New Yorker Climate Issue – Just for the Record

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Bill Hewitt

The New Yorker had a characteristically superb compendium of stories last month about the climate crisis. The best one was “Climate Change from A to Z” by Betsy Kolbert. She relates important facts about climate change, going through the entire alphabet: A for Arrhenius (who scoped the physics of global warming in the late 19th Century) to Z for Zero (in which she recounts how the “Colorado River basin has been called ‘ground zero for climate change in the United States.'”

She touches on the promise of clean tech but neglects one of the key burgeoning areas that is going to help us mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis, namely hydrogen. I wrote a letter to the magazine and, just for the record, I want to share it here. Continue reading →

Watching the Meter Run Backwards

Posted on July 15, 2022 by Bill Hewitt

I’ve been working on environmental issues for decades: activist with the Sierra Club, working for NYSDEC in New York City, teaching at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs, and writing all along the way. I like to think I’ve been reasonably effective over time. Continue reading →

Sept. 11, 2001 – Time Capsule

Posted on September 11, 2021 by Bill Hewitt

Here’s our family’s story from 20 years ago today. I sent this around to friends, colleagues, and relatives a few days after the event. It was a good way for many of them to have a personal connection to the day and its aftermath.

***********************

Dear Diana,

On September 10, 2001, you were six months old. The next day the world around you changed as it rarely ever does – with violence, stunning in its cruelty; with mind-numbing speed; and with a decisiveness almost unheard of in human history.

I bear witness to what happened because we were very close to the epicenter of this world-shattering earthquake.

Continue reading →

A Consummation Devoutly to be Wished

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Bill Hewitt

This nightmare that we’ve been experiencing for the past four years may finally be coming to its end. Like many nightmares, it looks like it may culminate in a last, intensely frightening burst of violence. And then we’ll wake up, bathed in sweat, but breathing freely again, feeling relieved that we’re not dead or mangled or crushed by the monsters that were pursuing us in the dreamscape. This nightmare has not just been afflicting those of us who feel as if social justice and sane, reasoned public policy are the means and the ends to which society should attain. Those among us who see ourselves as rightful inheritors of a legacy of cultural dominance over the “other,” be they of a different skin color or sexual orientation or religion, have also been plunged into a darker night of fear than that in which they had previously been trapped. Continue reading →

Unity

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Bill Hewitt

On May 10, 1940, German armed forces invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. That evening, the chairman of the UK’s Labour Party, Harold Laski, wrote “We are at a turning point in the history of the world.” Less than a week later, Winston Churchill, newly installed as Prime Minister, and Clement Attlee, the leader of the opposition in Parliament, announced an agreement to form a coalition government in order to prosecute the war. Unity was the watchword. David Low’s famous cartoon from that time vividly illustrates the fierce resolve of the leadership and, indeed, the public.

Continue reading →

Bull Hill

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Bill Hewitt

(click on the photo here, then see the slide show)

We were out with friends early in November for a hike over Cold Spring, NY to Bull Hill. Here is a photo from about fifty miles north of New York City. You can see the towers of Manhattan and also Jersey City off to the west. This was a great day to get out of the big city and to get a sense that there are mountains, and forests, and the mighty Hudson all still there beyond the concrete and steel, the millions churning and the power plants burning. Sometimes you forget how magnificent our old planet really is. John Muir’s message was to get out and see the magnificence and then get back home and work like the devil to protect it. “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.” Continue reading →

Climate Mobilization or Transformation?

Posted on September 18, 2019 by Bill Hewitt

There are a lot of ideas out there to save the world from our global environmental crisis. Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Project Drawdown, and the Green New Deal among them. A friend of mine pointed out a new essay in the New York Times this morning, “Climate Change Is Not World War.” The writer, a professor of English, purports that “We are underestimating both the deep national trauma of World War II and our present challenge.” Here’s my reaction. Continue reading →

The Nightmare Continues

Posted on October 16, 2017 by Bill Hewitt

You can find all sorts of explanations for the parlous state of our body politic. The catastrophe of our last national election cycle here was preceded by the irrational Brexit vote (a misguided cry of anger and pain from English nationalists [but not Londoners]), has since been compounded in Europe by the onslaught of the far right in Germany in September and now this week in Austria. I wrote a paper several years ago that took a long, hard look at the Contemporary American Right in which I posited that right wingers are, in a word, ill. A distinguished student of conflict, Vamik Volkan, calls them regressed. (Notice that I don’t dignify the inhabitants of these pathologies as “conservative” – it does them far too much justice.) Continue reading →

The New, Improved American Right

Posted on November 11, 2016 by Bill Hewitt

I was re-reading a paper I wrote ten years ago and found it all too relevant to what we’ve been experiencing for the past year in America culminating, for the moment, in the catastrophe that was Election Day here. You may find it helps to explain a few things.

The epigraph for my master’s thesis on the “The Underlying Psychology of Violent Political Conflict” was from Erik Erikson: “There is no time left in which to be as naïve historically as, in all past history, the historians have been psychologically. (Childhood and Society, p. 403.) Let’s all of us, activists, political scientists, everyday decent people, not be so naïve about what just happened and what’s going to happen all too soon.

Here is my paper from the Fall 2006 edition of the “Journal of Psychohistory.” (Read the pdf here if that’s easier.) Continue reading →

Catastrophe

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Bill Hewitt

I’ve been offline for a long time, nearly a year, I know. (Working on a new book and a few other impediments got in the way.) But yesterday’s election makes me want to record my few thoughts here.

I think yesterday’s events are equivalent, probably worse, than those of September 11, 2001 or November 22, 1963 or December 7, 1941. It looks and feels that violent. I remember September 11th vividly. We were right on top of it. I also remember JFK’s assassination and the grim weekend that followed. I wasn’t yet born when Pearl Harbor was attacked but I’ve been to the National Monument and got a sense of the scope of the disaster. Continue reading →

A Newer World

on the policy, politics, science and economics of environmental protection, sustainability, energy and climate change

Category Archives: essays