A January 2025 Update from Climate Copium & Request for Info and Comments

Happy new year to you all and a few notes on plans for 2025! Plus how you can help the mission here at Climate Copium!

Happy new year to you all! Before I dive into the climate stuff, I want to start with a quote from another newsletter, The Garden of Forking Paths, on the legacy of the recently deceased Jimmy Carter. It is an uplifting reminder of how powerful the progress we can make, is:

In the mid-1980s, nearly four million people were infected by Guinea Worm each year. Caused by the parasitic roundworm Dracunculus medinensis, it’s certainly a disease you wouldn’t want to experience. The infections come from stagnant water, in which the worms lay their larvae, but the worms mature inside the human body. Over the course of a year, an infected person eventually plays host to a worm that grows to become one meter (3.3 feet) long.

Once fully grown, the worm creates a lesion on the skin and then escapes from the body, usually producing agonizing pain in the process. … Fully removing the worm can take days or weeks. It’s extremely painful, and often leads to secondary infections. …

Jimmy Carter decided to do something about it.

There was no glory in it. This wasn’t like cutting a ribbon or raising funds for a high-profile cause. In the United States and other rich countries, few people had ever heard of guinea worm, so Carter wasn’t exactly about to generate front page publicity for taking the parasite on, but he nonetheless decided to make it a core of his post-presidency public health agenda.

And it’s hard to overstate just how successful he was. Take a look at this chart (from NPR), showing the estimated number of cases in 1986 versus today, due to the Carter Center’s investments to eradicate the disease.

Before Carter got involved, Guinea Worm was prevalent in 21 countries, infecting at least 3.5 million people per year. Today, that figure is down to just 13 cases per year. It’s a reduction of 99.99% in just a few decades, making it one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Experts estimate that, without the efforts of the Carter Center, roughly 80 million more people would have been infected by Guinea Worm. Instead, they were saved from excruciating pain and crippling disease by a former president who gave a damn about a disease that nobody else seemed to care about.

Imagine if your legacy was that you helped to stop around 80 million people from an agonising, debilitating and possibly fatal parasite? Quite something. Not all progress get headlines and Time covers.

Back to the climate; Thank you to those who've commented, messaged me etc on posts - always helps to know your thoughts. Since the November 2024 post here about structuring the newsletter and content (and big thanks to those who completed the survey!) I've moved forward with the updated format and I'm happy to say that the two posts since (here and here) have been some of my best performing posts in terms of views, ever! So I'm assuming most like the updated approach. (I should note I do this out of both interest and commitment to a better climate future, so ultimately while stats help to understand you as readers, I'm going to cover topics that grab me or matter, popular or not!)

Future Topics

Some of the topics I'm looking to cover in future articles include:

• The rise of EVs and electrification (thanks to those who noted it!)

• More on Fusion (as was covered here)

• Climate and democracy (the inter-relationship here, I’m a keen advocate of the democratic process so both interest me, so how to stop climate chaos and strengthen our democratic institutions)

• The psychology of climate change (as in how us human perceive threats and respond to them and what we can learn to help our advocacy of the issues at hand)

• The disconnection of economic activity and fossil fuels (as had been argued for decades that you could not have one without the other and that’s clearly not true any more!)

• Testing an audio format for posts.

So if you have any interesting links, connections etc on any of the above or thoughts on topics to cover, please do let me know in comments, DMs etc (as you have been!)

Resources

I’m also going to put up a resource post that I will update as I process with both links and other media (books, films etc) suggested. These will be focused on areas of interest that I cover and not intended to be a ‘catch-all’ list. These include:

• Your energy provider - Make sure your own supplier of energy is getting it from renewable sources. (UK link) Also, if you have influence at work, ask about if your work place can also switch energy suppliers.

• Investments/pensions - If you have investments/pensions and can control where they invest (or where they don’t!) seek to move from any fossil fuel ones to renewable energy.

• Support new renewable capacity - If there is a renewable energy project seeking planning permission in your area, write in support of it (as for sure, there are campaigns to stop such projects getting built!)

• Politics - Contact your poltical representative and talk to them about climate action - even if you don’t think they care - let them know you both care and vote! If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people?

• Join a climate action group. There’s loads around and this does not have to mean protest - any group always needs a core of people to help from admin, funding, logistics and more. Being part of something is one of the best ways to stave of despair.

• Support an independent media outlet. One of the issues why we hit headwinds in climate progress despite a majority of people wanting to see action is that we face a huge, well-funded climate denial media network. However there are individuals and outlets doing good reporting, investigations and more. These always need support, so find one you like and subscribe!

• Better media use - Stopping doom scrolling (an interesting read here)

So if you’ve got suggestions to add to these or books you recommend, please do let me know and I’ll take a look.

Climate Images

Finally I like to add images in posts, again related to the way I cover climate change. Some are ones I’ve taken and some come from Creative Commons images I find online. If you’ve got images of yours and you are happy for me to use them, please do post them comments, DMs etc and I can look to use some in future posts (and please do give me the credit line for the post! Note only images of your please, not ones you’ve found online)

(Image - Solar farm near Blagdon, Noth Somerset - one of mine!)

Thanks and my next post is coming soon!

PS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.