A few months after moving into our current home, we found ourselves needing to buy our own lawnmower for the first time. We learned that electric lawnmowers were a thing and figured that taking that route might be the most responsible thing to do from an environmental perspective, especially once we realized we could buy a string trimmer from the same company and use the same batteries for both. Both purchases have served us well, but our first battery didn’t last as long as we’d hoped, and with a second one currently on the fritz, I’m starting to suspect that the amount of e-waste that we’ve generated so far is outweighing any environmental benefit that we’ve created by not using gasoline to mow our lawns.

Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

Important, helpful read.

Wow, wow, wow. I was intrigued by what I knew about this book when I first bought it but am only now getting to it, five years later. It’s a beautiful book and quietly radical, using the story of Mormon to develop a theology of the world ending around us. Miller explicitly invokes the climate crisis at the end of the book and calls for disciples to be willing to sacrifice all things instead of simply waiting to lose all things. Even outside of that context, Miller’s quasi-mystical reading of Mormon has so much to offer—and is pleasantly aligned with some of the theologies I’ve heard in Community of Christ. This is a good one.

This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health.

I’ve been thinking recently that I need to reread Doctorow’s The Lost Cause (about beating back the climate catastrophe), so this blog post was welcome. Doctorow’s hopefulness—all while rejecting naïve optimism—is what I needed to read this morning.

I am very grumpy about this. Also, the point of emoji is that they exist within Unicode, yeah? So these aren’t really emoji in the way that those icons are useful—they’re just a fun trick that’s helping advance the climate crisis.