Sustain What?

Whether you blame the Supreme Court’s Citizens United tragedy, social media, late-stage capitalism, all of the above, I encourage you to listen to this song about wealth’s stranglehold on America by my dear friend Carl Karush, one of the wonderful characters and creators in our Downeast Maine musical community. We went into a friend’s recording studio yesterday and he laid down an updated version...

I hope you’ll watch, listen to and/or share my Sustain What conversation with Daniel Palken , a highly-regarded guide to energy trends and legislation at Arnold Ventures. My curtain raiser for the webcast has background on the new U.S. Energy Data tracker we discussed and the permitting reform bill negotiated by two senators from each party: A core question in our chat was, should proponents pursu...

On October 3, The New York Times published a provocation (more than a story) comparing songs generated by humans and generated by giving prompts to generative artificial intelligence trained on vast catalogues of human-created music. The writer was Matt Richtel , a wide-ranging, Pulitzer-winning reporter for The New York Times who’s a songwriter on the side. Here was the headline: Musicians Versus...

As regular readers know, I consider the sustainability of government of, by and for the people part of the focus of Sustain What. You won’t get anything productive done on climate, biodiversity, AI or the other issues of our time if autocratic rule continues to gain power here. With that in mind, I just had a sobering and yet still-hopeful conversation with Jacob Weisberg, the longtime politics-fo...

Amid the flow, a story out of Singapore from The Wall Street Journal caught my attention. It’s the kind of sidenote feature that can be easily missed, but I feel is very important. So I did a quite live video chat and I’m posting the lede and a gift link from me here. Barrels of Sake and Rooftop Galas: Energy Traders Toast the War Boom As geopolitical conflict disrupts global supply, commodities b...

In March 2021, I hosted a fascinating discussion on the stormy, co-opted, polarizing online media environment with Georgetown Internet scholar Renee DiResta , Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology and Jeff Orlowski, the director of the hit 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (not to mention Chasing Ice, Chasing Coral, Chasing Time ). We explored the film and issues that now se...

Here are my pop-up Sustain What AI conversations with a top cybersecurity expert who says the Trump administration is poorly positioned to undertake the steps necessary to avoid superintelligence hacking us all, and a philosopher of technology who sees the path to safer artificial intelligence coming through dialogue with the technology more than direction. As President Trump on Sunday said the ra...

Amid the still-unfolding tragedy following the Nepal rock and ice collapse and tsunami-like mountain flood, there are hints of a safer future. That was the core idea emerging from a pop-up conversation I had Friday with Basanta Raj Adhikari , the director of the Center for Disaster Studies at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. He had just returned to Kathmandu after an overflight and on-the-ground ins...

After my initial post on the unimaginably violent and deadly flood in the crowded valleys along the Nepal-Tibet (China) border, I reached out to two experts on this kind of catastrophe and just ran a pop-up Sustain What conversation on the still-unfolding situation and science. You can watch above or on X/@revkin , LinkedIn , Facebook and YouTube . (If you go there, please SHARE the videos with ot...

I just held a solution-filled Sustain What conversation with three people working to spread materials and methods that can substantitally stem wildfire risk to communities ( by cutting vulnerability ) even as the long fights to stem human-driven global heating and manage wildland fires at the source play out. Two of them, James Greer of Wildfire Defense Mesh and James Brooks of the consultancy Fir...

Think of how Anthony Fauci has become kind of a tainted totem, tussled over by starkly opposed factions in fights that omit almost all of the complexity that attended the COVID-19 pandemic. Then watch my pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the 11 authors of an important recent Nature commentary: " Six ways to put the public at the heart of science and policy ." A key passage: At a time...

Updated below July 25 - My new song, " For Those Who Put to Sea ," honors men and women who harvest the ocean's bounty and is sung in memory of those who sometimes don't come back. I just posted this fresh video version on YouTube and TikTok (and will post elsewhere soon). Please share this song with anyone who enjoys seafood or lives in a coastal community. I shot most of the footage at the Maine...

My new song about maritime dangers, “ For Those Who Put to Sea ,” is out on all platforms ( YouTube , Spotify , etc.). Here’s my post from Maine’s Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day: Growing up in Rhode Island, I got out on the water any way I could, ranging from skin diving to sailing to fishing to clamming. In summers during high school and college, pondering a career in marine biology, I got a...

I found myself having a quiet moment (I’m hoping you find them) at home and thought I’d share a bit of a musical ramble as a “Sunday Sanity” offering. You can find a short playlist of previous episodes of this track of Sustain What shows here . I’m playing my first guitar, which I bought in pieces for $35 (Canadian) in Halifax at age 17 in 1977 and then fixed up in my dad’s basement workshop back...

Insert, 3:15 p.m. - Months of planning and permits amounted to nothing as the Coast Guard, apparently on orders “from above” (see below), ordered the captain of the Sloop Clearwater, launched in 1969 by Pete Seeger and friends to clean the Hudson, to “turn your vessel around” instead of taking its place escorting a Portuguese square rigger up the Hudson in the big Fourth of July Sail 250 event (vi...

These days, many of us tend to think of coders, algorithms and AI as a predatory threat stalking our online communication environment, and all too often that is true. But here is an inspiring example of an effort to put these skills and technologies to vital use in an unfolding catastrophe. Jorge Bastidas normally spends his days in Buenos Aires as CTO of The Empire, a small Florida-registered com...

Here’s the post-show post and audio podcast for my conversation with the Capital Weather team, who’ve just returned to independence after 18 years of weather communication and community building affiliated with the Washington Post. Details are in the curtain-raiser post: We talked about their early days as a blog back in 2004, when co-founder Jason Samenow was at the Environmental Protection Agenc...

I just hosted a pop-up Sustain What conversation with three of the dozens of climate and weather scientists who are running a 50-Hour livestream to boost public appreciation of the observational and analytical science that bolsters societal resilience and boosts understanding of our amazing, and changing, planet. A goal is to sustain federal support for weather & climate science even as the curren...

Program note : Today at 11 a.m. Eastern, join me live with several of the dozens of scientists participating in a 50-Hour livestream to sustain federal support for weather & climate science : YouTube , LinkedIn , Substack , Facebook , and X. The webcast is under way through June 3: My conversation with Chris Mooney Here’s the post-webcast post of my conversation with Chris Mooney . In 20 years, Mo...

I’m continuing to write songs along with my Sustain What webcasting and blogging here — in part to keep sane and in part because this has always been one of my ways of connecting people with ideas. ( Buy my new album here .) In this post, you’re getting the first look and listen to the first rough recording of “Nothing is Quiet.” The lyrics — also still a work in progress — are below. Everyone can...

I just wrapped a super-sobering and, at the same time, fun and hopeful conversation on the urgent issues surrounding the plaid-speed evolution of AI. With my guests Brad Allenby and Andrew Maynard at Arizona State University, the prime focus was the Vatican rollout of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter and the Pope’s admonition today that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.” Please listen...

I hope you’ll watch and share this illuminating and constructive face-to-face discussion with four key analysts of the scenarios for emissions of planet-heating gases that indirectly have shaped, and sometimes misshaped, climate policy discourse and decisions (and media coverage). My guests were Richard Tol , Zeke Hausfather , Matt Burgess , and Roger Pielke Jr. As I discussed here recently , the...

I just hosted a great discussion of the importance of bolstering long-term observational science and the capacity to integrate findings into decision making and policy. As I wrote in the curtain raiser post on Thursday, what drives me nuts is that even scientists who think global warming warnings are way over the top agree on this fundamental point about long-term monitoring. I have to post this s...

Snag “ Wake Me up Martha ,” a sonic survival guide for these crazy times, on Bandcamp today - Bandcamp Friday - when the company doesn’t take its percentage: revkin.bandcamp.com . You can listen on every conceivable platform and they’re all here: andyrevkin.hearnow.com . Here’s the curtain raiser post that preceded this show: Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next...

J.A. Ginsburg , a k a Janet Ginsburg, is a business analyst and writer (and many other things) who is scouring the world for scientists and startups pursuing substitutes for the materials societies have long depended on — but that are in short supply because of bottlenecks like the one created by President Trump’s war on Iran. I urge you to sign up for her Substack project, which is the learning j...