Altered Carbon

Living in the shadow of the sun

Left to right: me, Colette Pichon Battle, U’Ilani Moore Wesley, and Branch Wesley on the UC Berkeley Campus for Bioneers 2024

Hi you,

Happy eclipse week. I hope you didn’t stare at the sun like our former president or use fraudulent eclipse glasses! I was mesmerized by the experience out in Palm Springs and got a little time lapse of our partial eclipse before the wind blew my gimbal over. I’m so excited to share this week’s newsletter, but before I dive into that, some professional news… Two of my projects are nominated for Webby Awards! For Branded Content, the second season of my Lenovo Late Night I.T. series; and for Education & Science, the social media for my PBS series, America Outdoors. Please vote. It’s annoying, but do it! Consider it practice for November 5. 

Now, let me take you on a tour through my feeds and share what’s been capturing my attention lately: 

• Quote of the week: “You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.” That’s Chef José Andrés, writing in The New York Times—a sentiment he also expressed Sunday in an interview with ABC News. Off and on, I’ve found myself compartmentalizing my heartbreak and anger at the way Israel is waging its war against Hamas and collectively punishing millions of people. The AP has a roundup of the numbers at the six-month mark. Sometimes it’s too much to handle, and I recognize that I’m not directly handling much of anything from my relatively safe perch in the United States. But as a friend and fan of Andrés, I was rocked harder than usual by the Israeli military’s targeted strike on World Central Kitchen volunteers. Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack demanded a response, as does the terror group’s ongoing refusal to release hostages, but there is no safety, security, or peace available through this brutal path of bombardment, blockade, and starvation.
  

  Given the near-famine conditions imposed on Gaza by Israel, I found On the Media’s coverage of the UNRWA aid organization to be an essential listen. Among other discoveries: It was the U.S. that helped form the organization, which was modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority with a goal of establishing economic ties that would lead refugees to resettle in neighboring countries.
  

• Other recommendations…: If you need an uplift, check out Shirley on Netflix. The biopic tells the story of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black person and first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Regina King delivers a transformative performance, and this story is just the sort of boost I feel I need in this moment.
  

  For another historical tale, I’ve started watching Manhunt on Apple TV+. The true crime series—created and executive produced by my college friend Monica Beletsky—offers a detailed and dramatic portrayal of the events following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and includes the perspectives of Black historical figures whose lives intertwined with the subsequent manhunt and investigation. It’s very hard to stop watching, and I found myself crying in the first episode while also sitting on the edge of my seat wondering what happens next… quite the achievement for a story whose ending we think we know.
  

• Finally, some good news: Years ago, when I was pursuing my own cable news show, I met with a network executive and pitched him on a radical idea: What if we covered the election from the perspective of voters and their concerns rather than politicians and their promises? It would be dramatic, colorful, different, and radically useful. He passed, of course. But in Colorado, a coalition of 30 newsrooms have come together to do just that! There are many collaborators in the project, but I’m struck by a simple element at the core: a survey created by Hearken to ask members of the public about their interests, not their personality preferences.

and now the featured essay, full version in Puck. Excerpts below.

Altered Carbon

An urgent dispatch from the 35th annual Bioneers conference, where the scientific community underscored a series of novel, and deceptively simple, frameworks for reorienting our societies to address our carbon problem. 

In the closing days of March, I found myself at the 35th annual Bioneers conference in Berkeley, California. The weather was nearly perfect, such that you could almost forget, for a moment, the drastic transformation of our planet’s climate. Last year was the hottest on record in human history, extreme weather events are on the rise, and our CO2 emissions continue to climb. Just two years earlier, uncontrolled wildfires ripped across this part of California, burning thousands of acres and choking the sky with smoke.

This year’s Bioneers event brought together scientists and academics, of course, but ultimately it was a gathering of planet-loving humans, seeking to restore environmental balance through science, journalism, and activism. I heard from people like Colette Pichon Battle, a lawyer and climate justice organizer for Taproot Earth; Charlotte Michaluk, a 17-year-old scientist and engineer; and Oren Lyons, a Member Chief of the Onondaga Council of Chiefs and the Grand Council of the Iroquois Confederacy. Each delivered powerful seminars addressing our climate and democracy crises, with a special focus on the ways in which human activity produces absurd and ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide—we’re all familiar with the hockey stick graph—far more than our natural systems are able to absorb. But these talks also underscored the fact that if we act now, in concert with these systems, we can both decarbonize our economy and begin to restore balance to the ecosystem. 

Thus far, humanity’s decades-old efforts at decarbonization have largely focused on a single technological approach—carbon capture and storage (a.k.a. CCS) initiatives, which have been around since the 1970s. But CCS programs are almost never as effective as advertised. Fossil fuel companies have long tried to convince us that their CCS initiatives essentially mitigate the problem, via a process that involves liquifying CO2 and transporting it through pipelines to a place deep beneath the surface of the earth. (The Inflation Reduction Act included record amounts of money to support this industry, thanks to heavy lobbying by Senator Joe Manchin and companies like Exxon and Chevron.) But pipelines leak, and can produce carbonic acid clouds that can asphyxiate humans and other life. As Taylor Brorby, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, put it at Bioneers, “Instead of just pumping emissions into the endless garbage dump of the atmosphere, we are going to create the nation’s largest sewage system that will then push liquid carbon dioxide under states.” 

But as I learned at the conference, recent scientific research has opened the door for more innovative and, frankly, humble solutions to our CO2 crisis. I admit, as someone who really likes technology—I constantly depend on airplanes and cloud services and machine learning—I’m enchanted by the idea that saving our planet will involve some massive technological moonshot based on yet-to-be-invented science. And yet, the best solutions might simply begin with the ground beneath our feet. There are natural processes constantly unfolding that can help us clean up our act, and new research is revealing ways that we can utilize this knowledge to pitch in. 

———

In the rest of the story I cite research

• on forests by Dr. Suzanne Simard

• on fungi by Merlin Sheldrake and

• on rivers under our rivers by Erica Gies

Final quote from the piece:

Yes, we are already suffering from the baked-in temperature increases due to already-emitted carbon. All sorts of species, not just humans, will be forced to migrate in pursuit of stability in a natural world that our actions have destabilized. But we can still limit that suffering, and find ways back toward balance, if we remember that we are part of nature, and that we should view nature as a partner instead of simply a source of profit. Our forests, fungi, and rivers are trying to help us. Peatlands, which cover only 3 percent of the world’s land area but store nearly 30 percent of its soil carbon, are trying to help us. (I saw this firsthand while filming America Outdoors in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, and there’s still time to save it.) Indigenous people, despite repeated attempts to eradicate them, are some of the best stewards of biodiversity and carbon-holding lands on the planet, and they are trying to help us. Will we accept their offer? 

I did a closing summary of the conference at the Berkeley Women’s Club which is on my YouTube and gives you a flavor of how I felt about the entire Bioneers experience.

Wishing you balance. Sending you love. Urging you to listen to Cowboy Carter. It’s good.

- Baratunde