I have a perfect storm of work, school, and family related urgent priorities converging at the moment, so I haven’t been posting as much as usual and might not for a few weeks.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The science on how bad a nuclear winter would actually be gets updated from time to time. It never gets any better!

Most hopeful story: This is the best I can do – Biden wasn’t able to take political credit for his infrastructure and energy transition accomplishments because his accomplishment was getting money appropriated for them, whereas implementation of these will be painfully hard and painfully slow. (Yes, I believe based on evidence and logic that investments in infrastructure and energy production that do not destroy the biosphere are good ideas.) But at least part of this agenda will be implemented over time, and Trump is spending substantial energy of his own only partially rolling back these programs.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: A Minimal Quality of Life index has been developed which is intended to better capture the cost of living real working families and parents are experiencing.