From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Some time in May I looked at my calendar and realized that every weekend in June was spoken for, and that July and August were looking pretty tight. This led to yet another summer where most of my free time has been spent either having fun away from home or preparing for said fun.

The first weekend in June was Untamed a pagan gathering in its second year, led by some of the core people from the now defunct Beltania event. It featured workshops, rituals, craft vendors, neo-highland games, a day of music performances, and drum circles. And rain. Lots of rain. It's been a wet year in Colorado, so I was expecting a wet and chilly event, and it definitely delivered. I wound up sleeping in tights plus two pairs of pajama pants, hiking socks under mucklucks, a T-shirt under a long-sleeve shirt under a sweat shirt, and a winter hat. I think the cold and damp helped the drum circles find some really neat rhythms and reflective grooves, and everyone had the good sense to bring drums that wouldn't detune too bad in the damp air. There was also a ham radio Parks on the Air event that weekend, and since the festival property is right next to the Pike National Forest I hung a wire antenna in the trees on the other side of the fence and made some contacts while keeping dry in my tent. Unfortunately, after I'd made a bunch of contacts around the 20 meter band and started to call for people to contact me ("calling CQ") my high-end radio from the early 1990s suddenly got stuck in transmit mode and I noticed a distinct electronics smell. The problem persisted when testing at home where it was warm and dry, so I've got a circuit board investigation project to do when I get a free weekend. Which will maybe be October? November. Sheesh. At least the maker space at my office should be back up and running by then.

As soon as I got home I had to unpack the truck, start packing suit cases, and plan two lobby meetings for CCL's return to Capitol Hill. Kelly and I flew out Friday and stayed with a friend's parents in northern Virginia. Spending three days at an in person conference is so much more invigorating than a day and a half of a virtual conference via Zoom has been. And I love "magical hallway conversations" that emerge; I ran into people from the Before Times that I didn't even know would be there, had some great conversations with folks I knew I'd find. Even the thirty second connections with folks are so much better than a Zoom breakout room. I also took advantage of the conference hotel's location next to Rock Creek Park to do a Parks on the Air activation with a small radio and portable antenna I brought. Band conditions were challenging and it's hard to get a lot of power from a small radio but I managed to secure enough contacts for the activation to count. While I was at the conference on Saturday, Kelly went to DC Pride and got into a bit of good trouble, engaging in "lawful annoying" peacockery to establish a perimeter in front of the homophobic street preacher who probably makes money suing people who punch him for being an obnoxious jerk.

Our day lobbying Congress was great. In the past we've been very focused on putting a price on carbon emissions. This is the most effective available solution to fighting climate change, but it's a topic that has trouble gaining traction in some Congressional offices due to their philosophical outlook or the political climate in their district. This year we had carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform as dual focuses with the meeting lead and member liaison choosing the topic that's the best fit for the office. This seemed to work quite well; we had some great conversations with offices where we've previously received a tepid response, and a lot of members were quite excited to see us. I was even involved in literal magical hallway discussion: a member was in a committee meeting all day, but really wanted to meet with CCL, so her staffers took us down the elevator and around the building where we had a ten minute conversation on a whole bunch of topics before their scheduler dragged them back in to mark up a bill. I also had the honor of leading a half-hour face-to-face meeting with Senator Hickenlooper who's been a big supporter of both carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform.

We took advantage of the CO2 expenditure of flying to Washington DC to take a small vacation around the Chesapeake Bay region. Our first leg took us to Williamsburg Virgina by way of the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, in part so we could pet the resident black cats. We checked into a B&B where all the rooms were themed after a U.S. president, ate some amazingly delicious mussels steamed in a chorizo sauce, walked down Colonial Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street at sunset (good historic architecture vibes, cool fireflies, and reduced chaotic energy from tourist hordes). The next day we visited both Jamestown historic sites. The State of Virginia and the National Park Service both run a site focused on the first English settlement in the U.S. and its interactions with the native people. The State-run one is significantly more tourist-oriented, featuring people in period dress engaging in 17th Century crafts, recreated sailing ships (there was much quiet singing of I'm On A Boat"), and a folk park style buildings recreating Powhatan buildings and the Jamestown Fort. The National Park version is more of an archaeological site than a folk park, though it does have a working recreation of the Jamestown glassblowing site. The site is also quieter, with more of a chance to connect with the landscape and the James River, giving something of a sense of how the settlers and Indians might have experienced the place. (For one, the English woolen clothing must've been incredibly uncomfortable in June.) We finished the evening with another Parks on the Air activation from a small strip of sand at the edge of James Island. I was able to contact Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and attracted a hunter from Spain which felt pretty good for a 15 watt radio.

After a fun crossing of the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel we spent the weekend in Maryland's eastern shore. The book themed B&B with a charming English hostess was much more our style. We'd hoped to take a canoe around Janes Island but the wind speed would've made paddling too difficult so we hung out at a picnic table coloring and playing ham radio. Band conditions were awful due to a geomagnetic storms, so getting the needed ten contacts for an activation took two hours. We then enjoyed a delicious crab cake lunch and then listened to Seldom Scene at the Crisfield Bluegrass Festival we didn't know was happening.

On the way back to NoVa we visited the Harriet Tubman Museum, a fairly new state park and national monument that does a really good job sharing and contextualizing Harriet Tubman's life and slavery in the mid-19th Century. Throughout the trip I was impressed with the care taken by museum curators to feature the slavery and Indian parts of the stories in meaningful ways, far beyond a token land acknowledgment.

The fourth weekend of June was ARRL Field Day when ham radio clubs across North America set up a temporary station and fill the airwaves with contacts. I've been in California for the last two Field Days, so I was excited to be able to check out the great setup the Boulder Amateur Radio Club does at Betasso park west of Boulder. I'd intended to set up a tent and operate into the late shift of this 24-hour event, but I realized that the generator would make falling asleep quite challenging and opted to get one Saturday night of the month in my regular bed. Sunday was spent recovering from the month that was, and mowing the grass that had been going bonkers from all the rain this year.

The Fourth of July long weekend brought Dead and Company to Folsom Field on their final tour. The shows were sold out or close to it, but I was able to find some spots with enough room to dance a bit. There were some really good performances, including some stellar drums & space, but I was a little disappointed with the set list. I think they only played two songs that premiered after 1979 (Standing on the Moon and So Many Roads). I knew they weren't likely to play any Pigpen or Brent Mydland songs, but it would've been great to hear something from the '80s like Tons of Steel or Throwing Stones or bring out a song that left the repertoire after the '60s like Viola Lee Blues. We also got a cat on July 1st (we'd been targeting this month for cat adoption for quite some time), so all my non-Dead energy for the weekend went into making the house safe and comfortable for a feline.

I spent the next couple unstructured weekends preparing for Burning Man. Given the amazing heat last year and the likelihood of wild and wacky weather from El Niño this year, I want to up my shade game so I have a hope of sleeping a little longer. I decided to drape a large piece of aluminet over two military surplus camo net poles, forming something of an A-frame. My ability to visualize objects and then make that imagined plan meet reality isn't one of my strong suits, so hopefully a test run of this shade structure will go well at Dragonfest (where shade that lets rain in isn't a huge win, but when else am I going to have time to try it?). I spent the final July weekend at a Ranger training campout near Ward. This was great fun, including the drinking-and-joking-around-the-campfire session, but its late season timing means I've got one less Burning Man prep weekend, and don't get a full weekend to prep for Dragonfest. Fortunately "camping in Colorado with a bunch of Pagans" is packing I can do without too much thought. I'm quite glad I decided not to go to the Ranger command team training the previous weekend, otherwise I'd have all the info for Burning Man and none of the actual necessary stuff.

August's weekend lineup features Dragonfest, then Pack For Burning Man Weekend, then Burning Man Opening Weekend, then Man Burn Weekend, then Get Home, Unpack, And Fall Asleep Weekend. That's usually followed by Clean The Dust Off All Your Stuff and then, wouldn't you know it, it's autumn equinox and time to do some kind of anniversary/birthday weekend getaway.

Yeesh. Maybe one of these years I'll spend a summer just hanging out.

I wrote previously asking people to write or call their Senators to include carbon pricing in the reconciliation bill. Now it's crunch time. If you're willing to do me a favor, please go to cclusa.org/take-action and make a couple calls to your elected representatives. It will take less than five minutes and help the U.S. achieve a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030.
(Please do this now even if you did it earlier this year. We're hoping for a really big showing.)


Since July, supporters of carbon pricing have made nearly 160,000 contacts to Congress and the White house on this topic. There's been lots of talk about carbon pricing in negotiations on The Hill, and lots of folks have endorsed the idea. It's not currently part of the reconciliation bill framework that Joe Biden announced last week or that the House is working with, but there's still an opportunity to get it in the Senate bill. Anyone who lives in a state with a Democratic Senator can help this happen: the more support (say) Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper hear for carbon pricing, the more they'll be willing to push for it in negotiations with Senators like Joe Manchin who are on the fence. Democratic Representatives also need to hear that it's popular in their district so they're on board if a carbon price is part of the final bill.

Republicans unfortunately don't have a seat at the table in the reconciliation bill process, but there's encouraging news there too. 72 Republican members of the House have joined the Conservative Climate Caucus and Senate Republicans just announced a climate plan with a target of 40% emission reduction by 2050. During a meeting for volunteers this evening, Citizens' Climate Lobby's government affairs leader used the metaphor that many in the GOP are now walking in the right direction and it's our job to encourage them to walk faster, which is a lot easier than convincing them to turn around and walk the opposite way.

The climate change podcast How to Save a Planet did a recent episode about social movement anthems and why the climate movement is missing one. There was a bunch of great material in the episode, but as someone who grew up around both folk music and social movement awareness, I felt like they missed the mark on a really key feature of a movement anthem. And it got me wound up enough that I wrote a whole long comment to the show about it, reproduced below.

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I enjoyed the movement song digging that Kendra did around We Shall Overcome and I am excited that you did a show all about finding a good climate anthem. It's much needed!

I think the criteria you laid out are missing a key ingredient: the song needs to be easy to teach to a crowd of people, who can then constructively sing along even if they forget some of the words. A climate anthem needs the key message in an easy-to-remember chorus, and ideally the verses should be easy to sing as call and response. It also needs to work well a capella, or at most with a single guitar. A song with a catchy tune and a danceable beat is probably not a good candidate, because the band won't be at every march. Independent of the lyrics, the clip of All Star by Smash Mouth was the only one played on the show that sounded like it could succeed musically as an anthem.

I also found Dr. Redmond's assessment of the lack of a climate anthem interesting. She proposed that popular culture is tied to Black culture, but the environmental movement has for a long time not been connected to that Black culture. I think that's only part right: it's not the connection to Black popular culture that's missing in much of the environmental movement, but a lack of connection to group singing in general. Singing in church plays a big role in Black communities (and played an even bigger one in the civil rights era). This isn't just a black thing though; socialist groups and labor unions that were predominantly white sang march- and hymn-derived songs like Solidarity Forever at meetings. (Solidarity Forever is, of course, based on an abolitionist hymn and thus connected to the Black struggle for freedom. But it could spread through camps of European immigrants with no connection to African American communities or culture.) With both church and labor union membership way down among left-leaning middle-class white folks, most of us are simply out of practice at singing in groups. And the proliferation of recorded music in the last half century has meant that if we want to hear a song we usually don't need to sing it ourselves.

The Daily Camera published my letter to the editor today—election day.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That's what came to mind as I read the Oct. 20 Editorial Advisory Board opinions and the editorials on Oct. 12 and 15 about climate change. These authors expressed a spectrum from mild concern to deep worry and a diverse suite of solutions. It's important to have these conversations — climate change and our responses to it will be the biggest story of the 21st century and all ideas should be on the table. From wildfires to floods like 2013, we've all got skin in this game.

We can do two things about climate change: reduce net greenhouse gas emissions (prevention) and adapt to a warmer climate (cure). We can accomplish the former by putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, investing in low-emission power and transportation, planting forests, sequestering carbon through agriculture, and more. Adaptation will involve mass migration, investment in disaster recovery, growing and eating different crops, paying higher insurance premiums, rebuilding or relocating cities due to flooding, combating insect-borne diseases, and resolving geopolitical tensions over water and arable land. We can invest in a combination of both prevention and adaptation, but the longer the wait, the more will have to pay to adapt.

Now is the time to have conversations about climate change and solutions. Share stories of how we've been affected. Explore climate risks and mitigation. Debate the pros and cons of each solution. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Share your thoughts in the newspaper and on the Internet. Call your elected officials and let them know that 2019 can be the year that Congress starts to invest in climate change prevention, or we can do nothing today and scramble to adapt in the 2030s. Trevor Stone Boulder

Last November I was really disappointed with the election. Not so much the results, but the way the whole year and a half had gone. People weren't listening to each other. They were shouting to their friends and painting folks they didn't know as terrible people. I managed to mostly avoid the commercial media, but the ads I did see were almost universally against an opponent rather than in support of a good idea.

So I decided that after I got healthy, I was going to be the change in political discourse I wanted to see in the world. As a left-leaning Boulderite who rides in technolibertarian cirlces, I wanted to come to a better understanding of conservative points of view and then find some conservatives to have some non-confrontational conversations with.

Since I was still moving slow from my year of illness, I realized that I shouldn't put the bulk of my energy in an imminent fight like health care or immigration. So I turned my attention to climate change, a systemic problem that doesn't require action tomorrow, but definitely requires action soon. It's also a problem that's not rooted in liberal or conservative values: every human has a stake in the outcome.

I connected with Citizens' Climate Lobby a non-partisan group focused on both national climate change legislation and cooperation across party lines. I realized that waiting for Democrats to take all three houses of power wasn't an effective strategy for addressing climate change. Not only would it delay action until the 2020s, it would be an easy target for repeal when the winds of change shift in Washington. CCL's carbon fee and dividend proposal is structured to be attractive to members of both major parties and therefore stands a chance of remaining on the books as people come and go from Capitol Hill. Plus, with the revenue generated from pricing carbon going to households, it could become a widely popular program, meaning constituents will speak up to keep it in place.

For the last few months I've been working with several other CCL volunteers to organize the Colorado Energy Freedom Tour. Following an outreach model that CCL has used from the Gulf Coast to Kentucky to Alaska, we're visiting a handful of towns in eastern Colorado. We'll be giving presentations in Erie, Fort Morgan, Greeley, Parker, and Sterling (and hopefully more to come). But more important than the information we're sharing, we'll be having conversations with folks about climate change, energy policy, and engaging with our elected representatives to ensure that Coloradans voices, whether urban or rural, are heard.

If you know anyone who lives near these towns and is interested in energy, climate, or market solutions, we'd love to see them at one of the presentations. We're also hoping to meet with organizations like city councils, newspaper editorial boards, chambers of commerce, and growers associations. Tell folks to check out Colorado Energy Freedom Tour on Facebook or on our website.

I made it to eight panels at this year's Conference on World Affairs at CU. Back in college, I would skip most of my classes during CWA week and listen to at least 20, but recently I just pop in for a few interesting talks. Some interesting notes:
( Hurricanes! )
( Refugees: Crisis? )
( Ambassador to Vietnam )
( From China with climate data )
( Politics, comedy, and lady parts )
( Revelations of Art and Symbolism )
( Equal opportunity Internet access )

Wow, that took a long time. I typed notes on a tablet during the conference, but it would've been hard to interpret. Retranscribing and contextualizing involved a lot more time-consuming typing than I expected.

I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up by James Hoggan with Grania Litwin, 2016

I went book shopping last weekend so that I would be better prepared to have conversations with conservatives about issues like climate change. This book sounded like exactly what I was looking for. James Hoggan is a professional in the public relations field. He runs DeSmogBlog, a site devoted to "Clearing the PR pollution that clouds climate science" and has published a book on the topic. He set out to write another book devoted to climate advocacy and highlighting climate facts, but he realized that there was a bigger problem: the public space in which our society discusses issues and comes to agree on policy is polluted, sickening democracy and making progress on any tough issue almost impossible. So he decided instead to explore what was clogging the public square and how we can engender more productive communication and enable action on important problems.

Hoggan structured the book's chapters around people he interviewed, most experts in some mode of communication. The result is a book where each part is clear and interesting, but it can be difficult to find an overall narrative. I came away with several important insights but without a full practical framework for making things better. The epilogue does help tie things together, and I'd recommend reading that first, then deciding if you want to read the rest of the book.

Hoggan's background concern of climate change and environmental concerns shows up throughout the book; most chapters share the interviewee's thoughts on how people relate to environmental facts or arguments. And while I bought the book hoping to improve my ability to have conversations around climate change, I think the book would have been stronger if he'd dug into specifics on several distinct issues. He mentions migration, gun violence, and other "big challenge" problems in passing but never talks about how someone might approach those particular problems using the ideas in the book.

Some of my key takeaways:

Experts on a topic (e.g. scientists) make decisions based on facts, rational debate, and deep investigation. Most non-experts make decisions based on emotion and narrative.

In a modern democracy, the support of non-experts is needed for any major policy. Facts are important in deciding what to do, a story (particularly one with values or a moral) is crucial in getting people to do it.

People have a self-conception in which they generally do the right thing and believe in the truth. When something challenges this view, people experience cognitive dissonance, which is uncomfortable.

If new information is presented in a way that's too shocking to that belief, people are more likely to assume that the information is wrong than that they've been wrong. It's therefore very important not to structure an argument as "You're wrong" or, especially, "You're a bad person." Instead, find shared values and express a policy proposal as a way of expressing those values.

Tell your own story; otherwise people who oppose your idea will tell your story in a way that undercuts you.

Once you've told your story, avoid responding to attacks. It's easier for folks to see an attacker as offensive if you aren't playing defense.

Anger is important in motivation, and appealing to anger "on your side" can be a good way to get folks involved in an issue.

But it's super important to drop the anger as you start talking to folks who don't get angry by the same things you do. If someone feels that you're speaking to them out of anger or that you perceive them as an enemy, they aren't likely to take your words to heart.

Self-righteousness and purity can hurt your position.

If the public sees two sides loudly asserting their own position, they aren't in a good position to evaluate the arguments and they may conclude that the issue is just a matter of personal preference or align with the side that has better hair or a slicker marketing delivery.

Change is scary.

People resist imposed change more than when they feel they have agency.

Inevitability is a terrible motivator.

To take action, people need to feel that there's hope and that what they do will have an effect.

Compassion is key to communication.

You can't make progress working with an enemy. But you can make great progress working with a fellow human being that you understand, respect, and disagree with.

One of the best paragraphs in the book comes in the epilogue:

People don't start out mired in hostility. The situation evolves. When someone publicly disagrees with something we feel strongly about, we perceive them as aggressors and we begin to question their motives and intentions. When people criticize or condemn our cause or our reasoning, our defense mechanisms kick in. Anger simmers and escalates. When people on both sides of an argument draw their positions from the perceived bad behavior of the other, they eventually start treating each other as enemies, and this provokes a perpetual shoving match and eventual gridlock.