I’m in this issue, with a piece on the politics of “complexity.” Everybody — from the Black Panthers to the neoliberals — praises complex systems thinking, an idea rooted in the physical sciences, and I try to figure out if we’re all really talking about this same thing.
You can pre-order now!
Talking to AI for science people is like talking to Bertrand Russell circa 1910. Their bottleneck is verifying truth claims generated at scale. How to do this? Well, by formalizing all knowledge of course!
Slide reading Methane Emergency Brake
Walter Benjamin’s emergency brake at the UNEP conference
Audience at Rewilding Appenines seated in a castle
Three people (two translators of the book, and the author) selfie at GKN driveline sign
Photo of a slideshow that says Half-Earth Socialism in a warehouse at the GKN factory
From the GKN factory occupation in Florence to Rewilding Apennines in Abruzzo, it's been a pleasure to speak with and learn from social, labor, and environmental struggles across Italy. You can find the Italian translation of Half-Earth Socialism online here: www.mimesisedizioni.it/libro/979122...
Leaning on late Lukacs is telling! But you're right, there is a real critique of the post-structuralist stuff as anti-political, but such ostentatiously bad readings are a symptom of something else.
JBF isn't a reactionary, but I'm just saying that in every Marxist of that particular mold just can't engage with French theory without making the texts a symbol of everything they don't like. If you're not careful, you react the same way to new social movements and BOOM you're Spiked Magazine
There is a reason so many Trotskyists became neocons... there's certain style of Marxist reasoning, one that overindexes on Marx the Lucretian/Darwinist and Engels the scientist, and ends up unable to understand why radical thinkers may have reacted against scientific bureaucracy post 68
Whether you stop by the worker-occupied GKN factory in Florence to hear about the book (jacobin.com/2023/04/ital...), or you join us in the swamps by Lake Maggiore to make updated methane measurements 250 years after Volta, I hope to see some of you in Italy!
Before the conference, though, I'll be on tour for the Italian translation of my 2022 Verso book, Half-Earth Socialism -- out now from Mimesis. Dates and locations below:
Something very important happened 250 years ago this year. That's right: Alessandro Volta discovered methane! I'll be in Ispra March 30 through April 2 for the Methane250 UNEP conference (www.methane250.org) presenting some of my recent work on methane trends (doi.org/10.5194/acp-...).
A photo of a harvester, with the text: Brecht-Tage 2026 - Die Erde, »die große Nährerin«. Brechts grüne Revolution
I'll be in Berlin next week celebrating Bertolt Brecht. The sessions look amazing! I'll be on some panels covering (1) resonances between Brecht and scientific modeling, and (2) Brecht on "being useless" (but in a good way).
love the wild mix of people and topics at the Brecht Tage next week, centering around the Brecht's 'green revolution' and featuring Thomas Turnbull, Hanna Hamel, @simschaupp.bsky.social, Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
lfbrecht.de/projekte/bre...
Yes
I called all my reps -- it's hard to overstate how important NCAR is to global weather and climate research
📰 The upshot is that we predict that South Korea is reaching a threshold where further emissions cuts will rapidly reduce PM2.5. You can read the paper in full here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... (4/4)
🧪🚗The answer is pretty complicated, involving nighttime nitrate radical chemistry (an alkene's worst nightmare)! To explain it visually and intuitively for a general audience, I wrote a post for my newsletter walking through all the details: drewpendergrass.beehiiv.com/p/a-strange-... (3/4)
🤔🕵️♀️ What was especially strange is that PM2.5 only got worse in the winter, only over the 2015-2019 period, and the worst air quality degradation happened at night and on the weekends. Intuitively, this doesn’t make much sense. More emissions happen during the week! It's a chemistry mystery! (2/4)
🧵 New paper thread! 🧵 We considered a strange case in South Korea where a major air pollutant — fine particulate matter, or PM2.5 — got worse, even as the pollutant emissions which drive PM2.5 formation fell substantially due to new regulations. (1/4)
Love to see the start of a Verso to city administration pipeline
📰 Read the paper for free! And stay tuned for more research using CHEEREIO coming soon, including from a team at U. Toronto working to track carbon monoxide from global wildfires and from a group at Tsinghua U. assessing China's performance on its methane goals. acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/...
🔥💧The record fires in Australia in 2020 were, in effect, a climate twin of the record flooding in Africa. This kind of anomaly is expected to increase with warming — an unexpected climate feedback, because it leads to more climate-warming methane to release from newly flooded wetlands.
🌏 This flooding in eastern Africa is associated with a positive anomaly in a climate pattern called the Indian Ocean Dipole, which leads water to be transported west across the Indian Ocean, away from Australia and Indonesia and towards eastern Africa.
🌍 In the paper, we apply CHEEREIO to calculate 2019-2023 global methane emissions using satellite methane observations from the TROPOMI instrument. We attribute the 2020-2021 methane surge to wetland activity from flooding in eastern Africa, especially in the river-fed wetlands of South Sudan.
🛰️ Satellites and ground-based monitors can measure pollutants in the air but cannot infer their sources directly; pollutants may have blown downwind or reacted away. During my PhD, I developed CHEEREIO (cheere.io), free software which tracks pollution back to its source using Bayesian optimization.
🧵 New paper thread! 🧵 We use satellite data to assess global methane emissions trends and seasonality. A greenhouse gas second only to CO2 in impact, methane concentrations surged in 2020 and 2021 for unclear reasons. We investigate in our paper. acp.copernicus.org/articles/25/...
Half-Earth Socialism, by @drewpendergrass.bsky.social and Troy Vettese, is now out in Italian thanks to Mimesis.
Here one of the authors answered our questions about ecosocialism, planning, vegetarian and vegan diets, social and environmental justice. Thanks to @jacobinitalia.bsky.social!
River or sankey diagram showing the allocation of profits from global oil and gas companies to quantiles of the US wealth size distribution via financial system intermediaries, such as asset managers, and categories of ultimate beneficiaries, such as business owners, pension funds and shareholders in listed companies. The scale is hundreds of billions of US dollars, and ultimately 50.4% of profits reaching the US personal wealth distribution go to the richest 1% of households.
🚨NEW PAPER🚨
We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Israel has just arrested Greta Thunberg and many others.
Statement from the Global Sumud Flotilla:
“People of conscience have been abducted. The flotilla broke no laws. What is illegal is Israel’s genocide, Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza, and Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon.”
1/3
Nice paper, but disagree a bit on framing. “Our estimate of 96.9 Gt carbon sequestration potential…amounts to 17.6% of the 640 Gt of carbon emissions since 1750.” This may be smaller than other estimates but that’s still a lot of carbon!!! Much more than I’d expect from DAC this century!
