Solstice Gifts
12/14/23 – Some thoughts, some book recommendations, and some good wishes
For the quotation of the week, I suppose I should offer up the little scrap of hope embedded in the final agreement at COP28, a sentence recommending that the world should be
transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.
As Bill McKibben points out in a piece titled “What Can We Do with a Sentence?”, the line itself is meaningless until activists give it meaning. He explains that, as with a sentence in the 1995 IPCC report that begrudgingly admitted human impact on the climate, and a sentence in the 2015 Paris accords that pledged to aim to keep global heating less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, one sentence can be an important tool for activists to wield. These sentences are ridiculous in their tiny truths, but they are tiny truths on a grand scale, and so become levers to use eve…
