Notes from the doors

Our democracy lurches toward a moment unlike any other

With the great climate champion Mike Tidwell on the streets of Philly.

One of the blessings of growing older is that—if you’re fortunate—you’re also growing less judgmental. With any luck you’ve come to understand that the world can be hard, and so to have some affection for your fellow travelers through it. Which is another way of saying: it was sweet to spend a sunny Tuesday morning in a not-so-good section of Philadelphia, knocking doors to turn out the vote.

I’m going to tell you about that experience, and the one that followed in Phoenix, because a) this is the most important election in climate history and b) your support of this newsletter is one reason I’ve been able to be out across the country these past weeks. And I thought perhaps amidst all the polling data and battling memes you might appreciate just a sense of what things are like out there right now.

I’d gotten to town the night before, coming from Atlanta. I’m on what we’re calling the Silver Wave Tour, organizing the members of Third Act across the swing states. We started up about three years ago and by now we have 100,000 people over 60 across the country working on climate and democracy. Often we do civil disobedience outside the big banks financing the fossil fuel industry, or lobby state public service commissions—but for the home stretch of this election we’ve been writing hundreds of thousands of posctards into the purple states, organizing round-the-clock phone banks, and bussing people into the most important districts to knock those doors—something we’re uniquely good at, because it turns out Americans will still answer the door if there’s a 70-year-old on the other side.

Anyway, the visit to Philadelphia began with a big rally at the Arch Street Meeting House in the center of the city. We heard from a dynamic young paster and city councilor named Nicolas O’Rourke, and from two young women studying at St. Joseph’s, and then I rambled for a while about the stakes of this election—a knife’s edge chance between electing a dangerous authoritarian or choosing our first woman president. The main job was just to psych people up for the real work, which at this late stage is nothing but turn out.

And so we gathered, fifty or so gray-haired activists, in Clark Park in West Philly the next morning. We stood around a statue of Charles Dickens as we took our marching orders—each team of two had an app called Minivan that gave us our catalogue of doors. The morning’s canvass had been organized by the non-partisan Environmental Voters Project, which has a big list of ‘low-propensity’ voters who can be counted on to pull the right lever if they make it to the polls. And so we set off.

Mike Tidwell, the veteran leader of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and I set off through the streets of West Philadelphia. It was morning, so not surprisingly most people weren’t home—the usual routine was to ring the doorbell, wait for a minute, and then print the person’s name on the literature encouraging them to be a “good voter” (apparently, testing shows this kind of ‘social pressure’ actually works) and hang them from the doorknob. We worked our way up and down the blocks, mostly having conversations with young men working on cars in the street (one Trump voter, but he was very deep into a tallboy at 10 a.m. so perhaps not to be counted on to make it to the polls).

Anyway, about halfway through a young woman on our list actually answered the door. I explained that we just wanted to make sure that she knew how to get to her polling place, at which point she said that was going to be a problem. She pointed to her right foot, where her sock covered a bulge—it was, she explained, an ankle monitor, and she wasn’t actually allowed to go out to the polls because she was awaiting trial.

Now, I imagine that at some point in my younger years, I might have thought: this person could be a criminal, should I be helping her vote? But I’ve lived long enough and attentively enough to understand that just because a young black woman has fallen afoul of our criminal justice system, it doesn’t mean an enormous amount. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in jail (for crimes I’ve been happy to admit) and in the process met a fair number of people who, it struck me, were guilty mainly of being born in the wrong place. I haven’t suspended judgment entirely—I don’t like crime, and I wouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate who had managed to acquire multiple felony convictions. But I sensed that this young woman probably did not have a crack legal team at her command, and anyway she wasn’t running for president—she just wanted to vote for president. So I helped her figure out how to approach the Secretary of State’s office. I hope it works, and not just because it will help Harris—because voting is good. (One thing I deeply admire about older Americans is that for all the opportunities they’ve had to develop real cynicism, they continue to vote.)

A few blocks later we came to one of our addresses and there was actually someone sitting on the porch. “We’re looking for Janis Merton,” I said (though I’ve changed the name.)

“Oh,” he said. “That name is deceased. I wish you would take it off your list.”

Now, for the first two-thirds of my life, I would assume that he meant Janis had died, and I would have offered my condolences and moved on. If I’d somehow understood that this was a person born a woman who had become a man I wouldn’t have known what to say; raised to be polite, I probably wouldn’t have said a thing, but I might have thought: ick.

But again I’ve been lucky. I’ve had the chance to get to know a fair number of people who’ve transitioned from one gender to another, and in every case it’s been a blessing. The idea that we live in a moment when people are able to connect with something deep inside them, and instead of feeling shame and sadness do something about it—that’s a joy. And one of the ugliest parts of this fall’s campaign is the degree to which the GOP has decided to stigmatize and target those people. The cruelty of the radio ads and the tv spots can take your breath away. As Tim Walz would say, none of your damned business—but to the degree it’s of the public interest, it’s awfully nice that you can love who you want to, including yourself. I’m pretty sure this guy was never going back, and more power to him.

We finished up our day’s list and returned our clipboards, and then I got on the plane to Phoenix. Again we had a wonderful evening program, thanks to the folks at Third Act Arizona—among other things it featured Candice Fortin, the organizing director at my old stomping ground 350.org. And Rebecca Solnit was there to headline things, thank heaven, since I’m getting a little weary. Some native dancers set the mood; a trio of young people brought it home. We ended by telling everyone to show up the next day to canvass, and a lot of them did.

This time the proceedings were organized by Seed the Vote and by La Lucha—the phone app took us across the sprawling Phoenix metro area to the suburb of Avondale, which has almost tripled in population in the first fifth of this century. It’s mostly Hispanic, a pretty solidly middle-class community—we were in a subdivision filled with twisting roads and not-quite-identical houses, each with a gravel front yard (Phoenix has successfully kicked the lawn habit, though there was one unfortunate experiment with astroturf). It was a fairly perfect rendition of the America that’s coming by mid-century, where white people are no longer a majority—the thing that may subliminally drive the MAGA rage. And yet it was so…normal. Pickups, a few of them jacked-up. Fancy doorbells (Ring vs Vivint, with a few SimpliSafe—you notice these things when you’re doorknocking).

The sun beat down—when we’d left the car it had insisted the outside temperature was 100, and it felt like that. The trees weren’t big enough yet to provide much shade, and I was inordinately grateful when the phone app sent us to the shadier side of the street. People were mostly missing—it was midday—and so, conspicuously, were solar panels. If this were California or Texas (or Vermont) you would have found them on many houses, but so far the Arizona utilities have roundly resisted any real efforts to take advantage of the fact that they are the sunniest city in the country, with the sun shining down 88.5 percent of the time. One would think that the record-smashing summer they’ve just endured—at one point 21 straight days set new daily temperature records, a streak with no equal in this country—might have convinced them. But no. And as Emily Atkin’s Heated points out today, a Trump presidency will make it impossible to build those renewables. We desperately need four more years for the IRA to roll out, and really step up to the task of changing out the 140 million homes in this country.

The literature we were dropping in Phoenix had a southwest feel

It was good to be outside walking the streets, even in the heat, in part because it meant there was no chance to worry about the polls, and all the other craziness. (While we were out there news came that the police had arrested the gun nut who shot up the local Democratic headquarters, and also the nut nut who set a mailbox on fire last night perhaps to burn up some ballots). Politics used to be kind of fun, but not since 2016—everything seems desperate, especially this gut-wrenchingly close election. But while it’s on there’s the chance for everyone to take part: to get out and knock doors, and in the process be reminded what kind of tenuous, noble, important lives our fellow Americans are living. To remind ourselves that one goal of all of this to make those lives a little easier.

And to make a voting a little easier too: a new study points out that casting the ballot is harder now when long waits in line are in ever-hotter temperatures.

+The really big climate news today is the new report from the UN Environment Programme on the “emissions gap”—the distance between the commitments made by countries to cut carbon, and the amount that scientists say is required. The news is not good—of all the countries on earth, only Madagascar is meeting the challenge, and we’re still set to see the planet warm an impossible three degrees.

The world is yet to turn the tide on rising CO2 emissions, with the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere climbing 1.3% last year, UNEP said. The landmark Paris Agreement in 2015 set a goal to limit global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally to 1.5C. To meet the more ambitious target, countries must collectively commit to cut emissions 42% by the end of the decade and 57% by 2035, compared with 2019 levels.

“We need global mobilization on a scale and pace never seen before — starting right now, before the next round of climate pledges — or the 1.5C goal will soon be dead,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP’s executive director.

But here’s the part that kills me. We could get back on track by spending…about one percent of the world’s GDP each year.

When it comes to finance, UNEP said the cost of the transition is relatively affordable. While funding for mitigation needs to be more focused on developing countries, investment globally must increase between $900 billion and $2.1 trillion per year, roughly 1% of the world’s total economic output, to achieve net zero by 2050.

To explain how dumb our delay is, here’s another new study that tries to point out the economic damage that’s beginning to mount, even in rich America

“I think the cost of climate [change] is increasingly a threat to our already very fragile fiscal outlook,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. Factoring in the prospect that the government must spend “tens of billions or hundreds of billions more each year to help mitigate the fallout of climate events,” he added, “the outlook looks even darker.”

One percent of GDP would be the savviest financial planning in the history of the earth.

+Many congratulations to Bryan Alexander, whose book “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis” won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Another notable new book comes from attorney Jared Sullivan; it covers the legal drama that ensued when a giant coal ash dam let loose in Tennessee, unleashing a toxic fifty-foot high tsunami. As the reliable Nathaniel Rich writes in the Times, who writes

A concise summary of Jared Sullivan’s “Valley So Low” is offered halfway through the book by its hero, Jim Scott, a plain-talking, suspender-wearing, Skittles-addicted plaintiff’s lawyer: “They had a toxic tub of goop, and it blew up.”

“They” are the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility. The “goop” is coal ash, the residual soot after coal is burned for electricity. Soot might not sound so bad (one pictures a burned-out campfire). But this coal ash contained arsenic, iron oxide, aluminum oxide, selenium, cadmium, boron and thallium, what Scott called “a Long Island iced tea of poison.”

Oh, and then there’s Elsie Gilmore’s new book, with the useful title “How to Find Joy in a Capitalist Hellscape.” It promises to help you

• Laugh in the face of corporate greed

• Find peace without breaking the bank

• Learn ways to build real connections in a fake-news world

• Stay joyful and united in a divided society

all of which seem like good ideas to me.

Along somewhat the same (if less ideological) lines, the University of Vermont’s Osher Center is hosting a zoom meeting on “Healthy People, Healthy Planet.” It falls three days after the election, so may serve a therapeutic purpose…

Oh, and if we’re really going for joy, and you’re anywhere near one of the stops, please drop in on the Climate Revival Tour that my old friends Antonique voice-of-the-climate-movement Smith and Rev. Lennox Yearwood have been staging across the south in the run-up to election day. As a Charlotte newspaper reported

Historically, the Black church has played a pivotal role in activism. During the Civil Rights Movement, it served as a physical place for community organizing and a metaphorical guide for energizing the movement.

Leaders often utilized the church as a base for mobilizing various efforts as well as the moral compass to get people invovled. Smith said this legacy was the foundation of her decision to spread climate change awareness through the church.

“People of color being at the forefront … It’s our issue,” Smith said.

+In less salubrious North Carolina news, the endlessly gifted Antonia Juhasz reports from the Tarheel State on the likely effects of a Trump win on environmental policy there. Essentially, the programs she describes below would disappear.

While Donald Trump has used Hurricane Helene as an opportunity to deny the reality of climate change and spread lies and conspiracy theories, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “are harnessing every agency and every authority to respond to Helene’s destruction and devastation,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “At the same time, we keep accelerating our efforts to build long-term resilience to extreme-climate disasters and attack the root cause of climate change itself.” 

Historic levels of federal funding for climate action, the energy transition, and environmental justice are included throughout the over $2 trillion in the administration’s “Investing in America Agenda,” which includes the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan, and CHIPS and Science Act.

With its Justice40 Initiative, the Biden-Harris administration stipulated within days of taking office that at least 40 percent of federal climate and environmental funds, across 19 federal agencies and totaling some $613 billion, must target disadvantaged environmental justice communities. These are Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities who have been overburdened by pollution and the climate crisis, and underserved by government. An official with the Environmental Protection Agency tells me the agency has exceeded that bar, with over 60 percent of the funds serving those most in need. 

It amounts to the nation’s largest-ever financial commitment to environmental and climate justice. “It’s unprecedented. I don’t think there’s any other time in history that there has been such a targeted plan to invest in disinvested communities,” Taylor-Sawyer says. “Just the EPA’s $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice program is 80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history.”

+Meanwhile, also in North Carolina, a good example of a genre I think we’re going to see a lot of. Robertson Work, chased from his home by Helene, writes about the experience of becoming a climate refugee late in life:

Halloween, Thanksgiving, the fiftieth birthday of youngest son Christopher, and Christmas are approaching. Where will we be for each of these? Will we be celebrating with our children and grandchildren? Will we be with new or old friends?

My body-mind, in its ninth decade, is trying to adjust, learn, adapt, be strong, and be present.

Who will the president-elect of the US be? How will the upcoming Senate and Congress be constituted? Will we be living in a fascist state or in a democracy? Will our nation help mitigate and adapt to climate chaos or ignore it? Who will the new government leaders be in Asheville, Buncombe County, and North Carolina?

How will our health be? What will we be concerned about? What will we be doing? What will I be writing and speaking about? How will we help others? How will our finances be? How will we age? How will we let go of this incarnation?

+And along the same lines, another new study demonstrates that climate change hits older people especially hard.

“That’s a real challenge in the places we’re talking about, where even [the] less dramatic flooding than the extreme weather events really matter for older adults in a place like Appalachia, where more routine flooding poses real barriers to get to a job or to get to a health appointment,” Dabelko said. “We’re still in the kind of the discovery phase, but we’re adding questions to community surveys here. [Like] do you have access to air conditioning in a warmer world? Have you had to miss appointments because of flooding in the last year?”

+Check out the new Fuel to Fork podcast, which illuminates

How fossil fuels became so embedded in our food systems. We trace this journey from the industrial extraction of guano, through the game-changing Haber-Bosch process, to today’s globalized food system. Along the way, we uncover the hidden impacts on biodiversity and human health—revealing the true cost of this reliance