Endorsing Kathy Hochul

Plus critiquing Derek Thompson on fertility rate hysteria, waiting on longevity influencers to wake up to climate change, and more...

New York Governor Kathy Hochul got her wish and has dramatically weakened the CLCPA, the landmark climate law that was passed in 2019. This defeat marks the culmination of a roughly decade-long cycle of climate policy/political dynamics in New York, and my view is that the call of the moment is to reconstitute a more effective, durable climate movement in our state, which – in spite of this setback and the milquetoast corporate Democrats who delivered it – remains at the national and global forefront of climate action. I’ve been working personally alongside a lot of great people (and in parallel to many no doubt more substantive efforts) to play a part in bringing people together across New York’s too often disparate climate activist, policy, tech, developer, and finance circles, as the failure to make common cause against organized, well-capitalized, and politically-connected/coherent adversaries (read: the gas lobby, some utilities, etc) stands as one key reason for our loss.

That said, and as I’ve emphasized elsewhere, a MAGA Republican gubernatorial victory in New York State would be far worse than our admittedly sometimes disappointing status quo, and given the pragmatic realities of our current political moment, I’m now taking the opportunity to endorse Kathy Hochul. Barring some dramatic change in the interim, and given that the June Democratic primary appears to be already settled with Antonio Delgado’s withdrawal from the race in February, I encourage all New York State voters to back her this November.

Against Pro-Natalist Population Decline Hysteria

The frequently disappointing Derek Thompson once again disappointed me with this interview (which was shared with me by a colleague; I don’t go looking for opportunities not to like Thompson and Klein’s perspectives! Just a testament to how effective they’ve been in getting them out there). Linking to the interview because I found his interviewee, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde compelling in spite of the frame of reference.

Best part of the interview is when they go straight from pointing out that Paul Ehrlich and company got their Malthusian predictions so terribly wrong by extrapolating then-current (the Population Bomb was published in 1968) population growth rates indefinitely into the future, to immediately reflecting histrionically on what would happen if Thailand’s current fertility rates stayed steady for the next 200 years. Spoiler: They say that the country’s population would drop from 63 million to just 2 million! First, based on every source I surface, Thailand’s current population is closer to 72 million (and has grown, but at a steadily decline rate, since it stood at 63 million in the year 2000). More to the point, if less then 60 years ago, many people badly misjudged the direction of global population growth, why in the world is Derek Thompson losing his mind on his influential podcast over what would happen if current Thai fertility rates stay steady for two centuries?!

No doubt, managing declining fertility rates and global population decline will present new challenges, given that most economic and societal models have been predicated on permanent growth, but it’s also telling that Fernández-Villaverde sees fertility rates and AI as the only “two things [that] are important right now in life,” and that climate change is mentioned, I believe, only once, and even then, basically in passing. Here’s what I wrote to the friend who shared the episode: “On the fertility piece, I’m finding all of the pro-natalist rhetoric/hysteria totally bizarre and untethered from reality. Our species have obviously dramatically overshot Earth’s carrying capacity in terms of our collective draw on its resources. Thankfully, we’ve arrived at a technological and social moment where, increasingly, it feels like we have the tools to course correct before we self destruct. Reduced birth rates are very likely part of that, and I think it’s fully reasonable to expect that, in a hopeful future where humans achieve a more sustainable balance on Earth, our fertility rates will adjust accordingly. Right now, many people are opting not to have kids because at some level they see/feel the state of the planet, and it is not particularly good.”

I wrote this before listening, and yet it matches closely Fernández-Villaverde’s conclusion for what is causing fertility rate declines. We have a lot of work to do to rebuild human confidence in Earth as a “safe home”!

Climate Change Destroys Individual Humans’ Health

And just some passing observations on the climate-health intersection. A few years ago, there was a flurry of fund formation roughly around the human-plus-planetary health thesis. My sense is that most of these funds went on to really just focus on either human health or climate tech (or pivoted altogether, or fizzled), rather than meaningfully working at the intersection, but every passing day deepens the material basis for such a focus.

Just to cite a few examples, there is a growing (and, I think, justified) preoccupation with indoor carbon dioxide concentrations as a meaningful contributor to human mood, quality of sleep, clarity of mind, etc, etc. Much of this focus has been driven by tech folks who are interested in longevity (and the various heavily overlapping subsets therearound), and yet I so far have not heard anyone make the obvious connection that, as/if global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to rise, they can very easily start to tip (or rush headlong) into ranges which are suboptimal for human health, well-being, peak functioning, etc.

Risks of runaway warming, catastrophic climate breakdown, etc should be motivation enough to prioritize rapid decarbonization of our energy system, but even for those narrowly focused on their own well-being, the task gets much harder if you have to wear an oxygen mask all the time…

In a similar vein, the Nature Sustainability article entitled “Sleep loss in a warming world” caught my attention. The summary: “High temperatures disrupt sleep worldwide, with disproportionate impacts on older adults, women and populations in lower-income countries. A study uses climate change simulations to project future global sleep erosion and, in turn, the decline in childhood general cognitive ability and associated socioeconomic costs.”

For now, people with money can pay to shield themselves from many of the ills being driven by climate change, but the worse things get, the harder (and more expensive/prohibitive) it is likely to become to insulate oneself at the strictly personal level – yet another great reason to join in the collective, generational work of slowing, stopping, and, if we’re so fortunate, even reversing anthropogenic climate change.

On Idaho, Rats, and Outdoor Dining

Finally, not often that my home state is in the national news, so I was pleased/alarmed to see two headlines this week: “Memo to Ezra Klein: Check out Wichita and Boise” and “In Idaho’s Suburbs, a Rat Invasion Tests the Limits of Small Government” – I appreciate that The Prospect has continued to dog Klein, who they rightly point out (not in this article, but on a regular basis) originally built his profile as an Iraq War hawk/apologist, and continues to carry water for bad neoliberal ideas, even as he rebrands them as being about “Abundance”.

On the second article, local pest exterminators in Boise are said to have “feared what they viewed as government overreach, with “government exterminators knocking on doors demanding to be let into people’s homes” if residents weren’t given an opt-out option.” The government exterminators will pry these rats from my cold dead fingers: Even with all the changes, still the same Idaho I grew up in!

I’ll end back home in New York City, though, where Streetsblog reports “Mamdani and Menin Blame Each Other For Delays to Fix Outdoor Dining” – I really appreciate Streetsblog, but continue to be mystified by their support (and the broader political consensus in favor) of year-round outdoor dining. It is very clearly a privatization of public space for the benefit of for-profit businesses; means that that space will not actually be used for any public amenity; and, perhaps most significantly, flies in the face of the basic fact that for roughly six months out of the year (that is, the months during which the current outdoor dining plans requires that dining structures be packed up and stored) almost no one wants to sit outside to eat in New York City!

What this means, effectively, is that instead of the cars that we all hate taking up that precious, scarce public space, these streets advocates and local restaurant fans are now pushing instead to have boarded up sheds standing vacant, blocking curbs, impeding views, definitely sheltering rats whether advocates want to deal with reality or not, etc for roughly half the year. I know everyone feels for mom and pop, the poor local restaurant owners who can’t make ends meet without a shed, can’t afford to store a shed, etc, but somehow New York City had many restaurants even before the pandemic led to a dramatic loosening of our outdoor dining rules, and were a good investigative reporter to go digging, I suspect they’d find that the money backing these rule changes is not originating with mom and pop.

Of course, we could just have sidewalk cafes and solve all the problems, but then we’d probably have to more directly grapple with the inordinate power of cars. I’ll leave readers to ponder. Here’s to summer!