Writing Climate Futures, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
I recently listened to this insightful and thought-provoking Los Angeles Review of Books’ discussion about "Writing Climate Futures," featuring writers and academics including Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation (which I liked) and Weather (which I haven’t read yet), and David Wallace-Wells, who’s fortunately moved away from his doomist obsession with worst-case climate scenarios. (I’m thinking of his New York Magazine piece and subsequent book.)
An interesting point emerges during this LARB discussion, about an apparent binary between hope and despair in a lot of climate writing these days. For journalists and writer, it’s not our duty to provide happy endings, finishing every piece on an optimistic note. That said, I think a lot of climate-related stories do have room for hope, or at least, some promising courses of action, should people, industries, and governments choose to take them.
But as always, I oppose focusing on individuals’ carbon footprints or making people feel guilty for their personal choices, whether it’s their diet or their car or their decision to have children or not. Our individual actions do matter, but as I wrote in Undark magazine a couple yeas ago, the real culprit is the fossil fuel industry, and we should never forget that. And we can’t be fooled by fossil fuel companies’ push for “clean coal,” or “carbon capture and storage,” or the myth that most plastics are recycled. Fossil fuels have always been part of the problem. As Emily Atkin wrote in her newsletter today, we should be vilifying the oil and gas industry.
In climate writing and climate journalism today, we need myriad voices, including stories about people and communities engaged in activism, such as those drawing attention to “Summer of Heat” protests against Citibank, one of the major banks financing fossil fuels. I don’t think we should be writing with fatalism about the climate crisis—it’s never too late to take action, but sooner is better than later—yet a speaker at the LARB event pointed out that young people have relentlessly heard so much bad news that many talk about it in a fatalistic way (sometimes seriously and sometimes in jest). It’s understandable that some young people have already joined and left activist groups like the Sunrise Movement, having become disillusioned. Let’s explore their stories, to learn more about those people and about those who continue their activism. Like with the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, and the movement against the Vietnam war, for example, it can take decades to change the course of history. It always takes an incredibly broad variety of people, who have different perspectives and concerns and paths through life, to make a difference.
In any case, my own writing and reporting has shifted over the past few years. My previous climate-related work often highlighted climate impacts, but now I’m also trying to draw attention to climate solutions, including those that have potential and those that seem dubious. I’m writing about carbon removal technology, solar geoengineering, climate migration, the revival of the nuclear industry, supposedly green hydrogen fuel, and more.
In other writing…
Encounters with the Maverick Archaeologist of the Americas, by Ann Finkbeiner, and The Very Hungry Urchins, by Lisa Gardiner, both in Hakai magazine
How Generic Can Kamala Harris Be?, by Jay Caspian Kang in the New Yorker. Many voters seem to be satisfied with “vibes” from the Harris team, but it’s still journalists’ job to ask questions about what she’d actually do as president. Last week, after this piece was published, Harris outlined a number of economic policies, including a child tax credit, a ban on price gouging, and proposals to reduce the cost of drugs and of housing.
The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age, by Niall Firth in MIT Tech Review
The California Beach Town Awash in Poop, by Rowan Moore Gerety in The New Republic, about border politics and an environmental justice problem in San Diego, my former hometown.
How a warming Earth is changing our brains, bodies and minds, by Clayton Page Aldern in Aeon magazine
The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies, by Rachel Cohen in Vox
Entangled, by Ben Goldfarb in bioGraphic, about the ecological impact of the world’s fences
What I’m reading: There There, by Tommy Orange
Looking back: Seven years ago, following Hurricane Harvey, I wrote in Slate about how FEMA’s flood maps are horribly flawed and backward-looking, leaving out climate projections and new development. It looks like the agency has yet to correct this problem.
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.