Sustain What?

Here’s the video and podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with two Maine-based educators and a superstar student taking on tough problems in their communities that have links to the wider world. Learn all the background in my “curtain raiser” post: We were joined for a bit by Radhika Iyengar , a colleague of mine during my time at Columbia University. She’s working on an online course w...

Here’s the curtain raiser post with all the relevant links related to Jon Allsop’s new book, What is Journalism For? , and Karen Bordeleau’s New Bedford Light newsroom, which made national waves with its vivid coverage of an atrocious abuse of force by immigration officers in New Bedford several days ago. Here are two illuminating moments: Jon Allsop on how an “emergency mode” for journalism facin...

This is my first stab at a Substack Live video - done by adding Substack to my Streamyard livestream tool. Here’s the curtain-raiser post with lots of context: Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epi...

Here’s the podcast post of my virtual Sustain What meetup with a batch of folks out in the Hands Off protests against the Trump and Musk approach to “governing.” I was also joined by a longtime reader, Josette, from New Hampshire, who used to work in telecommunications at Perkins Coie, one of the law firms that Trump has attacked. We discussed this bit of good news from Friday ( here from Reuters...

“Elon Musk can declare, properly, every Starship explosion as a step forward because you have to try lots of things until you see what works. You can't do that with commercial airlines.” - James Fallows Here’s the webcast / podcast version of my Sustain What transportation conversation with longtime journalists James Fallows , David Kerley and Jim Motavalli. All the details and relevant links are...

I hope you heard (or now watch) my 2021 conversation with the Cambridge University climate researcher Mike Hulme and science and propaganda historian Naomi Oreskes on trust and mistrust in climate science . The same goes for our 2023 conversation about his latest book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything , which describes what he calls “climatism” - a tendency in climate-policy discussions to put CO2...

Here's today’s Sustain What discussion with two journalists from Global Press, an international newsroom supporting female reporters in the world’s most troubled regions. Global Press immediately began widespread reporting on the realtime impacts of the initial USAID freeze and persistent chaos around money flowing to public health and other vital programs from Nepal to Uganda. (I apologize for so...

Here’s the podcast version of my Sustain What conversation with three authors of a sobering, and yet slightly hopeful, paper identifying a rising number of autocracies that are followed by a sharp social and political u-turn to democratization. A rough dynamic transcript is here . The paper is here : The hopeful part of the open-access study is this: The analysis presents a systematic empirical ov...

Here’s a fresh tune for these times from my songwriting side, which has been energized since I signed on to a two-decade-old annual project called February Album Writing Month ( FAWM.org ). There’s more below about this remarkable effort - aimed at getting participants to write 14 songs in 28 days (yes, FOURTEEN !) - including a video explainer by its founder, Burr Settles , a machine learning res...

I’ll wager that most of you have already heard or read Ezra Klein’s powerful audio “ Don’t Believe Him ” manifesto examining Trump’s take on Steve Bannon’s longstanding “flood the zone” strategy designed to overwhelm media and institutional capacity to convey and challenge his unfolding demolition derby presidency. If not, here’s the captivating opening. But it’s vital to get past the initial stat...

Here’s the podcast / webcast version of my talk with Tom Kalil, who’s moved from advising two presidents on science and technology policy to building Renaissance Philanthropy , a consultancy for wealthy people who want to help fill funding and capacity gaps to help science serve society and sustainability. We talked about that work and also about the challenges and some possibilities as the second...

This is the podcast version of the Sustain What discussion I just had with the relentless clean-energy optimist, investor and evangelist Michael Liebreich . Key sections are on the need to switch metrics for success from kilowatt/hours to energy services; the ethics of focusing decarbonization on the most carbonized nations; the potential for energy-hungry AI giants to help United States regions r...

Here’s the video and audio podcast of my #SustainWhat show offering a valuable update on trends in emissions of heat-trapping methane and emerging science showing the tropics are the dominant driver of the recent rise in the flows of this potent greenhouse gas. Listen and share and weigh in. Background on my guests along with a batch of relevant links are in the “curtain raiser” post below. Here a...

This talk is the latest iteration of what I’ve learned and unlearned through 40 years of reporting and conversation wrangling around the intertwined challenges of building a safer human relationship with the climate system and with energy. My focus, echoing my goals in these dispatches, was conveying how to get beyond amorphous labels like sustainability and climate emergency by asking productive...

Take a mental break and do tell me how you stay sane and centered given the turbulence of this political and societal moment and the tough path ahead? For me - along with our dogs, cooking, carpentry, hikes and the like - there’s always music. (Read my post explainng that side of my life if you haven’t already.) This new song of mine, “After the Roaming,” was inspired by a melody composed by fello...

UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.” As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry , an Academy-Award winning film director. I...

This is the podcast version of my Sustain What show on an illuminating Washington Post story on issues and insights around the newsmaking and much-cited “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” assessments by NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I’ve been deeply impressed with Harry Stevens ’ reporting on climate at the Washington Post in his Climate Lab columns. He’s...

Here’s the podcast version of my “ Watchwords ” conversation with Mekala Krishnan , the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “ The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition .” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify. We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering , the co-founder and exec...

First , here’s my freshly updated post offering a heap of ways anyone anywhere can help the organizations and volunteers working nonstop around Hurricane Helene devastation zones: Second , here’s a shoutout to the professional and volunteer first responders doing highly dangerous work seeking and rescuing survivors. Several are among the more than 215 victims so far . The North Carolina National G...

Updated February 2025 - Given what’s unfolding under Trump 2.0, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020 with University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs , who teaches propaganda literacy and is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age . She has built a priceless suite of online learni...

Update, 6:30 pm Brazil time, Aug. 31 - X flickered to life just a few minutes after I posted this, at least from my Rio hotel - just long enough for me to tweet afresh. But now it’s spinning and frozen again. So back to Threads and Bluesky for the moment. On the final morning of a hectic three-city visit to Brazil to brainstorm with journalists, students and scientists on next steps for climate co...

My Sustain What webcast project started early in the pandemic and quickly evolved into having several tracks - one being regular Monday sessions I centered on pathways to Thriving Online . Here’s one of my favorites - a chat with two very different artists using drawing to communicate consequential environmental science and policy choices (also on YouTube ): Karen Romano Young (@doodlebugKRY), a s...

There are paths to cooperation and respect amid deep difference, and - in person or online - there are strategies that can move conversations either in a constructive or destructive direction. Elected and community leaders have a rhetorical choice to make every day facing that reality. That’s true even for bullet-grazed Trump. As I tweeted yesterday, the momentous shooting in Pennsylvania can lead...

Here’s a key point I made in today’s pop-up webcast: Think of Tornado Alley as a syndrome, not a place. And it isn’t what, and where, it used to be. In 2018, longtime tornado researchers Victor Gensini of Northern Illinois University and Harold Brooks of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., completed widely-covered research showing a substantial shift in the particular meteor...

I hope you’ll watch and weigh in on this Sustain What episode testing the arguments against climate alarm of Steven Koonin , a former chief scientist at BP and former Obama-era Energy Department science undersecretary who is the author of the best-selling book Unsettled – What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. An updated edition was eleased on June 11th . You can also...