Good Friday. Right? When is a Friday not good? But in particular this one is great because I am ready for carrot cake (no raisins, please) and all the deviled eggs on Sunday. My kids might not be home to color Easter eggs anymore but that doesn’t mean I can’t decorate them! And be saddled with boiled eggs for a week after.
This week’s must read: The Conservative Case for Protecting the Environment (TIME)
This one published March 25, but in my subpar state of health, I did not include it in the last Week En Review.
“The revocation of the Endangerment Finding is not just a policy shift. It is a departure from what it once meant to be conservative in America,” writes the author, Matthew Roling, a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and the founding Executive Director of the Abrams Climate Academy. “The decision was heralded as the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. But what it truly represents is a rejection of responsibility, a break with the rural communities most vulnerable to climate impacts, and a surrender of the conservative identity that built America’s environmental legacy.”
What if climate policies could increase your health and your wealth?
It would be a no-brainer that the U.S. would go hard on implementing those solutions, right?
Well, they do! Which begs the question, why don’t we lead with these facts when talking about climate change?
This episode’s guest tackles that very question.
Norm Leo is a climate scientist with more than 20 years of experience engaging diverse audiences on climate change. He recently published a book titled LOOK AT IT THIS WAY: Climate Solutions Will Benefit Your Health and Wealth — a reversible read that quite literally flips the climate narrative. Readers can start from either side of the book: one side explores the impacts of climate change and the other ,the benefits of climate action. It’s designed to make climate solutions feel personal, hopeful, and accessible.
I appreciate this attempt to switch up how we communicate about climate change; instead of focusing on despair and urgency, sacrifice and doom, we look at the opportunities, many of them economic, that market based climate solutions offer.
Coming up next week, how does energy transmit from point A to point B and how is this transmission of energy in need of a major update? Tune in next week for Rachel Levine, Senior Transmission Policy Analyst for Niskanen Center.
Flashback Friday
This week, on a call with none other than the coiner of the term EcoRight, our former teammate and forever friend Alex Bozmoski, we were reminiscing a time (3 years running, actually) when we were highly successful at playing April Fools Day gags. Lover of history, I went back into our archives and found those old posts.
The first one felt pretty funny in the spring of 2016: that our very own Bob Inglis was on the VP shortlist. The team did not even tell Bob we were doing this, so we got him too!
We followed up in 2017 with a post we ultimately labeled “April Fools” in the subject line because it was getting some media play. People with a proverbial checkmark were earnestly retweeting it and repurposing the news, despite one very funny misspelling; none of us can recall whether such typo was an honest mistake or intentional.
In 2018 we got y’all one more time before hanging up our careers as comedy writers.
I thought about reviving the game this year, but if you have to think too hard, you’ve probably already let the humor seep out. But you better pay attention next year because I have 360+ days to plan a doozy!
LTE of the week
Have you heard/read me herald the practice of writing letters to the editor? It’s been a minute since I’ve made that push, but maybe this letter published in the Rochester Beacon will inspire you.
“I have been a Republican all my life and living in a rural farming community has taught me that we all must live with and depend on the natural environment. We ALL have to be good stewards. It is not for one side of the aisle, it is for all the people,” writes the author, Robert Johnson, who is poised to participate in the upcoming CCL Conservative Caucus Lobby Day. “It pains me to see politicians, across the spectrum, portray climate change as a partisan issue. Scientific knowledge transcends politics. There isn’t separate science for each side of the aisle. Advancing scientific knowledge is crucial to improving the human condition.”
Bob in the wild
Why you should care about sea level rise… even if you don’t live on the coast