In case you missed them, here’s a few pieces I’ve recently written and published in Nautilus magazine, Inside Science, and Voice of San Diego. Thanks as usual to my excellent editors! I’m only posting brief excerpts here, so if you’re interested, please check out the whole thing using the links below.

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Making climate change policy more blue

A new push for attention to coastal communities, marine conservation, and ocean infrastructure.

When meteorologists give names to oceanic storms and hurricanes, they customarily do so in alphabetic order: Arthur is followed by Bertha is followed by Cristobal, and so on, until the year ends and the order resets. By September of 2020, the meteorologists responsible for naming storms coming off the Atlantic Ocean ran out of names and switched to their backup, the Greek alphabet. 

It was one of the worst Atlantic hurricane seasons ever recorded, and merely the latest in a rising tide of climate-related coastal catastrophes. In just the last few years, shoreline bluffs collapsed in Southern California; Hurricanes Sandy and Harvey devastated Houston and New York; and acidifying waters corroded the shells of Dungeness crabs on the Pacific coast. The 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to harm both wildlife and people, collateral damage of the demand for fossil fuels. And that’s just in the continental United States.

In response to these crises, a coalition of U.S. environmentalists, conservationists, and economists drafted the Ocean Climate Action Plan, informally known as the Blue New Deal—a riff on the Green New Deal, an ambitious set of proposals that invoke the federal New Deal adopted during the Great Depression, and aim to create green jobs while moving the U.S. economy toward sustainable sources of energy. The Green New Deal, however, has a blind spot: coastal economies and marine ecosystems…

[Read the entire piece in Nautilus magazine, published in December.]

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