Sustain What?

I’ll be doing another conversation about Trump’s threats to take Greenland soon - with Greenlanders. But I had to elevate the important statement made on January 9 in defense of the 57,000 citizens who inhabit Greenland’s coastal communities - signed by more than 200 American scientists who have worked on that giant ice-sheathed island. The curtain raiser post for this webcast with Greenland-focused researchers Yarrow Axford and Paul Bierman has all the relevant links:Please watch (and share!) the full show, which addresses lots of question, including why scientists feel the need to weigh in. We also explore relevant coverage and commentary, including a Wall Street Journal editorial board piece criticizing Trump’s bellicose approach. As for geopolitics, the longtime Greenland-focused scientist Paul Bierman says the national security debates so far have missed the strategic threat posed by the 20 feet of sea level rise banked in the island’s two-mile-high ice sheet. Here’s that clip and statement:Protecting Greenland’s ice is the most important piece of national security you could imagine and global security you can imagine. It’s not critical minerals. It’s not military strategy. It’s keeping that ice frozen.Bierman’s reflection resonates with Bill McKibben’s post on Trump’s aggression last week:Below I’m adding input from two of the statement signatories who couldn’t join us last night - Eric Rignot and Raymond Bradley.I do greatly appreciate the financial contributions of a small, but growing, portion of subscribers chipping in a bit of cash to help me justify the time to write and organize these Sustain What shows. Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. Even with all the paywalls, do consider becoming a paying supporter.Longtime polar scientist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, a signatory, sent this note:I have worked in Greenland for the past 33 years (first campaign was in 1993) funded by NASA and NSF on aircrafts, helicopters, ships, and on foot; I have flown all four corners during PARCA (1993-2008) and OIB (2009-2019), visited many fjords to map the bathymetry (2010-2019), and have been several times on Petermann glacier (2002, 2023), Jakovshavn glacier (2016-2017) and Zachariae Isstrom (2024).The Greenlanders have always been supportive of our work. We often hired them on boats, or we hired their boats and crew, they gave us permits to operate and collect data, and we interacted with them, although not as often as I wish. They are good people who survived 2 centuries of colonisation. They have been brave enough to form a semi autonomous government for the past 26 years, which is an amazing achievement.I am proud to say that fishermen use our bathymetry in a phone app. While they know their own fjords very well, they do not know every corner of them; our maps helped them find new fishing ground. For us scientists, to see that our work is directly useful to them, is very rewarding because we are very thankful they let us conduct science in their country.The US military in Greenland, esp. Pittufik, have been instrumental on many levels to facilitate work in Greenland as well. I would not throw a stone at them. They have been keen over the years to entertain a good relationship with Greenlanders and Danish people. I wish that this “collaboration” would continue and be encouraged and facilitated. Similarly, the Danish military has collaborated with us over the years.The threat of mining companies in Greenland is real. They will destroy the environment, pollute the fjords forever, ask fishermen to go away, and they won’t clean up. Clean mining does not exist. Greenlanders are opposed to mining because environmental regulations are weak.I won’t comment on the attempts of the US government to overtake Greenland. They already have military presence, bilateral agreements with Denmark, they do not need more than that. They are already a unique partner.A takeover by the USA could put an end to many international scientific studies in Greenland, which would be dramatic. We need to leave Greenland to the greenlanders. We need to respect them and work with them. We need to find a way to cooperate with them on the terms of their choosing. They have all the reasons in the world to be scared by the USA. The USA has not taken care of its own indigenous people, the condition of American indians is absolutely terrible. Until we show the world that we can take care of our own people, we should not pretend that we can take care of greenlanders.Greenlanders will protect the environment in Greenland, they care about it deeply, they have done so for many generations. No other nation will do that job better than them. This is their home. Leaving Greenland to greenlanders is the best way to protect Greenland and the best way to show greenlanders the respect that they so much deserve.Ray Bradley of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a signatory and longtime analyst of long-term Arctic climate variability and change, sent this statement:I’ve worked in different parts of Greenland and currently lead an NSF-funded project in northern Greenland (north of the ice sheet) investigating environmental conditions (don’t say CLIMATE!) when the earliest people arrived on the island ~4500 years ago. The project is a collaboration with archeologists from the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk.The whole idea of the US ‘Invading” or “occupying” Greenland is ridiculous and I’m afraid it has been hyped up by the media and egged on by Trump & his henchman Miller to distract from their other domestic problems. The media falls for it every time.Let’s just consider what an invasion or occupation means. There are only about 5 or 6 airstrips in all of Greenland where you could land a C-130. The most “strategic” location of those airstrips is at Station Nord in NE Greenland, and that dirt runway is a mud bath in the Spring and so often inaccessible. The base itself would be hard-pressed to house 100 people and the canteen can handle about 40 people at a time. So...good luck “occupying” that key location.Other sites include Kangerlussuaq, Nuuk (the capital) and Thule (now called Pittufik) on the West coast & Narsarssuaq in the south (a new runway is being prepared at nearby Qaqortoq, I believe). Minor airfields in Kulusuk & Mittarfik Nerlerit (Constable Point) on the east coast provide access to commercial flights from Iceland on Dash 8 aircraft--probably limited to other STOL aircraft. There are no hangars to repair large aircraft and very limited fuel supplies.60% of Greenland’s population live in Nuuk-the rest are scattered in small villages up and down the coast, often only accessible by helicopter (Air Greenland) or boat.There may be Russian (or Chinese) submarines operating around Greenland, just as they do around the US but I don’t think there are surface ship operation in the area--something the media has not investigated, yet it’s Trump’s main argument for taking over Greenland. I am quite sure that there are more Chinese ships approaching the West coast of the US every day than have been to Greenland in the last decade.If Trump was really concerned about N. Atlantic security, he’d pay attention to Iceland (where they do have airfields and docks for ships) or even Svalbard (where they also have coal!) and the Russians operate there already (in Barentsberg). (Not that I would encourage anybody to show the guy a map).He is obsessed with rare earth minerals, of which Greenland has an abundance. But often rare earth minerals are found along with uranium. That concerns the local people who have already rejected plans to mine in S. Greenland for fear of contamination of their land. The costs of extraction in some areas are enormous. The 2nd largest known zinc deposits (designated by the USGS as a strategic mineral--the biggest deposit is in Russia) is in NE Greenland (north of Station Nord at Citronen. An Australian mining company has explored and mapped the deposit & received full blessing of the Greenland Govt to extract the ore. The US EXIM bank put up over $600M to support the operation, but the company was unable to raise the required additional private equity and after several years of trying, they just abandoned the license. The reality is, extraction requires ships, which need to know the offshore bathymetry (rarely mapped in detail) and a reliable dock (generally missing). And then...did I mention sea-ice? How many icebreakers does the US currently have? Just a fraction of what the Russians (& even the Scandinavians) have...We’ve just seen how reluctant oil companies are to venture back into Venezuela, so I don’t think there are too many mining companies that will be ready to put up huge amounts of money to extract ore in Greenland versus other locales.Thank you Aviva Rahmani, Keith Kloor, Vivian Henry, Tracy Frisch, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s the audio/video podcast post of my live conversation with a determined duo of longtime broadcast journalists spending two months with intrepid scientists aboard the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon seeking fresh data that could show how fast Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice mass, the Thwaites Glacier, could raise sea levels. Miles O'Brien and Kate Tobin are an independent team working together through three decades at CNN and now independently, with their output seen on CNN, PBS and now Substack through O’Brien’s Miles Ahead newsletter. This map from the latest report of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration shows vividly why this region is so important. Here’s a relevant portion of the research collaborative’s 2025 report:Following some key studies beginning two decades ago, it was widely recognised that Thwaites Glacier posed a potential threat of rapid contributions to sea level. Prior to our research, little was known about the mechanisms controlling the retreat of this enormous glacier - one of the largest and fastest-changing glaciers in the world. If it collapsed entirely, sea level would rise by 65 cm. Thwaites Glacier spans an area equal to the island of Great Britain or the US state of Florida, and in places is almost 4000 m (13,000 ft) thick. The amount of ice flowing into the sea from Thwaites Glacier and its neighbouring glaciers more than doubled from the 1990s to the 2010s, and the Amundsen Sea region now accounts for 8% of the current rate of global sea-level rise of 4.5 mm a year.Here, O’Brien describes why this particular ice mass matters so much:From ice sheets to Main StreetWe also explored the challenge of linking Antarctic ice sheet dynamics with decisions in coastal communities around the world faced with the reality that sea levels of the past - relatively stable for centuries - are history. I noted my earlier Sustain What show on the importance of driving “managed retreat” or other policy shifts, as articulated in a great paper by Lizz Ultree et al, “From ice sheets to main streets: Intermediaries connect climate scientists to coastal adaptation.”A viewer asked about ways to stop the ice escape and warming and O’Brien mentioned that David Holland of New York University is on the research team aboard the ship. He’s part of a collection of researchers eager to test whether a “seabed curtain” - a small-scale geoengineering intervention - could hinder the melting influence of warm waters getting beneath the ice sheet.Learn more at the seabedcurtain.org website.Conveying a momentous story without hypeAnd we got into the challenges of doing accurate but effective journalism in a world fixated by, but also paralyzed by, overstatements. O’Brien makes vital points here about the challenge of balancing compelling narrative and the real complexity and time scales revealed by the science:For more on that issue, make sure to explore my post and Sustain What #Watchwords webcast on asking “by when” when you see the word COLLAPSE in the context of glacier science:Thanks for watching, weighing in AND sharing this post. I guarantee you know at least a few people who don’t know about Sustain What but could benefit from the information and ideas here. And of course chip in to help me justify the time it takes to do this work in my 69th year. :-)Sustain What is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

I hope you’ll great Sustain What chat on the shifting nature of climate journalism and the role of culture in climate [in]action with Sammy Roth. His 14-year track on the climate and energy beat has taken him from the Desert Sun to the Los Angeles Times (where his Boiling Point newsletter became a key read for climate-concerned folks) to Substack since October, with his fast-growing Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.Here’s his foundational post explaining how he focuses his work and why culture and the industries around it - including Disneyland - matter as much as energy systems and the industries around them:We explored a heap of issues, including why he moved from the Times to Substack (freedom!):He talked about his Times coverage of the 2022 “Glaring Absence” study by the The Media Impact Project at USC’s Norman Lear Center of climate and related references in Hollywood productions: They analyzed 37,000 scripts of TV shows and films for the second half of the twenty tens, which was quite ambitious. And they found that only 2.8 percent of scripts included any mention of climate change, and they didn’t just look at climate change. They had a list of, I think, three dozen different climate keywords. They had greenhouse gas, sea level, clean energy, fossil fuel…The moral of the story, even with three dozen different keywords, only 2.8 percent said anything about climate change or anything related. They said that they found the mention of the word dog 13 times as often as all 35 climate keywords put together.There is much more, so dive in and please share this post.And do subscribe to Climate Colored Goggles and consider chipping in. At my stage of life, Sustain What is more a labor of love than a monetary project. Sammy Roth’s newsletter is his foundational source of income and young journalists need all the support they can get. I created a subscribe button for him here:Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video. Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s the webcast/podcast post for my Sustain What conversation with Jennifer D. Sciubba, the new president of the near-century-old Population Reference Bureau, a longtime source of unspun demographic data and analysis.The focal point was her new book (with two veteran expert coauthors), Toxic Demography - Ideology and the Politics of Population.Learn more in my “curtain raiser” post:But here are some quick takeaways and links to material we explored. We discussed long cycles of politics and fear mongering, as I noted how Elon Musk’s December 11 tweet about New Zealand losing its whiteness (so much to think about there) echoes the anti-immigrant U.S. political art of 1903.Sciubba stressed that while a core goal of the book is creating more reality-based discourse around population data, some critical sources of such data are threatened under Trump and the current Congress.I pointed to George Monbiot’s column - “The facts are stark: Europe must open the door to migrants, or face its own extinction” - and Sciubba spoke about the limits to what governments can do - even in China - to reverse fertility trends (read this related Mercator Institute article)I pointed to the latest piece by longtime demographer Joseph Chamie on fertility declines, in which he echoes Sciubba et al’s conclusions about the limits of what countries can do to change fertility trends:There’s lots more in the conversation of course. Please watch above and offer some thoughts in the comments. Or watch and share on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, YouTube.And of course consider supporting my work if you can afford to:I hope you’ll consider becoming a free or paid subscriber or you can send a one-time donation below.Thank you Susan Spencer, Rachel of Sunchoke Falls, Bart Ziegler, Patricia Watts, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe

This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop, a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires.Here’s the curtain raiser post with lots of relevant links:Here are some relevant papers and posts we alluded to:2021 PNAS paper: Stewardship of global collective behavior https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.2023 paper (article summarizing): Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study is the first to offer estimates of the number of youth users on these platforms and how much annual ad revenue is attributable to them. The study was published on December 27, 2023, in PLOS ONE.Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier’s manifesto:https://www.jaronlanier.com/tenarguments.htmlReversing “enshittification” of everything - my chat with Cory DoctorowBluesky’s for-profit modelhttps://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-planThe Conversation - a global op-ed page, in essence, largely facilitated and populated by universities.https://theconversation.com/us/partnersThe website for the philanthropy efforts of YouTube’s titan, “Mr. Beast”:https://www.beastphilanthropy.org/our-workWhen Expertise Becomes a Requirement: Lessons from China’s New Influencer Regulation https://www.ssbm.ch/when-expertise-becomes-a-requirement-lessons-from-chinas-new-influencer-regulation/Center for Humane Technology - social media in societyhttps://www.humanetech.com/social-media-societyHow to Fix the Internet podcast, Electronic Frontier Foundationhttps://www.eff.org/how-to-fix-the-internet-podcastA sobering moment from my conversation with Tristan Harris (a founder of the Center for Humane Technology) after the release of the Netlix documentary Social DilemmaSustain What is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thank you Steve Chapple, Victor I. Covaleski, R Hull, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit revkin.substack.com/subscribe