Earth Day 2023 -- doing our bit for sustainability

Somehow I missed noticing the original Earth Day in 1970. Perhaps I was distracted by Richard Nixon's monstrous escalations of our immoral and futile war on Vietnam. Sure, I got it that Rachel Carson was onto something, but my young mind and heart were elsewhere.

I am immensely grateful for the masses who did notice Senator Gaylord Nelson's call to action for the environment. And I'm thrilled Joe Biden has chosen to speak for environmental justice, an essential cause which my friends in the old Center for Third World Organizing helped raise up in the early 1990s.

And so today we face human-induced climate instability and there is much good news to keep front of mind there -- though still so much to do.

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Slowly at first, and now accelerating, with an assist from the rebates in the Democrats' recent aid legislation, we're moving away from fossil fuels and toward electrifying from clean sources. We still use a lot of energy to run this civilization and will continue to use more, but the sources are changing. Goodbye coal and oil.

Via Robert Wright: 

Earthlings may have reached a major climate threshold—and, for once, it’s the good kind! A report from the environmental think tank Ember says greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector may have peaked in 2022. Thanks to the growing use of such renewable energy sources as solar and wind, these emissions are leveling off despite increased power generation overall. Solar and wind together accounted for 12 percent of the power generated in the 78 nations studied (which generate 93 percent of the world’s power). That’s up from 10 percent in 2021. If the renewables trend line continues, that can more than counteract growing total power consumption, the Ember report says.

Part of the reason the Erudite Partner and I are in Massachusetts is that we've been arranging to replace the old oil furnace in the family house here. It took 7 weeks to bring it together, but we've signed a contract for a heat pump system to go in next fall, using the rebate.