Notes on Camp

The Texas tragedy and what it might teach us.

Sending your kid off to sleep-away camp is a milestone no less for parents than for kids—it’s often the first time you’ve really let go of them. I clearly remember the pleasure of getting a postcard from our 9-year-old daughter a few days into her first year of camp: on the front it said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I miss you.” When you flipped it over, in huge letters on the back, it added “NOT.” We breathed a sigh of relief—she was fine (and we felt like successful parents, too).

So watching the horror still unfolding in the Texas hill country is almost unbearable. I can’t bring myself to imagine what it must have felt like for the girls swept away in the night by water rising an inch every twenty five seconds, or to be a counselor trying to figure out how to cope with this kind of emergency—I’ve been literally shutting the images out of my mind as they form. But I can all to easily imagine, with a leaden feeling in my stomach, what it must have felt like to be a parent waiting for news. We mock the “thoughts and prayers” response to disaster (and rightly so, if that’s all that our leaders offer), but thoughts and prayers are heartfelt today, as they are after school shootings and every other such tragedy. It must be simply unbearable, realizing that you won’t be going to parents day at camp, or meeting the bus that brings the campers back home in August.

A well-run camp strikes me as a reasonable analogue for a well-run society, in that it attempts to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk. Those things are always in a certain amount of tension, and balancing that tension is a big reason why we form governments and adopt rules.

So, for example, going for a swim is a slightly perilous thing—we’re not really water-evolved creatures, and drowning is surprisingly easy. But swimming and sailing and water-skiing are great fun and so we’ve figured out ways to lower the risk: we teach kids how to swim, we assign them swim buddies, we have lifeguards. As we learn more, we change those rules—my mother, for instance, was a devout believer in the conventional wisdom that required waiting half an hour (not a second less) after eating before you could jump in the pool, but it turns out that actual data shows that’s unnecessary. On the other hand, we understand a lot more about why you shouldn’t go in a lake with blue-green algae, and so we both close down beaches and try to clean up the pollution that causes it.

Camp’s not a perfect analogy for society, of course. Most of us are adults, and at least theoretically better equipped to make our own decisions, and the thing we’re most bent on maximizing is not fun but wealth (probably a mistake, but there it is). Still, unless we’re true libertarians we acknowledge the need to address risk and opportunity in some sensible fashion. Which we’re not doing at the moment. The huge budget bill that finally passed last week is a perfect example.

The Republicans who passed it—and this was an entirely Republican operation, stem to stern—clearly wanted to maximize the wealth of rich people: the most affluent one percent of families will receive a trillion dollars in new income. (This is the camp equivalent of giving almost all the s’mores to one or two kids). In return they were willing to embrace a wide variety of risks: Not just the risks posed by a higher deficit in a time when we’re not at war or in recession, but the risk that comes from $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That will cause rural hospitals to close, for instance, making health care much harder to access and in the process surely endangering large numbers of lives. Or the 20 percent reduction in SNAP funding for food assistance, which will clearly raise the risk of people going hungry.

The only risk they really seemed to care about was violent crime by immigrants—that was the justification for tripling the ICE budget so we can have a quantum increase in the number of guys with neck gaiters shoving people into vans. This is not just immoral, it’s statistically dumb, the equivalent of waiting half an hour to swim: immigrants are highly unlikely to be violent criminals compared with native-born Americans. If violent crime was your concern, you’d be better off deporting lots and lots of Americans and filling the returning planes with generally more peaceable immigrants. (But let’s don’t do that either).

And of course they’ve chosen to ignore one huge category of risk entirely—the risk (really at this point more a guarantee) that we’re going to damage in extraordinary ways the climate that sustains us. Consider Chip Roy, the congressman whose district was so damaged in the floods. He has been vehement in his opposition to subsidies or mandates or anything else that might help clean energy, and he has voted for everything that might help the fossil fuel industry. Let’s assume he’s acting in good faith, and not responding to the more than $671,788 in campaign contributions from the hydrocarbon industry. (Not perhaps a wise assumption, but it’s a day for acting in good faith). He’s expressed himself on this exact question of comparative risk, in a 2018 article in the San Antonio paper when he made his first run for Congress.

He explained that, in essence, he wanted to maximize the wealth and fun that came with hydrocarbons:

“What I know is that our lives are made so immeasurably better by the availability of affordable, abundant energy.”

And he said that he thought the risk was low, at least relative to the benefits of fossil fuels.

“My belief is that the net positive impact of energy production relative to whatever the question-mark impact is on CO2 (carbon dioxide), to me, comes out very much on the positive.”

Again, let’s take him in good faith. So—since 2018 two things have changed.

One is that it’s become ever more clearer exactly how dangerous climate change is: just in the past few days we’ve had a new report from the UN on how drought is devastating unprecedented swaths of the planet (“this is not a dry spell. This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I’ve ever seen,” one of its authors explained), had new data from the Antarctic on how rising salinity in the southern ocean is melting yet more polar ice (“we may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop”), and had firsthand accounts of life in the broiling European heatwave (“like swimming in soup.”)

The second thing that’s changed is that it is now far cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels—the price of solar and wind has dropped almost 90 percent since that 2018 interview, and batteries that make them round-the-clock fuels are now cheap too. You know who realizes this? Energy regulators in Texas, where renewables are growing faster than anywhere in the country.

The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.

When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive — and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 p.m. CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOT demand.

Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been ​“forced,” meaning unscheduled.

At 6:15 p.m. CST, batteries jumped in and delivered more than 10% of ERCOT’s electricity demand — the first time they’ve ever crossed that threshold in the state.

“Batteries just don’t need the kind of maintenance windows that thermal plants do,” said Lewin, who authors the Texas Energy and Power newsletter. ​“The fleet of thermal plants is pretty rickety and old at this point, so having the batteries on there, it’s not just a summertime thing or winter morning peak, they can bail us out in the spring, too.”

In other words, right there in Texas renewable power is the cheapest and most reliable way to have what Roy calls the “affordable, abundant energy” that makes our “lives so immeasurably better.” For me, these sets of facts should be enough. No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power (the rest of the world has clearly figured this out).

But either Roy hasn’t been paying attention to the new landscape, or those campaign contributions are too sweet, or the grip of ideology too strong. Roy not only voted to end all support for what he called, in a press release, the “Green New scam,” he also voted to close down the various programs of NOAA and the National Weather Service that even try to monitor the effects of climate change and warn us about emergencies like the weekend’s floods. (A good Times story reiterated something we talked about a few weeks ago in this newsletter: many of the necessary posts at the relevant NWS offices were vacant). In summer camp terms, he and his colleagues fired the lifeguards and pulled in the buoy ropes that mark the safe place to swim, while declaring the buddy system to be socialism. Sink or swim on your own—even after the floods he called for “fewer bureaucrats” as the best response to the nightmare.

If an experience like this close to home won’t open his eyes, then we have to organize to make sure that people like him aren’t returned to office—both in an effort to help slow global warming, and, at this point, in an effort to help us survive what we can no longer avoid—an effort that will require solidarity, not the selfish solipsism that is the mark of MAGA.

Earth Day in 1970 turned into a (highly successful) drive six months later to defeat a ‘dirty dozen’ Congressmen. Hopefully the energy that comes out of SunDay in September will have something of the same effect. Our new poster came out today. Join in the effort at sunday.earth

In other energy and climate news:

+Our excellent climate progenitors at Substack, Heated, have an account of the theoretically green corporations that continue to fund climate denial efforts at places like the Chamber of Commerce. Microsoft, for instance, which

has previously expressed concerns about the Chamber’s anti-climate advocacy, but has not changed its membership status.

The tech giant only responded to HEATED’s questions with “Microsoft has nothing to share at this time.”

+From India’s Deccan Herald, a sobering hour-by-hour account of how life works in the sweltering heat of the new northern India:

Noon, 43 Celsius, 109 Fahrenheit By noon, the laborers at the construction site had paused their plastering of a wall. But there wasn't much relief as they cooked their lunch under the baking sun.

The villages around Sri Ganganagar become largely deserted between midday and late afternoon, with people retreating indoors. But that was less of an option in the city proper. Roadside carts remained open, and construction work continued in the blistering heat.

The fire department tried to cool off the sstreets by spraying water, and volunteers ran water stands. "The main thing is the laborers and people who work outside," said Dr. Deepak Monga, who leads the city's main hospital. "They continue their work, because otherwise, they die of hunger."

+Michael Grunwald has an excerpt from his new book in U.S. News—it explains pretty clearly that if you want to change your diet to help the planet the thing to cut is beef.

+New York Renews, the important Empire State climate justice group, announces its opposition to the governor’s plan for a new nuclear reactor upstate—largely on the grounds that it’s a waste of money compared to cheap renewables and batteries

“The Build Public Renewables Act of 2023 gives NYPA the ability to build 15GW of publicly-owned renewables. NYPA should be laser-focused on rapidly scaling up the buildout of affordable solar and wind, which is the only way to meet the state’s science-based climate goals and lower energy bills. Simply put, community solar and utility-scale solar are the most affordable, most reliable, and most expeditious source of energy generation,” said Michael Richardson, co-facilitator of Third Act Upstate New York.

+In a truly sterling report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Caitlin Looby writes that pipeline company Enbridge failed to consult with indigenous groups as it bought land for its Line 5 Michigan project, in a land swap that

may have sidestepped a provision in the National Historic Preservation Act. Further, public records, court filings and emails reviewed by the Journal Sentinel, as well as multiple interviews, reveal how Enbridge leaves tribal officials feeling ignored, and how federal oversight can be manipulated to bypass protections for Indigenous lands.

Just three months before Enbridge and the county signed their land swap, bones were uncovered during an environmental review by Enbridge contractors and the Army Corps at a separate location near the Straits. The Journal Sentinel is not specifying the location at the request of tribal officials, due to the risk of looting.

After the discovery on Sept. 2, 2022, an Enbridge security guard contacted the Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office. According to the sheriff’s report, numerous Native American remains have been discovered in the area over the past 50 years. Based on the age of the bones and location of the find, the county medical examiner concluded the remains were likely from an Indigenous grave. The bones were described as very old, flat and small, possibly from a child or small woman.

Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, explained that the tribes had a plan with the Army Corps and Enbridge for unanticipated discoveries, knowing there was a high likelihood that human remains or artifacts of cultural significance would be found during the survey process.

Tribal historic preservation officers from Bay Mills had warned the Enbridge contractors and Army Corps officials there was an unmarked burial in the area, according to Gravelle. However, the contractors and Army Corps officials did not tell Bay Mills when the discovery was made.

Work continued, with Bay Mills kept in the dark, Gravelle said. It wasn’t until rumors spread that the tribe says it pressed Enbridge and the Army Corps for answers.

Once the discovery was in the open, Enbridge questioned whether the bones were human, and sent them for further testing. An osteological report from Georgia-based New South Associates on Nov. 16, 2022 found that of nine fragments recovered, two were likely non-human. The rest were classified as “indeterminate.”

The osteological report also noted a thimble found near the bones. In court filings challenging a permit issued in Michigan, Bay Mills Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Paula Carrick explained that such items are often buried with the deceased for their journey in the afterlife. Some bone fragments also were described as calcined, suggesting exposure to high heat, possibly as part of a funeral ceremony.

+Academics at Columbia University are producing model climate laws for states to use—mimicking the highly successful tactics pioneered by the right-wing ALEC consortium

Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and nonprofit campaign group Environmental Advocates New York on Wednesday launched the “Model Climate Laws Initiative,” with organizers saying some of their first targets will probably be greener state building codes and rules boosting electric vehicles.

“States are the front line for climate action in this moment of the second Trump administration. And one of the key needs that state legislators have is legal support for writing better laws,” said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates New York, which is also funding the initiative. “We see climate legislation ending up very consistently in the courts, being challenged. And if that is going to be the case, we need to start writing legislation with the strongest possible legal basis.”

+Here’s a bad idea—a Saudi energy official is going to be a key player in the IPCC?

Mustafa Babiker, who’s worked for nearly two decades as an economist with Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Saudi Aramco, has been nominated as one of three coordinating lead authors for a key chapter of the next assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the one that advises governments on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

The report is due in 2028, though there’ve been persistent reports that it may be delayed.

“The nomination of a longtime employee of Aramco as coordinating lead of the Government Policies chapter for this next IPCC report is one the most blatant examples of political capture by the oil industry of climate policy that I have ever seen. This is exactly why we are failing to move forward to increase climate ambition in domestic policy and international negotiations,” Tzeporah Berman, founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty secretariat, told The Energy Mix in an email statement.

“The oil companies will never manage their own decline,” Berman added. “The oil companies’ infiltration of policy reports and negotiations is holding the world hostage to the systems of the past that benefit polluters at the expense of lives and livelihoods. It is holding us back at a crucial moment in history when we are running out of time to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change caused by the continued expansion of oil, gas, and coal.”

+Along the same lines, European oil giant Equinor is using a video game to promote fossil fuels in British schools.

In an unusually frank admission of lobbying children, a web page promoting the game stated that it “aligns with our work to build future talent pipelines and secure permission to operate at a time of sensitivity around fossil fuels, particularly in light of . . . the Rosebank development”. The story was first revealed by the Norwegian news publication E24.

In Energy Town players must build a city that survives until the year 2050 by choosing a mix of housing, energy sources, businesses and community assets. The game was promoted on a site run by the Association for Science Education (ASE), which provides free online science resources for teachers and students.

Rosebank – the UK’s largest untapped oilfield – was greenlit by the Conservative government in 2023, prompting condemnation from climate campaigners. That decision was ruled unlawful by the courts in January this year because it had not taken into account the carbon emissions created by burning any oil and gas produced. Equinor, Norway’s state energy company, continues preparation work on the site under its joint venture with Shell.

+Journalist Dom Phillips (and his colleague Bruno Pereira) were killed in the Amazon while investigating deforestation. His widow Alessandra Sampaio has now finished the project. She told NPR

SAMPAIO: Indigenous around Brazil, not just in Amazon, especially in the Javari Valley - they say to me because I went to Javari Valley for three times, and at the first time I was there, one guy hugged me and said to me, now, you are part of our family - because Dom was part of our family because he died trying to protect us. So now we will take care of you, and you will take care of us. So I have this commitment with them. And they also say that Dom and Bruno became spirits of forest. So now, they continue protecting rainforest and its inhabitants.

+Blackrock, under pressure from red state treasurers, has pulled back on its environmental commitments, and now it’s paying the price: the Sierra Club Foundation is the latest to cut ties with the financial giant

+The respected non-profit National Security Archive released a new report on how intelligence agencies have assessed the climate threat over the decades.

The assessments published here today grow increasingly sophisticated over time in their analyses, evaluations, and warnings about the risks of climate change to U.S. interests, with more recent reports placing greater emphasis on complex threats like ecological degradation and biodiversity loss. Still, from 1999 to present, the IC has generally overlooked the domestic impacts, human-driven causes, and systemic contributors to climate change.

These analyses also reveal a deeply siloed approach to climate intelligence, the result of a state-centric analytical framework that typically focused on “hard” security issues like terrorism and great power competition. By structuring its climate focus around regions and nation states—such as extreme heat in the Middle East and flooding in Southeast Asia—U.S. intelligence agencies treat climate change like a nonstate, tactical actor, rather than a borderless, existential threat. The IC’s focus on geopolitics reflects a “narrow understanding of national security” that ultimately “downplays the risks” of climate change, according to the former State Department intelligence analyst, Dr. Rod Schoonover, who resigned in 2019 after the Trump administration blocked congressional testimony he prepared on the risks of climate change.

+For the financially inclined, a new book on using carbon as currency. In this podcast co-author Gustav Peebles

lays out a novel, scalable way not to just dole out carbon credits, but to actually monetize the conservation of carbon waste and discusses the fundamentals of a possible carbon banking system, and talk through just how such a concept might roll out.

+A new study of fig trees shows something interesting: they eventually turn to stone, which truly sequesters carbon dioxide.

Some species of fig trees store calcium carbonate in their trunks—essentially turning themselves (partially) into stone, new research has found. The team of Kenyan, U.S., Austrian, and Swiss scientists found that the trees could draw carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere and store it as calcium carbonate 'rocks' in the surrounding soil.

The trees—native to Kenya—are one of the first fruit trees shown to have this ability, known as the oxalate carbonate pathway.

+Nicholas Rogerson asks a sensible question in Current Affairs: Why are we still subsidizing fossil fuels?

Global subsidies for the consumption of oil and gas exceeded $1 trillion in 2022. That’s not a typo; we’re talking about more than a trillion dollars per year in the form of direct grants, vouchers, tax reductions and price regulations. And that’s only counting explicit subsidies. The International Monetary Fund published a study in late 2023 that counted implicit subsidies, like undercharging companies for environmental costs or giving them tax breaks on consumption, which translates to government revenue that is sacrificed to artificially lower the cost of things like gasoline or heating fuel for consumers. That rounded out to nearly $6 trillion in the same year. In other words, if one counts the explicit and the implicit together, we’re talking about $7 trillion in a year, worldwide. That’s more than 7 percent of global GDP…

Even if you’re unwilling to count the indirect subsidies, this idea of fossil fuels as free market exemplars is completely ahistorical. In fact, for the last century, U.S. direct oil and gas subsidies are estimated at around $4.8 billion per year (in 2010 adjusted dollars). That’s roughly a half trillion dollars over the course of the century. Nuclear power was similarly subsidized, especially early on: annualized, the average direct subsidy in nuclear energy, for the second half of the 20th century, was around $3.5 billion per year. Some of the tax credits and incentives that large companies still benefit from were put in place in a very different historical time. It was 1916, for example, when the tax deductions on drilling expenses that major oil companies still enjoy were put into place. This is why the conservative talking points on this are shallow and misleading. Energy policy professionals on both sides of the issue are well aware that virtually all new energy technologies have been subsidized in the beginning, and that we’ve spent a century directly subsidizing oil and gas.

+Finally, some lovely news: offshore wind turbines are turning into giant reefs supporting lots of sea life. Chris Buxton writes

Charter Captain Steven Forsberg, running trips from Montauk, watched his clients pull up fish after fish around the Block Island foundations. "Get as close to the foundation as possible," he'd instruct his anglers, positioning his 65-foot Viking just 30 yards from the steel pylons. The rumors were true: these artificial structures were attracting everything from black sea bass and porgies to Atlantic cod and flounder.

A seven-year study—the first of its kind in America—tracked nearly 664,000 fish representing 61 species around Block Island's turbines. The researchers found no negative effects on bottom-dwelling fish during construction or operation. Instead, they documented something extraordinary: fish were thriving around these new artificial reefs, feeding on mussels that grew on the turbine foundations and using the structures as nursery habitat.

The results mirror what European wind farms have seen over decades. At Danish installations, researchers recorded a 60-fold increase in food availability compared to the original sandy bottom. Belgian wind farms documented dense aggregations of over 22,000 individual fish around single turbine foundations, supporting 121 distinct marine species.

This isn't just about concentrating existing fish populations—it's about creating new habitat that produces more marine life. The turbines act as ecological catalysts, much like wolves reshaping Yellowstone's landscape, fundamentally altering marine food webs in ways that cascade through entire ecosystems.