I spend a lot of time reading posts and essays and articles about the latest in science and solutions for climate change. The science is fascinating and relevant to my own future and the future of our society at large. It’s clear that if the world doesn’t significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the future will be increasingly unpleasant, dangerous, and economically stressed. Hell, it’s clear that this is already happening and that our actual choice is whether the negative consequences of climate change will be less or more severe.

Understandably, there’s one hell of a lot of hand-wringing that goes on in much of what I read about our challenge to minimize the future damage of climate change already embedded in our human soiled atmosphere. Given the stakes, this is understandable from an emotional perspective, but what I find strange are all the proscriptions for how to climate care one’s feelings, whether from the angle of climate optimists or those who plea that we must all gird our loins and march to the barricades tout de suite. For example, Jim Ball’s Climate Hope Together Substack, in a post titled “Let’s Make Climate Hope Happen Together,” with the subtitle “Climate Movement: How to Get Our Intensity Back! Part Two” raises the issue of how to boost the intensity of the climate movement.

The post starts this way:

In my previous post I documented what those of us in The Climate Movement know in our gut: as a movement we’ve lost our intensity. We’re floundering. From whence will come the passion to ignite intensity’s potential?

Ball goes on to describe “Ten Climate Movement Values” and while every one of these values is good, I’m left wondering why we must need this basic guidance about being a good human. Am I an old curmudgeon fixated on some idea that adults living a self-examined life know all this and that refresher courses on being intelligent—both intellectually and emotionally—aren’t the leading priority of the climate movement? But to my chagrin, Ball is likely right.

I know that our culture today is described as materialistic, consumeristic, and distracted (i.e., not reading beyond an Instagram post, tweet, or AI email summary), and that many feel socially isolated one from another. Ball’s Substack’s subject—at least of late—is about the climate movement and how to grow it, how to reinvigorate it. His first post came about a year ago. He’s been prolific and the Substack has solid organizational structure. I’m actually a fan of his work and think he’s got a lot to contribute. But maybe we should allow there to be more practical steps than boosting our mojo.

Practical Steps ‘R Us

Ball’s latest post just came out at the time I’ve been pondering why there seems to be little acknowledgement of the triumphs of climate action, and to be fair, Ball, later in his post, presents such acknowledgements. (For a running report on positive developments, there may be no better source than Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack, The Weekly Anthropocene.)

There’s a section of Ball’s post with the heading “The Good Stuff: A Just & Prosperous Sustainability,” which starts this way:

We are on the precipice of the transformation we’re calling for. We’ve got the tech right now to do what’s needed. And more is on the way every day.

I’m suggesting that there is far too much focus on how we feel about climate change and far too little about the practical steps available to all of us to do something about climate change. I mean, sure, human-caused global warming and the fossil fuel industry’s resistance to correcting it is freakout-worthy. Fortunately, there are plenty of things we can do about it and plenty of things we’ve already done.

Maybe we will benefit from spending less time working on why we feel the way we do, and more time spent on action.

The Practice of Knowledgeable Voting

There are practical steps to help push climate progress forward. I believe political action is the biggest lever available to address climate change and I don’t get caught up in worrying whether political action is possible. Why am I not fixated on the question of whether there’s the possibility of political action on climate change? The answer is simple: Because there has been a lot of political action to address climate change. The Biden administration and the previous Congress accomplished miracles in the form of the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), to name the two biggest examples.

Yes, of course, then came Trump, but this time of Trump is less about climate change and more about the threat to America’s democracy experiment, now in its two-hundred-and-fiftieth year. The current absurdity of Trump’s drive toward fascism and self-dealing is a political problem with a political solution, and this threat’s solution is to vote the bums out. We need to get America back to a full democracy if we are to have any hope of getting back on track with climate progress legislation. Restrengthening democracy is America’s biggest climate action solution. Therefore, the first climate progress practical step is a political step: voting. If I hear one more person mopey about climate change but not voting, I may have to be physically restrained.

It would be helpful to have clearer resources about candidate positions on climate action, perhaps in the form of a one-stop clearinghouse, but there are plenty of relevant resources. Here’s a partial list, sourced from a simple Google query, but there are plenty more—just not any great fully-comprehensive lists for one-stop shopping:

1. Run on Climate https://runonclimate.org › candidate-resources
2. The climate movement needs to demand more of candidates than just platitudes.
3. Western Resource Advocates https://westernresourceadvocates.org › climate-question …This election year, we have the opportunity to vote for climate leaders all the way down the ballot. The candidates who are elected will make critical decisions …
4. League of Conservation Voters https://www.lcv.org › 2024-climate-candidate-guide
5. Want to vote for candidates who will protect people and the planet? Search here to find endorsed climate candidates in your local, state and national races.
6. Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund
7. Releases specific environmental scorecards for major state and federal races, grading politicians on key biodiversity and climate change platforms.
8. Climate Cabinet https://climatecabinet.org › candidates
9. We support pro-climate candidates in high-impact elections across the country. We back competitive local candidates in overlooked races. We help high-impact local leaders run, win, and legislate on climate change.

In my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book in my literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet, there’s Climate Covenant, a clearinghouse for comprehensive local, state, and federal candidate climate action ratings. By 2035, which is when the action of this book takes place, Climate Covenant has been playing an important role in elections for years. The practical step here would be to move this fictional service into the real world.

Any takers?

Understanding the Progress Underway and that Doing Nothing Is the Far More Expensive Choice

While people bemoan their climate-crisis-induced fragile emotional or psychological states, attending workshops on self-care or subscribing to the “Woe is Us” school of thought, what is often not considered is that the past decade has produced amazing progress in fighting climate change. I mean, sure, it would have been far better if we’d started this work when the consensus emerged about human-caused climate change three-and-a-half decades ago, but unless someone has a handy time machine, bemoaning the past isn’t all that helpful.

What might be helpful? One thing I’d love to see is the correction of the biggest failure for climate progress, which is ignoring our bullshit pricing of oil. Fossil fuels should carry the costs and consequences of their production, protection, and use, or what are referred to as “externalities.” Thanks to sneaky indirect subsidies, fossil fuels escape accounting for and paying the damages its product causes, an exceptional condition among businesses that usually include the cost of their product in the market price.

So, let’s learn to talk about the real costs of fossil fuels. Let’s try to get this talk into the political discussion, especially at this time of affordability as an election issue.

Fossil fuels are actually very expensive. The price at the pump doesn’t cover the actual costs. Here is an AI Summary table that addresses actual cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. Before you jump on me for providing something generated from AI, please understand that I know the sources and the arguments and that the exact and precise numbers are too complex to pin down to anything other than a range. Still, the table is convincing:

Pricing Scenarios: Current vs. True Cost

The table below highlights how different economic frameworks alter what you would actually pay at the pump to clear these hidden debts.

Pricing Model	Est. Cost per Gallon	What It Reflects
Current Retail Price	~$3.50 – $3.80	Covers private supply costs (extraction, refining, retail margins) and standard state/federal fuel taxes.
IMF “Socially Efficient” Price	~$7.00 – $8.00	Supply costs plus conservative global warming and local air pollution impacts. This closely matches what drivers in Germany or France pay due to high corrective taxes.
Comprehensive Externalities Model	~$12.00 – $15.00	Uses high-end “Social Cost of Carbon” estimates, factors in localized toxic evaporation, water table remediation, and dedicated military oil-security spending.

A Tax on Carbon Makes Sense, Socially

One way to bring out the true cost of fossil fuels is to put in place a tax on carbon, along with an accompanying dividend to offset the regressive hit for poor people. The tax on carbon has been long overdue but is especially appropriate now that we have real alternatives to fossil fuel use in transportation and the heating and cooling of our human spaces. The clean energy alternative is not only real, but economically competitive with fossil fuels, plus typically faster to build. If you want a good overview of where we are today and where we are heading, check out Ember and their annual slide deck, The Electrotech Revolution, from Kingsmill Bond and the Ember Futures team. Each year they unpack how electrotech “is rewriting the economics and geopolitics of energy.” Keep in mind that the current slide deck was published in September 2025, and it’s likely that the new one, no doubt in process, will present an even stronger picture of clean energy today and where it’s all heading. The clean energy transition is a viable and beneficial replacement of fossil fuels. We are on our way.

Of course, we can be on our way less or more fairly. Social justice is an important goal when it comes to climate change, but there are two important perspectives to keep in mind and these points are intertwined. Sacrificing climate action on the altar of social justice—the sort of “perfect being the enemy of good” condition—sometimes delays or blocks positive climate action. Often there’s a NIMBY element in opposition, where placement of, say, a community solar/BESS facility ends up in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood. It isn’t that the all-too-frequent complaint of such onerous project placements in poor areas is wrong, because this occurs absurdly too often. The counter to this, however, is that any project expanding the transition to clean energy should be supported, not blocked, because the clean energy transition provides significant benefits to all. Energy access and affordability is one such benefit, and there are location-specific health benefits in getting rid of polluting sources of fossil fuel electricity generation and road traffic. Any project that moves us away from fossil fuel generation is intrinsically a social justice victory.

This doesn’t mean there should be no consideration of other factors that may affect social justice, but rather that we all must balance such issues of fairness with the larger goal of supporting a world that supports life—it doesn’t get more basic than this issue. There’s a clock running, after all, and the Global South is already bearing an unfair share of the burden of climate change consequences, so any and all climate progress work is social justice work.

When Bill Gates published his absurd diatribe suggesting a problem with a singular focus on climate change progress priorities, he rightly got hammered. I joined in with “The Headlines are Full of Bill Gates’ Latest Wisdom—It’s Hysterical!” He was wrong to talk about disease eradication and economic uplift as competing priorities not because these are not important, but because fighting climate change itself answers these priorities. You want to eradicate disease? Maybe a good step is to reduce the causes of disease proliferation and the climate change-induced body stress conditions that weaken people. Want to lift more people out of poverty? Clean energy systems can leapfrog centralized grid barriers to provide electricity far more widely, cleaner, and quickly than anything based on fossil fuel-based electricity generation.

It isn’t that Gates is wrong about the need for better world health and shared wealth, but he is wrong to underplay climate actions reducing barriers to pervasive solutions for better world health and shared wealth. And, no, I’m not saying there is no place for public health aid, research, and services. I am saying that as climate change consequences damage our environment, all other types of aid, including those that seek to support improved health and economic justice, will be addressing far more overwhelming problems in the world that is not intensely pursuing climate progress.

Maybe the Clean Energy Transition is Simpler than We Think

There are lots of stories and data points showing the emergence of clean energy is not only real, but unstoppable.

I’d say that this represents a ton of mojo.

Big Oil’s days are numbered, although there’s plenty of hard work ahead to get the number of those days down, and fast. Climate change is already wreaking havoc, so the work here is to speed up the transition: the faster we stop greenhouse gas emissions from rising and the more quickly we bring these emissions down, the better.

We have the technologies and the economic arguments to accelerate the clean energy transition and those technologies and economic arguments keep improving. Maybe the transition we should be concerned with now is to shift our attention toward naming the enemies of the transition and supporting the friends of the transition. In other words, focus on the political changes needed to further encourage and support the transition and the legislators who can push the transition forward.

Sure, the person sitting in the Oval Office is a huuuge enemy to the clean energy transition, but fortunately, he and his cronies are so heavy-handed in their attempts to suppress clean energy that the hand they’re dealing is ever more obvious to the body politic. Fortunately, the issues of cost and affordability have become positive ones for clean energy. The politics—apart from the abuse by those bought by Big Oil—seems ever more interested, even eager, to pursue the clean energy transition. But, of course, the coffers of Big Oil are huuuge and the headwinds strong.

Still, there is a growing understanding that Big Oil is in trouble, with court cases around the world poking and prodding, trying to find a way in. By 2035, as I present in Over Brooklyn Hills, the days of legal reckoning of Big Oil are getting underway after decades of delay. In 2035, in the changed political environment of that time, Democrats are less corporate-inclined and more service-minded. The Supreme Court has been rectified and that purchased defense of Big Oil is evaporating. Hey, there’s a nice plotline about a widespread hacking job to disrupt the legal document management systems of dozens upon dozens of law firms and State Attorney Generals offices to further delay judgement, but you’ll have to read the novel for more on that.

There Are Plenty of Resources for the Climate Change Curious… and There Are Plenty of Climate Change Convinced

Although the mainstream media is failing, with the mass exodus of climate reporters just one symptom, some of the very best journalists covering climate science, technology, and policy are now found on the Web, and more specifically Substack. There are the stalwart, too, on Substack: David Roberts is one such example, where his podcast, Volts, provides current guidance on what good people are trying to do to push the energy transition forward. And then there’s the longtime climate warrior, Bill McKibben, still dispensing climate news round-ups of high utility, not to mention a moral perspective on the whole of climate change issues. If you follow these people—or, really, any of the excellent climate change and clean energy transition writers—you can’t remain too mopey.

Ball’s recent post reiterates a growing awareness that a hell of a lot more people are climate active than is commonly perceived. He points to the need to break what he calls “the Climate Talk Taboo” as being as important to the clean energy transition as direct work. For most of us, one of the last hurdles to overcome is to let our friends, family, colleagues, and other members of our community know that we are also interested in the work of the clean energy transition.

Pursuing climate progress is simple: we have the means to cut a big part of the GHG emissions and the means of doing this makes plenty of sense. We simply need to talk to each other about it, so turn that frown upside down and start talking to others about the clean energy transition.

OMG, am I a climate optimist, too?