A Great and Good Man

On the passing of Bill Moyers

A point of personal privilege, as they say: I want to take a minute to mark the death and life of Bill Moyers, first because he was a friend and an integral if quiet part of the climate fight, but also because I think—more than almost anyone else—he puts our strange moment in stark relief. In the wake of today’s grim Supreme Court decision imperiling American citizenship for millions, he exemplified what a citizen could and should be.

I knew who Bill Moyers was, of course, my whole conscious life. He’d been an omnipresent figure in the 1960s, coming to DC as a key aide to vice president Lyndon Johnson only to quickly peel off to help found the Peace Corps. When LBJ wound up in the Oval Office, Moyers became one of his core advisors, helping shape the Great Society programs, before he finally broke with his mentor over Vietnam. Then he remade himself into the most important television journalist of his time, with a devoted following at CBS and then PBS.

But he really emerged into my thinking in the early 1990s when I was writing a book called The Age of Missing Information, which was an effort to understand how the mediated lives we were living shaped our minds and world. It was something between an experiment and performance art: I found the largest cable system in the world (a hundred channels in Fairfax Va) and taped everything that came across them for for 24 hours—that meant I had 2400 hours of tv, which I spent a year watching. A miserable year—there was so little sustenance. Except for Mister Rogers, and for Bill Moyers (who were not unalike, come to think of it). He interviewed a poet and it was thoughtful and real and human, an oasis in that desert. No wonder he was beloved; no one save perhaps Murrow ever used the impoverished medium that is television with as much grace and skill. (Thirty Emmys, by the way.)

And then, a few years later, still in my 30s, through a series of coincidences, I got to work with him much much more closely; he’d asked me to join the board of the Schumann Foundation, the philanthropy that he ran for many years even as he continued his documentary career. Schumann was an unusual operation—the two brothers (heirs to the IBM fortune) who’d founded it were on the board too, and they were as generous as it was possible to be. When Bill decided an idea was worth, say, $200,000, they would invariably propose $400,000 instead. And so a great deal of important media and progressive work for several decades was funded essentially through his good graces.

I left the board, in fact, to avoid a conflict of interest because they wanted to make the grant that would help found 350.org; without it the first global grassroots climate campaign would not have gotten off the ground. And when the time came to start Third Act, the Schumann Foundation, then in the final throes of “spending down” their assets, made a small but key grant to give us the chance to explore the idea. I was a volunteer in these organizations, but not everyone can be a volunteer; Moyers understood that, and helped make sure that we, and others, had the wherewithal to pay decent wages to people doing hard and important work. He was instinctively generous.

But that’s not what sticks in my mind right now. It’s his other qualities: a deep empathy, a deep curiosity, and a deep commitment to reality as the basis for understanding the world. Those are not to be taken for granted—he’d grown up in the segregated south, for instance. But he cultivated them his whole life, till they were his nature. And they are, I think, the exact and polar opposite of our current political dispensation—the people defunding black colleges and renaming naval vessels to make sure they don’t honor diversity, the people shutting down satellite feeds so we can’t see the Arctic melting, the people fixated on rounding up the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

Bill Moyers was the pre-eminent interviewer of his time because he was so good at listening—that’s what effective interviewing really is. And listening is the thing most out of fashion in the people who rule over us now. Trump, above all, just talks and talks and talks some more, in CAPITAL letters.

Moyers, by contrast, was not just an architect of, but also the exemplar of, the postwar liberal order in America, one of the best reflections of its virtues (and doubts). He represents a literacy now passing, an unpretentious sophistication that marked America at its intellectual best. I know, from many conversations in recent years, just how saddened and alarmed he was by the turn our world has taken but I also know that he was constantly thinking of ways to make the future work. Which is, after all, our job.

In other energy and climate news:

+An eminent team at Years of Living Dangerously and the Columbia Business School has just released an important series of short documentaries on clean cement and clean steel. These are exceptionally well done, thanks to David Gelber and the hard-working economist Gernot Wagner, and they are also exceptionally important—these are some of the hardest-to-clean parts of the economy, but they make clear that smart engineering is easing those difficulties!

+A mammoth and chilling piece from the Financial Times, which details how climate change could touch off a massive and essentially permanent version of the 2008 financial crisis.

It begins with the number of insurers pulling back from US states swelling from a stream to a flood, and not just in disaster-prone states such as California. Across the country, homeowners face soaring premiums or an inability to renew their cover as insurers confront a remorseless spate of wildfires, storms and hurricanes.

Cash-strapped governments try to plug the gaps with more last-resort insurance schemes. But these plans typically cost more and cover less, raising a chilling new reality for thousands of homeowners. The value of their family home, which had risen year after comforting year, instead begins to sink.

The contagion spreads because you need insurance to get a mortgage, so as property coverage fades, so does the presence of banks. In state after state, it becomes impossible to find a bank branch. Some lenders quit the mortgage business completely. A few begin reporting big losses.

And the US is not alone. Climate-driven upheaval intensifies abroad, rattling insurers, banks and property markets from southern Australia to northern Italy. In city after city, people find themselves living in homes worth less than what they had paid for them. Each monthly mortgage payment feels like throwing good money after bad. In a disturbing hint of past financial turmoil, mortgage defaults begin to rise, along with foreclosures and credit card delinquencies.

But this time, it’s different. Unlike other financial disasters, the underlying cause of this one is not financial, it is physical, and it is not clear how it will ever end.

+A huge new survey, conducted across 39 states, shows that most people who live near solar farms consider them good neighbors and would like some more

Most residents felt positive (43 per cent) or neutral (42 per cent) about the solar project in their neighbourhood, while only 15 per cent felt negatively about it.

Asked whether they would approve of more solar projects being built in their area, 82 per cent expressed support or felt neutral, and 18 per cent said they would be opposed.

+Tom Kimmerer has an interesting reflection on the power of shade at his Substack, which hit especially hard during the remarkable eastern heatwave at the start of the week. (My Champlain Valley has rarely if ever been so hot). He went out with his thermometer to measure the cooling effect of trees: Feet away from each other, he found pavement reading 140 degrees, and shaded grass clocking in at 84.

While you’re reclining in the shadows, maybe read the latest offerings from Plant-Human Quarterly, which “explores the myriad ways writers make manifest their relationship to the botanical world, attempting to communicate across boundaries and possibly approach a plant’s-eye-view of the world.”

+Excellent new campaign to get the Screen Actors Guild to divest a hundred million dollars in big oil investments from its pension fund. Can you actually lose a fight if Jane Fonda, Rosario Dawson, Debra Messing, Mark Ruffalo, Ted Danson, Sam Waterston, Sally Field, Josh Brolin, and Mark Hamill are on your side? I don’t think so.

+Assuming New York governor Kathy Hochul goes along (never an entirely safe assumption in the true swamp that is Albany), New Yorkers will no longer be financing new gas hookups for their neighbors, a subsidy that has hampered the quick conversion to cheaper and cleaner electricity. As Allison Takemura reports

From 2017 to 2021, New Yorkers spent roughly $200 million per year connecting new homes and other buildings to the gas network under the ​“100-foot rule,” as it’s often called, according to an analysis by energy think tank RMI. Those subsidies helped add nearly 170,000 customers to the system.

“By socializing the cost [for new gas hookups], we’re raising energy prices for everyone on the gas system,” Abe Scarr, energy and utilities program director at nonprofit U.S. PIRG Education Fund, told Canary Media. From 2020 to 2022 in utility National Grid’s territory, for example, the average cost pushed onto existing customers for a new gas connection was about $5,000 to $14,000, he said.

Due in part to the boilers, furnaces, and stoves that burn gas, buildings are the state’s largest source of planet-warming pollution. In 2021, three out of five households in New York used gas for heating.

+Massive cuts at NOAA may kill people because of inferior weather forecasts, experts warned this week

“It will stop all progress” in U.S. forecasting, said James Franklin, who retired in 2017 as chief of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast specialists.

Abolishing that research will be “a generational loss" of any progress that would have been made over the next 10 years or more, Franklin said. “We’re going to stagnate and we’re not going to continue to improve as we go forward.”

Veteran meteorologist Jeff Masters explained that the problem is especially grave because, in overheated waters, hurricanes are rapidly intensifying as they near shore.

“Rapid intensification events often occur because an upper-level trough of low pressure with a strong ‘jet streak’ of powerful upper-level winds is located just to the north of a hurricane, providing an upper-level outflow channel that ventilates the storm, allowing it to gather in more warm, moist air near the surface to help feed it,” Masters said. “With less data to predict the positioning and strength of such troughs, our rapid intensity forecasts will likely be degraded in some situations when multiple balloon launches do not occur because of NOAA staff cuts.

+America’s first all-electric hospital has opened in Irvine, California. Check out the local news coverage!

+Powerful new report on the plight of farm animals on a rapidly warming planet. For example:

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene struck the east coast of America. With winds of over 140 miles per hour, it was the most powerful hurricane ever to strike Florida’s Big Bend region. More than 230 people were killed and 2 million were left without power. The storm displaced more than 375,000 people, causing an estimated $78 billion in damage.

More than six million acres of agricultural lands were affected by Hurricane Helene with an estimated 96,871 farms in the region. Trees were uprooted, sand and sediment were deposited onto farmlands, damaging soil microbiology. There were significant agricultural losses, particularly in Georgia. Estimates suggest $5.5 billion in damages.

Georgia is the country’s biggest chicken-producing state, slaughtering 1.3 billion chickens annually. According to local reports, Helene destroyed at least 165 poultry houses, causing damage to another 500. With approximately 30,000 birds in each unit, this equates to an estimated five million birds killed in just one state.

+Older people are learning to love e-bikes—which among other things make it much easier to take disabled folks out for rides. As Kristen de Jager reports:

Cycling Without Age Vancouver is an organization that does this by taking seniors living in long-term care homes out on trishaws. The trishaws are powered by pedal assist, meaning they provide the volunteer cyclists a boost, like e-bikes.

Jake Winn, the executive director of Cycling Without Age, stressed that the e-assist component was essential to the trishaw experience.

“The e-assist allows us to ferry people regardless of their weight,” said Winn. “Cycling can be jarring, even in a city like Vancouver, with such incredible bike lanes and bike infrastructure, there are still a lot of bumps and bounces and things like that, and the e-assist allows the rides to be really smooth.”

Winn said that the smooth ride makes it easier on the senior in the trishaw and the volunteer pushing the pedals. Saying that the less intense exercise allows them to “actually have a wonderful conversation and connect.”

The connection is what Anne-Marie Comte, a recent retiree, loves about volunteering at Cycling Without Age. She said that she can see the seniors’ demeanours change from when they start their ride to when they get into the city.

+Fascinating essay from Brian Kahn and Eric Rolston about how the Trump administration doesn’t even bother engaging in climate denial any more—now it’s just climate dismissal. For example

“The Department of Defense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” —Pete Hegseth

“We’re not doing climate change crud anymore.” —Brooke Rollins

Defense Secretary Hegseth and Agriculture Secretary Rollins used similar terms on the social media platform X and when speaking to Fox Business, respectively. Their message is clear: Government climate programs are a distraction at odds with their agencies’ missions. This approach sidesteps outright denial, a position that’s become harder to hold in light of overwhelming scientific evidence and supercharged weather disasters. Dismissal, on the other hand, is “a way of saying, ‘It’s beneath our contempt. We don’t even have to debate this—we’ll just call it crap,’” Texas A&M communications professor Jennifer Mercieca says.

+Though the Senate parliamentarian put the kibosh on the worst of the proposals, the GOP is still trying to sell off vast tracts of public land in the West, asJonathan Thompson reports on his Substack. He has a list of some of the 1.2 million acres that may be on the auction block, and this warning

These desirable tracts will draw big bids and the winning developers will slice them up into huge lots for a handful of multi-million-dollar homes. It will do nothing to address the housing crisis except to further exacerbate it, meaning this is yet another of the many, many giveaways to the wealthy in Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Meanwhile, the elk and bears and mountain lions that call the place home along with the hikers, mountain bikers, and trail runners that frequent the area would be out of luck. And once the land is sold, the American public is never getting it back.

+As I’ve been predicting, the American absence from global climate talks is turning out to be both a problem and a relief for other negotiators

Until the U.S. confirmed in mid-June that they would skip this year’s talks in Bonn, “the concern was that they would show up and sabotage it,” said a Latin American negotiator, who like many diplomats who spoke to POLITICO was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on behalf of their governments.

“The general sense is, it’s not that bad they’re not here,” they added. “For the world, for cutting emissions, it’s of course terrible. For negotiations, it makes things easier.”

+Glaciers, sadly, are melting (to use the climate scientist’s most oft-employed phrase) “much faster than expected.” As Andrei Ionescu chronicles

A new study pieces together twenty-plus years of satellite images, laser surveys, and boots-on-ice measurements from the Rockies, Cascades, and Swiss Alps.

The verdict: glaciers in western Canada, the contiguous United States, and Switzerland have already surrendered roughly 12 percent of their total volume since 2021 – and the pace is accelerating.

Why did melting suddenly roar ahead? Two culprits stand out. The first is heat. Early-season heat waves have flipped the melt switch weeks ahead of schedule, scrubbing away winter snow that normally reflects sunlight and protects the ice below.

Switzerland’s record-hot summer of 2022 and western Canada’s scorching spring of 2023 gave the glaciers no time to recover. As Menounos put it, “2023 was the year of record, no question.”

The second culprit is surface darkening. Pure snow is brilliant white, bouncing most sunlight back to space. But when windblown dust or wildfire soot coats the surface, that reflectivity – scientists call it albedo – plummets, and the ice soaks up heat like a blacktop road.

In the Alps, Saharan dust storms tinted the snow a dull ocher. Across North America, smoke from unprecedented wildfire seasons peppered the ice with black carbon.

+Ethiopia is not messing around—they’ve banned the import of all internal combustion vehicles, even in kit form. According to Clean Technica:

Ethiopia’s motivation? A high fossil fuel import bill of over US$5 billion a year, taking a huge chunk of the country’s scarce foreign currency resources. Energy security and self-sufficiency were other major drivers. Ethiopia recently commissioned the first units from the 5,150 MW Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The GERD will add another ~15,500 GWh of clean electricity to the country’s energy mix. This means Ethiopia now has some exceptionally good locally generated renewable energy that can be used to substitute a significant portion of that huge import bill.

There are a number of exciting developments in the electric vehicle space in Africa, with several counties backing plans to accelerate adoption. For example, Zambia, Rwanda, Mauritius, and others have either eliminated or reduced import duties and taxes on electric vehicles. In Zimbabwe, the import duty levied on electric vehicles was reduced from 40% to 25%, whilst the duties levied on ICE vehicles remained at 40%.

+A good explanation from the folks at Axle about how EVs make electricity cheaper for everyone (as long as they’re charged at the right time)

Adding EVs means that:

• Households without EVs pay less for electricity (because more grid charges are paid by EV-owning households)

• Households with EVs reduce their average cost of electricity (through increasing off-peak usage)

Indeed, they include this rather remarkable clipping from a Chicago newspaper making the same point in…1912

+Ocean acidification—the evil twin of global warming—is ramping up steadily, and indeed according to Mongabay’s Sam Mowbray, may have passed new thresholds

Helen Findlay’s team at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK found that four of seven ocean basins have crossed the planetary boundary for ocean acidification — with polar waters and ocean upwelling areas particularly affected.

They also found that this acidification picture becomes worse when one looks deep below the ocean’s surface. The authors found that 60% of the world’s ocean has crossed the safe limit down to 200 meters (656 feet) depth, compared to 40% of surface waters.

That’s concerning for marine life, Findlay says, as this part of the water column is where much of Earth’s marine biodiversity thrives.

+Finally, a shout-out to Ireland, Europe’s newest coal-free country. As Michelle Lewis reports

Ireland has officially pulled the plug on coal power – the country shut down coal operations at Moneypoint, its only coal-fired power station and largest electricity generation station. That makes Ireland the sixth European country to fully kick coal out of its electricity mix.

This big milestone didn’t happen overnight. At the start of the 2000s, wind energy made up just 1% of Ireland’s electricity. Now, it supplies over a third (37%) of the country’s power. That clean energy growth is what made ditching coal possible.

Meanwhile, thanks to a big new solar farm, the London Underground is getting closer to its 2030 goal of running entirely off the sun. Something for Mayor Mamdani to work on in the Big Apple!