Adam Russell Taylor. This is the first in our “how do spiritual commitments influence voting patterns” series. To find out more and register, visit this site. It’s free!

Also! Many thanks to reader Samuel Y. Chiu for referring three friends to this newsletter. You’ve earned an appreciative shout-out. Thank you!

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This Week in Climate News

Spouse Ron and I spent last weekend “up north” in Traverse City, Michigan, visiting our daughter and son-in-law. Normally, we spend our time up there enjoying the outdoors, hiking Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park perhaps. Not this time. We had to stay indoors the whole time because of wildfire smoke rolling in from Canada. The air outside was dangerously thick with particulates, worse than 2023 as I recall it. I’m just grateful we were all safe, unlike people who lost their homes and communities to these fires.

If you don’t have this app on your phone, you should. We’ve been checking it frequently lately. Remember when we didn’t know what AQI was? I learned in 2023 that the Air Quality Index is now a vital tool. Not perfect, as Daniel Engber explains in detail for the The Atlantic, but certainly better than nothing.

No doubt you have heard a lot of nonsense about how this wildfire smoke is all Canada’s fault for not managing their forests properly. Wrong. That’s just bad-faith political theater.

Here comes the science. Zeke Hausfather explains what’s going on, complete with chapter and verse from the scientific research literature. Bottom line: it’s not about management. It’s about climate change.

It’s true that management protocols have been an issue in America’s western forests, where fire suppression over a few generations ended up allowing brush and dead branches to build up on the forest floor, making fires bigger and hotter. Fortunately, we have been doing better on management strategies since the 1970s and 80s. But in Canada, we are not talking about these kinds of forests. We are talking about boreal forests that burn across the canopy. That’s what these forests do naturally. Brush-clearing on the forest floor wouldn’t help. Anyway, they’re waaaaaay too huge to manage. Hausfather writes:

The boreal is on the order of three million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

Wondering why our Canadian neighbors aren’t putting out all the fires is, among other things, a failure to comprehend the scale in question.

A better question: why are the fires so bad right now? Because it’s hotter and drier, thanks to climate change:

Canadian fire seasons (May through September) have warmed about 2.2C on average since 1959. Canada warms at roughly twice the global rate, and its north at roughly three times. That warming matters for fire through a well-understood mechanism: warmer air is exponentially “thirstier” (saturation vapor pressure rises ~7% per degree), so it pulls moisture out of live vegetation and dead fuels alike, priming the landscape to burn. It’s the same fuel-drying pathway that Abatzoglou and Williams (2016) found had roughly doubled cumulative forest area burned in the western US.

Hausfather continues: “In addition, parts of the northwestern boreal are now burning at rates that do appear to exceed anything in thousands of years.” These fires are not caused by careless campers or arsonists, by the way. They’re overwhelmingly caused by lightning (90+% of the 2023 fires were caused by lightning). Lightning setting boreal forests on fire is a natural process. Climate change is simply making it all worse: “Because warming is expected to increase high-latitude lightning, climate change can contribute to both the fuel dryness and the ignition side of the equation.”

Yep. Canada is a lot hotter.

Let’s do a little more myth-busting, shall we? People not only hear misinformation about fires, but also about the reasons the planet is getting hotter. They have many reasons for believing these myths, but it’s important to keep putting the actual facts out there.

Thus I’m grateful that Jonathan Watts of the Guardian interviewed renowned climate scientist Ed Hawkins to assemble a terrific, simple guide to busting myths about extreme heat. Hawkins offers solid, understandable, science-based answers to myths like “Aren’t heat waves caused by natural weather cycles?” and “Scientists disagree on how much humanity is affecting the climate, right?” This is Climate 101, but very useful if you are having conversations with people who are unsure what to believe.

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It’s confusing, isn’t it, that climate change seems to be causing both heat/droughts and huge rain events? But that is correct. This is why climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has long referred to “climate weirding” rather than “global warming.” The average global temperature is indeed warming, but we experience that as weird weather whiplash. This year’s El Niño cycle is an example of how this works. This year’s El Niño is more and more certain to be record-shattering, peaking around the end of the year.

Bob Henson explains in Yale Climate Connections that while El Niño is a “normal” pattern that shifts heat and moisture around in short-term cycles, climate change is making the cycles far more extreme: waaaay too dry, waaaay too wet, way too everything:

El Niño—a periodic warming of the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific—is the world’s single biggest shaper of global temperature and regional climate over periods of a few months to a year or more. Heat that’s stored in the ocean during the cool counterpart phenomenon, La Niña, rises from the eastern tropical Pacific during El Niño. The result is a spike in global temperature, as well as climatic reverberations that typically include drought over Indonesia and parts of South America and Africa, wet winters over the southern U.S., and a shift away from Atlantic hurricanes toward North Pacific hurricanes and typhoons (a shift already in progress).

This map helped me understand better how different regions experience these cycles:

OK, let’s balance all that gloom with some encouraging developments: time for this week’s clean energy update.

First: solar! Africa is definitely engaged in a solar revolution. The good people at Fix the News reported on a new analysis from African Energy Live and created this graph to tell the story. Note that the graph only accounts for grid solar, excluding the panels people all over the African continent are installing on their roofs or farms:

Meanwhile, in the US, the excitement over balcony or plug-in solar continues to march across the states. Is plug-in solar legal in your state yet? Here’s a reminder of that terrific tracker website where you can check. If you’re in one of the lucky ten states so far, here’s a deal for you from Bright Saver: buy yourself some solar panels at cost, plug ‘em in and start offsetting your electricity costs.

Easy-peasy. Just plug this thing into an outlet and it starts producing electricity for your house. It’s OK: it won’t hurt anything. Keep in mind that Germany now has 4 million plug-in solar systems like this operating.

Bright Saver is a nonprofit group, and they are aiming to give this beginner solar strategy a big boost in the US by offering excellent deals. Wait: Is plug-in solar safe? Yes. You can read all about it here. The bottom line for this Bright Saver deal:

Bright Saver sells a 180-watt kit for about $285 and a 360-watt kit for $414. To access these prices, you first have to become a member, which costs $29 annually (with renewal optional). Otherwise, a 180-watt kit is $499, and a 360-watt kit is $699.

The organization aims to be the Costco of clean energy; only members can access the deep discounts. And more product deals are coming. Bright Saver plans to offer plug-in home batteries that work with balcony solar kits as soon as next year.

Finally, a battery update. Clean-energy-producing tech like solar and wind need pairing with batteries to be “firm”—that is, producing energy that’s available at all times. So developments in battery tech are a big deal, and although sodium ion battery tech has been around for a while, it hasn’t hit the scale we need. Perhaps until now, thanks to—you guessed it—China.

Batteries based on sodium promise to be cheaper, safer and much more environmentally friendly than lithium-ion cells. And this year could mark the start of the sodium era.

In April, Chinese firm CATL—the world’s largest battery producer—announced that it will start mass-producing sodium-ion batteries before the end of 2026. CATL, which is headquartered in Ningde, added that it had signed deals to sell the batteries both to a car manufacturer and to a provider of energy-storage stations for electricity grids.

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Deeper Dive

OK, folks. Fasten your seatbelts because we are going to take a stab at some complicated and infuriating stuff about: data centers. Yes. I’m sorry. I hate this topic, but we’ve got to deal with it. Hang in there, and we’ll get to some good news.

As you probably know, we are experiencing a remarkable bipartisan backlash against data centers in the US, especially so-called “hyperscale” data centers. In both red and blue communities, no one wants data centers, and for fairly obvious reasons: they’re huge and ugly, they don’t create many jobs once built, they suck enormous amounts of energy and water, and they drag on the grid and raise energy costs. Meanwhile, Big Tech keeps telling us that AI is inevitable! Soon AI will be sentient! Everything will be better with AI! Trust us because we are smarter and more powerful than you!

People are not impressed. We are sick of being pushed around by billionaires and megacorps.

The bad news is that companies invested in AI are nevertheless doing everything they can to force through their data center ambitions. If you want to understand all the complexities better, I highly recommend this bracing explainer by energy analyst Jeremy Symons.

Among many nefarious aspects of this whole AI phenomenon: Big Tech is collaborating with the fossil fuel industry to power data centers with gas, locking in more gas-burning for decades.

A data center campus in Abilene, Texas. Image credit: Crusoe via Inside Climate News.

Here’s one case in point:

Microsoft recently signed a deal with Chevron that will co-locate a hefty 2.7 gigawatts of gas-fired power next to a planned data center in Texas. The new power plant would rank among the 20 largest power stations in the United States and produce power equivalent to the electricity used by about two million homes.

The AI companies are also getting around various environmental regulations by favoring “‘behind-the-meter’ gas turbines built as part of the AI data complex, or co-located nearby, instead of going through the steps necessary to connect to the existing grid.” Sure, nice that you’re not dragging on the grid, but you’re still burning gas!

To get data centers online faster, both AI companies and fossil fuel industry lobbyists are pressuring legislators to help override local objections and loosen permitting and regulating structures.

As Symons explains, we ought to be skeptical when we hear politicians touting an “all-of-the-above” strategy for energy. This amounts to an excuse to keep subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, building fossil fuel infrastructure (especially LNG), and keeping the industry swimming in profits. “We need so much more power for data centers!” is often the excuse. However, we can, in fact, achieve “energy abundance” without locking in fossil fuels for decades to come. Other countries are moving fast toward that goal.

We also need to watch the “permitting reform” fight carefully. Legislation now floating around Congress proposes making permitting easier both for clean energy and for fossil fuels. Many clean energy advocates are tempted to take this deal, hoping that market realities will help clean energy surge and fossil energy fade. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, as Symons explains. Moreover, if we were really facing facts about market realities, energy security, pollution, and climate disruption, we would be eliminating permits for any new fossil fuel development.

Action item: Call you federal reps and tell them not to pass any legislation that overrides community protests over data centers, and to resist any legislation that makes permitting easier for fossil fuel infrastructure. Symons offers the details so you can speak about specific proposed legislation.

More good stuff to read or listen to for a deeper dive on all the issues related to data centers:

• This really, really good episode of the Volts podcast, “Making Sense of the Data Center Backlash” with David Roberts, Jigar Shah, Jamie Nolan, and Arnab Pal. This one covers public opinion, energy markets, psychology, media ecosystems—it’s fascinating. They also discuss a way to build data centers while actually benefitting communities and pushing the clean energy transition forward. It’s possible! That’s not what’s happening, but it could be.

• This also really, really good episode of Volts, in which Hawaii state senator Chris Lee explains that state and local legislators typically do not know much about clean energy (or energy systems in general)! They just don’t know! His group is trying to fix that, but keep in mind that when you pressure your state and local reps toward clean energy, you are doing them a service.

• A deft, short essay by Sambhav Shankar on why Trump’s “energy dominance” strategy means dominance for the oil companies and a terrible deal for everyone else.

Now for the good news: public opinion on climate.

You are not alone. A big majority of Americans believe that climate change is happening and human-caused. A majority also link the increase in extreme weather events to climate change. In other words, despite all the mis- and dis-information floating around, most Americans understand what’s happening. They also want action.

Two recent polls bear this out. First, a poll done in April by premier climate research group Yale Climate Communications. Some juicy tidbits from their executive summary.

• Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not by a ratio of more than 4 to 1 (68% versus 16%).

• By a 2 to 1 margin, more Americans think global warming is mostly human-caused (59%) than mostly caused by natural changes in the environment (27%).

• 65% of Americans say the issue of global warming is “extremely,” “very,” or “somewhat” important to them personally, while 35% say it is “not too” or “not at all” personally important.

• Majorities of Americans say they are worried their local area might be harmed by extreme weather events or related impacts including water pollution (79%), diseases carried by mosquitoes and ticks, such as Lyme disease and West Nile Virus (79%), electricity power outages (78%), air pollution (77%), extreme heat (77%), droughts (72%), water shortages (70%), wildfires (63%), and flooding (63%), and 45% are worried about hurricanes.

Most Americans also want more media coverage of climate-related stories (for most issues around 70% want more). Unfortunately, as we’ve known for a long time, only about 34% of Americans ever talk about climate change. So don’t be shy! Most people agree with you and want to talk about it—they just don’t dare.

Here’s more: American voters understand that extreme weather events are worsened by climate change. This from a recent poll by Data for Progress of likely voters across parties. From an article on the poll by Dharna Noor in The Guardian:

About 61% of likely American voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years…. That includes 72% of Democrats, 63% of Independents, and nearly half—46%—of all Republicans.

You know, instead of reducing their climate-related coverage, as many major US outlets have done since 2024, they could be following Japan’s lead. Perhaps you remember that huge global survey finding that 89% of the world’s population wants government action to combat climate change. Well, Japan is making sure no one forgets:

At a time when some US news outlets have retreated from the climate story, hundreds of news organizations in Japan are headed in the opposite direction.

Inspired by Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project, every television network and station in Japan this spring began a two-year program of airing public service commercials pointing out that 89% of people in Japan support climate action, “so people shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it.” …

Now, 136 of Japan’s media outlets have gone further, joining a public awareness project called “I am one of the 89% who want to stop global warming.” Organized by the UN Information Center in Japan, the project aims “to make visible the voices of prominent figures and people from all walks of life who want to stop global warming, and to amplify them into a collective voice of society.”

Imagine if the US news media did this. Sigh.

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Refugia Sightings

Now for this week’s featured refugia: those places where life and life-giving systems persist amid crisis. By reading this newsletter, you join the many people striving to be people of refugia, working in their communities toward a more just and sustainable future.

We’ll begin today with a passel of examples from the folks at Blessed Tomorrow, an interfaith alliance inspiring and equipping faith communities to work for earth-healing and climate justice. They’ve released a series called “Caring for the Earth: Stories from Faith Communities.” These seven short films feature a range of people, communities, and actions all aimed at connecting faith commitments with climate action. Here’s the whole series and here’s a 3-minute trailer:

Next: indigenous land stewardship. We’ve known that lands stewarded by indigenous peoples tend to be healthier and more biodiverse. Is it simply because they’re more sparsely populated? No, instead it’s about indigenous beliefs, knowledge, and practices. New research helps deepen our understanding of why indigenous people must be involved in land management and conservation decisions not only in their own territory but as part of larger global efforts. They are a source of experience and wisdom.

Researchers interviewed 49 Indigenous leaders from six continents about how they steward their land, which ranged from the Amazon rainforest to East African savannas and Pacific Islands. They found that traditional management practices like avoiding overfishing, maintaining sacred spaces, watching for fires and other threats, and direct resistance against extraction contribute to the remarkable health of Indigenous territory. … Shrestha [the study’s lead author] stressed that although each Indigenous community is distinct, there are shared lessons the entire world can learn from.

The study builds on years of research that shows, among other things, that the world’s healthiest forests are on Indigenous lands and conservation efforts are more effective when they incorporate Indigenous autonomy and decision-making at every step.

Finally, emergency beehives. Not what it sounds like! Instead, these beehives are a portable energy strategy designed to assist during disaster or disruption. Katie Myers writes in Grist about projects in North Carolina designed to build better energy resilience. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, people are keenly interested in better preparation.

One strategy is the solar microgrid. Solar microgrids combine solar with battery storage and can serve when needed as resilience hubs, providing emergency power even when the main grid is down. These stationary grids are popping up all over the country.

“Beehives,” however, are fleets of trailers that can go out as “bees,” carrying mini-solar/battery power wherever needed. According to the nonprofit Footprint Project, “Hives are semi-permanent, centralized solar microgrid sites installed for six months to five years or more. Hives are strategically placed within a community to maintain and dispatch the Bee fleet.”

Myers quotes the CEO of Footprint Project:

“Cooler bees” include fridges and freezers for medications and food, “power bees” provide charging stations for phones and other devices, and “water bees” filter water. “Because they are mobile, these bees can be towed immediately to communities hardest hit in disasters,” said Footprint Project CEO Will Heegaard.

Trailer-mounted solar/battery ready to go where needed. Image credit: footprintproject.org.

I actually knew about these beehives from an interview I did while researching Refugia Church. I spoke with Jenny Phillips, Director of Environmental Sustainability at General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church—and she told me she works with The Footprint Project, “a disaster management organization that develops and deploys sustainable infrastructure networks to empower community resilience.” Cool.

You can read more about Beehive Microgrids on the Footprint Project’s website. You can even support them with contributions!

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One More Delight

Whew! That’s enough for today. I’ll leave you with another delightful photo of some pollinator garden action.

This female bee is collecting pollen into her pollen baskets—or as I call them “bee jodhpurs.” Image credit: Ron Rienstra

Wishing you some good rest, delights small and great, and strength for another day. Till next time, be well.

Note: Bold text in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Note: I typically include the names of the writers whose work I quote in order to honor the importance of good climate journalism and the people who do this vital work.

Welcome, new subscribers! I don’t know what Katharine Hayhoe has been up to lately, but a bunch of you seem to be finding this newsletter through her Substack. Hello and welcome. In case you’re wondering, refugia are places where life persists and renews amid severe disturbance. We’re trying to be people of refugia here, by healing the earth, renewing our spiritual communities, and serving as life-giving places in our cultural systems. Glad to have you join us.

I always begin with a wee personal update. This week, after turning in the book manuscript for Refugia Church (release next spring!), I’ve been puttering about in a bit of a daze. Turns out I like puttering, though. Amazing how fast the day goes by when you putter through it.

In a weird frenzy last night, spouse Ron and I decided to Reorganize Our Books. Well, one batch of them. While alphabetizing my “high access climate-y books” (it’s important to use the correct technical terms), I discovered that apparently most climate-related authors have last names beginning with A-M. Hunh. Come on, N-Z authors! Where are you?

This is only half of the high-access climate-y books. A-M on top, N-Z on the bottom. I had to move all the M’s down below to fit the rest of the high-access books (not pictured). And of course, Ron and I have many, many, many, many other books in the house. Not to mention in our offices at our respective work places. Sigh.

We’ve also spent some lovely time at the Lake (that’s Lake Michigan, for you non-Michiganders), and I’ve been experimenting with my new/old fancy camera some more.

I do not know what I’m doing (yet), but I thought this one was kinda cool.

OK, now I’ve got some recordings to share and invitations to extend. I promised I would share the recording of part 2 of my interview with Bill McKibben on the Earthkeepers Podcast, with thanks to host James Amadon and producer Forrest Inslee for the invitation. Earthkeepers Podcast, by the way, is produced by the good people at Circlewood in the Puget Sound area.

Next, below is the recording of Third Act’s Hope & Joy series, hosted by the lovely and gracious Dan Quinlan. This series is meant to soothe your weary spirit, wherever you are in your spiritual journey. Dan asked some beautiful questions about my own spiritual journey, and I did my best to answer.

Now for invitations. Please join us on July 28th for another Third Act event, this one hosted by the Faith working group. I serve on the Coordinating Committee for Third Act Faith, and we have a terrific series planned on the theme: “How do our spiritual commitments influence our voting patterns?” Our first guest is Adam Russell Taylor, to be interviewed by Jim Antal. I’ll keep you up to date on future events in the series.

Finally, if you are a preacher, and you wish you could preach more confidently with ecological realities in mind, please consider joining the EcoPreacher cohort now forming for the upcoming year. This is an established, research-based cohort program “of robust community support and education for preachers who want to integrate or sharpen their climate-conscious, justice-centered preaching.” The people involved are absolutely top of the line. Highly recommend! Here’s an example of the kind of research they consider and discuss as a cohort.

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This Week in Climate News

Speaking of Katharine Hayhoe, she linked to this super-cool, dynamic global temperature monitoring tool from Reuters. Actually, I should call it super-hot, because that’s what it tells you: just how much hotter it is than normal. On the landing page, you see a nifty spinning globe showing temperature patterns, and then you can search for any location you like to see how much hotter than normal it is there.

Focus is fuzzy on that globe because this is a screenshot, and on the site, the globe is gracefully spinning.

You’ve read about the extreme heat in the US and around the world in the headlines. Very possibly, you have felt it searing down in your own community. So I’m not going to go over the headlines about what has become “danger summer” in the Northern hemisphere. Instead, we’re going to talk about money.

Who is paying to continue propping up the fossil fuel industry? You are. The taxpayer. I’m sorry to tell you this, but this essay by David Fickling in Bloomberg explains the icky details. Fickling begins:

To judge by the way many people discuss the energy transition, we’re engaged in a fight between green idealogues in government and academia on the one hand, and a more realistic private sector that recognizes the innate superiority of fossil fuels on the other.

Follow the money, and you’ll see precisely the opposite picture. The share of private energy investment going into oil, gas and coal has slumped from about 50% to 28% since 2015, according an International Energy Agency database. The public sector, meanwhile, still invests most of its money in dirty power — 53%, down more marginally from 67% a decade ago.

That actually understates quite how bad things are, because the state doesn’t just fund carbon-based energy by investing in its production. It also pumps out subsidies to make it artificially cheap. That encourages us to use more polluting energy, and deters us from making the switch to cleaner, more affordable alternatives.

In the US, don’t forget the $700 million of your tax dollars spent to prop up coal mining and the $1 billion to pay off wind developers to abandon their projects. But the US is not the only problem (though we are currently an egregious part of it). Public investment in fossil fuels is still robust around the world. Fickling’s recommendation: “Governments must stop throwing sand in the gears of the energy transition.”

Meanwhile, the “green economy” is growing. If you want to be a good capitalist, that’s where you want to look for action right now. Ajani Stella reports for Inside Climate News:

The group of companies that derive significant revenue from environmental solutions, known as the green economy, has topped $10 trillion in market value, a new report found.

That milestone was tied to a 5.3 percent growth in green revenue last year, according to the London Stock Exchange Group’s report, released Wednesday. Green companies—those with at least one-fifth of their revenue coming from environmentally focused activities—outperformed the broader market by around 12 percent over the past decade.

This whole article is worth reading, especially if you understand finance better than I do.

The bottom line here: The markets are telling us that investing in the fossil fuel industry amounts to throwing good money after bad. Investing in the green economy is where the action is, now but especially in the mid- and long-term.

One more news-related thing, this one fun. What to do about that stupid Reflecting Pool debacle? Skip the “chemical warfare” and “bring back the swamp”—that is, turn the thing into a natural wetland! Michael J. Coren, writing for the Washington Post, has it all figured out (free link). All you need is a “well-designed system of running water, gravel, microbes and wetland plants.” No problem; there are companies who can make that happen. The article goes into all the delightful details of how it could be done. What do you think?

Perfectly lovely, right? “Natural pool firm Bionova created AI-assisted renderings of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with natural filtration systems. (Courtesy of Bionova).” Image and caption credit: washingtonpost.com.

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Deeper Dive

All right. It’s time for another rant about the corruption of the fossil fuel industry. Sometimes ranting is appropriate, I’m afraid, and this is one of those times.

Bill McKibben covered this story in detail in his Substack. The story was researched and written by a team from ProPublica and Drilled, including the intrepid Amy Westervelt. The story begins with a paper released in 2004 by two Princeton University professors working out of the Carbon Mitigation Institute (CMI), who “found” that the globe could totally manage climate warming if we would engage in 15 “wedges.” Those wedges included burning biomass, burning hydrogen, shifting from coal to natural gas, and engaging in lots of carbon capture and storage. No problem! They also set a very easy baseline of comparison and a very high tolerance for carbon in the atmosphere.

Turns out, the CMI researchers were basically putting their credentials behind an “invented” future (their words) in which fossil fuels would still be 50% of the energy mix for the next 50 years. Why? Wait for it. Because BP was funding their work. In fact, a BP exec was actually involved in editing the study report.

This fib-for-dollars scheme was entirely clear in the documents uncovered by the ProPublica/Distilled reporters:

When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.”

So. This paper had real results, costing real taxpayer dollars and causing real pollution and environmental damage. All that fracking since 2004? A result of fabricated projections. Note the red and pink lines on the graph below. See how coal goes down and gas goes waaaay up, kinda suddenly?

What about all those investments in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)? I mean, the welfare for the fossil fuel industry that your tax dollars are paying? How is our massive investment in that CCS project going? Are we getting results? Hmm. Look at the red line below.

That graph is from this long report, also in ProPublica, about the “progress” on CCS. Conclusion: “there is no conceivable way this can work.” The article explains, patiently and with beautiful graphics, that the math just doesn’t math for CCS. This would be a good one to share with people who have imbibed the idea that we can keep burning fossil fuels because CCS is on its way to save us. Nope.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is making a last-ditch effort to extract oil and gas and extract profits. Here’s Jonathan Watts for The Guardian:

So, while the world burned and conflicts raged, BP’s profits more than doubled in the last quarter.

It is a similar story elsewhere. The six European oil majors increased their combined profits in the same period by 43% to the highest level – $22bn – since 2022. Most have backtracked on green energy commitments in recent years and ramped up production plans. Norway’s state oil company, Equinor, has lifted its oil and gas output target by 6% by 2030. Brazil’s Petrobras is aiming to supply 21% more oil by 2030. Almost every country and company, it seems, is racing to produce the last barrel of oil.

Now you see why I had to rant a bit. There’s more. There are ways for oil majors to sue governments for lost profits if governments promote clean energy. Seriously. It’s called “investor-state dispute settlement.” So governments face a disincentive for those green policies when they can be sued for “lost profits.”

The idea that fossil fuels are necessary and inevitable is less true than ever. And yet. Sigh.

OK, after all that, we need some signs of life and hope, yes?

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Refugia Sightings

And I’ve got some good stuff for you today. In fact, I have rather a backlog in the refugia sighting department. So we’ll just choose a few celebrating plants.

First, New York City announced their first-ever urban forest plan. The goal is to increase tree canopy across the boroughs to 30% by 2040. The initiative, which comes from the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice (they have one of those!) and involves multiple city agencies, “outlines measures to protect existing canopy, expand planting in streets and public spaces, promote tree planting on private property, and strengthen workforce and stewardship programs that engage New Yorkers in caring for the urban forest.”

Tree canopy is critically important for mitigating heat and managing stormwater. Trees also improve air quality and cheer people up. Recognizing the unequal distribution of green spaces in most urban areas, the plan takes environmental justice concerns into account, too:

At the core of the UFP is the City’s commitment to addressing unequal distribution of tree canopy as a critical matter of racial and environmental justice. Environmental Justice communities have approximately 19% canopy cover, compared to 26% in non-Environmental Justice areas.

Image credit: nyc.gov. The person in the middle is New York City Chief Climate Officer Louise Yeung (they have a chief climate officer!).

In case the urban forest initiative seems like merely feel-good, PR-generating silliness, there’s actually a strong return-on-investment for urban green spaces. At least, that’s what the people at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land say in a new report:

We found that every $1 invested in parks and recreation returns, on average, at least $3 in local economic benefits each year, stemming from reduced stormwater treatment costs; lower healthcare costs; improved public health outcomes; consumer savings on fitness and recreation; rising tax revenues, and a boost in public-private partnerships, among other things. [bold original]

No one is claiming that more trees and flowers will “solve climate change”—they decidedly won’t—but they sure help us cope, both practically and spiritually. Speaking of trees and flowers, the next story is about all those native plant gardens you’re probably starting to see. Are they really such a big deal for the planet? Well, in their way, yes. They help repair biodiversity loss by rebuilding biodiversity from the foundational level with plants and insects, especially when we create many patchwork quilts of them. Plus they’re beautiful. And fun.

Environmental writer Ferris Jabr published a beautifully written piece in the New York Times Magazine this week (free link) about his and his husband’s quest to turn their new yard into a garden paradise. Jabr describes learning about the importance of native plants, becoming somewhat skeptical, and then visiting Doug Tallamy, the cheery, no-nonsense professor behind “Homegrown National Park,” a national initiative to encourage regular property owners to un-turf part of their lawn and plant native plants instead.

Jabr seemed skeptical because of some native plant puritanism he was encountering, which is completely fair. In fact, Tallamy himself and his organization are not puritanical about natives either. If you are considering doing a native garden at your home or house of worship, read Jabr’s article and also the response from Homegrown National Park. You’ll get a fuller picture, but remain, I think, extremely enthusiastic about the prospect.

Besides, everyone is doing it, at least according to the explosion in sales of native plants.

No shortage of photos in my cache from my own native plant gardens. These are New England asters from last summer.

In case you’re wondering to yourself, “What is the actual status of the globe’s plant and fungus biodiversity,” well, wonder no more. You can read the report released last month from the center of the world when it comes to plants: the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (outside London). (Note: one of my favorite places ever to visit.)

The report announces “the complete digitisation of our Herbarium and Fungarium— together representing one of the world’s largest collections of plants and fungi.” This was a massive effort, and an essential one because

This vast, interconnected, global metacollection of digitised specimens is an expanding source of information for understanding the geographical distribution of species in the past, present and future. Linking this biodiversity information with other measurements and models representing key environmental threats, such as climate change, agricultural expansion and deforestation, is enabling us to not only document changes but to take timely action, designing the most effective ways to safeguard biodiversity for the wellbeing of people and all life on Earth.

Among other wonders, you can see the world’s most amazing lily pads at Kew. Image credit: piccoloexplorer.com.

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Bee Love

I’ll end with a report on a very pleasant outing this week to my university’s honeybee refugium. That’s not the official name, but that’s what I’ll call the lush little piece of property adjacent to campus where some hidden, scruffy, small-scale refugia business hums along (bee pun). There are numerous in-ground garden plots rented (cheap) to university staff and neighbors, a sort-of hydroponics hut a neighbor is building with and for students, and six thriving beehives.

My colleague and friend Tom Steenwyk is the man behind our beekeeping “operation” right now at Calvin University, and he invited me to stop by and visit the bees. Here’s what I learned about beekeeping: it’s addictive. And it’s a whooooooole world—of experts, suppliers, keepers, conferences, equipment, techniques, and technical knowledge. I also learned that honeybees are amazing and weird and pretty wonderful.

Tom explains the provenance of each of our hives. Students painted the boxes different colors to help distinguish them from each other.

Tom got into all this about four years ago after reading a beekeeping book given to him by his daughter. With a gleam in his eye, he soon found a local dealer—a bee supplier who works out of his garage—and now beekeeping has become an obsessive and joyful hobby. He tends two beehives at home plus the six at school, which he checks on several times a week. He also, incidentally, runs the university’s Center for Student Success.

“This campus is heaven for honeybees,” Tom told me. Our campus has excellent biodiversity of trees, shrubs, and native wildflowers, plus a whole field of clover right in the bees’ front yard. Bees can fly 1-2 miles from the hive if they need to, but why bother when they have such a short and easy commute to the local grocers?

Tom told me that our 300,000 bees (I know, right?) are producing about twice the amount of honey his bees at home are making. Perhaps, I suggested, they are “overachieving Calvinist bees.” More likely they’re just feasting on our campus abundance.

Yes, Tom got me all suited up, and I got close to the bees—even held one of those frames. The bees were docile and didn’t bother us. But I’m glad we were safely en-netted!

Tom cheerfully explained complex aspects of beekeeping such as splitting hives, buying packages of bees-with-caged-queen, managing mites, helping hives overwinter, watching carefully when to add layers of frames. If the bees start to feel crowded, they will swarm, and if they do create a “bee tornado,” well, you might end up climbing an apple tree (as Tom recently did), chopping down the branch where they’ve set up shop, and shaking the bees off into a new hive.

Tom has a loyal “following” of about 30 passionate students who have caught the bug (sorry) and will come and help out whenever needed. One enthusiastic senior this year turned up on Commencement Day to work with the bees, then put on her cap and gown and went off to graduate.

We did not neglect the niceties of bee reproduction in our chat, either. The queen, it turns out, is the only one who lays fertilized eggs. She goes off to mate once, where “she’ll meet some drones up in the air”—as if she were out clubbing one night or something. Then she’ll lay for 2-3 years, laying 1-2000 eggs a day. I mean, wow, girl. If workers find themselves queenless, they will make a queen by feeding one larva “royal jelly.” (They’re committed to monarchy, it seems.)

Tom points out capped honey cells, capped brood, and capped drone babies. Honeybees have a complicated division of labor. We are not talking about a democratic society here.

I asked Tom how we’re going to harvest the 150 pounds of honey or more the bees are producing this summer. He explained the whole process: you remove the frames and persuade the bees to vamoose (there are various ways). Then, preferably in a garage or something, you shave off the wax with special tools, spin the frames in a special spinner that extracts the honey by centrifugal force, then filter the honey, then bottle. He’s planning to label the bottles and sell the honey. Any ideas for how to brand the honey made on the campus of Calvin University? What do we put on the label? Extra points if you can work in a Reformation pun.

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Once we finished our bee seminar, we relaxed in the two adirondack chairs stowed on the property for just such a purpose, and enjoyed this peaceful spot.

Many thanks to Tom for his generous hospitality and fascinating explanations. And thanks to the bees, too. I hope to put some of your honey in my tea this fall.

Thanks for reading. I hope you can enjoy some refugia peace in the next weeks to sustain you through the storms. Until next time, be well.

Note: Bold text in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Note: I typically include the names of the writers whose work I quote in order to honor the importance of good climate journalism and the people who do this vital work.

The book, friends, is DONE. At least, I have flung myself inelegantly over the biggest hurdle. I turned in the entire manuscript of Refugia Church last week, and the editor did not hate it. A triumph! Now come revisions (not too bad—whew!) and copyediting and all that. I’ll share the cover with you when that’s ready. Please enjoy this brief reprieve before I start nagging you about pre-orders.

Finishing a first draft, no matter how faith-related the book’s topic, usually involves, in the last stages, referring to said book with mild curse words. This is true for me anyway. But I keep at it, because apparently people find this whole refugia thing helpful? For instance, I was astonished to receive a tip that, earlier this month, United Methodist Bishop Dan Schwerin focused his recent address at a regional conference on the theme of refugia. Books have a way of ending up in places you never imagined, and that’s really cool.

This past week, spouse Ron and I did a fun webinar for A Rocha Canada, and I also appeared as a guest for Third Act’s Hope and Joy series. I’ll share those links with you when they’re ready.

We also got to spend some time with dear friends visiting the Indiana Dunes National Park. I practiced a bit with my new/used camera, a hand-me-down from my daughter (hand-me-up??). I have no idea what I’m doing. But this photo of the Michigan City lighthouse turned out all right!

Taken with a Nikon D3400 with some sort of fancy lens. Boy, that camera is heavy to tote around!

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This Week in Climate News

To offer us all another reality-check on climate change, Europe has been sweltering under another heat dome. Since you’ve probably already read about this in the news, I’m just going to say: wow. Brutal. Hang in there, European friends. Here’s a CNN weather map from June 24 (in Fahrenheit).

While acknowledging this and so many other instances of real suffering due to climate impacts, I’m going to focus on good news today. There’s so much! I’ll select just a few stories.

First, a follow-up on the threatened removal of ocean monitoring systems that I covered last time: threat averted! That was a quick and satisfying reversal! Maxine Joselow writes for the New York Times:

The Senate passed a measure Wednesday [June 17] that would block the government from dismantling the system, with lawmakers in both parties warning that the action would be illegal and would threaten the safety of coastal communities. The Trump administration had also tried to cut the program’s funds the last two years, but Congress restored the money both times.

The senate! By unanimous consent, even! How do you like that?

Now for another beautiful act of resistance against this regime’s attempts to dismantle science. The folks at Carbon Brief have just launched Project Cosmos, a massive climate science database. Fix the News summarizes:

Carbon Brief has launched Project Cosmos, the world’s largest database of climate change research, covering 1.8 million publications and more than 40 million citation links. Built from every major IPCC report since 1990, plus 22 climate-focused journals, the database ranks the most influential climate papers, authors, and institutions, and will help researchers track how the field has evolved, where knowledge is concentrated and where gaps remain.

That image is the map of this database! Click on the image to go to the Project Cosmos website—it’s super cool. The website explains the image:

This is the vast “cosmos” of academic literature and evidence that underpins humanity’s knowledge of climate change.

Every “star” – all 1.8m of them – represents one of the studies inside Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database.

The coloured “nebulae” and “galaxies” within this cosmos illustrate where clusters of studies share similar citations and, hence, areas of common academic focus.

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Now for some clean energy wins.

In May, solar overtook coal in the US for the first time. That is, solar power provided more energy than coal power that month. Such a pretty graph. You can read the whole Ember report here. Or an article in Grist here.

That green line is so pretty. And look at the icky black line going dooowwwwn.

Meanwhile, just a little snapshot from the Ember dashboard to keep our clean energy enthusiasm buoyed up.

Australia’s free electricity plan is about to go into effect. You want affordability? There you go. Free. Basically, Australia is producing so much solar power now, they have decided to give people in some areas free power for part of the day. Last fall, Jameson Dow of Electrek explained the reasoning behind the plan, which has to do with grid load and grid demand:

The program would require electricity retailers to provide free electricity to everyone for at least three hours a day, in recognition of the incredibly low wholesale cost of electricity during daytime due to extensive solar power penetration.

There are some tricky things to iron out yet about fairness, but this is one early experiment in responding to clean energy abundance. We could have nice things, people! We could!

“The Tumbleweed project’s surroundings resemble Texas: The arid, scrubby terrain that once hosted oil extraction has become a hot spot for wind, solar, and batteries.” Image credit: Rev Renewables via Canary Media. Caption from Canary Media.

To have nice things, we are going to need: batteries on the grid. They’re coming everywhere, and California is leading the way in the US with the Tumbleweed project. Julian Spector reports for Canary Media:

On June 1, the Tumbleweed project in California’s Kern County became the first major battery installation in the U.S. that can discharge power for up to eight hours at a time — twice as long as typical energy-storage facilities.

The idea is to soak up energy created by solar during the day and discharge it as needed after sundown. Long-duration batteries get California closer to 24/7 clean energy.

Next: legal wins. To help you feel brave and steely-eyed and determined, read through this commentary piece by Justin Gerdes in Quitting Carbon. Here’s the headline and tagline:

Clean energy advocates are winning the legal fight against the Trump administration. A string of legal setbacks has the Trump administration on the back foot. Clean energy companies and Democratic state attorneys general should continue to press their advantage.

Gerdes’s advice: keep on the offense!

There’s lots more. But I’ll end with this juicy bit. Thanks, Michael Bloomberg. Cash always helps:

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and founder of Bloomberg L.P., has announced $590 million in new environmental commitments in recent days.

The New York Times’s David Gelles reports (free link) on how the Bloomberg Philanthropies money will be spent:

Some $285 million will go to efforts accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy at a moment when the Iran conflict is rattling energy markets.

Bloomberg Philanthropies said it would do this by supporting renewable energy industry associations, providing data and analysis on the industry and advising regulators and grid operators.

That associations bit is important: clean energy industry associations need resources to fight the fossil fuel industry associations, which are awash with cash and bristling with nefarious legal and public relations schemes to thwart clean energy.

Finally, what’s the latest on balcony solar in your state? You can find out with this super nifty legislation tracker.

A wee screen-shot sample from the tracker. Come on, Michigan! Keep at it!

Action item for today: remind your state reps that balcony (or plug-in) solar laws are sweeping the nation, and make sure they’re on board!

Oh! And if you wish you could invest in fossil-free investment funds, but don’t know where to find them, here you go.

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Deeper Dive

Two deep dives today. First: corals. I had no fewer than six separate stories on corals hit my in-box these past two weeks. What was up? Some landmark study? Well, yes—and more.

This study is actually a great refugia sighting, but I’ll put it in the Deeper Dive category because: ocean. The study is the result of research efforts to identify—you guessed it—coral refugia. That is, places where coral reefs are surviving, and likely to continue surviving, despite extremely warm ocean temperatures that tend to bleach coral reefs. The study used AI to crunch a whole lot of data and identify “166,364 km² of climate-resilient reefs spanning 72 countries and 100 territories and jurisdictions.”

As Katharine Houreld reported for the New York Times (free link):

The newly identified refugia are not evenly spread around the world. More than half are in five countries: the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Others cluster around small islands in places like Vanuatu, American Samoa, Christmas Island and the Chagos Archipelago.

Coral near Pemba Island, off the Tanzanian coast. Image credit: Michael Markovina via New York Times.

Why do we care about coral reefs? Because coral ecosystems support about 25% of ocean species, and a lot of people depend on them, too, to supply fish and protect coastlines. Unfortunately, extremely warm ocean temperatures are killing off these crucial ocean ecosystems:

Already, the world has lost more than half of its coral reefs to the combined pressures of climate change and other human activity. Some scientists warn that without significant intervention, more than 90 percent of tropical reefs could disappear in the next 25 years.

That last bit is from an article by Teresa Tomassoni for Inside Climate News, which leads me to two other quick coral stories. That article describes a group of researchers looking for “super reefs,” which not only survive hotter water temperatures but could also reseed other reefs. Which is exactly what’s happening in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park, (according to more reporting by Tomassoni) where scientists are “outplanting” lab-raised baby coral, including a new cross-breed of Florida and Honduran elkhorn corals called “Flondurans.”

All of this science is supporting decision-making about where to focus research spending, management efforts, and policy initiatives for ocean protections.

Refer a friend

Now that we’re all caught up on coral reef news, let’s turn to climate communications. It is so hard to talk to people about climate action, isn’t it? Especially when these neighbors, family members, co-workers, friends, co-religionists or whatever are skeptical or grumpy. Well, there are strategies that work!

This is my if-you-click-on-nothing-else story for the day. The people at Potential Energy Coalition do amazingly helpful research on which messages move people to take (and support) action on climate. You can click through and download the whole report, but I’ll give you a taste here with an excerpt.

Three shifts in frame that can strengthen climate communications

1. Make the consequences of climate change human and material: for the people I love, for my health, for my wallet. Across all six countries, three messages about the everyday impacts of pollution and an overheating planet are consistently the most effective at driving support.

2. Make the cause concrete: “pollution” reminds people climate change is a problem we can solve. Returning to the root cause in plain language emphasizes this is a real, physical problem with a practical solution: reducing the pollution that’s warming the planet.

3. Make the cure exciting: unlimited, local sources of reliable power. Instead of focusing solely on the things we’re banning and blocking, spend time on what we’re building toward: MORE energy to affordably, securely meet rising demand.

If you want to think of this in terms of key motivations, here you go:

Regardless of whether we think these are the messages and motivations that should move people, these are the ones that apparently do. Check out the report for all the details and the methodology for the research.

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Refugia Sightings

Two sightings today. First, mangroves are doing better! Mangroves are marvelous coastal anchors, and thanks to stronger protections and public awareness, declining mangrove forests are bouncing back. For the BBC, Matt McGrath and Esme Stallard write that “the key factor … is the remarkable capacity of these forests to regenerate naturally once humans stop chopping them down.”

Mangroves like brackish water and need to have “their feet wet.” As a result,

Mangroves are one of the world’s unsung environmental heroes.

Not only do they store up to five times more carbon dioxide than land-based forests, but their tangled roots can also slow down waves and protect coastal communities from storm surges and tsunamis.

These same roots provide a perfect nursery for many species of fish and other marine life - protecting them from predators and providing ample food. [some bold original]

Image credit: sustainabletravel.org

Now for a refugia-palooza. Thanks to Tim Gossett, Associate Director of the Iowa Faith & Climate Network, for sharing with me this nifty blog written by Deborah Douglas. Deborah writes stories on faith communities across Iowa who are Doing The Work. She’s mapping a refugia network!

The five stories available so far feature Presbyterian, Catholic, UMC, and Lutheran churches plus a campus ministry engaged in a range of projects: slapping up solar panels, planting veg and pollinator gardens, offering Bible studies on creation care, planning creation-focused worship events, and more. I’m impressed with the two sets of retired couples who founded their churches’ green teams. Go, elders!

The veg garden at Bread of Life Presbyterian in Dubuque, where they grow veg for a local food pantry. Nothing builds community like getting muddy in a garden together! Image credit: iowafaithandclimate.org.

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Extra Fun

Some Michigan loveliness for you to close out today’s newsletter. Michigan Public Radio did a fun podcast episode on the perennial mystery of Michigan: Where does “Up North” begin? No really, we’re serious about this question in Michigan. People have opinions.

Well, I’m happy to report that my own answer to this question, based on intuition gained from many trips up north over my lifetime, turns out to have scientific evidence behind it. So there! It has to do with bioregions, but I won’t spoil the rest for you; the podcast episode explains. OK, just one hint…

Speaking of “Up North,” we have good news from the northern Michigan beaches where the critically endangered and irresistibly adorable piping plovers breed. It’s been a great year for plover love, with 90 nesting pairs—which should be called “plover lovers,” don’t you think? Great Lakes piping plovers are endemic to the Great Lakes basin, which means they don’t live anywhere else.

It really helps protection efforts when the birdies are so doggone cute. Image credit: Lester Graham for Michigan Public Radio

Wherever you live, whatever you’re dealing with right now, I hope you find some grace and courage this next week. Thanks for reading. Till next time, be well!

Note: Bold text in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Note: I typically include the names of the writers whose work I quote in order to honor the importance of good climate journalism and the people who do this vital work.

You know, I think it is possible to max out on pollinator gardens in one’s yard. Shall we call this bug-maxxing or something? We’re on native plantings area number four at my house, and I had to give away some black-eyed Susans I grew from seed (from seed, I tell you!) because I ran out of space. Also, the native plants are starting to pop up where we did not plant them. All good things, but I’m reminded that plants are wild creatures. They will do what they can to live and multiply. Never mind your little planning drawings.

Some of the black-eyed Susans that did wind up in my own gardens.

If you look veeerrrryy closely, you can spot a bee backing out of a foxglove beardtongue bloom. Hint: upper right of image. Wild quinine and mountain mint in the background.

Meanwhile, some vegetable failures in the garden beds already: radishes, cabbage—no go. So far no successful baby squashes, either (apparently you have to help them with, um, fertilization??). The tomatoes, however, are doing great. Anyway, if you are a gardener, too, I hope you are finding joy in successes as well as in solving all the inevitable puzzles (what are those weird brown spots? who is eating the leaves?).

I continue to push hard toward the deadline for Refugia Church. I am almost finished drafting the entire manuscript, working now on the chapter about resilience hubs. That’s what I should be working on today, but instead, let’s have some newsletter fun, shall we?

I promised I would let you know when the Earthkeepers podcast episode released featuring me and pal James Amadon interviewing the legendary and ever-generous Bill McKibben. Here it is! Actually, we had such a great conversation that the producers decided to split the release into two episodes, so this is only part 1. Bill talked to us from his home in Vermont, on the porch, and while we were recording a big thunderstorm came through. You can hear it in the episode—it sounds really cool. Thanks to the good people at Circlewood, sponsors of the podcast, for creating this opportunity, especially executive director James and usual podcast host Forrest Inslee.

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This Week in Climate News

Fine. I will talk about AI and data centers. As a writer and educator, you can imagine that AI is not my favorite topic. But data centers have been in the climate news these past few weeks, so: FINE.

I refer you to the long piece I did in this newsletter last November in which I tried to explain, as best I understand it, what is going with data centers. I’m pleased to find that the information in that piece still holds up. Here, I will address two important developments: the pope’s encyclical and the growing opposition to data centers.

Perhaps you have already read through all 42,000 words of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). No? Well, neither have I. But I have read some good summaries—actual human-written ones, not AI summaries. This article in the National Catholic Reporter by Justin McLellan emphasizes the philosophical and theological themes in the letter, emphasizing that AI serves as the presenting “case study” for a larger exploration of humanity and technology. The pope is keen to “disarm” AI and to critique the concentration of power in the tech industry, as well as injustices that harm the poor and the potential degradation of human dignity represented by the rise of AI.

Image credit: maryknollgc.org.

Here’s an interesting fact I did not know: “The document is the fruit of 10 years of dialogue on ethics between the Vatican and the tech industry.” What? Apparently, at least some folks in the industry were seeking some ethical guidance from the Vatican. Hunh.

Two other good introductions to the encyclical, both by my friend Jim Stump. He wrote a more serious piece for the BioLogos website, but I especially enjoyed his cheekier but also very wise Substack article in which he fruitfully explores the governing images of the letter: the Tower of Babel contrasted with the rebuilt walls of Jerusalem in Nehemiah. And yes, Jim has read the whole encyclical (probably all of Nehemiah, too).

OK, all of that sets the scene for the main news story this week: growing opposition to data centers. The ginormous tech giants would love to slap up data centers everywhere in the race to make money from AI (see previous newsletter for more), but it turns out nearby residents are not so keen on data centers as neighbors. This summary by Claire Brown in the New York Times (free link) gives a brief overview. The lede:

The backlash against energy-guzzling data centers has snowballed in recent months, prompting more than 100 proposed moratoriums at the local, county, state and national level.

Proposals for data center moratoriums fall into two categories: Most call for a short-term pause in permitting or construction to give local governments time to establish guidelines. A few others call for permanent construction bans.

Interestingly, this surge of legislation is being driven by: public opinion. People are catching on (partly thanks to good advocacy groundwork by a number of environmental groups) that “jobs and tax base” are the usual iffy promises hiding higher energy prices, noise, enormous water use, air pollution, and big ol’ ugly buildings.

Recent reporting by Emily Pontecorvo for HeatMap shows that people blame data centers for increasing energy prices across the political spectrum even if that’s not quite true in their area. This anti-data-center backlash is fueled (sorry) by rising energy prices that are mostly resulting from the Iran debacle and grid problems.

Grist did a deep dive in February on what is actually causing higher prices in each region of the US. It’s definitely data centers in some regions, but not in all.

Wondering whether there are any data centers proposed near you? You can find out! Check out this very cool interactive tool. Watch especially for “hyperscale” data centers. Those are the big ones everyone is especially worried about. Wondering whether there are any proposals to pause or block data centers? You can find that out, too! Another cool tracking tool!

A screenshot from the proposal tracker focused on lower Michigan. Interestingly, only one of these dots is actually in production. The rest are proposals or have already been delayed or withdrawn. Note that this tracker is a citizen-run endeavor based on publicly available records. (Secret deals not included, ie.)

Screenshot from the moratorium tracker. Note that this website is run by a firm excited about the rise of AI.

Whatever results from this public pushback, I think it’s noteworthy how quickly it is happening and how widespread the opposition. This tells me, among other things, that people are learning how to speak up about issues that affect them. That’s a good thing.

Hollywood Climate Summit. Speaking of not crushing human creativity with AI slop and stolen creative work, I’m always a fan of artists enlisting the imagination to shift public opinion, convince more people that climate change is real and urgent, and help us imagine better futures. So good to know that Hollywood is on the job (kind of) as evidenced by this year’s Climate Summit. Reporter Sammy Roth (having recently left the LA Times) is now writing a great Substack called Climate-Colored Goggles. He attended the summit this year and loved it, because it was fun. And also serious:

Over two days this week, hundreds of people spanning a wide range of industries and job descriptions — environmental science, filmmaking, philanthropy, activism, space exploration, journalism, religion, video games, advertising and more — gathered for a series of panels, workshops and happy hours. …

But even when the topics were wonky or scary, the conversations were joyful. Folks were bursting with energy and ideas. They were totally convinced that if they pooled their expertise and creativity, they could tell stories that inspire people to care about the climate crisis and take action.

Roth also mentioned a great new database that catalogs films, TV series, and episodes made since 2018 that “feature climate and environmental themes.” It’s called the Green Title Database. Pop the popcorn and start at the top! (Just kidding. There are a LOT of titles here—which is good.)

Image credit: hollywoodclimatesummit.com

Finally, one quick update on a previous story. Thankfully, I presented this one with a hedge: “Donut Lab claims…” that their new solid state battery is a game changer. Well, it came out this week that they were pretty much running a scam. The battery uses lithium, among other things. So not really a game-changer after all. Electrek’s Fred Lambert reported the story in full technical detail. Bill McKibben also covered the story here and quoted this crucial statement from Lambert:

My biggest concern now is that this damages public trust in solid-state battery technology more broadly. I hope it doesn’t cool people on the technology, because solid-state batteries do appear to be genuinely, finally coming. Toyota has invested over $15 billion and targets production vehicles by 2027-2028. Samsung SDI has the world’s largest pilot solid-state production line and plans mass production by 2027. These are real programs from companies with real technical credibility. Solid-state is coming — just not from Donut Lab, and not with the impossible combination of specs they promised.

By the way, McKibben’s headline story in that newsletter is the death of Lee Raymond, former Exxon CEO. He is one of the main people responsible for setting up decades of deliberate and strategic deceit about the impacts of burning fossil fuels on the climate. That is his legacy. That’s all I’m going to say.

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Deeper Dive

Let’s take a few moments to mourn the rapid (and utterly foolish) dismantling of American federal science. I cannot keep track of all the disheartening stories in this category. But I’ll sum up a few recent ones here, and end with a glimmer of good news. Just a glimmer.

We have already lost 17% of the federal science workforce in 2025 alone. That’s 10,109 PhDs either leaving voluntarily or being forced out from the FDA, CDC, NSF, EPA, NOAA, USDA, USGS, and US Fish & Wildlife. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a public thank-you letter to federal scientists on May 18, acknowledging the real grief and loss involved:

During the past year, we watched this exodus and the strain that it and the associated uncertainties put on our colleagues across the federal agencies. These are colleagues who do some of the world's most important research, reinforcing the country’s status as a global leader in science and technological innovation. Reflecting on these events, we want to express appreciation to federal scientists, engineers, and health professionals for their contributions.

Did you know that yesterday, June 12, was “Hug a Climate Scientist Day”? Neither did I! Check out this sweet cartoon series in Grist.

You probably already know why people are leaving government agencies. But here’s a fresh example. Dan Vergano for Scientific American reported:

On Thursday the White House released long-anticipated draft regulations that, if enacted, would give political appointees the final word on federal research grants and other funding across government agencies.

The plan is to have the head of the Office of Management and Budget sign off on all scientific funding. And who heads the OMB? “Russell Vought, lead architect of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration.” So this would make a political appointee the boss of the future of American science—not people who actually know what they’re doing. For a concise list of reasons why this is BAD, try this site. If you want to speak against this, the comment period is open. Submit a comment here.

What happens when federal science is subject to ideological control? Dumb things. For instance, the NOAA is told to dismantle an ocean monitoring system. Paula Dobbyn writes for Inside Climate News,

The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean chemistry, wave action, water temperature, salinity and a host of other metrics.

Why are they trying to do this? Well, they say it’s to save money, be nimble, etc. Really? And how much are we spending in Iran right now? The more likely reason is that the data is very useful in proving that climate change is real.

“A NOAA crew retrieves an Ocean Station Papa buoy in the Gulf of Alaska.” Image and caption credit: Laura Dwyer/NOAA via Inside Climate News.

Dobbyn’s article focuses on the response to this plan from Alaska’s fishing industry:

The NSF’s decision to pull the observatories from the water has alarm bells ringing in fishing circles of Alaska, home to a $5.3 billion commercial seafood industry that employs nearly 42,000 people.

The fishing industry needs real-time information from these buoys to run their businesses, especially since Alaska is dealing with marine heatwaves and other climate impacts.

Yes, people are fighting the proposal, including high-profile legislators. Of course, if the US abandons our science leadership, other countries will take over. Dobbyn quotes University of Alaska climate specialist Rick Thoman:

“You know the Chinese could come and plunk down a buoy there tomorrow if they’re inclined,” Thoman said. “If anyone thinks that the U.S., by stopping doing this, is going to stop the monitoring or stop our understanding of this, they are woefully mistaken. All of these things are international efforts.”

Time for that glimmer of good news. Pushback on these sorts of nefarious anti-science tactics does make a difference.

Mauna Loa is OK! After the current regime threatened to shut down this crucial monitoring site, sanity has prevailed. The story is actually rather complicated, but is explained beautifully in Forbes by Ingmar Rentzhog. The threat, believe it or not, hinged on a $105,000 budget line item for the observatory’s support station in Hilo. Also, there was a volcanic eruption in 2022 that messed up roads to the observatory—not related to federal budget cuts but also problematic.

Rentzhog explains why this observatory and the data it produces is so important:

Since 1958, measurements from Mauna Loa have produced the Keeling Curve, the iconic record of carbon dioxide rising in Earth’s atmosphere. The curve is famous because it is so brutally simple. Year after year, CO₂ rises. Season after season, the planet breathes in and out, but the long-term direction is unmistakable. The Keeling Curve does not argue. It measures.

The Mauna Loa Observatory, at 11,000 feet. Image credit: AP Photo/Richard Vogel, file, via forbes.com.

Lava from the 2022 caused access problems, but the scientists figured out how to keep going (helicopters were involved), determined to keep up the “unbroken thread” of data. Cancelling the lease on the Hilo support office—to save $105,000—would basically scuttle that unbroken thread.

Fortunately, “This spring, NOAA announced the opposite: the same site [the Hilo site] was being reopened, rebuilt and expanded.” (Note: the expansion was planned before the eruption.) Rentzhog attributes this outcome to a collection of people who steadfastly addressed the threat, including the Congress members who refused to defund the NOAA:

Scientists explained why the Hilo office mattered. Journalists reported on the issue. Lawmakers publicly defended the observatory. The lease was preserved, funding continued, and access to the site was restored.

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Refugia Sighting

Three very different sightings today. First, Guns to Gardens. Perhaps you know the verse from Isaiah 2:4, “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” That verse is the inspiration behind a program that helps people surrender their guns and have them immediately dismantled and then made into gardening tools, sculptures, jewelry and more. The surrender and initial dismantling happens in church parking lots! Alma Beauvais writes for The Trajectory:

Guns to Gardens has been turning unwanted firearms into garden tools and art for over a decade. Since 2013, this faith-based safe disposal movement has destroyed and repurposed an estimated 13,000-plus guns across the country.

A volunteer slices up a gun at a Guns to Gardens event. Image credit: Guns to Gardens Metro Denver via The Trajectory.

The program was founded by Mike Martin, a Mennonite youth pastor in Colorado Springs, after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. He decided to learn blacksmithing himself and found the nonprofit RAWtools, which began as a by-appointment endeavor. Raw because raw is war spelled backwards, by the way.

In 2021, after a mass shooting in Boulder, the Community United Church of Christ organized the first Guns to Gardens event in Colorado. Also, you can go to their website and purchase tools, jewelry, and sculpture made from dismantled guns.

People often see this kind of gun surrender program as a meaningful way to respond to trauma after they have been touched in some way by gun violence, such as a death by suicide in the family. They are eager to make sure that their guns will never be put back into circulation, as sometimes happens with police buy-back programs. Beauvais writes:

Guns to Gardens has since grown into a nationwide network with hundreds of volunteers — including blacksmiths, woodworkers, and artists — participating in annual church-organized events across more than 25 states, supported by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship's Action Circles. Attendees and volunteers at these safe surrender events include gun owners, people directly affected by gun violence, and veterans.

Next: beavers! Of course. Climate change is causing increased flooding in England, and that means the Underground can get pretty soggy sometimes. In West London, the Greenford Tube station ticket office kept flooding, and finally the city brought in the experts: beavers. It worked! This very fun article by Lauren Frayer for NPR tells the tale:

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek's flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall—mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

Not only did they dry out the tube station, they brought back a lot of biodiversity and charmed the neighbors. The article is worth reading and the photos are great. There is even a video of beavers working at night, with little hardhats and orange vests on. (Just kidding, but there is a great video.)

A beaver released in 2023 in West London. Image credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images via NPR.

Finally, many thanks to reader Terry Woodnorth who sent me a tip recommending the 2023 documentary Wilding, streaming on PBS. I don’t know if you ever plan to inherit a beautiful English estate, but if you do, you might want to consider what Isabella Tree and her husband Sir Charles Burrell did with their land: they stopped farming it and let it transform into wildland again.

Konik ponies. Image credit: bbc.co.uk

Inspired by the Oostvaardersplassen experiment in the Netherlands, Sir Charles and Isabella brought in grazing animals close to ancient wild species: Heck cattle, Konik ponies, and almost-wild pigs. Over 20 years, the Knepp estate transformed and healed. It wasn’t always easy, neighbors were not always thrilled. At one point, they were rescued by a butterfly migration, at another point by: beavers! But eventually, with a little prompting and a lot of letting go, the land has become an incredible refugium.

The film is really beautiful: so much terrific nature cinematography. It’s based on Isabella Tree’s 2019 memoir, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm.

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Extra Fun

Two fun photos to conclude today. Friend Bill Vriesema—who is both an excellent photographer and an expert gardener—sent me this photo he took of a remarkable find in his compost pile. It’s a gourd nest! I mean, a nest for gourds!

Bill wrote:

Yesterday I was turning over our compost and came across this gourd with its babies growing inside. I was surprised it had life in it when all neighboring debris was turning to dirt. The story didn’t end well, however. We took it up to our deck to show the boys [his grandsons] last night. This morning we noticed all the plants missing. Something came and snacked on them. Oh well!

Speaking of nests in odd places, how about this?

Notice anything interesting about that sleeve under Jesus’s right hand? Yeah, “Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts” (Psalm 84:3). Actually, I don’t know if that’s a sparrow’s nest. I’m going to guess robin.

According to my sources, “This picture was taken on the front lawn of the St. Rene Goupil Catholic Parish located in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Uploaded anonymously on Reddit.” Anyone know this parish? Or the photographer? I’m happy to give proper credit.

All right, that’s enough for this week. Remember to hug a scientist today (with permission, of course). Wishing you the grace to carry on with courage and purpose. Till next time, be well.

Note: As always, bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

You know how avocados are perfectly ripe for about two hours, and if you misjudge the moment, well, you’ve got an avocado that is either rock hard (too soon) or disappointingly squishy (too late)? Peonies are similar. You get three days. If you miss those golden few days, because you’re traveling or something, well, too bad. This year: I’m on it!

Of course, once you cut a few and put them in vases, you get maybe 24 hours of perfect glory, and then the drooping begins. Also, ants adore peonies, and you will definitely bring along an ant or two when you bring the blooms inside. Never mind. It’s worth it.

Besides happily fussing with plants, I’ve been working down the wire on the last bits of Refugia Church. I don’t want to admit how much work there is to do yet, but it’s OK. I’ll do it. Have to if we’re going to make that early 2027 pub date. More on some great recent interviews for the book below. (Refugia Faith, of course, is always available through your favorite bookseller.)

Meanwhile, welcome to new subscribers! If you’re wondering what on earth “refugia” means, well, it’s a biological term for places in nature that survive severe disturbance and (ideally) go on to adapt, spread, and serve as seedbeds for renewal. That’s what we’re trying to be in this historical moment: people of refugia who nurture and even create refugia spaces in every way: in the natural world, in our human cultural systems, and in our faith communities.

In this newsletter, I try to keep us informed on news pertaining to climate mitigation, adaptation, and conservation. Even more important, I try to provide inspiration for our collective refugia work, especially as people of faith and conscience. Welcome!

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This Week in Climate News

“Danger season” in the northern hemisphere is hitting early and hard, especially in Europe this week, which has been suffering under a heat dome. Temperatures in the high 90s and even 100°F tested people’s endurance across Europe. Last summer was the UK’s hottest summer on record, and this year, the UK set a new record for the hottest day in May. According to Kiley Price for Inside Climate News, “Experts say extreme heat events are becoming more common as the continent heats up roughly twice as fast as the global average.”

Price quotes climate scientist Christophe Cassou, speaking to LeMonde: This heat dome “is an unprecedented event with a one in 1,000 chance of happening at this time of year based on the climate from 1979 to 2025 and virtually impossible in the preindustrial era.” So yeah, this is new.

The UK’s infrastructure, like other places in Europe, was built for cold weather, not for sweltering summers. Few people have air conditioning. Last year, the London Underground got 9°F hotter than the street during heat waves. Yikes.

Europe’s heat wave puts this next news story in context. You may have read this week about the retiring of the worst-case-scenario climate change model developed in the 2010s, the so-called RCP8.5 scenario. That was always a crazy-insane scenario based on an increase in coal use and other unlikely developments. This is how science works: they ask the “OK, but what if?” questions and try out different modeling outcomes. The RCP8.5 projected a 4.4C average temperature rise by 2100, basically incompatible with civilizational survival. Unfortunately, the scenario became known as the “do-nothing” scenario (not quite accurate) and got spun out into a lot of terrifying doom-and-gloom.

In April, a scientific paper published by the European Geosciences Union proposed a whole new modeling scenario framework, based on developments since the 2010s and better modeling parameters. (For a deep dive into all the science, this piece in the New York Times by Brad Plumer and Eric Niiler explains it clearly. Free link.) In the new proposal, the high emissions scenario isn’t quite as bad as RCP8.5. Predictably, a lot of public nonsense ensued, including from the Nonsense Pedaler in Chief in the White House, claiming that “those nefarious scientists were wrong! climate change is a hoax!” (not his exact words, but definitely the main idea).

Hardly. The newly proposed modeling framework is just science iterating as it should and does. And what’s going on in Europe demonstrates that even where we are right now is still very bad, and it’s going to get worse. Right now, we are hovering at 1.5°C average temperature increase over pre-industrial levels, while current policies and actions would bring us to a plenty frightening 2.6°C rise. This essay from Yale Climate Communications explains likely temperature scenarios very well, if you’re up for feeling anxious.

Let’s mitigate that dire business by turning to solutions news! We’ve got some good ones this week. I don’t usually have so many stories that I need to number them, but that seems to be a theme in this week’s newsletter. So here we go.

1. The United Nations General Assembly voted 141-8 to support the recent landmark ruling from the International Court of Justice. This ruling stated that governments have a legal responsibility to take actions to prevent the climate crisis from worsening. Guess who voted no? Yep, the United States, along with our pals (?) Belarus, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. (Note: 28 countries abstained.) Even though the ruling is not legally binding, as The Guardian reports, “the court’s advisory opinion is already being used in climate litigation around the world and judges are starting to reference it in their climate-related rulings.”

2. The Electrotech Revolution presses on. A couple weeks ago, Canary Media reported on the surge in battery installation around the globe. Dan McCarthy writes for Canary Media:

Installations of grid batteries, which can store solar and other energy for later use, surged by 48% in 2025 from the year prior, per new data from BloombergNEF. A total of 112 gigawatts of battery storage capacity was installed worldwide in 2025 — a record high that represents a tenfold increase over the amount constructed in 2021.

So, where are all of these batteries sprouting up? The short answer: mostly in China and the United States.

Yes, despite the US federal government’s many insidious and foolish behaviors right now, even here, the energy transition is happening (though more slowly than it should). China accounted for over half of new battery installations, but the US came in at 16%. Which gives you a sense of how quickly we are falling behind.

Batteries are the golden ticket. As the New York Times reported (free link), citing this report, “at a time when oil and gas supply is faltering, the cost of wind and solar energy keeps declining. And, when paired with battery systems for storage, renewables can often provide steady electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, even when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.” Despite what you hear from some people, intermittency is not the no-go problem purported by deniers. Batteries in many places (California, Australia) are already soaking up the excess energy generated during high production and discharging it back into the grid as needed. (More on that under Media Corner below.)

3. Speaking of falling behind: EVs. I admit, my spouse and I have enjoyed feeling a little smug lately. We jumped on EVs years ago, so these days, we plug in our leased EVs at home as needed, and haven’t been to a gas station in years. In the wake of the mess the US made in Iran and the resulting jaw-dropping gas prices, sales of used EVs are shooting up in the US. People want them, but it’s hard to afford new ones since the IRA incentives went away and US manufacturers have backed off from the EV ambitions they hatched before 2024.

Meanwhile, the EV market is leaping forward elsewhere in the world. Tim DeChant reports in TechCrunch:

All that doom and gloom about the state of the electric vehicle market? That’s just an American problem. The rest of the world can’t get enough EVs, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

EV sales surpassed 20 million units last year, capturing 25% of the global market. Growth was highest in China, and market share in other regions has also been picking up pace. In Latin America, for example, sales grew by 75%. Meanwhile, sales in the U.S. are stagnant, with EVs hovering around 10% market share.

As the article points out: US “companies that don’t get their respective EV houses in order could lose out to competitors in the global market, sacrificing revenue that could keep them competitive for years to come.”

4. Finally, a nifty story from NPR’s Climate Solutions Week. In Portland, Oregon, thanks to an innovatively structured climate fund, over the last seven years the city has “built a community solar project to reduce emissions and lower energy bills for 150 low-income families,” “distributed more than 20,000 free air conditioning units to help vulnerable households prepare for heat waves,” “funded energy efficiency retrofits for 3,100 homes,” and “trained 2,000 people in the renewable energy and construction fields.”

   

   How did they do all this? The Portland Clean Energy Fund offers grants to support projects proposed by community stakeholders. The city raised the money in the fund through a 1% sales tax that large corporations operating in the city (Target, Wal-Mart, REI) pay on every sale. Nonprofit leaders representing communities of color devised the plan, and 65% of voters agreed in 2018 to get it going. It’s a great idea, and other cities (Denver, Ann Arbor, Seattle) are working on similar schemes with variations.

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Deeper Dive

You know how faith communities like to send young people on summer “mission trips,” where the youths and their leaders go somewhere for a week or two, usually some economically stressed place, and help out by painting people’s porches or something? Well, wouldn’t it be cool if mission trips involved learning about science and ecology, and doing service projects for the earth as well as for people? That’s the idea behind Blue Theology, a learning-serving program operating in the Monterey Bay Area, sponsored by a Disciples of Christ Church in Pacific Grove. Groups of young people (or adults!) and their leaders spend five days learning about marine ecology and practicing how to care for the planet as part of their faith.

I first learned about this program in Talitha Amadea Aho’s beautiful book, In Deep Waters: Spiritual Care for Young People in a Climate Crisis. Highly recommend the book, by the way, especially if you work with young people. Anyway, this week, I spoke with the founder of Blue Theology, Deborah Streeter, and the current director, Caitlyn Isaac. What an inspiring, inventive program they’ve created with all their local partners! I won’t go into all the details here—you can visit the website or wait for the whole story in chapter 6 of Refugia Church—but I tell you this to explain that Deborah and Caitlyn inspired me to focus on the ocean for our Deeper Dive today because, you know, deeper dive.

So how are we doing on ocean conservation? Well, we’ve made some progress. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced in April that “The international community has reached an important global milestone, with 10.01% of the ocean now officially designated within protected and conserved areas.” (Where exactly is that .01% I wonder?)

This is good news, a nice rise from 8.6% in 2024. However, we have a ways to go before meeting the 30% by 2030 goal committed to in 2022 through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. And of course, protecting the ocean is tricky. The brand new High Seas Treaty, which went into effect in January, helps protection efforts in international waters. But a great deal of the ocean’s biodiversity is in coastal waters controlled by nations. This makes international cooperation vital and enforcement terribly complicated.

Nevertheless, to honor the new 10% achievement, IUCN Director General Dr. Grethel Aguilar commented:

Oceans are havens of biodiversity, providing food, resources and livelihoods for millions, and are key to the survival and health of humanity. Hitting this important benchmark reminds us what can be achieved when the international community works together, using legal frameworks, scientific data and community-based projects to realise global ambitions. … Together, we have the skills, knowledge and partnerships to equitably and meaningfully conserve 30% of the Earth by 2030.

There are, of course, countless conservation programs for particular species or regions. I’ll mention one: we had some good news last week about right whales. The New England Aquarium, which monitors the North Atlantic Right Whale Identification Catalog (yep, that’s a thing), announced a tiny baby boom this season: 23 new calves. (Well, the calves themselves aren’t tiny. They weigh about a ton at birth.

Right whales were nearly extirpated before hunting them was banned in 1932. At the time, there were only a few dozen left. They did better for a while, and then fishing operations got more sophisticated in the 1980s and started threatening whale numbers again. Now climate change is shifting their food supplies into new areas, exacerbating their endangered status. The people who manage the right whale database monitor the population carefully, identifying each individual whale by—get this—the white patterns on their heads created by whale lice. Don’t worry: the lice are actually crustaceans and don’t bother the whales at all.

As marine scientist Amy Warren explains in this terrific interview with Aynsley O’Neill for Inside Climate News, the whale-calf boom is great, but we’re still coming off several rough years for whale babies, and of course, baby whales do not always survive to adulthood.

OK, now for a treat: the Monterey Bay Aquarium is apparently a life-changing place. At least it was for both Deborah and Caitlyn, the two leaders of Blue Theology described above. Inspired by their love for the aquarium, I went to the website to learn more and discovered… live-cams! You should definitely check these out. Jellies cams! Sea otter cams! Shark cams! And more! How cool is that?

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Refugia Sightings

Four great sightings this week. I’ll keep each one short. (More numbers!)

1. Forty years ago, the worst nuclear plant disaster in history made Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, uninhabitable. Thousands of people had to flee the area because of the radiation. Since then, it has been an “exclusion zone”: no one allowed. But nature has moved back in, among abandoned buildings and ruined farms, and trail cams are now sighting lynx, moose, red deer, wolves, and even the rare Przewalski’s horse, reintroduced in the 1990s as an experiment. The creatures seem to be doing fine. This is an incredible demonstration of nature’s resilience.

   As this piece in EuroNews notes, “Chernobyl is likely to remain off-limits for generations—too dangerous for people, yet full of life.” Scientists rotate in and out to avoid exposure and set trail cams and study the return of wild creatures. “For those of us in conservation and ecology, it’s kind of a wonder,” [head scientist Denys] Vyshnevskyi says. “This land was once heavily used—agriculture, cities, infrastructure. But nature has effectively performed a factory reset.”

2. In my own state of Michigan, some good conservation news: Shari McWhirter reported for MLive that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has safeguarded 73,000 acres in the Upper Peninsula’s Huron Mountains. The region is now permanently off-limits for future development, as stipulated in a conservation easement. Limited sustainable forestry can continue, but the area is now a natural area open to the public for recreation.

3. In South Korea, a company called Ecopeace has invented a nifty tour boat that totes people around while simultaneously cleaning water. The sleek, solar-powered Eco-Bot “uses artificial intelligence to clean floating pollutants and oil spills in real time. It also cleans up excesses of green algae, which can be responsible for the mass deaths of fish and animals and pose health risks to humans.” Plus it monitors water quality. More of these, please.

   

By the way, South Korea now requires that any government parking lot (national, regional, municipal) over 1,000 square meters has to install a solar array. That’s just one piece of a multi-prong solar strategy. Go, South Korea!

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Media Corner

A few strong recommendations from my recent listening/viewing.

1. Thanks to my friend Matt Heun for recommending this inspiring episode of the podcast Planet: Critical, featuring environmental social scientist Michael Miniates. Even if you click through to nothing else from today’s newsletter, do go listen to this one! Miniates makes a convincing and extremely helpful case against the “myth of individual responsibility,” the idea that if we all just behave purely as individual consumers, we will fix the climate crisis.

   

   Not true, and not how change happens. Worse, that myth ends up serving corporate interests while making us all feel guilty and hopeless. “The problem is not the mouse, it’s the maze,” Miniates argues. Instead, Miniates explains how systems change actually happens. Individuals still have plenty of power, but the best strategy is to work for specific changes in local communities where you already have trust and influence. Then, we scale out rather than scale up. It’s perfect refugia logic. And though he and host Rachel Donald never mention faith communities, they should! We are exactly the kind of groups that help people channel their desire to work together toward the common good.

2. If you’re a long-time reader, you know I love the Volts Podcast, hosted by David Roberts. Well, here’s another excellent episode to recommend. Roberts interviews Pier LaFarge of Sparkfund, and the two discuss the magic that batteries are bringing to the clean energy revolution. In particular, certain distributed battery prototypes in Minnesota predict (says LaFarge) that “US electricity will become cheap, abundant, and boringly reliable.” See what you think!

   

3. Finally, many thanks to faithful reader Judy Gale for alerting me to this hour-long documentary designed to address English-speaking Orthodox believers. “The Face of God,” produced by The Orthodox Fellowship of the Transfiguration, and released in 2021, is worth watching, as it gently and persuasively inspires people of faith to care about and work for the healing of the earth. I learned that 1) Orthodox folks have all the same problems with theological distortions and apathy that other Christians do, and 2) Orthodox beliefs offer beautiful nuance to faith-inflected climate work, especially regarding beauty and sacramentality. (Also, it has a really cool soundtrack.)

Well, that’s certainly enough for this week. Stay safe, build community, take heart, and till next time: be well.

(Note: As always, bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.)

Turned in my semester grades yesterday! Hooray! It always takes a few days to sink in, but that’s another academic year behind me. That was number… 30. Yeah, I’ve been at this for a while. I think I might be getting better at it. Possibly.

While finishing up all that grading, I was also able to tend the little plant babies I started from seed. I don’t claim any plant-communication superpowers, but I think these seedlings are saying: “For crying out loud, lady, can you please PLANT US OUT NOW??!!”

Yes, yes. The last frost date is today! Just give me a minute, OK? Also, y’all pouted and drooped in the cold the other day during hardening-off hours outside, so just calm down!

Last week I recorded a delightful episode for the Earthkeepers Podcast, sponsored by Circlewood. Circlewood director James Amadon and I interviewed Bill McKibben! We had a great conversation about the role of faith communities in energy transition and ecosystem healing. I’ll let you know when the episode releases.

This week, I have a bunch of interviews lined up in which I get to ask the questions. To prepare for writing the remaining chapters of Refugia Church, I’ll be interviewing people deeply involved in resilience hubs, advocacy, and ocean-based faith-formation experiences. The results of these conversations will turn up in the book, but I bet they’ll also provide fodder for some great Refugia Sightings in this newsletter. Stay tuned!

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This Week in Climate News

I try not to feature constant climate doom-and-gloom stories here, not because the stories aren’t important, but because I want to emphasize practical and spiritual responses to climate impacts. Also, you probably encounter the doom-and-gloom elsewhere because that’s what sells. The good people at Fix the News made this point in their newsletter this week. Doom-and-gloom spreads, but fails to motivate action. Meanwhile, the stuff that does motivate action tends not to get those media algorithms fired up.

That said, I should probably say a word about the Super El Niño that seems to be firing up out West.

El Niño and La Niña are together a well-understood weather pattern that oscillates in 2-7 year cycles. As the NOAA website explains: “El Niño can affect our weather significantly. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south of its neutral position. With this shift, areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.

According to Patrick Pester reporting for Live Science, this year is likely to start an extreme El Niño period:

Ocean temperatures reached a near-record-breaking monthly high in April as forecasters warn that we could be on the cusp of one of the strongest El Niño events of the century.

… Forecasters have predicted that there’s a one in four chance that an unusually strong, or “super” El Niño, could emerge this year, with new data suggesting that warming El Niño conditions will soon be upon us.

This little article in Nature weighs the evidence, and includes a not-so-happy graph:

Apparently, we’ll know more in a few weeks about just how bad this one will be. Some climate folks, such as Bill McKibben, believe that the dire effects of a Super El Niño could jar even more people into pushing for climate action. David Wallace-Wells isn’t so sure, but he does offer a helpful history of the El Niño/La Niña cycle.

Balcony solar update. On to those practical solutions. Thanks to climbing energy prices, the whole Iran debacle, and the frightening experience of direct climate impacts, more people are realizing that clean energy transition is the path to better resilience, lower costs, and energy security. As a result, peer pressure is mounting for states to join the club and take an easy-peasy step: balcony solar laws. This week, Colorado joined Utah, Maine, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut and Vermont!

How is your state doing? Canary Media gives a glimpse with this graphic:

For more about balcony (or plug-in) solar, this article in Clean Technica offers some good, basic information. Balcony solar is a plug-and-play technology that allows people to generate some of their own energy without installing the more complex and expensive rooftop solar. It’s not the grid-scale solution we need, by any means, but it’s a good start available to apartment dwellers and homeowners.

Speaking of solar, if your house of worship is interested in installing rooftop solar on your building, now is the time! Federal incentives for commercial solar (including Houses of Worship and nonprofits) will sunset at the end of 2027. My friends over at Solar Faithful are among the many organizations that assist with the process of designing and financing a solar project.

Solar Faithful is a Michigan-based nonprofit whose vision is “A world where faith-based organizations lead the equitable transition to renewable energy—empowered with solutions that strengthen their role as pillars of community care, sustainability, and resiliency.” They’ve done 23 projects, have 21 in construction, and are in some stage of the process with 1300 more faith communities.

Trinity Lutheran in Okemos, Michigan, one of Solar Faithful’s finished projects.

Depending on where you live, Solar Faithful can help (or help you find another org in your area)! For those of you whose faith community has gone through this process, how did you finance and manage it? Leave a comment explaining how you did it.

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Deeper Dive

A couple weeks ago, ecoAmerica released their American Climate Perspectives Survey report. The survey was relatively small (only about 1000 respondents, surveyed earlier this year) but the results are still suggestive. The survey found that while 68% of Americans are “concerned” about climate change, we doubt that other people are:

“While nearly 7 in 10 Americans (68%) say they are personally concerned about climate change, only half believe that others around them share that concern. This perception gap, referred to as hidden consensus or pluralistic ignorance, widens among those who are ‘very’ concerned: 36% say they are personally ‘very’ concerned about climate change, but only 13% believe others are, a 23-point gap.” [p. 4, bold original]

So the more people worry about climate, the less they think others care. Why? Basically, we don’t trust that other people can discern between reliable information and nonsense. Admittedly, there is a lot of nonsense around these days.

And this chart tells a tale:

However, you will notice that of the people who get their news from Fox and Newsmax, almost half are still clean energy believers. In any case:

“The findings point to a striking paradox: while many Americans trust the information they encounter and are concerned about climate change, they believe others are far less concerned and less able to recognize accurate information.” [p. 1, bold original]

The survey explains that those of us who are concerned about climate change tend to believe that others are gullible, apathetic, in denial, not worried about a threat that seems distant, or stuck in the ideologies of their political identity.

What do we do about this? The report concludes:

“The challenge is not a lack of concern, but a gap in trust and perception. This gap is known to create a spiral of silence, where people hesitate to step outside perceived social norms to engage. Making climate concern more visible, reinforcing credible information, and linking climate action to shared values and practical outcomes people care about can help rebuild shared understanding and unlock broader momentum for action.”

By the way, that 68% of people concerned figure comports pretty well with the latest Yale Six Americas Survey information from late 2025, if you add up the Cautious, Concerned, and Alarmed categories:

Meanwhile, up in Canada, young Christians are hugely worried about climate, according to a survey done by A Rocha Canada and Tearfund. Their study finds:

Over 90% of young Christians surveyed say that they are worried about climate change and nature loss, with 60% stating that they are “quite” to “seriously worried.” 88% say that they believe that creation care is an essential aspect of the Gospel message.

Unfortunately, they are not necessarily getting that message at church:

A full 1 in 3 young Christians say that the church isn’t doing enough and another 1 in 3 haven’t even heard it mentioned [at church]. Only 17% said that the church and church leadership influences their thinking on the matter–-only politicians ranked lower!

Across faith communities, I’m willing to bet that talking about extreme weather, biodiversity loss, and caring for neighbor and the earth might be more welcome than people realize, especially among young people. It’s a matter of spiritual care as well as spiritual formation and practical necessity. How you talk about this stuff, what terms you use, that depends on context. More on that another time.

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Refugia Sighting

I’m grateful to Scott Sabin for reaching out and inviting me to chat with him while he was in town for the recent Festival of Faith and Writing. Scott knows my spouse, Ron, through Ron’s work with A Rocha USA, so I was glad to learn more about the organization Scott has worked with for a long time, Plant with Purpose.

Plant with Purpose was founded in 1984 in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It’s an international Christian organization partnering with local leaders to encourage tree-planting, agroforestry, and regenerative farming. The idea is to empower people with a holistic approach to relieving poverty and working on environmental problems at the same time, since of course, these are interconnected:

Plant With Purpose’s Community Designed Restoration (CDR) is about more than just fixing problems—it’s about restoring hope. By combining economic development, environmental restoration, and community empowerment, CDR addresses the deep, connected roots of poverty and deforestation within a watershed.

A woman in Thailand with native tree seedlings grown from seed collecting.

Plant with Purpose now works in nine countries, supporting local people in improving their lives and their environment. For some really nifty before/after photos (you can toggle with a slider!) to show what reforestation can do, check out this page on the website. This is great refugia work!

Scott told me some beautiful stories from his own experience, including one about his time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thanks to Scott for letting me share excerpts from his written version of the story.

Scott describes hiking through some rough terrain in the mountains near Lake Tanganyika to get to a Plant with Purpose project site, led there by the Congolese director and a group of local men. Scott learned that the men were from four different ethnic groups, and had long been fighting with each other. In fact, Scott discovered that Kitaki, the fellow who had helped carry Scott’s pack, had himself been a warlord.

One night, Kitaki explained to Scott how taking care of land had changed these men’s lives by giving them something to do:

“The men here used to do nothing but sit around and play cards. But your pastor came and taught us that work was a gift from God. I had gifts I could contribute.” Then with growing excitement, [Kitaki] exclaimed, “I thought, maybe if I helped my wife on the farm, together we could do something really great!”

Scott wondered if Kitaki had converted. No, he told Scott. “I have always been a Christian. I was baptized in the church, I got married in the church.” Then after a pause, “I just never knew it applied to anything outside of Sunday before!”

I don’t want this to sound like a White Savior thing. That is exactly not the point with Plant with Purpose. Their goal is empowerment, and in this case, with a little inspiration and some tools and techniques, some folks in the DRC found respect and purpose after a long history of disempowerment and conflict.

Scott writes that he stills keeps in touch with Kitaki:

In the years that have followed, I have checked up on Kitaki a couple of times, and he continues to be a leader in the area, working for reconciliation and helping his wife on the farm. Once a fighter, he has found a larger purpose in helping his neighbors and restoring the watershed that he and his community depend on. His faith had been renewed and his life now has meaning, beyond simply waiting for the afterlife.

Furthermore, the entire region has been transformed, with a significant drop in poverty and hundreds of thousands of trees planted. Most importantly, there is a noticeable feeling of hope and possibility.

Scott says a marketing group once suggested the organization be called “Plant with Prosperity.” For a variety of reasons, they didn’t go with that name, and Scott is glad. Plant with Purpose turned out to be just the right thing. Growing purpose is just as important as growing trees.

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OK, just for fun, I’ll mention another refugia sighting: koala corridors! Johan Augustin reports for Mongabay that New South Wales in Australia is establishing a new park that will “link existing conservation reserves with state forests, creating a protected area of almost 5,000 square kilometers (about 1,900 square miles), making it one of the largest reserves in NSW.”

Eucalyptus: yum. Image credit: Johan Augustin for Mongabay.

Koalas are, of course, endangered in the wild, thanks to the legacy of the fur trade as well as the intensive logging that has destroyed their rainforest habitats. Climate change, meanwhile, has exacerbated wildfires. As a result, koala habitats are “now heavily fragmented along the east coast” and “restoring forest connectivity is critical.” Thankfully, the park is only one effort among many to help these little furballs thrive again.

Corridors are the key to helping refugia spread and knit together. This is true not only in the wild world but in our human communities as well. We need ways to connect!

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Three-Question Interview

I don’t usually get to correspond with people who work for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) or serve as VPs of Climate for major companies, attempting to funnel capital into nature-based climate solutions. But Tim Christophersen does both those things, and he reached out to connect this week. Big thanks to Tim for agreeing to revive my long-neglected newsletter feature, the Three-Question Interview.

Tim grew up in Germany, where his forest ranger grandfather sparked his early love for woods and waters, a love which has sustained him throughout his career in business and international relations. He is now based in Denmark, where he and his family practice agro-forestry and regenerative farming on their land.

Tim Christophersen on his farm in Denmark, accompanied by the beautiful Felicia.

Tim’s book, Generation Restoration: How to Fix Our Relationship Crisis with Nature, was published by Wiley last fall. I haven’t read the book yet—I’ve just learned about it—but Tim will share with us some themes from the book right here. If you want to learn more, you can read this excellent, longer interview in Mongabay. Many thanks to Tim for generously responding to my questions. Let’s get to it!

You advocate describing the natural world as “vital infrastructure” and calling for a “healed relationship” with the natural world, which are two very different forms of persuasion. In your experience, which form of persuasion most helps folks with financial or policy power get excited about restoration work?

Persuasion can speak to the intellect or to the heart. Most people use both their head and their heart, but which one they listen to more, and for which purpose, varies widely. Decision-makers in the finance industry or in public policy tend to need rational arguments to take action, and there are solid ones for investing more in nature. For example, nature provides us with health, wealth, and resilience, and investments into repairing nature’s infrastructure provide more than just financial returns. Ecosystem restoration also returns social, natural, and inspirational capital.

Nature is indeed humanity’s most important infrastructure. And it is, at the same time, so much more: for those who already feel intuitively that we need to change our relationship with nature, my book shows how we can do so in easy steps. Speaking to the heart and experiencing our relationship with nature through the heart, not only with the mind, is a more powerful persuasion. But it only works for those who are ready to understand that our role as humanity must evolve into being stewards of nature. Nature is more than a line on our balance sheets. Nature is our balance.

You invite us to revel in nature’s incredible resilience—and to do everything we can to promote healing and thriving, on large and small scales. What sorts of experiences and what kind of imagination can help us commit to the global “century of ecology” we must undertake?

The title of the book, ‘Generation Restoration’, is meant to evoke the feeling that we are all in this together, and at the same time, that this is an intergenerational effort. One way to access the imagination we need to rebuild nature at scale is to listen to stories from our elders. Not only our indigenous elders and leaders, but also our own grandparents, and our parents, and hear their stories of nature when they were young. Then we need to think collectively about how we can restore the natural wealth by leveraging some of the amazing achievements of our modern age, such as technology.

We suffer from a form of collective amnesia called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: because the loss of nature plays out in generational timeframes, we need to link back to our roots, and to the places we are from or have spent a lot of time in, and search for the true potential of those places. Once we have the ecological literacy to ‘read’ a landscape and see its true potential as a powerhouse of nature that can provide us with food, shelter, and all we need for our well-being, we will also start to rebuild the resilience in our communities to tackle this challenge. And yes, it will take more than the current UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030. It will take a century of ecology.

How might people of faith help in the project of healing the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world?

People of faith can play an essential role in rebuilding our relationship with nature. Pope Francis outlined beautifully in his encyclical Laudato Si’ that we are part of nature, and more than that: we are stewards of creation. The idea of stewardship is gaining traction across many efforts in spiritual and religious movements, and it is starting to counterbalance the predominant notion that the so-called era of Enlightenment hammered into our collective Western consciousness, and which still dominates our value system and our economic framework: that only humans are divine, and the rest of creation is here only as a commodity to be used and consumed at our leisure.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Humans play a special role on Planet Earth; even someone who is agnostic can easily recognize this, based on our outsized potential to control and regulate other species. However, every part of creation is divine, and we come from the same source, and we have a responsibility not only for our own species but for all of creation. We are nature’s most powerful ecosystem engineer, and we need to play that role with humility, respect, and gratitude. Nature is waiting. It’s time to come home.

****

I’ll end with this photo from the Dale Chihuly exhibition now at Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was especially entranced by these sculptures from Chihuly’s Seaforms series, inspired by creatures who live in Puget Sound where he grew up.

All right, that’s all for this week. May is often a busy month. I hope you can find some moments to immerse yourself in some natural beauty near you. Strength to all. Till next time, be well.

Note: As usual, bold in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

This is the moment in the academic year when professors feel all the feelings: grief to lose our dear graduating students, anxiety about all the grading yet to do, and excitement about summer plans. My first job this summer: finish the manuscript for Refugia Church. I’m getting close!

Also: spouse Ron and I shall attempt to undertake various crazy schemes around the yard. I’ll share some schemes in future newsletters. Will we get a water feature built? Stay tuned.

I’m seed starting some native plants this year as well as vegetables. These are teeny-tiny black-eyed Susans that I had to “cold stratify.” Thanks to Rebekah Novak for showing me how to do that. Look, Rebekah! They’re germinating!

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to share with you this recording of my interview with Bishop Marian Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC. Bishop Budde joined us for a Third Act Faith event focusing on our theme this year: interfaith friendships. We have been exploring how interfaith friendships can strengthen our work on climate and democracy. We all came away from the event with a sense of deep refreshment, thanks to the bishop’s wisdom and gentleness. If you would like to read an elegant summary of the evening, visit the Going Deep Newsletter at the Third Act Faith website.

Eesh. Sorry about that ridiculous smirk on my face in this video thumbnail!

Finally, we tried the Refugia beer! With the beaver on the label! Thanks to Speciation Cellars for inventing this craft brew with—as I mentioned before—zero input from me. The verdict: it’s good! It’s a “tart saisson” (translation: farmhouse ale) with hints of cinnamon and plum. I don’t even like beer much, but this was quite good. Here we are enjoying it with some of our Refugia D.Min. cohort.

All the reverend doctors (not me, I’m just a doctor): Dave, Betsy, spouse Ron, me, Paul, and Dani, who is receiving her doctoral degree today. Hooray!

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This Week in Climate News

It’s been another couple of rough news weeks in the U.S., so I’m going to try to expand our vision to the rest of the globe and see if we can gather strength from some good developments. Let’s begin with the first international conference specifically on “transitioning away” from fossil fuels, held in Colombia last weekend. This conference, as you might recall, came out of the last COP in Brazil, when a number of countries decided they were fed up with COP stalemates and lack of action. The huge COP gatherings leave a lot of the negotiating power in the hands of petrostates, creating a power imbalance that blocks meaningful action.

So 57 countries gathered in Santa Marta, Colombia, (China, Russia, India, and the US were not invited) to discuss practical pathways and create discussion processes that correct some power imbalances. Daisy Dunne for Carbon Brief summarizes:

Against a backdrop of war, a global oil crisis and worsening extreme weather events, ministers and envoys from across the world sat side-by-side in small meeting rooms to have open and frank conversations about the barriers they face in transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy.

This new format—devised by co-hosts Colombia and the Netherlands—was described as “refreshing”, “highly successful” and “groundbreaking” by countries attending the talks.

They’re going to do it again next year, with Tuvalu and Ireland hosting. Tuvalu is one of those tiny island nations fighting to remain above water, literally.

This year’s event was focused on better process as the point, but they did announce three “workstreams” as outcomes to prepare for next year’s summit.

• developing national and regional roadmaps away from fossil fuels

• establishing a science panel for global energy transition, including working on financial systems that block transition

• addressing fossil-fuel intensive trade.

This work will be done in parallel with COP, not as a rival to COP. From what I can discern, it seems like a much-needed “let’s get stuff done” boost adjacent to the COP structure.

Elder and former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Image credit: The Elders/Bob Stender.

The venerable Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and a member of the global Elders, spoke at a pre-conference webinar and had some pointed things to say about our historical moment (as reported by Bob Berwyn for Inside Climate News):

[Robinson] said the erosion of international law and the global economic impacts caused by the Iran war shows why a just transition into renewables is now “a security imperative.” The second major energy shock in just four years isn’t just a wakeup call, she added, but “a clear signal that our energy systems need urgent structural change.”

Yes, please. I see this Colombia gathering and impressive list of people involved as hugely encouraging developments.

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In other cool news, this year’s Goldman Prizes all went to women! These women are climate justice heroes taking on powerful governments and corporations to protect people and the more-than-human world. Liz Kimbrough reports for Mongabay:

Six environmental activists from around the world will be awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize on April 20. Known as the “Green Nobel Prize,” the Goldman Prize honors activists from the six inhabited continental regions. In a historic first, all six winners are women.

This year’s winners fought to protect a rare bat in Nigeria by training community members to prevent wildfires; won a court ruling in South Korea forcing the government to set stronger climate targets; stopped an oil drilling project in the U.K. after a decade of legal battles; pressured a global mining giant to clean up a toxic abandoned mine in Papua New Guinea; blocked the largest proposed open-pit mine in North American history in Alaska; and helped prevent commercial fracking from taking hold in Colombia.

The 2026 Goldman prize winners are Iroro Tanshi from Nigeria, Borim Kim from South Korea, Sarah Finch from the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob from Papua New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley from the United States, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco from Colombia. Image and caption from Mongabay.

There’s more good news from around the globe coming in our Deeper Dive today, but first let’s look at the wind energy scenario in the US. What are we up against? Maria Gallucci of Canary Media sums up the anti-wind shenanigans the current regime has been trying to pull:

Over the last year, the Trump administration has repeatedly sought to block wind development in U.S. waters by freezing leasing, halting construction on in-progress wind farms, rolling back tax credits, and attempting to rescind key permits. Federal judges have struck down several of those efforts in recent months. Now, the administration is trying a different tactic: paying developers to walk away.

In good news, the “stop-work” orders that stalled five huge offshore wind projects off the coasts of Massachusetts, Long Island, and Virginia, are rescinded, and it looks like the government is giving up on fighting this further in court. Jake Bittle writes for Canary Media:

[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum had vowed to fight back, but last week, the department quietly let the final deadline for appealing the courts’ decisions lapse. The move means construction of the nation’s first five major wind farms along the eastern seaboard can continue absent a change in the case. When complete, the wind farms will generate enough electricity to power well over 2 million homes.

North Atlantic offshore wind projects in the production pipeline as of August 2024. Image credit: Offshore Wind Market Report: 2024 Edition, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, via Stateline.org.

Another court ruling last week shut down some of the Trump team’s permitting delays, tangles, and shenanigans. Brad Plumer reports for the New York Times:

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a series of decisions that wind and solar developers say have throttled hundreds of renewable energy projects across the country.

So that’s good news, too. Now for some bad news: another company is trying to get one of those nice, juicy US government bribes to forfeit their leases for wind developments off the US coast. Remember the $1 billion of taxpayer money being paid to TotalEnergies? Well, Engie wants some, too. There are, of course, legal questions to wrangle. Is it even legal for the US government to do this? More fun stuff to hash out in the courts. Sigh.

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Deeper Dive

But back to good news! (We do seem to undergo news whiplash every day, don’t we?) The top-shelf energy research group Ember released their annual Global Electricity Review for 2026. Friends, the report offers encouraging findings, and the climateratti are all over it. Here’s Ember’s main headline:

Record solar growth meant clean power sources grew fast enough to meet all new electricity demand in 2025, thereby preventing an increase in fossil generation. This was the first year since 2020 without an increase in electricity generation from fossil fuels and only the fifth year without a rise this century.

Right? This is a fantastic milestone. Get ready for some pretty graphs!

There’s more. This milestone reflects a continued massive upsurge in solar capacity growth—that is, growth in the amount of energy we can generate with solar:

It was only the third time ever that a source increased by more than 500 TWh in generation in a single year. For the fourth year running, solar recorded the largest absolute growth of any electricity source.

Another pretty graph. See those lovely upward slopes? That’s wind and solar.

But what about China and India, you say? Aren’t they still the bad guys, using all that coal and other fossil fuels? Actually, less and less. They are building out wind and solar at incredible rates, and thus:

This was the first year this century that fossil generation declined simultaneously in both China and India, two of the world’s three largest power sector emitters.

There are so many happy graphs in this report. I’ll offer one more, and then some places to go for more detail. Take a look at this prediction, based on conservative extrapolations:

I think… I think we are turning the corner now? Even in the US, we are seeing graphs like this:

See that little pink line? See where it intersects with the icky blue line? Pink line go up, blue line go down. Image credit: Canary Media.

OK, if you want more, you can find the actual Ember report here. Carbon Brief sums up the highlights in a shorter read, as does The Guardian. If you would rather get into the wonky details while you’re driving or cleaning or otherwise busy with your hands, you can listen to this excellent Volts podcast episode in which host David Roberts interviews the two lead report authors from Ember. Finally, if you like to get your global energy updates while you’re on the treadmill, watch this video from the excellent and entertaining Simon Clark. He walks you through the report with lively commentary.

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Refugia Sighting

Today’s sighting features a town in North Carolina that exemplifies what local leadership can achieve in creating the future they want. Enfield, North Carolina, just got a grant for $300,000 to build a shared geothermal system that will heat and cool a whole neighborhood’s worth of buildings. This is a key piece of their visionary master plan. Elizabeth Ouzts reports for Canary Media:

Since late 2023, [Mayor Mondale] Robinson and the team who formed the Enfield nonprofit have been holding town hall meetings to vet and refine their ambitious goals for low-cost energy independence. Their plans include a town-run solar farm, a weatherization hub to help residents access grants for insulating their homes and upgrading appliances, and a revamp of the town’s dilapidated grid, which suffers frequent outages.

The geothermal project, called a thermal energy network, is part of this larger vision. The pilot project would serve an upcoming affordable housing development that Robinson is spearheading, made up of 34 townhomes in southeast Enfield. Eventually, the group hopes to expand the geothermal network to the entire town of some 2,000 — providing a sizable chunk of the community’s energy needs. [some bold original]

Image and caption from Canary Media. “From left, Willam Munn, Mayor Mondale Robinson, and other members of the team behind Enfield, North Carolina’s clean energy vision (Courtesy of Helen Whiteley, fourth from left).”

The mayor and his team are keenly aware that their work could become a model for dealing with environmental justice issues in their region:

The thermal energy network, he said, could serve ​“as a model for what’s possible in rural Black spaces, throughout the Black Belt in North Carolina and the South at large.”

The town is working the system, despite the rollbacks on IRA tax credits. They’re going after the geothermal tax credits that survived the purge. Plus they’re getting that $300,000 grant from philanthropic foundation BuildUS. Their plan involves improving water infrastructure and creating local jobs while they’re doing this energy transition. All wins for a small town used to neglected infrastructure, shockingly high energy bills, and power outages.

Enfield is a great example of refugia experimenting: adaptability amid crisis toward a more resilient future, modeling a way forward for others.

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Media Corner

Thanks to reader Mavis Moon who sent me a tip on some beaver-related media. This podcast episode of RadioLab, “The Builders,” features our industrious, waddly friends. The podcast is for kids, so it’s pretty… high-energy, let’s say. But it’s fun! And packed with good science about beavers. They even use the term refugia!

One more pleasant photo for you. This is one of many I took while walking the beach at Lake Michigan a couple weeks ago. Enjoy.

I really cannot get enough of sand textures. Is that weird?

I hope you can find deep wells of consolation as well as some sparks of good energy in the weeks ahead. Thanks for reading. Till next time, be well.

Note: As always bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Friends, I got to meet Robin Wall Kimmerer this weekend! As I write this, we are smack in the middle of that glorious biennial book party here at my university, the Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing. Sponsored by the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing, the Festival brings about 50 authors and 2000 attendees to campus for three days of conversation around all things faith and literature. Kimmerer was our Thursday evening plenary speaker, and I had the wonderful privilege of introducing her. Gah!

Here we are before her evening lecture, which was, of course, utterly compelling and inspirational. If you can ever hear her speak in person, my suggestion is: do it.

I trust you know all about Kimmerer’s work, but if not, please read Braiding Sweetgrass as soon as you can. She has other marvelous books, too, but Braiding Sweetgrass is, I think, the best way to immerse yourself in her prophetic combination of botany, indigenous wisdom, and storytelling. It is a life-changing book—I know that myself and, as I observed the book-signing line after the talk, I overheard so many people thanking her, hand on heart, for what her work has meant to them. They were positively glowing.

Kimmerer ended her talk by telling a Haudenosaunee story that spoke to living at a dangerous inflection point in history. She had us completely mesmerized.

In another session, I got to moderate a fascinating conversation between Kimmerer (can I call her Robin now?) and my friend Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, author of Following Jesus in a Warming World. We talked about how faith communities (especially Christians) can learn from indigenous wisdom. I’m hoping a recording of the session will eventually be released as an episode of the Center’s podcast ReWrite Radio. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to Betsy King-MacDonald for the photo. In case you’re wondering about that tube thing: our session took place on the stage where the Calvin students would be performing Bye Bye Birdie that evening. When that tube thing is lit up, it resembles a jukebox. Cool, eh?

Anyhow, it’s always so great to meet someone you admire and find out they are as lovely and kind in person as they seem on the page.

As if that wasn’t enough for one week, I’ll be interviewing Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde on Tuesday evening. Bishop Budde leads the Episcopal Diocese of Washington DC. You might recall her (in)famous sermon during the recent inauguration, in which she pleaded with a certain new (old) president to show mercy to the most vulnerable. The event Tuesday evening (7 pm ET) is free and online, sponsored by Third Act Faith. We’ll be asking Bishop Budde about interfaith friendships and coalitions of moral witness. Come join us!

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This Week in Climate News

Since I’m running around campus this weekend trying to help host our big festival, I’m trying to keep this edition of the newsletter short. So here I’ll simply revel again in the photos gifted to us by the crew of the Artemis II mission.

First, let’s recall this incredible photo, “Earthrise,” taken in 1968 by William Anders of the Apollo 8 crew.

In 1968, humans had never seen their earth like this, as a whole, from a distance. So beautiful. So fragile. So oddly small against even a miniscule framing of space’s vast expanse.

Yes, the photo may have helped catalyze a nascent environmental movement. The “Blue Marble” photo taken in 1972 also became iconic, of course. The reason, though, goes far beyond environmentalism. People understood viscerally perhaps the single most crucial principle humans have been striving to learn: we are all connected, all in this together, woven in a single garment of destiny.

Could these new photos help us review that lesson, at a moment when we so desperately need it?

This one is called “Earthset,” which I hope is not prophetic. It was taken on April 6 by Reid Weisman, commander of the Artemis II crew.

It’s been interesting to read what climate communicators are saying about these photos. Katherine Hayhoe, climatologist and consummate climate communicator, focused on Pilot Victor Glover’s words: “As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love. … To all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the moon. We will see you on the other side.” Hayhoe remarked that these words gave her goosebumps because “it is so close to what I say about why we need climate action.” [bold original]

This one is called “Hello, World.” It was taken on April 3. Everyone is agog about the auroras you can see glowing at the earth’s poles (see the green tinge on the upper right).

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and another consummate climate communicator, also wrote about the Artemis mission, and she quoted another climate scientist, Kate Marvel. Until recently, Marvel worked for NASA, but she resigned on March 24. (I just reviewed Marvel’s latest book here.) Here’s what Marvel said in her resignation letter:

Space should be for everyone who lives on this singular planet, not a playground for the wealthy or a frontier to dominate.... We should remember what we’ve been shown: the beautiful marble, the Earth half in shadow from space, a pale blue dot seen by a little machine sent far from home. The more we learn about the Universe, the more we should cherish our perfect and irreplaceable home.

Besides reveling in the photos, other folks have been wondering why this whole mission made us feel so deeply. One writer, Liz Plank, titled a post “Artemis II is Competency Porn and We Are Starving For It.” Here’s what she wrote:

Did you feel it too? That specific relief that’s hard to name. I found myself trying to understand it. The closest I can get is this: the feeling of watching something go right and realizing, somewhere deep in your body, that you had forgotten things could go right. Because when something actually goes right, when the people in charge do their jobs well, speak in full sentences, make decisions that protect people instead of endangering them, the reaction can feel strangely emotional. What you’re feeling isn’t just relief, it’s grief. Grief for every year you spent bracing. Grief for how normal the bracing became. Grief for how completely you forgot that competence was once ordinary.

That is not a small thing. That is your nervous system coming up for air. I want you to enjoy it.

I don’t usually read Liz Plank, but this essay is worth a look. Unfortunately, as Kate Marvel’s resignation signals, NASA is still in deep trouble from explicit and implicit censorship of their work. You can read more about that here.

And if you want even more reflection on the Artemis II mission, here’s the essay I wrote reflecting on the spiritual implications of seeing our world as one integrated whole in which we are all interconnected. (You might recognize a couple sentences from the essay that ended up in this post… shhhhh…)

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Deeper Dive

For all you forest lovers, we have a bad news/sort-of good news situation here. The bad news is that forests all over the world are under threat, not only from deforestation but from climate change itself. The good news is that biologists continue to gather data to help us understand these threats—and we hope—motivate more strenuous efforts to protect forests.

Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News published a piece last week describing two recent studies. Summarizing the basic principle of these studies, Berwyn writes:

Climate shocks don’t act in isolation; they can cascade through forest systems and amplify one another, as weaker trees and leaves become more vulnerable to insects and wildfires.

Beech forest in Europe. Image credit: Bob Berwyn via ICN. You’ve got to appreciate a reporter who reads dense scientific studies and takes lovely photos.

Heat and drought, in particular, form a kind of double-whammy that forests have difficulty adapting to. The damage is evident from space:

Recent hot and dry summers [in Europe] have damaged forests on a scale visible from space. Leaves dried, scorched, faded and even died weeks or months ahead of schedule.

To understand the limits of what trees can tolerate, one recent study “identified climate thresholds beyond which leaves are irreversibly damaged.” More technically, the study examined, in lab conditions, the “hydraulic–thermal cascade that defines a critical vulnerability of temperate forests to intensifying hot droughts.”

Meanwhile, another study worked on modeling cascading disturbances in order to develop modeling tools that will help forest managers focus their protection efforts on the most vulnerable areas. The study’s conclusions are not exactly encouraging:

Our results show that forest disturbances will continue to increase throughout the 21st century, with disturbed areas more than doubling relative to the recent past under an unabated continuation of climate change. Wildfires are the main agent driving future disturbance change. Changing disturbances result in an increase in young forests, substantially altering Europe’s forest demography. Because of their profound implications for forest carbon storage and the habitat value of forest ecosystems, disturbances should be a priority of forest policy and management.

Right. The word “unabated” there is key. Everything we do to “abate” climate change helps preserve forests, and we need our forests to be the lungs of the planet, storing carbon, creating habitat, moderating extremes. All our lives depend on the earth’s forest ecosystems.

Another great photo by Bob Berwyn of his son in a Douglas fir. Note the dying lodgepole pines in the background—and the refugia still hanging on. Also note that very good dog watching out for his friend.

Heat, drought, wildfire—unfortunately, those factors create ideal conditions for another plague: insects. In a behind-the-scenes piece on Berwyn’s coverage of forest stories, he describes bringing his son along to interview a Forest Service scientist in Colorado to learn more about bark beetle infestations:

It was hot and windless. At one point, the scientist asked us to stop talking and listen. After a few seconds, we heard and felt a faint, pulsing vibration—the sound, she said, of millions of beetles chewing through the nutrient-carrying phloem layer just beneath the bark.

The damage was mostly invisible, but it was happening everywhere at once. The researcher explained that spring had come so early and summer lasted so long that the insects were breeding an entire second generation within the seasonal cycle, something that had never been recorded before the 1980s. That all but guaranteed that the remaining trees would be overwhelmed, and soon after, the mushroom patch would disappear.

Forests will do their best to adapt, but they do have limits. Supporting the work of forest preservation and health is, therefore, good refugia work. In fact, Appalachian forest activist Danna Smith makes an economic argument for resisting the tantalizing prosperity promises now dangled before stressed rural areas: AI data centers. She writes:

Forest protection is a proven economic strategy for rural communities. The outdoor recreation economy generates far more revenue and jobs than the timber industry. Conservation and recreation jobs, ecological restoration, and community‑led development create long‑term prosperity without sacrificing land, water, or health. These sectors keep wealth local, strengthen small businesses, and attract people who want to live in places defined by beauty and belonging—not destruction and noise.

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Refugia Sighting

In further celebration of indigenous wisdom and healing, I want to share this incredible story about the Quapaw Nation in northeast Oklahoma who cleaned up a Superfund site. I learned about the story through one of my go-to sources: Alaina Woods’s Good Climate News Substack (highly recommend). Her summary is great, but this article by Todd Price in the Guardian offers even more detail.

The background here is a typical horror show featuring all the injustices perpetrated against Native peoples. Dispossessed Native people were “given” land in northeast Oklahoma and expected to become “civilized” and farm it according to settler methods. Some of the region was then brutally poisoned with iron and zinc mining waste for almost a hundred years. (The mined metals were used—get this—to make bullets and shells.) Naturally, the mining companies abandoned the land when the mines ceased to be profitable. They left behind toxic, nearly dead land and people with severely high incidences of lead poisoning.

Todd Price describes what happened next:

By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.

The Quapaw can now graze bison and cattle on restored land, as well as grow crops. Image credit: Thalia Juarez for The Guardian.

The government made a few lame and insufficient efforts at cleanup. Then, in 2013, the Quapaw got permission from the EPA to clean up the land themselves. Basically they said: “We’ll do it, and we’ll send you the bill.” Which is more or less what happened. The tribe has been working to detox, cleanup, and renew the land so that it can be used for agriculture and cattle-grazing. So far, the Quapaw have restored about 600 acres, including a 200-acre parcel called the Laue:

After years of cleanup, the Laue has been cleared of chat [poisoned mining rock waste]. The ground has been restored and tested. The soil is healthy again. Like hundreds of acres across the Quapaw Nation, it has returned to agriculture. And the Quapaw, a community with more than 6,000 members, have led this revitalization themselves as the first and only tribal nation in the country to manage and carry out a Superfund cleanup. By cleaning contaminated ground – a slow process that began 40 years ago and will likely continue for decades – the tribe can expand its farming efforts and food production on its own terms.

The tribe now grazes cattle and bison on the land and they grow wheat, soy, corn, vegetables, and more as part of their food sovereignty programs. This process continues to require enormous ingenuity and dedication from tribal experts and leaders—it’s worth reading the article to learn about the details. It’s another astonishing story of indigenous people, after centuries of brutal and grossly unjust treatment, nevertheless acting as skilled caretakers—working with the land to create refugia spaces.

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Garden Update

Every year I get more ambitious with my gardening aspirations. I’m still just a beginner, but I’m learning! I thought you might enjoy a glimpse at what’s happening with my seed starts. I saved some delicata squash seeds from a grocery store squash last year, and look! That little sprout in the front? That’s a delicata squash! More special, though, is that powerhouse sprout in the upper right. That’s a Palestinian heirloom seed called a Yakteen Gourd. My friend Linda gifted me with two huge seeds. They’re both sprouting. Notice in the middle-left of the photo how the second Yakteen seed is bursting the soil so powerfully it’s creating a miniature earthquake! If you look closely, you can spot the green sprout. In honor of all new life—and the hope of healing in Palestine and everywhere—thank you, little seeds!

Holy Week greetings to those of you who observe the Christian calendar. Today is Holy Saturday, that strange lull between the sorrow of Good Friday and the joy of Easter. I’ve been feeling the weight of many losses this week, but I’m remembering the words of a friend, Scott Klinger, who wrote to me months ago about Holy Saturday, refugia, and composting.

He reflected that refugia are seedbeds, literal and metaphorical. However, “it is also true that some seeds that have been patiently waiting for their refugia moment will not sprout during each crisis. Rather than seeing this as failure, I think of those seeds as decomposing back into life-giving soil, waiting for the next moment that might be theirs. Rather than grieving death or things that didn’t make it, against all of our hopes, let us see death as the precursor to resurrection down the road.” On Holy Saturday, he suggested, we can remember that “unnamed Spiritual Composting is happening.” I am trying to pray and trust that this might be so.

After attending a Good Friday service yesterday, as a further spiritual practice I composted all my garden beds. Not shown: me as a muddy mess.

I hope you were able to join a No Kings event near you last weekend. As we know, these public gatherings do not solve problems on their own, but they do serve important purposes: visibility, solidarity, community-building, and courage-building. The day was a success, with over 8 million people showing up at 3300 local events spread across every state. Spouse Ron and I, with our friend Linda, hung out with local clergy folk who gathered on the main stage to speak out against Christian Nationalism. As we wandered through the crowds later, numerous people spotted Ron’s and Linda’s clerical accoutrements and thanked them for being there. People seemed pleased to find clergy in attendance, acting as a public witness against cruelty.

Ron, me, and our neighbor and friend Rev. Linda Rubingh.

Now we enter Earth Month, with Earth Day coming up on April 22. The folks at One Home One Future have put together a tidy interfaith resource list to help faith communities plan Earth Day events. And here’s rundown of some faith-based Earth Day events on the Third Act Faith website. If you know any great Earth Day/faith resources, share in the comments!

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And now, in wildly unforeseen refugia news, I present to you… Refugia, the beer.

I promise, I had nothing to do with this. A local craft brewery (one of dozens in my town) called Speciation Cellars whipped up a small batch of this brew, and thanks to friend Nate Ruah-Bieri, we got wind of it. Technically, it’s a “Tart Rustic Saison w/ Kortinje Cinnamon & Plum.” I do not know what that means. But here’s the great part: if you look closely, you will notice that the label features a beaver! Of course!

When Ron went over there to purchase a dozen bottles (obviously), the owners assured us they had never heard of Refugia Faith, nor were they especially interested in reading it. Never mind, we bought the beer. How is it? Don’t know yet. We’re saving it to share with our Refugia doctoral students when we gather later this month to celebrate one of our cohort member’s graduation. I’ll report back.

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This Week in Climate News

This week, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon absolutely slammed down the current president’s attempt to replace the White House East Wing with an extravagantly tasteless ballroom. You have no doubt already been shaking your head over how this ballroom nonsense serves as a metaphor for this regime’s standard playbook: smash something to bits illegally and see if they can get away with it. Then it goes to court, using up enormous amounts of public energy, time, and money that could be deployed toward more productive things. Meanwhile, we all sit with the destruction.

Sigh. Such an apt metaphor.

This is how I think of the news story this week about the so-called “God Squad” ruling, overriding Endangered Species Act restrictions in the Gulf of Mexico to allow more oil drilling. The God Squad is a committee formed in 1978 by Congress, made up of agency heads, that was intended to allow exemptions to Endangered Species law for matters of national security. They haven’t met since 1992, and the exemption they proposed then was later withdrawn. This time, the committee did not even bother hearing testimony from outside experts. They made their decision in half an hour.

So we have yet another destructive bullying move, this one on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, which is already doing plenty of drilling in the Gulf. Of course, the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice have already filed lawsuits. And here we go again.

Moving on! Let’s look at some good news. This is the moment for “subnational actors” to take the lead on energy transition, and Virginia is all in. Facing a data center boom and touting the magic word “affordability,” the Virginia legislature just passed a whole bouquet of clean energy bills—over 50 of them. This article by Elizabeth Ouzts for Canary Media explains all the details.

A solar/battery project in Powhatan, Virginia. Image credit: Dominion/via Virginia Mercury.

The new laws work at energy transition from all the angles: permitting reform for large-scale solar as well as rooftop and balcony solar, incentives for large-scale battery storage, provisions to maximize and upgrade the grid, and even requirements that utilities “invest millions in energy-efficiency upgrades for low-income, elderly, and disabled households.”

In my last newsletter, I featured a story about Virginia and balcony solar—but that was only a small piece of this huge initiative. Virginia is setting the bar for states to respond constructively to the current energy affordability crisis.

The energy transition pushes forward, in fact, across the country. Michelle Lewis reports for Electrek on the latest data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Despite everything going on in the White House, the US is still growing our renewables capacity as a percentage of total capacity.

In fact, the EIA is predicting even more growth in 2026:

Should EIA’s forecasts come to fruition, new capacity additions by solar, wind, and batteries during the second year of the Trump administration would be 60% more than those in its first year.

Meanwhile, forecasted growth for fossil fuels and nuclear power is even bleaker than last year’s. Zero growth is currently projected for nuclear power, while net fossil fuel capacity is expected to fall by 4,261.3 MW.

Thus, during the coming 12 months, renewables and battery storage will account for all net new utility-scale capacity additions.

“EIA’s data show that the Trump administration utterly failed to stop the nation’s transition to solar, wind, and battery storage during its first year in office,” noted the SUN DAY Campaign’s executive director, Ken Bossong. “The second year of the Trump Administration is projected to be even more lopsided in favor of clean energy.”

Moving out to the global picture, Fix the News summarized a new Ember report this week: “Global renewable capacity surged in 2025, with 814 GW of new solar and wind installations (more than the entire electricity capacity of the EU), the fastest expansion on record” [bold original]. Enjoy this beautiful graph:

Yep, we need much more of this, much faster. But the economics of clean energy keep pushing us in the right direction—especially as the Iran debacle raises oil prices and presses us against geopolitical instability in an oil-based global economic system.

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Deeper Dive

If you haven’t yet had enough of renewable energy wonkery (I never seem to get enough of it…), I highly recommend Bill McKibben’s Substack this week. He offers a trenchant update on the state of battery storage in the US. In short: astoundingly good progress. McKibben interprets the following pretty graph with the fondness and skill of an art historian. I won’t spoil it, though. Read for yourself.

We now move from energy wonkery to a more philosophical reflection. I’ve been thinking about this evocative piece by religious ethicist Liz Bucar. Bucar reflects on the recent New York Times interview with Rebecca Solnit (free link), especially an often-quoted section of the interview in which Solnit was asked to suggest who might be the counter to Trump. Here’s Solnit:

I often think one of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex whose superpower is the ability to inflict and endure extraordinary violence. When actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. It brings up something really beautiful that Thich Nhat Hanh said at some point before he died a few years ago, which is: the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha in Buddhist terminology is the community of practitioners…. It’s the idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an ubermensch. Maybe the community is the next hero. And it’s exactly what Minneapolis is. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society.

Bucar suggests that Solnit’s reflections constitute public theology. Bucar then expands on Solnit’s ideas, outlining how all religions promote social change through beloved community. Even Christianity, which obviously does worship a savior, defiantly rejects the violence-wielding conqueror model—or at least we are supposed to. Instead, Christianity offers the church is a body of people who, following Jesus’s example, resist injustice and witness to redemption by offering humble servanthood. So yes, a community of practitioners. (Christian theology would insist, however, that God does the saving—we only help.)

Anyway, what does all this have to do with climate? Well, mitigating and adapting to climate disruption demands that we learn how to care for each other, how to make change happen from the grass roots, how to build networks of… well, refugia. Bucar’s essay affirms that all people of faith and good conscience have traditions on which to draw to do this work.

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Refugia Sighting

Fire fungi, the first responders of the world. Mycologists and ecologists studying how ecosystems recover after fires are beginning to understand the crucial role of fungi. It looks like certain fungi basically operate as refugia-foundation engineers. Heather Thomasy, writing for bioGraphic, explains:

In the grand succession of life after a wildfire, the first beings to appear are neither plants nor animals, but fungi. Species of pyrophilous fungi—from Greek for “fire-loving”—thrive in the burned terrain. Just weeks after a blaze tears through a landscape, swaths of fungal fruiting bodies emerge from the soil to release spores, briefly dominating the otherwise-barren surface.

A work of art, isn’t it? What a gorgeous photo of pyrophilous fungi. Image credit: bioGraphic.

Plants can’t grow in completely charred soil. Such soil is mostly soot and carbon in forms not bioavailable for plants. However, “this resourceful little fungus,” writes Thomasy, “turns on genes to produce enzymes to help break down the charred material, ultimately transforming it into a more bioavailable form that could help kick-start the rest of the food web.” Go, little fungi!

Next: hat tip to Philadelphia for using green infrastructure to better manage stormwater and flooding. The water utility’s program Green City, Clean Waters has a 25-year plan to “reduce the volume of stormwater entering combined sewers using green infrastructure and to expand stormwater treatment capacity with traditional infrastructure improvements.”

Their website nicely details all the benefits that green infrastructure provides. Environmental benefits include improved air quality, mitigated heat, wildlife support, and of course water management. Economic benefits include higher property values, job creation, local business partnerships, and avoiding expensive flood damage. And social benefits include a more pleasant city and community pride.

If you live in Philly, are you noticing the green infrastructure? How is it going over there?

A nifty video concisely explaining how green infrastructure prevents stormwater runoff. This video does make me wonder about people’s toilet habits in Philly, but … never mind.

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Beaver Update

Fulfilling my duty to keep you updated on all beaver news, I must report on a recent study suggesting that beavers improve an ecosystem’s carbon storage capacity. A 13-year study in Switzerland, just published in Communications Earth & Environment, was the first to measure carbon storage thanks to beaver activity.

A little article in ScienceDaily quotes one of the study’s authors, Dr. Annegret Larsen, Assistant Professor in the Soil Geography and Landscape Group at Wageningen University: “By reshaping waterways and creating rich wetland habitats, beavers physically change how carbon is stored across landscapes.” According to the article, “The results show that wetlands shaped by beavers can store carbon at rates up to ten times higher than similar areas without their presence.”

I’ve been slowly working my way through Leila Philip’s magnum opus from 2022, Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. I’m just getting to the part where she describes how, in a bioregion managed by beavers, rivers do not typically form large, deep channels, but spread out across a landscape, rather like a series of capillaries instead of only major arteries. The way humans manage water—more or less by trying to create only the big arteries—exacerbates flooding, promotes soil erosion and pollutant concentration, and diminishes carrying capacity for wildlife. As we face heavier rainfalls and more flood events, it’s a good thing we are gathering more wisdom from our beaver friends.

Reggie, my emotional support beaver, wanted to dress up as the “Easter Beaver.” Clearly he’s more of an expert at dam-building than at fashion. But you know: it’s for the kits. (What does he bring the little ones? Chewed saplings?)

Blessed Easter tomorrow to those of who celebrate. To all of you: may you feel the energy and strength of renewed life, deep in your spirit. Till next time: be well.

Note: Bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

I’m coming to you today from the mountains of Western North Carolina, where I am nestled in the Appalachians with the lovely women of Trinity Episcopal Church Asheville. More on that below.

First, it’s outdoor science time! Thanks to reader Eric Anglada, who sent me a note in response to my frustrating battle with the cottonwood tree on my property, as recounted in Refugia Faith. Eric wondered if I had ever heard of the stars in the cottonwood branches. He told me about a Dakota story explaining why, if you cut a branch, you will find a perfect star inside.

Well! I had no idea. So I first did a little outdoor research. I certainly had no shortage of cottonwood branches strewn about the yard for testing purposes. The upshot of my adventures, however, is: always watch the TikTok instruction video first. Let’s just say I snapped and clipped and lopped a lot of branches with little success, then went in and did a little more research, then went out and tried again. Here’s my best result

Sure enough! But as I say, it helps to do it the correct way. You have to snap at a particular point on the branch. And the branch has to be dry, which was mostly my problem. Everything is pretty soggy right now. This TikTok video offers a how-to, as well as one of the indigenous stories, in which every time you snap open a branch, you release stars back into the sky.

@lovelyacres✨ When I was little, I was told a story originating from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne tribes that the stars live inside cottonwood trees. 🌳✨ Now, I share that same tale with my own kids. If you take a fallen cottonwood branch and gently snap it at the little rings, you’ll find tiny stars hidden inside the wood. 🌟 Each one waiting to be discovered. So next time you’re out walking, break a twig, find the stars, and then look up — you might just see the ones you set free twinkling in the night sky. 🌌 #plants #tiktoklearningcampaign #nature #everydaymagic #magic

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Eric sent me a somewhat different story, this one in audio version by Dakota storyteller Mary Louise Defender Wilson. Here’s a transcribed short version of the story. The main idea is that one little star kind of fell in love with people, but was only allowed to hang around them while staying hidden, so as not to disturb, and wound up in a cottonwood tree. The little star enjoys listening to people:

The women, the men, the children, laughing, and saying good words to each other. Today the star is still in that cottonwood tree, hoping to hear those beautiful sounds.

I think the idea is: so make beautiful sounds, you humans. The trees are listening. I suppose I wouldn’t have been quite so grumpy about the mess my cottonwood makes if I had known this story before. Or at least, I would have kept my grumpiness quiet while outdoors.

Thanks, Eric, for sending the story along. By the way, Eric has a Substack, too, called Embracing Repair. I recommend it, especially if you’re interested in wild church, Catholic-inflected social justice, and indigenous wisdom!

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This Week in Climate News

All right. Down to business now.

Time to reconsider our dependence on fossil fuels, eh? Aman Azhar of Inside Climate News sums up how picking a fight with Iran is spiking oil prices—and not doing American households any favors:

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply flows, has exposed the fragility of a global energy system still tied to fossil fuels. … As Gulf producers declare force majeure and governments debate emergency reserve releases, energy analysts and clean energy advocates are warning that short-term fixes will not shield households from the price volatility that has accompanied every major Middle East conflict in the past.

Yep, another oil war, worse price volatility than ever, people dying for oil.

It’s a moment, people. In his newsletter last week, Bill McKibben surveyed the heat wave hitting the West—even though we are supposed to be in a La Niña cooling trend, with El Niño predicted to return this summer. McKibben noted that maybe this is a crisis we shouldn’t waste:

We don’t know for sure how the Iran war will play out, nor the El Niño; at the moment, though, things look ominous. All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures. And what do you know, we have a midterm exam coming up on November 3.

With that midterm exam in mind, good on the Democrats in Congress who have chosen this moment to put forward a bill. Arcelia Martin of Inside Climate News describes what they’re up to:

The “Energy Bills Relief Act,” signed by more than half of House Democrats, 122 in all, seeks to establish new incentives for renewable projects and to protect consumers from rising electricity costs due to grid demands from large energy users such as data centers….

Here’s the part I love best:

In addition to re-upping clean energy credits introduced in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the sweeping legislation would reinstate grant money for renewable energy projects that the Trump administration terminated and authorize $2.1 billion to address shortages of transformers and other grid technologies.

It’s entirely possible to do this, now. We could have clean, cheap, reliable renewable energy not dependent on the Middle East! Alas, the bill is not likely to pass. But who knows? I’ve already called my congressional rep to tell her thank you for signing on to the bill. What if we all call our reps and say YES PASS THIS BILL? Even if it doesn’t pass, the legislation lays a foundation for sane legislation when the power balance shifts in Congress.

The idea is that you can prop these panels up anywhere and just plug them into an outlet, offsetting your electricity costs. (Image credit: solarunitedneighbors.org)

Virginia is not waiting around. They’ve become the second state after Utah to pass a bill allowing “balcony solar.” Elizabeth Ouzts of Canary Media covers this story:

On Wednesday [last week], the Democratic-controlled Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill legalizing ​“balcony solar” by a unanimous, bipartisan vote. The Senate, where Democrats also have a majority, had already approved the measure with only a handful of dissents. It will soon reach the desk of Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, who is expected to sign it.

Set to take effect next January, the law will make Virginia just the second state in the country, after Utah, to treat solar panels like an appliance you can buy at your local big-box store and set up yourself — on your balcony, in your yard, or anywhere the sun shines on your property.

Meanwhile, as I’ve covered so often in this newsletter, the rest of the world is catching on that renewable energy is now the wisest choice for resilience, cost, and public health. This NPR story by Julia Simon focuses on Pakistan, the land of resourceful people putting cheap Chinese solar panels up all by themselves. But the story surveys other regions, too, who are racing toward renewables to help protect themselves from from old-school oil wars.

Because so many Pakistanis now have solar and batteries, Imran [a Pakistani researcher] says the country's electricity sector has more of a cushion in this crisis. “Which kind of makes Pakistan's energy transition story,” she says, “not just a story about climate, but also a story about risk management for energy security.'“

Oil and gas prices may be up, Rosenow says [climate analyst at Oxford], but the sun and wind don’t care what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz.

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Deeper Dive

Why are your power bills higher? Even before this whole Iran debacle, Americans have been seeing much higher energy prices. Why? Those dastardly data centers? Actually, data centers haven’t (yet) been the biggest culprit in most places—though they certainly could be without precautions. That’s not to say data centers pose no problem; there are plenty of problems with the frantic buildout in data centers. But energy costs depend on a lot of other factors, too, and those factors differ across regions.

Thankfully, the good people at Grist have sorted this out for us in this terrific article by Naveena Sadasivam and Clayton Aldern. The article breaks down cost analysis by region and identifies one main culprit per region, such as wildfires (California), oil dependence (Hawaii), natural gas prices (the Northeast), extreme weather (Southeast and Mid-Atlantic), or “regulatory free for all” (Texas, of course). Once again, this is data from before the Iran business.

There’s even an interactive graphic (love those) where you can choose your state and compare your prices to the US average in three sectors. Here’s Michigan:

Interestingly, in Michigan, our price increases have been softened by wind power that supports our grid. Good for us! In the Pacific Northwest, hydropower has helped keep prices lower and more stable.

Poor California. Here’s their graph. Depite their rapid solar buildout, they’ve got other problems, like wildfires. As the article explains:

Much of that increase has been driven by the soaring cost of infrastructure upgrades aimed at reducing wildfire risk, along with rising wildfire-related insurance and liability costs. After the 2018 Camp Fire, PG&E declared bankruptcy, citing $30 billion in estimated liabilities. Utilities have also poured billions of dollars into replacing aging transmission and distribution lines and expanding the grid to meet growing demand.

For decades, we didn’t necessarily think about electricity grids and public utility commissions, did we? Well, I guess this is part of being a citizen now.

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Refugia Sighting

Many thanks to the good women of Trinity Episcopal Church Asheville for hosting me at Lake Logan Retreat Center for a weekend of refugia reflection. The place itself is one of those spots that operate as a pilgrimage refugium. People go there to rest, reflect, relax, and gain strength for whatever awaits them back home.

The women on this retreat remember Hurricane Helene all too well. Later today we will hear more about this bioregion, what Hurricane Helene did to the camp, and how folks responded to help repair and renew a beloved spot.

OK, I can see how people love this region. Even in early spring before the trees leaf out, the hills and pines and waters are so lovely.

The cabin where I got to stay. I mean, gimme a break that’s cute.

Another cabin in the “Sit-n-Whittle” area of the retreat. I did not whittle. But I did sit.

Finally, the women of Trinity say hello! (Special thanks to the wonderful Amy Peterson, Associate Rector of Trinity and a wonderful host.)

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Media Corner

I’ll end by sharing with you a review I just published on Kate Marvel’s excellent recent book, Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel about a Changing Planet. Marvel is an atmospheric physicist and NASA climate modeler. In this book, she speaks as a scientist, but also as a person in love with a suffering planet. Here’s my thumbnail summary:

Marvel organizes the book by emotions that she (and all of us) feel: wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope, and love. Each chapter tucks serious science into the folds of human stories, literature, history, personal narrative. The scientific explanations thread in and out so deftly, you hardly notice what’s happening. I found this approach captivating. I’ve read many, many books and articles on climate change over the last ten years, and I think this is one of the best, even for someone new to reading about climate.

If you have people in your life who are somewhat skeptical of the science of climate change but open to learning, this book is ideal. She explains not only what we know—and don’t know—but how we know it. And why this planet is worth loving.

Enough for this week. I hope you are finding signs of new life amid so much chaos and destruction. Till next time, be well.

I admit I’ve felt rather discouraged these last two weeks. You too? We are all carrying so much right now—I realize, some of us far more than others. I am grateful for the refugia communities, local and dispersed, that keep me going. I am grateful to hang out with earnest and good-hearted students who make me laugh and challenge me to be my best self for their sakes. I’m grateful for church, friends, family, all the fantastic and brave activists and leaders I get to work with, for the promise of spring, and … for you! Together we are trying to draw on the resources of faith and nurture life-giving soil, literal and metaphorical, amid so much loss and moral poison. I hope you are leaning hard into your own refugia spaces these days.

We’re on spring break now at my university, and although the weather here in Michigan is classically cold, wet, and dreary, the birdies are chirping like mad, gossiping, I suppose, about their spring task lists. I even spotted a sparrow the other day poking around an old nest. She wasn’t exactly building a new nest yet, but you could tell she was feeling some spring urges.

Not from my backyard! This fantastic photo of a Tiger Longwing (Heliconius hecale) was taken by Rebekah Novak, interning for A Rocha USA this year under my spouse Ron’s direction. Rebekah took the photo at Frederick Meijer Gardens here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in their tropical conservatory. The Longwing is native to tropical forests in the Americas. Look at that proboscis!

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Mostly this week I’ll be grading (it never ends) and working on Refugia Church. You could help! Do you know any Christian faith communities who have done great work either with advocacy or with serving as resilience hubs? I’m still looking for more good examples. If you know someone(s), just leave a comment or reply to the email that brings you this newsletter. Thanks!

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This Week in Climate News

It’s still happening. One of the most encouraging things I’ve read lately appeared a week ago in the New York Times. It’s an essay by David Wallace-Wells, the guy who published a book in 2019 called The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, whose basic idea was “it’s way worse than you think” and, you know, apocalypse is coming.

That same David Wallace-Wells, it seems to his own surprise, has cheered up just a bit. He wrote last week that yes, it appears in the US—and elsewhere—that we are taking steps back from renewable energy transition. We’re dealing with a hostile US federal government here and some backtracking elsewhere, and even politicians on the left aren’t talking about climate as much. However, Wallace-Wells continues, politics is not the same as facts on the ground:

After a period of growing concern and accelerating momentum, the project of greening the world’s energy systems certainly feels as if it has been thrown into reverse.

But by the most straightforward measures, that’s simply wrong. There is more green stuff being installed than ever, and judged simply as a global infrastructure project, the volume is pretty staggering. In 2024, 92.5 percent of new power capacity installed around the world was renewable. In 2025, it’s believed, global green installations were even greater. And even in Trump’s United States, which has been behaving in many ways like a petrostate, more than 92 percent of utility-scale electricity capacity planned for 2026 is green.

Wallace-Wells offers a short overview of various dimensions of the energy transition around the globe—EVs, grid power, China, India, the US, sub-Saharan Africa, Saudi Arabia. It’s true we are not moving fast enough, and we will feel grave climate impacts. We already are. But we are moving way faster than anyone imagined. Everything he says here comports with everything else I’ve been reading, across multiple sources and across many months, as you know if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter. In other words, Wallace-Wells is not by any means a lone voice.

In fact, his piece follows up on a gloomier essay he wrote last fall, after which leaders and advocates around the world contacted him to say, he explains, “that I was being too downbeat, focused too much on empty rhetoric and hit-or-miss policy momentum, not focused enough on taking the concrete measure of change on the ground.” If you click through on nothing else in this newsletter today, go ahead and read this piece. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Let’s add detail to Wallace-Wells’s summation with a few specific transition-related news items from the past couple weeks.

Balcony solar. Canary Media reports: “As of Wednesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers in 28 states and Washington, D.C., have announced their own legislation to make these systems permissible, according to Bright Saver and other sources.” Deep red Utah is the only state with a current law permitting balcony solar (also called plug-in solar), which allows people to buy simple solar panels, plug them into an outlet, and immediately save on energy costs. People on the left and the right want the freedom to do this—it’s a bipartisan win-win—so these state laws are likely to proliferate quickly.

Battery tech. Lots of stories on advances in battery tech lately. The holy grail here is to build batteries that do not use lithium and cobalt—rare earth metals with an ethically problematic supply chain—and instead base the battery on something cheap and abundant, like sodium. Well, it’s happening. Tina Casey for Clean Technica noted some US companies are now competing in the home-storage as well as EV battery markets by developing sodium-ion batteries. They’re trying to keep up with Chinese manufacturers, who are, of course, way ahead. Casey also wrote another piece about a new US company, 1854 Motors, and their attempts to enter the US EV market. This piece is worth reading just for Casey’s use of the term “gasmobiles” to describe combustion cars and for her subtle snark about Tesla, especially the disastrously stupid Cybertruck.

Meanwhile, in Finland, a company called Donut Lab is just now coming out with third-party confirmation that their new solid-state battery can check all the boxes. Guess what, Tina Casey wrote about this, too (go, Tina!). She explains why solid-state is a big deal:

Regardless of the recent squishiness in the US market, the vehicle electrification trend continues apace globally, and solid-state batteries are among the innovations that will help accelerate uptake. In contrast to conventional lithium-ion EV batteries with liquid electrolytes, the solid-state formula offers faster charging, longer range, enhanced safety, and more freedom from environmental and ethical complications in the automotive supply chain.

Donut Lab is claiming that their new battery retains capacity across 100,000 charge cycles and performs at full capacity in extreme heat and cold. Here’s more on solid-state sodium-ion technologies.

For true geeks only: a 24-minute explainer from Donut Labs.

EVs still coming online, even in US. Once you go EV, you never go back. That’s certainly my experience. And research bears it out: 96% of current EV owners say they will consider another one for their next car. Even though the current federal regime is doing whatever they can to suppress the EV market in the US, car manufacturers know they have to face an EV-dominated future. This piece by Matt Hogan for Inside EVs surveys no fewer than 32 new EV models releasing this year in the US, plus upgrades to older models. Quite the lineup! He writes: “this isn’t the end of the EV market, but the beginning of a mature one, one with choice in far more segments, serving a variety of different price points.”

Subaru, I tell you! This is the Subaru Trailseeker (fun to see what the companies are naming these things). Photo credit: Patrick George via Inside EVs.

Most of the new EV models look pretty normal. Some are just weird. This one is… a lot. Thankfully, it’s a prototype, and it’s a Jaguar, so you can’t afford it anyway. Photo credit: Jaguar via Inside EVs.

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Deeper Dive

Let’s just admit right now that the major mainstream news networks are not the place to get good climate news. In a previous newsletter, I briefly mentioned the gutting of the Washington Posts’s climate desk. And with Bari Weiss in charge of CBS news, you can bet fossil fuel talking points will dominate any shreds of climate coverage that might persist. The fact is, though, climate reporters working for big media companies have long fought for more extensive and truthful climate coverage, even at a place with great climate writers, like the New York Times.

This week, the intrepid Emily Atkin of Heated interviewed NBC’s Chase Cain—who is no longer with NBC. NBC didn’t fire him; he resigned, “citing burnout from near-constant internal fighting to get important climate stories on air—stories that he says were routinely deprioritized, buried late in newscasts, or cut entirely.”

Atkin examines a recent Media Matters report to contextualize Cain’s frustration. It’s not just his imagination. Climate reporting has declined sharply at the big networks.

Why? An attempt to sail with political winds, obviously. And fossil fuel money. The Media Matters report notes that, as Atkin explains: “Even more stunningly, only 8 percent of all corporate broadcast climate segments mentioned fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change. So even when corporate news networks do cover climate change, they systemically refuse to explain why it’s happening.” [bold original]

This is not about “what the people want.” Most of us do want to know what’s going on—we want the truth. In fact, over half of Americans are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, with a full 25% of them in the “alarmed” category, according to the latest data from Yale Climate Communications’s ongoing Six Americas survey. Despite how things might feel, only about 24% of Americans are dismissive or doubtful. Unfortunately, a bunch of those people are currently in charge of the US government.

What do we do about this? Well, we move our eyeballs to better news sources. I try to follow a variety of reliable, independent climate news sources for you and summarize important stories, with plenty of links for you to follow as you wish. I want you to know where I get my information, and I want to help you find these sources yourself, too.

Meanwhile, thankfully, educators in many school districts can read the tea leaves. This piece by Ariel Gilreath for The Guardian (where good climate reporting lives on!) surveys the rise of climate- and renewable-energy-related curricula, especially in high schools. Educators, take note! Gilreath writes that, despite efforts from the federal government to protect fossil fuel interests and pretend climate change isn’t real:

school systems in both blue and red states are adding classes in fields like clean energy and infusing environmental sustainability lessons in construction, culinary and other career pathways, as part of an effort to prepare students for a workplace altered by climate change.

What’s driving this? Employers! They want young people trained for the jobs of the future, a future that is rapidly upon us. Also…

There’s another reason schools are adding sustainability focused courses, too: A growing number of young people, many of whom have lived through severe hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, are worried about the warming planet and seek ways to alleviate it.

Young people know the score. They would like a survivable future, thank you very much, and they are keenly interested in participating in solutions.

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Refugia Sightings

Monarchs are amazing—they migrate from North America down to Mexico every year, gathering high in the mountains to hang out together in congenial hordes over the winter. Even more amazing, it takes a few generations of butterflies to get all the way down and back. Unfortunately, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, and insecticides, their populations are way down, especially for the Western monarch—Eastern monarchs had a better year last year, at least. The good news is that a company called Cellular Tracking Technologies has invented a teeny-tiny tracker.

In an interview with Steve Curwood, environmental writer Dan Fagin explained “Project Monarch,” which will use this new tracking technology to create a massive citizen-science project. The idea is to help us figure out where monarchs are going along their migratory route and how weather affects their travels. If we know more about them, we can help them survive by creating more refugia along their way, packed with the milkweed they depend on for food and for nurturing their eggs.

Monarchs are extremely light, of course, so a tracker has to be teeny-tiny indeed. Fagin explains the tracker-to-butterfly ratio for this new tech: it’s like “three uncooked grains of rice riding on half of a raisin.”

Can you see the tracker? Looks like a little butterfly backpack. Image credit: Cellular Tracking.

Fagin describes how monarchs navigate using two complementary “biocompass” abilities: a “time-compensated sun compass” plus a sensitivity to earth’s magnetic field. Project Monarch, he suggests, is seeking “a nice, big, robust data set” to help us learn more about their routes and navigation. Regular folks like you and me can download the Project Monarch app on our phones (of course there’s an app) and look for monarchs with regular old Blue Tooth technology, sending data we gather to the project.

A monarch from our yard last summer. We have tons of milkweed, though I still don’t see monarchs nearly as much as I did when I was a kid.

Living Infrastructure. Los Angeles can be a tough place. Hot, so much pavement, pollution, and a history of environmental injustice so that heat, toxic pollution, and lack of green space are worse in socio-economically stressed neighborhoods. However, some people are trying to help neighborhoods create refugia, essentially, through a project called Living Infrastructure:

Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA) and Spherical collaborated with several L.A.-based partners to develop the Living Infrastructure Field Kit as a starting point for L.A. residents. The Field Kit is a free tool for envisioning and planning local living infrastructure projects and securing the funding to get these ideas off the ground.

The project “envisions a path toward resilience, healing, and regeneration.” And toward that end, they center five beautiful principles: honor place, grow participation, embody justice, foster resilience, generate life. Those principles ought to apply in so many contexts, right?

Here’s the nifty video the LA folks produced to show how their kit works.

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Art and Media

My church has its own art gallery—I know, that’s how cool we are. It’s just a hallway that we set up for exhibiting art, usually by congregants. We have, I’m glad to say, an artist-intensive congregation.

Anyway, last week, I was delighted to see a little exhibition in “The Artery,” as we call it, by Helen Bonzelaar, Professor of Art Emerita at my university. Helen serves with me on the Creation Care Team, and she must be in her 80s? (I haven’t asked…) She is still active at church and also as an artist. Lately, she’s been fascinated with: mycelium. Yep, underground fungus.

I asked Helen how she got interested in crocheting mushrooms, and here’s what she told me:

What got me interested in mushrooms and mycelium is coming across a community of puff balls in the Manistee River swamp near my cottage. The community was so wonderful, as all those mushrooms were packed together, each affecting its neighbor. To me it represented a Christian community. Of course.

Then Helen read Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, the memoir in which Simard recounts her groundbreaking (sorry—soil science pun) research over the years proving that the mycorrhizal network does indeed allow trees to share resources and biochemical information. This made Helen think about Christian community, too.

Thanks for letting me share, Helen!

Delightfully whimsical. Note: not meant to represent actual mushroom species.

I’ll leave you with this beautiful piece by my friend Nate Ruah-Bieri on resilience: “on regulating (and acting) in a dysregulating climate.” Nate helpfully sums up the best wisdom on emotional resilience, especially with regard to climate. The essay includes this little video from Tressie McMillan Cottom, in which she explains concisely and persuasively that we feel more exhausted when we do nothing. Even small, positive actions build resilience.

Hope you are finding ways to take positive action with good companions and to connect with our more-than-human companions, too. Till next time, be well.

Welcome to the all-nature edition of this newsletter! Longtime subscribers will know that I tend to cover a lot of clean energy and politics stories, so I sometimes neglect the refugia-in-nature aspect of our remit here. Not today!

OK, fine. I will do one politics/energy story. Then we shall move on, I promise.

In the Christian calendar, we have now entered the season of Lent, a time of reflection, repentance, emptying-to-be-filled with God. People observe Lent in all kinds of ways: abstaining from certain foods, recommitting to a prayer practice, reading spiritual books, memorizing scripture. This year, I’m trying to focus on the kindness of God—praying for kindness among people, but also observing the way this earth is designed for healing. I’m praying for an awakening of human (and divine!) kindness toward an earth that wants to heal.

Lent is the blessed time when my lack of talent in seasonal home decorations can be excused as Lenten asceticism. Ahem.

I hope you’re finding meaningful spiritual practices to sustain you right now, whatever your tradition or commitments. If you like, I invite you to join the lovely folks at the Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat in Iowa for a little online retreat I’ll be doing on Saturday, March 14, from 10-noon Central time (link is to registration page). I’ll be trying out some material from the book I’m working on, Refugia Church.

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This Week in Climate News

We have to talk about that endangerment finding decision from the EPA. We’ll keep it short. The endangerment finding is basically the directive for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. The legal basis for this is a 2007 Supreme Court case. Lisa Friedman and Maxine Joselow of the New York Times explain:

In a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. E.P.A., the court ruled that the agency could regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, as long as these gases were a threat to public health and welfare.

That ruling, based on the science at the time, led to the EPA’s endangerment finding: that is, greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and thus the EPA must regulate them.

On Feb. 12, the EPA rescinded the endangerment finding on the basis of … science? Ha. No. They tried that, and their attempts were ruled illegal (as I covered last time). This time the argument is based on interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The argument is basically “Nunh-uh! The Clean Air Act doesn’t say specifically to regulate greenhouse gases, so we’re not gonna!” Keep in mind the Clean Air Act was originally passed in 1963 and strengthened in 1970.

The EPA’s legal “argument” is based on the following sophisticated line of thinking:

1. Regulations = always bad

2. Corporate profits = must be worshipped

3. Pollution = we don’t care. See #1 and #2.

Truly, this is an ideologically driven attempt to favor fossil fuel profits over Americans’ health.

Of course, a flurry of law suits have been filed by environmental groups, health advocacy groups, and more. This moment from Marianne Lavelle’s coverage in Inside Climate News sums up the next steps:

So is this “final” decision really final?

Not in the least.

The science connecting greenhouse gases to climate change and health impacts is now even more decisive than it was in 2007. The legal argument is flimsy at best. So this will play out in the courts for a while. The danger is at the Supreme Court level, since we know the conservative majority is sympathetic to the “major questions doctrine,” which is the idea that federal agencies may only do specifically what congressionally passed laws order them to do on “major questions.”

Fascinatingly, the oil industry doesn’t necessarily want the endangerment finding rescinded. The American Petroleum Institute (the big industry group) lobbied against it. Why? Because it could ironically make the industry more vulnerable to state-level legal means of holding them accountable—it’s complicated, but explained well here.

What can you do about this? Well, support the lawsuits. I suggest supporting Earthjustice. And of course, nag your federal reps and let them know that you definitely want the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases and if they need to create and pass regulation to that effect: do it.

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Deeper Dive

Now, on to good nature stories! This deep dive will go deep on this theme: when humans work in wise partnership with nature, we can restore ecosystems and biodiversity. Protecting and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity is a key strategy in mitigating the climate crisis and adapting to a warmer world. Healthy ecosystems sequester carbon better and better support all life, including human life. Plus, for people of faith, partnering in earth healing is a redemptive practice that honors the sacredness of life.

The Year the Earth Changed.
Have you seen this documentary about what happened in the animal world in 2020-21, during the pandemic quarantine? I hadn’t seen it until last week. It’s so good!

In short: during the quarantine, animals thrived like crazy all over the globe. Watching penguins and sea turtles and humpbacks and other critters breathe a sigh of relief at the downturn in human noise and commotion felt both tragic (because of how much human activity suppresses creaturely thriving) and wonderful—because it doesn’t take that much to help creatures thrive again. We’ve learned some things about which of our activities are most hurting them. Also, the cinematography is beautiful in this short film (48 minutes), and David Attenborough narrates. So there you go.

The best story, for me, was the one about elephants in India (in the last ten minutes). Elephants had started to ravage a village’s crops, so the people planted an edge-crop of rice and bamboo to give the elephants something to munch on other than their human crops. It worked! The elephants were happy to stay near the forest edge and eat the plants set out for them. “If we love the elephants, they love us back,” says one villager. Reciprocity!

Amazon deforestation down in Brazil. Brazil has been working to reduce deforestation and it seems to be working. This article by Rhett Ayers Butler in Mongabay reports on the latest satellite tracking. Butler writes:

Speaking at a press conference announcing the data last week, Environment Minister Marina Silva said the decline reflects coordinated government action. She noted that most high-deforestation municipalities have now joined federal initiatives aimed at curbing illegal clearing.

Data from INPE’s DETER and Imazon’s SAD detection systems showing deforestation in the Legal Amazon (“Amazonia”). Image by Mongabay [caption from article]

Yangtze River. To address a heavily degraded river and the collapse of the fishing industry there, the Chinese government instituted in 2021 a ten-year fishing ban on the Yangtze. It was a big deal: 200,000 fishers had to be moved and the whole thing cost $3 billion. But it worked. A 70-year decline is quickly healing, with fish biomass already doubled.

Jonathan Tonkin sees in this story two encouraging lessons: “Ambitious political decisions made for people and the environment can pay off” and “When we make space for recovery, ecosystems respond.”

Klamath River. Another good river story! This one celebrates indigenous land stewardship and activism. After decades of advocacy and pressure, four major dams were removed in fall of 2024 from the Klamath River in Oregon and California, freeing the river to support wildlife again, particularly salmon. The results have been immediate and astonishing. Lyric Aquino wrote for Underscore Native News back in October:

At a virtual press conference on Thursday, Oct. 9, Klamath River scientists announced that a year after the last of the dams were removed, river health has begun to bounce back. With salmon swimming upstream, bald eagles flying overhead, and increased bear, beaver, otter and osprey activity, the ecosystem is booming with ecological shifts thanks to the completion of the world’s largest dam removal effort.

Source: Underscore Native News.

Indigenous folks and wildlife and fishery agencies are working together to monitor the comeback and continue to restore vegetation, which helps hold the sediment uncovered by the draining of dam reservoirs. Image credit: Dylan Aubrey, Yurok Tribe, via Underscore News.

Danish millionaire rewilding farmland. Jacob Jelsing, a Danish scientist whose research helped develop GLP-1 drugs, wanted to use his money for good. So he decided to help heal Danish fjords and waterways from agricultural runoff by… buying the farmland. He founded a company to purchase farmland and rewild it. His company Earthbreak, founded with his wife, oversees the projects.

I loved his frank comments, as quoted by Robert Langkjær-Bain in Imagine5, on how wealthy people ought to behave:

[Jelsing is] particularly tough on those who, like himself, have the money to make a sizeable impact. “There’s a lot of wealth in Danish society,” he says. “But the hundred richest Danes… they’re more focused on whether they can move up that stupid ladder instead of actually doing something good with their money.”

@jacobsimonsaysHe’s buying farms to let nature take them over 😎

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This Tik Tok from Jacob Simon seems to be based on the Imagine5 article linked above.

More good news about agrovoltaics.
The research on combining solar farms with agriculture continues to support the enormous benefits of agrovoltaics. From the abstract of a new study:

Agrivoltaics not only promotes more efficient land use but also reduces water demand and carbon emissions by partially shading crops, thereby mitigating the negative effects of climate change on yield and irrigation needs. It is clear that agrivoltaics is a multidimensional solution with far-reaching global implications.

Want some numbers on that? “Agrivoltaics can add 1800+ million tonnes to global crop yields annually.” “Over 2.1 billion people could be fed yearly with surplus AVS crop production.” “Agrivoltaics may generate over $1 trillion in added global agricultural income.”

Image credit: Berkeley Food Institute.

Regenerative farming for local distilling.
In Madison, Wisconsin, State Line Distillery is helping create a “farm-to-glass” process. They’re partnering with local, organic farmers to grow and process the grains for their booze, like winter wheat and barley. Partnering with local farmers gives them an option to grow something other than commodity corn and soy for agribusiness and helps them take better care of their soil. Not only that, but the distillery waste circles back to farmers:

Instead of the waste from the distilling process being thrown out, all of the leftover product is then sent back to farmers to be used for feeding livestock…. By the end of the process, no waste has been produced from the raw materials, and all resources and benefits are kept within communities in the Driftless Region.

This story was written for Inside Climate News by a grad student intern, Sarah Mattalian. Shout out to young climate journalists!

From the State Line Distillery website.

Swift bricks in Scotland.
Finally, this sweet story of people learning to regard creatures as neighbors in order to help them thrive. Swift populations have been down 60% since 1995 in Scotland, and they’re on the “Red List” of threatened and endangered species, so the Scottish parliament just passed a law requiring that new buildings include “swift bricks”—a special brick with a nifty little nesting hole for swifts. They cost about £35 each. According to The Guardian, despite four years of pressure, England and Wales have been balking in passing similar requirements.

Here’s Sam Bentley covering the story with his usual delightful cheerfulness.

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Refugia Sightings

Our sighting today is a work-with-nature story too. Spouse Ron just got back from a jaunt to Florida with the A Rocha USA staff and board. While there, they visited Echo’s North America Impact Center, a global demonstration farm and seed bank. Echo is a wonderful organization that Ron and I have been sending a few spare dollars to every year for decades. Echo equips and empowers people in over 190 countries around the world “by teaching small-scale, sustainable farming methods so families can provide for themselves and their communities. By tackling hunger at the source, we’re growing hope from the ground up.”

They are a Christian organization, combining agroecology, inventiveness, and lots of experimenting. They develop and distribute seeds, experiment with farming techniques, help missionaries help the farmers they serve, and figure out better ways for people to grow locally and culturally appropriate crops with minimal resources. Their original lab and demonstration site is in Ft. Meyers, Florida, though they now have six sites across the globe.

Ron was most excited to learn about Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, or FMNR. (Tony Rinaudo, author of the book The Forest Underground, pioneered this technique.) This is a way for low-resource farmers to manage their land for better yields, long-term sustainability, and climate resilience. The techniques include, for instance, coppicing acacia trees (pruning back the trunks), which sends nutrients back into the tree’s root systems and back into the soil. The tree keeps growing, keeps providing shade for crops, and the farmer can use the coppiced wood for fuel. This practice helps farmers enrich their soil from the ground up rather than from the surface down.

An uncoppiced and coppiced acacia tree on Echo’s demonstration site.

Stacy Swartz of Echo demonstrates an inexpensive, easy-to-make device for planting and fertilizing seed for no-till farming.

Thank goodness for orgs like Echo. They’ve been helping people create and nurture refugia for decades, for people and ecosystems.

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Just for Joy

More nature photos! Thanks to Ron for sharing these images he took while visiting the Orlando Wetlands.

A roseate spoonbill showing off that fabulous pink plumage.

Not to be outdone, the anhinga dazzles in black and white.

This purple gallinule knows that bright green sets off those purple-blue-turquoise shades, not to mention that beak!

Ron assuring me he is keeping an appropriate distance from alligators (still too close for me!).

Back here in Michigan, my daughter and son-in-law’s doggie Anza is hanging out with us this weekend. This particular species, Germanshepherdus operaticus, has a lot to say—or sing, really. She sends her greetings.

As always, thanks for reading. Till next time, be well.

Note: Bold in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

In class this week, I could sense that students are beginning to droop. We’re four weeks into the semester, winter in Michigan grinds on, and there’s a long way to go before spring break. Plus, of course, the barrage of daily news. I get it. We all feel the weight and weariness of the moment.

I’m grateful for you, readers of this newsletter, and for the knowledge that even across the interwebs we can strengthen each other. We all need refugia—places where life persists and our strengths adapt, even amid crisis. I hope you are finding many life-giving refugia, and I hope this newsletter helps a little as we walk on together.

This week, while trying to keep my classes going, I tried to continue making progress on Refugia Church. Most of the manuscript is drafted; now I’m revising. Current state of Chapter 1:

Note the scissors and tape and sticky notes. As I tell my students, sometimes the best way to revise your organization is to literally cut the chapter into pieces and shuffle the pieces around. Gives you a sense of the proportions and how the pieces fit together logically (or not).

In the next two weeks, I’ll be recording an episode with pal Caleb Haynes for the ecoChristian podcast and joining the good folks at Water & Wilderness Church (online) for one of their formation webinars. I’ll let you know when I have links to share the recordings.

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This Week in Climate News

Yes, the weirdly cold weather we’ve experienced in the past month is still related to overall global warming. You probably know that, but just in case you need to explain it to someone, I have a couple handy sources for you. Very, very basically, when the Arctic warms, the polar vortex weakens, and cold air gets pushed south.

This graphic helps:

Source.

David Gelles for the New York Times provides a handy explanation of all the various factors involved. Fundamentally, when the earth and oceans warm overall, the whole weather system becomes wobbly:

Colder colds. Hotter hots. These are the intense bouts of unusual weather that scientists for decades warned would become more common with global warming.

“This is the thing we’ve talked about with climate change,” said Judson Jones, a Times meteorologist and reporter. “The extremes are going to be more extreme.”

Here’s more science from Kate Furby for Michigan Public Radio. Good to see “climate change” reported frankly and clearly as the cause of the exacerbated extremes.

Legal wins. Let’s take some encouragement from a few important legal wins in the past weeks.

That junk DOE report was illegal. I reported in a previous newsletter on how Lee Zeldin of the EPA and his pal Chris Wright of the Department of Energy gathered a panel of five “experts” to write a “report” on the “science” in order to allow the EPA to rescind the endangerment finding—that is, the established legal precedent ruling that greenhouse gases are dangerous and therefore the EPA can regulate them. Besides stacking the panel with known climate denialists, the DOE did not follow any of the procedures requiring transparency and public comment. Well, on January 30, this transparent scheme was ruled illegal. Lisa Friedman reports for the New York Times:

A federal judge on Friday ruled the Energy Department violated the law when Secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming.

The Reagan-appointed judge found that, guess what, “the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 does not allow agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups for the purposes of policymaking.”

Show us the EV charging money. Earlier this year, the current federal regime unlawfully froze $5 billion in congressionally promised money for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program. The money was meant to “build reliable, high-speed electric vehicle charging infrastructure along America’s highways.”

Well, 17 states and several environment organizations sued, and on January 23, they won. From a press release in CleanTechnica:

The Court’s order represents a complete victory for plaintiffs, ensuring that States can move forward with building NEVI-funded charging infrastructure. The order permanently bars the U.S. Department of Transportation from withdrawing States’ funds, canceling implementation plans, or otherwise interfering with the program in violation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

However (of course there is a however), the current budget bill working through Congress cuts $500 million of NEVI funding, buried in a package of cuts. Sigh. When you call your House reps this week, mention that you think this is a nasty trick, especially in light of the federal court ruling.

Who’s on the hook to pay for all this? Taxpayers? The estimated total cost of climate-supercharged extreme weather events since 1980: $3.1 trillion. Source.

Polluters should pay. It’s only fair. But how do you get them to do it? This next story is not a win per se; it’s another attempt to test legal strategies for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable. Holding them accountable is, to say the least, an uphill battle. Hat tip to my state’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, for taking the lead on a lawsuit that uses antitrust law to sue four major fossil fuel firms plus the American Petroleum Institute, spearhead of the industry’s most disingenuous efforts to protect fossil fuel interests. Karen Zraick for the New York Times reports:

A new lawsuit against oil giants over their role in climate change is pursuing a novel strategy that may ring a bell. It’s focusing on high prices and affordability.

The federal antitrust lawsuit, filed Friday by Michigan’s attorney general, accuses the companies of creating a “cartel” and raising costs for people in the state by colluding to stifle renewables, such as wind and solar power, and to suppress information about the dangers of global warming.

Will it work? It won’t be easy. A countersuit by Trump’s DOJ has already been struck down. That helps. But the industry has bottomless resources and armies of lawyers. In other cases, they’re trying to erode state authority and create a legal structure for federal law to override state’s rights to protect their environment. They’re also trying to push a “liability shield” law through Congress.

Meanwhile Illinois is working its own strategy. They’re working on a “superfund bill,” as are numerous other states. Keerti Gopal of Inside Climate News reports:

Illinois lawmakers plan to introduce a climate change superfund bill in the state legislature this session, the latest in a growing number of states seeking to make fossil fuel companies pay up for the fast-growing financial fallout of climate change.

As the costs of global warming rise—in the form of home insurance premiums, utility bills, health expenses and record-breaking damages from extreme weather—local advocates are increasingly pushing states to require that fossil fuel companies contribute to climate “superfunds” that would support mitigation and adaptation.

New York and Vermont have already passed such laws, and numerous other states are working to introduce them. How do regular people feel about polluter pay laws? They want them. Gopal notes that “71 percent of a national sample of likely voters were in favor of oil and gas companies paying a share of climate-related damages.” People understand the fairness of cleaning up your own messes. Especially ones you’ve made billions of dollars creating.

As I’ve noted before in this newsletter, these legal strategies depend on establishing two principles: 1) burning fossil fuels causes climate change, which causes damages, and 2) the industry knew this and has deliberately and systematically lied about it for decades—they’re still lying about it. Both principles are well-documented, well-proven facts. For a grim but necessary summary of the history of fossil fuel industry deception, I recommend Bill McKibben’s newsletter from this week. He describes how the industry’s lying has created a permission structure for the culture of lies spewing from the current federal administration, which functions these days as an obedient handmaiden to the fossil fuel industry.

I’ll conclude this news section with a little salute to the intrepid Emily Atkin, one of many independent climate reporters doing excellent work, even as places like the Washington Post, for crying out loud, cripple climate reporting with layoffs (thanks a lot, Jeff Bezos). Atkin wondered in these past few weeks: how do I keep reporting on climate when we have an authoritarian crisis and state-sponsored violence on our hands? She wrote two posts about this, both worth reading. The second one describes succinctly how authoritarianism and climate change are related. In sum: “Authoritarianism is fueled by fossil fuel dollars.”

Atkin writes:

The fossil fuel industry was one of the largest corporate backers of Donald Trump’s return to power, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, and nearly $20 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Oil and gas companies were also some of the biggest donors to Republicans in 2022 and 2024, helping secure the GOP majority in both houses.

That money helped entrench a political movement openly hostile to democratic norms. This was not an accident. Authoritarians are better for fossil fuel business. If governments actually answered to the public, the transition away toward renewables would likely move much faster.

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Deeper Dive

What can we do? Many things. But here’s a great one: work on the local and state level to push that transition to renewables, especially solar. Third Act—an activist group for older Americans who are “determined to change the world for the better”—is focusing their work this year on a “Simplify Solar” campaign. As I have mentioned before, I am active in Third Act’s faith subgroup, so I get in on all the hot new campaigns. What is Simplify Solar? This:

The purpose of the Simplify Solar Campaign is to harness decentralized, people- powered grassroots advocacy to accelerate and improve local rules for permitting and installing residential rooftop solar in towns and cities across the country.

This week, Third Act released their Simplify Solar Toolkit. I thought I would share it with you.

Here’s the link to the Google doc.

The document is worth a good browse. Did you know that rooftop solar is two to three times more expensive in the US than in other countries? This is mostly due to “unclear, outdated local rules and red tape.” There are tens of thousands of local permitting entities in the US, all but a few with outdated permitting processes designed for a long-ago era. We can fix this! But it’s got to happen one municipality at a time.

The document has basic information, FAQs, and step-by-step guidance for working on the local level. For instance, in case you’re confused about all the categories of solar production, here’s a handy list.

Utility-scale: for electric grid production, usually >5 MW
Commercial-scale: such as on big box stores, large businesses, schools
Community Solar: usually ~2 MW - 5 MW; generating power off-site for use by residents who cannot produce it on their own homes or businessesResidential Rooftop Solar: average size ~8 kW; also includes ground-mount
Plug-In Balcony Solar: smallest, ~0.4 - 1.2 kW, also referred to as “Appliance Solar”, not permanently affixed as a building system.

The Simplify Solar campaign “focuses on fostering ease and affordability nationwide for these latter two forms of production: small Residential Rooftop Solar systems on private homes and businesses, and even-smaller, emergent Plug-In Balcony Solar tech.”

It just means that if we regular folks want solar, we can get it, cheaply and easily.

Image credit: Third Act.

One nice thing about this particular campaign is that it draws on principles across the political spectrum: climate change, yes, but also affordability, energy autonomy, cutting red tape, and so on.

No need to be overwhelmed by the idea of local advocacy. The secret is to do it with others and let organizations like Third Act help with ideas and resources.

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Refugia Sightings

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Rebecca Solnit’s latest essay, “When Love Thy Neighbor is a Cry of Resistance,” in which she ponders the incredible solidarity demonstrated by regular Minnesota citizens, defending their neighbors against the dangerous and even lethal fascism poisoning our nation. Solnit reaches down to the very fundamental dynamics at work here, outlining opposing worldviews beneath the clash between violence and neighborliness.

At the very heart of almost all our crises is a conflict between two worldviews, the worldview in which everything is connected and the world of isolated individualism, of social darwinism and the war of each against each. I call the latter the ideology of isolation.

This is at the heart of the opposition to climate action—acting on climate requires first of all recognition that everything is connected. That truth is offensive and threatening to this worldview which would like to believe in the unimpeded freedom of the elite individual to act without impediment or consideration, be it a rich man in his jet, a landowner to clearcut her forest, or a fossil fuel corporation to produce and promote this destructive material. They endeavor to sever cause from effect, the to deny that the burning of fossil fuel leads to the buildup of methane and carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, thickening the planet’s insulating blanket and generating climate chaos.

Neighborliness, by contrast, Solnit observes, results from understanding our deep interconnection, a principle at the heart of all major faiths, not to mention ecology and indigenous philosophies. How wonderful, then, to see clergy and faith communities redeeming public witness by speaking out and acting in mercy amid the brutality we’ve seen these last weeks.

For example, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, invited all Catholics everywhere to participate in a Holy Hour for Peace, standing against violence and the degrading of human dignity. The Archbishop encouraged Catholics to continue offering acts of mercy and solidarity with those threatened by ICE.

In the Twin Cities, we’ve seen faith groups organize to provide an upswelling of mutual aid. This little article in Civil Eats features eight faith-based organizations supplying people with food while they’re hiding in their homes from ICE and/or unable to work.

Food ready to go out to people in need. Image credit: La Guadalupana Supermercado via Civil Eats

Maybe you have seen some of the moving statements from Lutheran clergy in Minnesota. And I encourage you to read this brief, beautiful, encouraging NPR piece about faith groups providing remarkable public witness. Reporter Jason DeRose writes:

As federal immigration enforcement actions intensify across the Twin Cities, communities of faith are at the forefront of resistance, organizing public witness, mutual aid and political action rooted in long-standing religious commitments.

Faith communities are singing and praying in public, providing all manner of practical support for targeted neighbors, participating in public watches and protests, guarding schools, standing between individuals and ICE agents, holding vigils, placing signs to mark where neighbors were taken by ICE.

And maybe you have seen how clergy from outside the cities converged to bear witness, resist, and assist. This piece in the National Catholic Reporter makes for bracing but inspiring reading. What most thrills me about this story is the way people are working across faiths and denominations to do this work together. We need this coalition approach now more than ever.

It may seem as if none of this has anything to do with refugia or with climate change. But it does. Addressing climate change requires repairing our tattered sense of neighborliness, building community connections, caring about our place with specificity and attention—and understanding of the global dynamics at stake. So whenever we exercise our community muscles, practice mutual care, look after each other in small and great ways, we are creating the kind of refugia spaces where a more just and sustainable way of life can take root. People of faith and conscience have divine mandate, tradition, principle, and courageous practices at hand to help them with this work. And we have each other.

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Ask the Beasts

Unfortunately, there is a severe lack of wildlife stories in this newsletter, so I’ll try to make up for that next time. For now, I think we need a moment to ponder how the “world is filled with the grandeur of God” and how God has infused the natural world with delicacy and loveliness. Sigh. Please enjoy the dulcet delights of owls and herbivores, singing their hearts out in celebration of life.

First, the barred owls. What do you suppose they’re saying to each other? Sounds like they’re complaining about the price of voles these days.

@fifty3_photographyBarred Owl pair at it again. #barredowl #owl #owloftiktok #wildlife #owllover

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And now, the lyrical musical stylings of roe deer, elk, goats, camels, llamas, and other eloquent creatures.

@planetfauna1Weird Herbivore Sounds #herbivore #animals #animalsounds #weirdsounds #weirdanimals

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That’s all for this week. Find courage and be well.

We are facing so much grim and frightening news in this country, I know, and the worst stuff this week is outside the scope of this newsletter. So I invite you, just for a few moments, to enjoy some good news. Good things are happening! Let’s take encouragement from the good things so we can respond to the bad stuff as best we can with renewed faith and strength.

Are you staying warm? Today in West Michigan, the temp is -4F with wind chills of -24F. Even the piles of snow seem to be shivering. Sunny, though! At last! I know this cold is hard on many people and winter storms are threatening much of the country right now. Here, at the moment, though, the outdoors looks very pretty … from inside my warm house. All the trees are beautifully laden with snow poofs. Spruces with snow on them! The best.

I hope you appreciate that I actually ventured outside to snap this photo! Brrrrrr.

To help us get through the Michigan winter, our friends over at Plainsong Farm staged a little refugia shenanigan: wassailing! About 30 of us gathered around a fire, drank hot cider, sang and read some scripture, and prayed for the light to return. We encouraged the orchard trees—and the birds that protect them from insect pests—by hanging pieces of toast on branches (we toasted the trees, ha ha!) as well as pine cones smeared with peanut butter and bird seed. And we performed our own little mummer’s play, in fine medieval fashion. We wrote down all the evils we want defeated this year and attached these pieces of paper to a homemade dragon. Then we enacted a convincing dragon defeat! We engaged, you might say, in holy play, a fun and cathartic way to express our longing for justice and peace. Here’s a quick video of how the drama went down.

Thanks to our friend Dave Celeskey for playing the role of our village’s hapless king! Thanks to the amazing Emily Ulmer for planning the shenanigan with her team at Plainsong Farm.

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This Week in Climate News

Let’s celebrate some climate wins, even as our denier-in-chief continues to humiliate the US on the world stage. Friends, the transition to clean energy surges on globally. Science magazine named renewable energy 2025’s “Breakthrough of the Year.” We no longer need to depend on virtue to motivate this shift. Now we have practical motivations on our side: wind/solar/batteries are now cheaper, faster-to-scale, and offer greater energy security than fossil fuels. As Science editors remarked, “That change in motivation may be the most important breakthrough of all, ensuring that this year’s inflection points are just the beginning.”

We’ll sum that up with a happy chart from the Science article, and then on to more wins.

1. Lots of reports this week about India and China shifting away from coal—finally. That Science article has an amazing spread on China’s overall shift toward green energy. But here’s a quick Fix the News summary of the coal situation:

   Coal power falls in both India and China. In 2025, coal-fired electricity generation fell simultaneously in India and China for the first time since 1973. India cut coal power 3% and China 1.6% as record solar, wind and storage additions outpaced rising demand. Together, these two countries account for roughly 40% of global annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and industry. Guardian [bold original]

2. India, traditionally another big carbon emitter, is shifting their energy mix rapidly toward solar. Bill McKibben covered this story thoroughly in his newsletter this week. This chart helps illustrate that, while China is ahead of India, India is moving up the solar ramp more steeply than China did.

   

3. California is leading the way toward a clean energy economy in the US. Fix the News summarizes the most recent stats from Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson:

   Wind, water and sunshine met more than 100% of California’s electricity demand for eight straight days in January, an unprecedented run (so much for the winter doldrums). Compared with 2023, gas generation is down 66%, battery output is up 387%, solar up 127%, and total WWS generation increased 29%. Mark Jacobson

4. The senseless stop-work order on major US offshore wind projects has been lifted by the courts, at least temporarily. From a Politico article:

   Three different judges — including one appointed by Trump — last week allowed construction to resume on multibillion-dollar offshore wind projects off the coasts of New England, New York and Virginia that the Interior Department was trying to idle.

4. The High Seas Treaty is now in effect. Sachi Kitajima Mulkey reports for the New York Times (free link):

   An international agreement to safeguard marine life is now in effect. Known as the High Seas Treaty, it represents the first time that international waters, which lie outside of any country’s jurisdiction and cover nearly half the globe, can be protected.

   The United Nations discussed the treaty for more than two decades, and formal negotiations began in 2017. The final text makes it possible for countries to create environmentally protected zones in international waters and includes requirements for new ocean industries.

5. Finally, smart people are working out the gnarly details for making a clean energy grid scalable, secure, locally controlled, and resilient. I found this episode of the wonderfully wonky Volts podcast so encouraging. I keep thinking about it. Host David Roberts deftly interviews Swedish tech entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson, who explains, clearly and succinctly, how we can and must shift our energy grids from giant hub systems to a network system more like how the internet is organized. That is, instead of only producing a bunch of power at big source points that we all try to connect to, we distribute power production (with millions of large and small production points) and create an internet-like decentralized system, where we’re all producing and we’re all distributing in nested and interconnected domains. Folks, I can’t explain this well. But listen to the episode! This system model is workable, it’s coming, and it’s so much safer, more efficient, and more resilient. I want it now!

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Deeper Dive

When people ask me “what can I do about climate change?” of course I encourage them stay informed, join with others who care, and nag their local, state, and federal reps constantly. But as far as our personal actions go, the two biggest priorities are 1) go electric as much as you can, and 2) eat less meat and dairy.

Let’s address that last one, because RFK Jr, our tragically unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services, just released his agency’s new Food Pyramid, which encourages us all to … eat more meat and dairy. This new pyramid is based on the “science” from a new report. Here’s all you need to know about that report: “Five of the nine authors of the new document acknowledged that they have received funding from the beef and dairy industries in the past, including from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the country’s biggest beef lobby” (from a good article in Inside Climate News). Possibly also relevant to the new guidelines: RFK loves beef tallow.

Completely aside from the health implications for a nation plagued with heart disease, these new recommendations ignore the climate impacts of our massive consumption of meat and dairy. Cows, you may know, belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas. More significant, however, are the environmental impacts related to land use. Raising livestock is extremely resource-intensive compared to raising plant-based proteins. Cows, especially, require tons of land and water as well as tons of feed, which also requires land to grow. The confined animal feeding operations that “finish” our beef also grossly pollute both land and water. Beyond the US, our ginormous global appetite for beef incentivizes deforestation abroad.

That’s a rough overview. This chart from Our World in Data dramatically illustrates the relative resource use of various agricultural products.

Emily Atkin’s piece on the new US guidelines concisely outlines the environmental and corruption issues raised with this “eat meat” plan. No matter how many of us wisely ignore the guidelines, they still become a government payout scheme for the beef and dairy industries:

The new inverted food pyramid isn’t merely a poster meant to guide individual choices. It is a set of policy guidelines that directs billions of public dollars toward specific foods, and the agricultural system that supplies them. It determines what food gets bought for school meals, child-care centers, senior-meal programs, and WIC food packages. It guides what foods the government buys for the military and federal cafeterias. It determines how SNAP educates low-income families about “healthy choices.”

Are we poor Americans in danger of not getting enough protein, though? Hardly. Atkin writes:

Americans already eat far more beef and dairy than most of the world. The average American consumes roughly 57 pounds of beef a year—nearly three times the global average—and the United States is the largest consumer of dairy on Earth.

From Our World in Data. Not sure what’s up with Portugal and Spain; lots of fish and pork I guess.

We do not need to be utter purists about giving up meat and dairy. Even if we just switch half of our protein consumption to plant-based sources, we would make a huge difference. Back in 2024, Frida Garza of Grist reported on a study quantifying that difference just within the US:

In its latest report, the Good Food Institute, or GFI — a nonprofit think tank that supports the growth of alternative proteins — calculates that if Americans replaced 50 percent of their animal protein consumption with plant-based options, then 47.3 million fewer acres of cropland would be needed to grow the same amount of protein.

That’s a land area the size of North Dakota.

If all this inspires you, as an act of defiance and dietary virtue, to try some plant-based dishes, allow me to offer my standard tofu protocol, perfected through much trial and error.

1. Press the tofu for ten minutes (yes, this is essential; I have a nice bamboo press).

2. Make the marinade: 2 T. soy sauce, 1 T. sesame oil, 1 T. rice vinegar, 1 T. maple syrup, juice of half a lime, 1 t. chopped garlic, 2-3 t. of gochujang paste (or more if you want it spicy).

3. Cut the pressed tofu, either in 1-cm cubes or in 1-cm-thick slabs. Marinate for at least ten minutes. If you want, after marinating, you can coat the slabs in panko bread crumbs!

4. Bake on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet at 400F for 20 minutes.

5. Ta da! You now have tasty tofu to serve any way you like. It’s umami-ed and firm without being too spicy. Enjoy!

More on this topic:

Reducing overconsumption of meat and dairy globally could cut one-sixth of emissions.

Some actual science on diet and sustainability in the US.

Grass-fed beef is not really better for climate, alas.

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Refugia Sightings

Every week, I see dozens of good conservation stories. Here’s my favorite for this week: London is becoming a stork refugium. As a person of half-Dutch heritage, I’m fond of storks, those lovely, gangly birds that famously nest on chimneys and rooftops. They’re considered good luck in the Netherlands.

Well, according to this article by Patrick Barkham in The Guardian, storks have been “extinct as breeding birds in Britain since 1416.” But thanks to a Rewilding East London project, they’re being reintroduced to an area called Dagenham. This is after successful stork reintroduction in nearby Knepp about six years ago. And guess what? London will be bringing in beavers (of course) to help with further habitat restoration that will keep the storks well fed with frogs and other critters.

Image credit: RA Chalmers Photography/Alamy via The Guardian.

Thanks to reader Scott Klinger for this next refugia sighting. Scott wrote me a while ago to tell me about good things happening on Prince Edward Island, where he and his wife visit every summer. Scott wrote about two examples of how PEI is working toward climate resilience: waste management and clean energy independence. PEI is demonstrating how small-scale refugia can prototype effective adaptation strategies that can then spread to other places.

First, waste management. Here’s what Scott reported after a recent visit:

Given it is an island with a high water table, they’ve been on the issue of waste disposal for decades. They have an extensive commercial composting program. Last week we put out three times as much compost as landfill trash. In fact, the only things that went to the landfill were the plastic wrapping around things like toilet paper rolls, and foil packs of coffee. Used paper towels and tissue are composted, as are shellfish shells, meat, and bones. They have a cool interactive recycling tool, very useful especially for the visitors that swell summertime populations. Summer guests are expected to cooperate and their landlords can be cited if they don’t.

Scott also wrote about Summerside, PEI, a mighty little town that had the foresight way back in 2005 to establish a long-term strategic plan for energy independence. Traditionally dependent on imported fossil fuels, they wanted to go 100% green.

Scott, is PEI always this gorgeous?? Image credit: travel.com.

As this feature in Green Energy Futures explains, the town started toward their goal in 2009 with their own 12-megawatt wind farm. Now they have solar, battery storage, a heat-pump program, and more. In about 20 years, they’ve gone from no local energy generation to providing 62% of their own power, right in town. Summerside is a leader in Canada in demonstrating how local energy generation can lower costs and enhance energy independence.

This video explains the details, including how Summerside is using a version of the programmed microgrid technology described in the Volts podcast mentioned above. The microgrid keeps an energy buffer in the battery system and disperses it as needed when energy is not coming directly from wind or solar into their grid.

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Where to Find Good News

For my final flourish today, I want to offer a short list of sources for good news, especially on climate. I try to keep up with all these and relay the juiciest tidbits to you. But if you want to curate your news feeds with some counterweights to all that algorithm-driven outrage and doom, you could sample from this list.

Fix the News. Based in Australia. They cover a host of good-news categories from around the world. They always feature conservation and energy news.

Hope is a Verb. The Fix the News podcast, in case you want to listen to good news on the go.

Volts hosted by David Roberts. I mention this fantastic podcast all the time. This is where I go to hear from smart, principled, generous people doing good work on energy around the world.

What if We Get it Right with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Another podcast to help us “meet” people doing amazing work. Tends toward the positive whenever possible.

The Weekly Anthropocene by Sam Matey-Coste. You think I produce a lot of prose?? This guy absolutely dwarfs my output. He summarizes and analyzes climate news globally and tends to take an optimistic approach.

Talking Climate by Katharine Hayhoe. Hayhoe always includes good news, not-so-good-news, and ways to take action.

Jes Craven on Sunday. Jes Craven’s Chop Wood Carry Water newsletter mostly covers political news and activism, but on Sunday she puts out a good-news-only newsletter that has helped save my sanity. She always includes good climate news. Based in California but covers the US.

Alaina Wood. She’s on all the platforms, but I follow her on TikTok. She has been doing good climate news for years. Based in Tennessee but covers the globe.

Sam Bentley. I follow him on TikTok, too, but here’s his YouTube channel. If you go to this video and watch from time index 4:00-5:00, you’ll see that stork story with video! He’s a Brit based in Birmingham.

There are more, of course. I’ll end with British physicist Simon Clark, who doesn’t limit himself to good news, but always tells it straight with science-based and cited sources. Plus he’s fun to watch. This video sums up the 2025 climate news very well.

Before I go, one more thing. Reggie says hi. Thanks to reader Steve Roels who perceived, even through the interwebs, the true nature of my newly adopted beaver friend. Steve wrote:

That refugia-making beaver looks like a Reginald to me. He goes by Reggie, though, because he has a hard hat and needs a construction-worker-style name. And his best friends just call him “Reg,” in recognition of his expert ability to regulate water flows. He has a high opinion of his contributions to the ecosystem and refers to himself as the “gnaw that starts the carbon sink” (those familiar with baseball legend Reggie Jackson will get the joke here).

So there you go. Reggie says hi.

As you can see, Reggie is not, at the moment, working on ecosystem engineering. It’s cold. He’s mostly watching nature documentaries.

That’s all for this week. Be well, stay warm and safe. Take courage. See you next time.

As always, bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Hello, friends. It’s been a rough couple weeks so far in 2026, I know. We’ll deal with some of that in a moment. First, let me offer my prayer that 2026 will bring a turning point toward renewed justice, kindness, and hope for all of us and for this planet. Do you happen to know about St. Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German Benedictine abbess, recently honored as a Doctor of the Church? One of her favorite words was viriditas—greening, the divine creative force in all life. I wish us all viriditas this year. Watch this 30-second video and pray with me, in whatever way is right for you, toward healing viriditas this year:

A few fun things now before we get into the news.

First, I thought you might appreciate a Christmas gift I received this year. If you’ve been reading this newsletter, this little fella will not surprise you.

I mean, come on. How cute! And he came with a hard hat and a little scarf that says “Ecological Engineer.” Thanks to spouse Ron for figuring out a way to add the accessories. Any suggestions for names?

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You might be amused to know that, to demonstrate the full extent of my extreme geekitude, I also received the newly released, three-volume prose edition of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser’s 1590/96 poem. On the tiny chance that you’re intrigued: it’s great!

Next, I’m happy to share with you a lovely conversation I had with Victoria Loorz, founder of the Wild Church Network and author of Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us Into the Sacred. Loorz hosts the Holy Wild podcast, and here’s the just-released episode where she and I got to chat.

In other refugia-related news, I am happy to announce that I spent some good time over the holidays polishing up my new website! It’s been live for a few months, but I finally got around to updating my speaking dates and the dreaded resources page (I’ve been procrastinating on that for [*mumble mumble mumble*]). Also, I have updated the website with all my essays on climate, popular culture, church life, spirituality—all kinds of stuff—that I have been writing for the past 14 years for the Reformed Journal. It’s all there! And I’m even working through them to make sure links and images and tags are all working. Check it out! (And if you notice anything not working, let me know.)

Finally, many thanks to friend and fellow Substacker Christy Berghoef for sending so many new subscribers my way. Welcome, all new subscribers! To thank Christy, I invited her to send a favorite pet photo. Christy says, “Here’s a picture of my favorite mama cat, Bob Ross (a stray who we mistook for a male... until there was suddenly a litter of kittens in our closet! 🤪)” Bob, you sneaky girl!

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This Week in Climate News

The whole Venezuela thing. You’ve read about it. You know the US’s actions there were illegal (bypassing Congress, e.g.) and set a terrible precedent for what nations can do to other nations. And of course, the pretext offered by the White House (drugs?) is nonsense. It’s about oil. The current president is obsessed with oil, and Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves (of the dirtiest oil there is), and Trump wants it. So he takes it, hoping to hand it over as a big, slimy gift to his pals in the US oil industry.

But what if… they don’t want it?

As usual, what Trump thinks of as business genius is actually a heaping debacle of foolishness, based on a past now fading away. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is a mess. Reporting by Marianne Lavelle and Georgina Gustin for Inside Climate News explains why oil majors will be reluctant to dive into that mess. Describing how Trump met with oil execs before the raid, Lavelle and Gustin write:

The prior outreach to the oil industry provides crucial context to Trump’s assurances that the United States’ dramatic raid and capture of Maduro on Jan. 3 would be followed by an oil-fueled rebuilding of the Venezuelan economy. Trump’s rosy forecast has led some to characterize the Maduro operation as a gift to the industry that helped bankroll the president’s return to the White House. But industry experts say oil companies have reason to view the Venezuela opportunity more as a leftover holiday white elephant gift than as a coveted prize.

While the nation sits on an estimated 303 billion barrels of oil, the world’s largest reserves by far, experts say it would take billions of dollars and many years to return production to its previous levels.

Don’t look for the oil majors to go rushing in there and start pumping and refining oil. They realize that would be financially risky, especially because demand is softening globally:

World oil production currently exceeds global demand, which is flat or weakening for a number of reasons, including a slow economy, abundant supply from U.S. fracking and the uptake in electric vehicles around the world. Global oil prices this week were trading at $57 per barrel, the lowest level since early 2021, when the world economy was just beginning to emerge from the pandemic slowdown. As a result, experts predict oil companies will be gravitating toward low-cost, low-risk opportunities for investment.

On the other hand, maybe the oil industry’s shrug is more of a ruse. That’s what at least one expert thinks. Either way, as one interviewee for the ICN article quipped, “It’s not a climate bomb if nobody demands it.” So there’s our job: keep reducing demand. As Bill McKibben wrote in his Substack this week, the geopolitical ugliness and violence over oil we have known for decades—that is one of our most compelling motivations to transition to clean energy.

Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66944

How about some stories about helping that transition along?

Offshore wind. In December, the US Department of the Interior issued stop-work orders on five offshore wind farms in development off the East Coast. Why? Um… security? Officials have offered no good reason. But of course we know that Trump hates wind. Hates it hates it hates it. Well, the wind development companies are suing for a preliminary injunction to continue work while their litigation goes through the courts. This short article by Lisa Friedman in the New York Times covers the story succinctly. She writes:

At stake overall is about $25 billion of investment in the five wind farms. The projects were expected to create 10,000 jobs and to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses.

Revolution Wind is more than 87 percent complete, and the company has already installed all offshore foundations as well as 58 of 65 wind turbines. Empire Wind is more than 60 percent complete and is slated to deliver power to the grid in 2027.

Stop-work orders are one thing, permit bans are another. Trump banned wind development permits on federal land by fiat the day he took office. But in early December, a federal judge “struck down the Trump administration’s ban on federal permits for wind energy projects in what supporters said was an important victory for the embattled industry.”

Thanks to the attorneys general in 17 states who brought the lawsuit. Dumb that we have to fight to move toward cleaner, cheaper renewables, but this is where we are. For now.

Global solar advances. I’ve covered the story of Pakistan, where regular citizens have used cheap, imported Chinese solar panels to improve access and slash costs for electricity. Pakistan now generates 25% of its electricity from solar, with most of coming from regular people installing their own panels. In South Africa, according to reporting by Somini Sengupta in the New York Times, solar is beginning to take hold in South Africa. This is part of a remarkably rapid move toward solar in at least 20 countries across the African continent. All made possible by: the Chinese solar/battery industry. Sengupta writes:

Tariffs have thwarted [Chinese solar panel imports] somewhat in the United States and Europe, but they’re finding enormous new markets in Africa, where around 600 million people lack reliable electricity. Across the continent, solar imports from China rose 50 percent the first 10 months of 2025, continuing a trend, according to a review of Chinese export data by Ember, a British energy tracking group.

The interesting part of the South Africa story is the way the actions of regular citizens interact with the country’s utility system. Thanks to bad management and infrastructure, energy in South Africa has been expensive and unreliable. When people start slapping up their own panels, though, their actions create economic ripples that compel the utility to shift to grid-scale solar. So now…

The utility has removed onerous licensing requirements on private installations. It has allowed people to sell power to the grid. And it has tweaked its rates so that customers pay a fixed charge in addition to the cost of any power they consume. Essentially, people pay simply to be connected to the grid, a standard feature in other nations that’s new in South Africa.

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Hunh. I wonder…. Could we do some of these things in the US? Yes, we could. Remember the power of “subnational actors”—that means states and municipalities. The League of Climate Voters has helpfully gathered a year-end good news report that highlights progress in states toward clean energy and energy affordability. States featured: Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, and Oregon. But there’s more! Here is the full report.

And here’s some encouraging news from the report:

These policies are working. This year, the U.S. Climate Alliance – a bipartisan partnership between governors representing 24 states and more than half of the country’s population – released data showing that collectively, Climate Alliance states have reduced greenhouse gas emissions 24% below 2005 levels while increasing their GDP by 34%. Ten of those states also reached their goal, set in 2013, to reach 3.3 million electric vehicle sales by 2025. Additionally, a recent analysis found that nearly all states with a higher-than-average amount of wind and solar power are paying lower-than-average electric bills.

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Deeper Dive

For the moment, I’m going to address only briefly the current regime’s petulant and self-sabotaging decision to remove the US from 66 international climate negotiations groups, including the UNFCCC and the IPCC, the big ones. None of this is a surprise, but it’s still a blow. Our friend Marianne Lavelle at Inside Climate News invited a bunch of sane US climate leaders to make appropriately fuming statements about this. Here’s one good one among many:

The United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC. Every other nation is a member, in part because they recognize that even beyond the moral imperative of addressing climate change, having a seat at the table in those negotiations represents an ability to shape massive economic policy and opportunity. A future administration that understands the stakes can rejoin the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change just as Trump decided to pull the country out of it. Fortunately, the U.S. is bigger than Washington. Action from cities, states, the private sector and other nations will become even more important to help prevent the worst that climate change will throw at us and protect the world’s most vulnerable populations. — Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council

Federal science funding… saved? Kind of? As you know, it’s been a very rough year for scientific research and evidence-based decision making. I watch these poor scientists suffer, and watch the sabotage of US scientific leadership, and it breaks my heart. I want to offer a little good news here, but I admit I am cautious—we’ve all been bruised by good news falling apart. Nevertheless, here we go.

It looks like Congress, in its flurry to mop up budget negotiations after last year, could pass a bill to preserve most federal science funding after all, for example proposing only a 4% cut to EPA funding. Liza Gross reports for Inside Climate News:

In a step toward heading off a government shutdown when a temporary funding agreement expires at the end of January, appropriators in both the Senate and House of Representatives released a bipartisan spending package Monday morning [Jan. 5] that kept the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency largely intact.

The spending package would fund several federal agencies and scientific bodies, including the EPA, departments of Interior and Energy and the National Science Foundation through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

The House has now passed their version of the bill, as of Thursday. Kimberly M. S. Cartier for the science journal Eos explains how this bill is a rebuke against Trump’s proposed cuts:

In May 2025, President Trump released a budget request to Congress that proposed slashing billions of dollars in federal science funding. However, during the many rounds of meetings throughout the year, appropriators in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle seemed disinclined to follow the proposed budget, including when it came to funding for climate research, clean energy initiatives, environmental protections, and other topics that run counter to administration priorities.

Even so, US science infrastructure is reeling from all the pummeling, and much damage is already done. Plus, this bill isn’t even through the Senate yet, let alone signed into law. So please feel free to call your federal reps and tell them: Yes, you support refusal to cut federal science funding!

Blessings and strength to US scientists. I highly recommend reading this little essay by Charissee Ridgeway, Senior Communications Advisor at the Environmental Protection Network (EPN)—an organization made up of mostly former EPA scientists. She outlines the damage already done to our federal science infrastructure, but then offers this encouraging declaration:

Equally real, though far less visible amid the daily barrage of bad news, has been the determined, coordinated resistance. Communities, scientists, current and former EPA staff, lawyers, unions, states, and nonprofit organizations have relentlessly pushed back on the Trump EPA’s harmful agenda. That pushback has slowed, weakened, and in some cases stopped parts of this toxic agenda.

Throughout 2025, we saw again and again that public engagement, expert advocacy, and sustained pressure matter.

As 2026 dawns, this collective effort has laid a foundation for something critical—the turning of the tide. We have seen that progress is possible once we undo the public disengagement that polluters have been counting on.

Ridgeway goes on to offer a number of encouraging signs, including, “The public did not sign up for this. And they are catching on.” She urges us all to keep paying attention. So here’s our quote of the day: “sustained public attention is one of the few forces powerful enough to slow even the most aggressive deregulatory agenda.”

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Refugia Sightings

We certainly need something lovely and joyful after all that deploring and struggling, so here you go: green buildings! I mean, literally green. Every time I see more examples of these urban greening initiatives, I feel more hopeful about the world we can build. Enjoy this video of five really cool buildings more or less encrusted and/or filled with plants. And if your town has some cool urban greening things going on, let me know.

@goinggreenmedia5 BUILDINGS INSPIRED BY NATURE🌿 Follow us if you want to see more projects like this! Hi everyone! As our first post of 2026 we want to highlight some of the incredible buildings that we visited last year that are taking inspiration from nature. We are tired of seeing concrete, steel and glass boxes. We need to create buildings which can respond to their environment, regulate temperature naturally, harvest rainwater, and support biodiversity—moving beyond static monuments to create living, breathing organisms that serve both people and planet. The buildings featured include: 5️⃣The California Academy of Sciences This green building is the only place on Earth with a rainforest, aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum—all under one living roof. This is the California Academy of Sciences, also known as the world’s greenest museum. 4️⃣Media TIC, Barcelona This building can breathe! It saves a huge amount of energy thanks to these cushions which fill with nitrogen in response to sunshine to insulate the building. 3️⃣Kö-Bogen II, Düsseldorf This building in Germany is covered in over 30,000 trees that help absorb carbon and pollutants from the center of the city. 2️⃣The Gilder Center, New York This building in New York immerses you in nature! The Gilder Center’s walls were designed to mirror the stunning shapes of canyon formations. It even has a Butterfly Vivarium with over a 1000 butterflies and an insectarium with a supersized beehive! 1️⃣San Francisco Public Transit Center This rooftop park is in the middle of San Francisco, it is over a quarter of a mile long and is 70 feet above ground level! The building serves as a public transit center and helps keep the city center cool. Let us know which one is your favourite ⬇️

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Next, I commend to you this talk from climate scientist and Episcopal deacon Lisa Graumlich on her new Substack. Gathering together to inspire and encourage each other is a healthy refugia practice, and this is exactly what was going on in Seattle where Graumlich gave this talk at St. Mark’s Cathedral. In her keynote, she urges the need for spiritual transformation, not just technological solutions, offering a beautiful gathering of wisdom across spiritual traditions, a celebration of thin places, and a call to prophetic witness and collective conversion.

“Terra” in Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, where Graumlich delivered her talk. Source.

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Bonus Goodies

Thanks to my Aunt Carol who noticed my little story about mycoremediation in the last newsletter along with my mention of Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life. She sent me this video, demonstrating a little project that only a mycologist could cook up. Here, Sheldrake allows fungi to eat his own book, and his friend Michael Prime has … well, I’ll let Shekdrake explain it:

The electrodes record the bioelectric activity of the fungus alongside its galvanic response (like a lie detector). These data streams control a tunable oscillator. Michael Prime uses filters to shape the raw oscillator signal, but the fluctuations in pitch and rhythm that you hear are a real-time sonic representation of the activity of the fungus as it eats the book.

And then, Sheldrake plays a jazzy little Latin tune over the fungus rhythm. I mean… wow.

As a final bonus, I offer you an essay that has virtually nothing to do with nature or climate change. I found this one when I was working through my old essays on my new website. I wrote it in 2022 and I wonder if you might find it amusing, especially if, like me, you were seized over the holidays with the urge to purge your closets and cupboards and storage rooms—and found yourself pondering, “At What Point do I Get Rid of This?” :

That storage room is already a shrine to stuff I can’t part with. I have a box of baby clothes down there from my first child (born 1993) carefully folded and packed in a plastic bin… for a grandchild? This will work beautifully if I do indeed someday have a grandchild and if that child is a girl born in the spring. What are the odds of that? Let’s not even talk about the fact that I have irrationally insisted on saving our children’s crib, a 1990s model that our babies survived just fine but is now considered instantly lethal to infants.

Alas, I think our storage room is actually worse now than it was in 2022, when this photo was taken.

Whew! All right. Hang in there, friends. Stay resolute. Work and pray. See you in two weeks. Till then, be well.

Note: As usual, bold type in quotations is added unless otherwise indicated.

Warm holiday greetings to all! In past years, I’ve taken this week off, but today I’m going to strew this holiday edition newsletter with good cheer in the form of 12 short, sweet, randomly assorted climate/faith-related stories. Think of this as a stocking full of stuffers. Or as a way to observe the Twelve Days of Christmas with a little bon-bon for each day. (No worries if you don’t celebrate Christmas—everyone needs bon-bons!) Next time, I’ll return to my usual news-focused format.

Cake as craft project. I’m about to embark on my annual bûche de noël experiment. This was last year’s. We do not eat the pine cones, holly, or spruce sprigs—just the chocolatey parts.

1. First, if you still need a gift for someone, or if you’re in post-holiday bargain-shopping mode, the Refugia Faith audio book is 50% off until January 1! I didn’t narrate it myself—I hope to narrate Refugia Church, we’ll see—but just click on the link for a deal.

2. Next, some inspiring words from Heather Cox Richardson to keep up our courage after a deeply dispiriting year in this country. Richardson appeared as the guest for the Third Act general meeting this month. (In case you’re unfamiliar, Third Act organizes people over age 60 to strengthen democracy and work for climate action.) Richardson’s interview runs from time index 9:00-24:00, but her reflections on what older women are contributing to society right now begins at time index 17:50, and her inspiring conclusion starts at 21:00.

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3. Speaking of Third Act, the “working group” I serve with, Third Act Faith, has a freshly organized resource page. So many goodies to explore! Third Act Faith is intentionally interfaith, which has made working with the Coordinating Committee especially delightful. We seek to gather people of all faiths, including those who identify as spiritual though not associated with a traditional faith, and join our creativity and witness together for justice and healing. The marvelous Jane Ellen Nickel has just sorted our Third Act Faith online resources for easy perusing, with essays, videos, newsletters, event recordings, and more. She has also sorted out our resources for spiritual communities, including ideas for eco-themed worship and links to resources from the Deyanu Jewish folks, the EcoJesuits, Green Muslims, Lutherans, Quakers, Buddhists, and more.

   Do you know of resources that are not on the website, but should be? Let me know and I’ll pass the info along! And if you are over 60-ish, head over to this website and click on the “join” button to join us!

   

   Third Act Faith members in Grass Valley, CA, take part in the National Day of Action on 3.21.23. (From the TAF website.)

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4. Here’s a refugia sighting for you: the EcoFaith Recovery folks in Portland, Oregon. Their mission is to equip leadership and support faith communities toward this vision: “We envision a collaborative, equitable, and regenerative world — beyond fossil fuels, industrial agriculture, deforestation, and systemic injustice — in which our interconnectedness with the whole community of creation is fully embraced, and all peoples are seen, named, loved, and flourishing together.” They support interns and pursue a dizzying array of initiatives, from Electrify Everything events to book studies to advocacy support. In fact, I was amazed to discover they have developed a whole set of resources for Refugia Faith book studies! Goodness! Thank you! And here is Rev. Dr. Janet Parker’s reflection on “Becoming Refugia Communities” on the EcoFaith Substack.

   

5. May this be the year of balcony solar! If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know I’ve been covering the rise of balcony solar (or plug-in solar) around the world, and you know that we are starting to see policy revisions working through several state legislatures to make balcony solar legal and easy in the US. This is a way to build a clean energy infrastructure from the grass roots up, even while we continue working toward grid-scale clean energy. This PBS News Hour story segment (mentioned in Bill McKibben’s Substack) explains it all beautifully.

6. If you are part of a faith community pondering whether you could do solar on your house of worship, check out Solar Faithful. They can help you! Here’s how they describe their mission: “Solar Faithful brings technical expertise and client-friendly financing to simplify participation in a just, clean-energy transition for faith-based organizations. Our work prioritizes serving: Historically disadvantaged people, Low-income communities, People of all faiths.” I love their vision, too: “We envision a world where faith-based organizations lead the equitable transition to renewable energy—empowered with solutions that strengthen their role as pillars of community care, sustainability, and resiliency.” I couldn’t figure out how to share their newsletter, so I guess you’ll just have to go to their website and subscribe.

   

   From Solar Faithful’s most recent newsletter, yet another story of a church starting a solar project. “Pastor Griffin of Pilgrim Baptist Church and Pastor Glass of Lord of Lords Ministries holding up their fingers to indicate who was the first black church in Detroit to install solar and who was the third.”

7. Also from Solar Faithful’s latest newsletter, good news about the IRA tax credits foolishly snatched out from under us: faith communities can still take advantage, with a little savvy and timing. Here’s what the newsletter says:

   The 2025 Congressional budget has moved up the sunset of the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC) from 2032 to 2027. The ITC provides 30% of solar project costs, including panels, inverters, labor, and even energy storage. Through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, nonprofits including houses of worship can now avail themselves of these tax benefits.

   Although the timeline for this incentive has decreased, there are still two ways to secure the 30%:

   1. Start construction by July 4, 2026 - Offers 4 years to complete the project.

   2. Finish and activate your system by December 31, 2027 - Requires a shorter construction window, more domestic content, and the same incentive.

   What You Should Do Now

   • Assess feasibility– Send us your electric bill and we will help review your energy needs and site requirements.

   • Start permitting early– Delays here are the most common holdup.

   • Lock in equipment & labor– Avoid price hikes and supply bottlenecks as deadlines near.

   Contact us if you would like to discuss this further so we can help you navigate these changes and assess your options. [bold original]

8. After I read the fascinating Entangled Life by mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, I put the book down and whispered: “Fungi rule the world.” I still believe that as a biological truth, and here’s more evidence: “mycoremediation.” This is the developing science of using fungi to heal contaminated soil from all kinds of pollutants.