This week’s edition of The Planet You Save May Be Your Own is a big one. I’ve got my reaction to a “climate feelings” book, written by a scientist who recently left NASA. I’ve brought back sections sharing more of what’ I’m reading and listening to. I’d love to hear if you end up reading anything I’ve linked here, and your own feelings about living on a warming planet.

NB: I requested and received a review copy of Human Nature from Ecco (meaning I didn’t pay for it). I’ve included a Bookshop.org affiliate link to the book; if you’re interested in it, buying it through there will help defray the cost of sending this newsletter.

Last week I read Human Nature by Kate Marvel, a climate scientist and science communicator, who recently became one of thousands of scientists who left federal service. It’s a non-fiction book and a series of essays in which Marvel discusses nine feelings (wonder, anger, guilt, fear, grief, surprise, pride, hope, and love) that climate change brings up for her. As a framing device, it’s refreshing: a scientist who knows deeply about the ramifications of shifting our planet’s temperature, talking about the very human feelings that work stirs in her. While her work days are concerned with expansive and detailed modeling of Earth’s possible futures and impacts, Marvel is insistent that no model will ever replicate the experience of living and feeling in a warming world.

As much Human Nature is a meditation on Marvel’s feelings after 20+ years of being a climate scientist, and the burden of what she knows, it is also a very readable summation of that knowledge. She explains how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere becomes stronger hurricanes, hotter summers, and rising seas. It’s succinct and clear about how a warming earth becomes a more dangerous one for humans and human civilization. She doesn’t shy away from the scariest scenarios, while identifying that that’s just what they are: one of many possible futures, almost all of them squarely now in our hands.

If there’s a driving argument in Marvel’s book, it’s that while the laws of physics that turn more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into climate change are inflexible, that’s not the case for human action and reaction. She writes, early on:

But history is a renewable resource; we keep making more of it. On a planet that receives more power from the sun in a single hour than the whole of humanity collectively consumes in a year, fossil fuels are not inevitable. We can have better things. We do not have to endlessly extract carbon from the ground and transfer it to the atmosphere. The flavor of the lie changes as the future slides into the present and recedes into the past, but at its core it’s always the same: that there are laws of human behavior as unbreakable as the laws of physics, and those those laws point inevitably to doom.

I’m angry at the falsehoods, the denial, the deliberate manufacturing of doubt. But more than anything, I’m angry at the suggestion that things can never be different. I stare at the future in the climate models, projections that range from nightmare to unpleasant dream to miracle. There is nothing about the physics of Earth that dooms us to the worst-case outcome, and nothing that says human being have to accept it. The planet is going to change. We can too.

This is Marvel’s version of something I increasingly hear from advocates and scientists: We thought people just didn’t understand; we thought sharing the right information with the right people, the people who make decisions, would be enough. We just had to get through.

They are increasingly, not necessarily disillusioned, but deeply dissatisfied with this approach. Good information is necessary, but not sufficient.

But until you get to the Pride chapter there’s very few stories of humans steering the ship towards salvation. For a book that so strongly argues that we haven’t settled our own future, that doomerism is a self-fulling prophesy, that humans do not respond in ways that are predictable as physics, there’s plenty of examples that do not inspire confidence. They include how humans have reacted to sudden climatic changes in the past that came from volcanic eruptions or natural variation. Her point is show how we have also been worked upon by climate, but in those situations, short-sightenedness, inequity and the search for an easy culprit to blame, is a story that keeps repeating.

The Hope chapter includes one of the hits that many who read about climate know about: the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 global agreement to end the use of CFCs. Producing CFCs at an industrial scale was eating a hole into the ozone layer, which protects us from the worst of the sun’s UV rays. CFCs are also a powerful greenhouse gas on their own, and phasing them out of of widespread use has avoided an additional 1 C of warming on top of what we’ve already done (about 1.3C) .

Marvel doesn’t get into this, but one of the notable things about the ban on CFCs is that is did not start strictly as a United Nations treaty, it ended that way. A smaller group of countries began the negotiation process, and spent significant time planning for the impact on developing countries. So why did Montreal Protocol work so well — and so quickly — while other international environmental treaties have not? I don’t know the answer. Marvel cautions against using the example as direct analogue for how to deal with climate change, but points to it as a major, recent example of a success story. “We fixed it,” she writes. Recent studies show that the ozone is recovering, preventing potentially millions of deaths from skin cancer.

The chapter also includes major environmental shifts humans successfully pulled off in the 20th century that I’d either not thought too deeply about (banning whale hunting for oil; removing lead from gasoline) and one I’d never heard of before: the response to the Great Smog of London, which killed thousands of people on a single day in 1952.

A weather inversion trapped dangerous smoke, which came from heating homes with especially dirty coal, close to the ground. The dramatic event led to the British Clean Air Act in 1956, but it was not a straightforward or predetermined outcome that so many pollution deaths forced the government to act. Instead, Marvel describes a process rife with denial of coal’s impact, a slow-moving Westminister commission whose findings were disparaged by the government in power, an industry worried about their coal export business, an eccentric and otherwise ignorant MP doing an end-run around Parliament with a royal ordinance, and ultimately, the actions of millions of Londoners:

Policy helped, but it was individual city-dwellers who replaced their polluting furnaces and boilers… the recognition that clean air was important, the use of government power to mandate smokeless fuels, the surge of interest in air pollution science, sustained public pressure and above all the actions of ordinary Londoners — all of these things converged to make something far form perfect, but a storm all the same.

For me, the lesson of the London smog is that these successful shifts towards particular environmental aim can’t tell us the formula for fixing a problem that feels so similar. The exact elements that led to change are impossible to replicate again, much like the lessons from Montreal Protocol have not neatly mapped onto wider climate change efforts, even though it seems like they should. There are unexpected elements, outlier individuals and events, and millions and billions of individual contributions that we never hear about because they aren’t an interesting story. But the unplanned and the untold can turn us either way.

What I’m Reading

• NYC wants to use thermal energy to cool subway stations, heat municipal buildings in the winter.

• “People really effing hate data centers”: E&E News identifies two Michigan primaries where data center politics made a difference, and how it could affect the general election. Does that translate into wider climate policy?

• Meanwhile, climate coastal impacts are driving the election in this Virginia district.

• Wired identifies two fossil fuel companies especially benefiting from data centers. One name you already know, the other you know if you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough.

• Both things are true: Confirmation that data center demand is driving increased emissions from electricity in the US; but the amount of renewable energy coming online this year dwarfs new fossil production.

• Department of Headlines I wasn’t expecting: In a first, Utah got more power from solar than any other source.

• Why Illinois has struggled to turn old coal sites into solar farms.

• Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard of the Parmesan cheese investment bank affected by climate change.

• Flint is nearly done digging up and replacing all lead pipes under the city, nearly 11 years after the water crisis.

• “When the chief of the Okanagan Indian Band looked down on his community from a helicopter last week, much of what he had known all his life was gone.”

• How reporters uncovered a state parks scandal in Florida, and turned around a “park in peril”

• Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ could fast-track massive expansion of Plaquemines LNG export terminal (aka the one I tried to figure out the insurance companies backing it in The Guardian)

Listening

Driving up past the wind farms of Michigan’s thumb, listening to the “70s on 7” satellite station on my mother in law’s car, I was suddenly compelled to find all the songs that have sampled the fantastic beat on You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine by Lou Rawls. I was underwhelmed by a few covers and one okay rap song. Get on this, record producers.

Thinking

• “Han uses the metaphor of a gym to make this concrete. People do not become strong by wanting to be strong. They need a place to train, equipment, coaches, and other people to work alongside. Civic capacity works the same way.”

• “Fast-forward to the summer of 2026, and three jewels in New York’s New Deal crown are coming back online, refreshed and reconfigured for how we beach today. Jones Beach, Orchard Beach and Jacob Riis Park — bathhouses that always represented different aesthetics — now also represent different ways to fund access to leisure.” (or, extremely rare Robert Moses W)

• “After all, I have a 30-year mortgage. I’m not locked in here with him. He’s locked in here with me”: How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor.

• “When you drive home today and see a green traffic light, notice it. Try to see it as bright and as beautiful as it really is. But don’t bother taking a picture. It won’t work. Everyone else will have to see it for themselves.” Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You.