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It is the last Sunday of November 2025. The world outside is bracing for winter, but inside the digital ether, a small group of international observers has gathered by Zoom, as they do every month. Hosted from Toronto by Metta Spencer for Project Save the World, this “Global Town Hall” is a microcosm of the anxieties and intellects defining our mid-decade crisis.
The screen flickers with faces from Cambridge, Warsaw, California, and Australia. They are activists, scientists, and sociologists, united by a fragile internet connection and a monthly get-together to share their concerns. This time they are thinking about the grinding stalemate in Ukraine, the insidious nature of corruption, and a fiery, fundamental debate on whether we are treating the Earth’s climate fever with the wrong medicine.
While the geopolitical discussions regarding Putin and the influence of Donald Trump provide a grim backdrop, the session’s emotional and intellectual core belongs to a sharp disagreement on the physics of heat. It is a debate that asks: Have we focused so much on the carbon in the air that we forgot about the sun hitting the surface?
Roughly one-third of the Town Hall’s energy was consumed by a compelling, high-stakes dialogue between Australian policy analyst Robbie Tulip and physician and former mayor Richard Denton. The subject was “albedo”—the Earth’s reflectivity— and whether the environmental movement has made a fatal error in calculation.
Tulip, calling in from bed before breakfast in Australia, referenced Solvable, a book by MIT professor Susan Solomon published last year. He used Solomon’s history of the Montreal Protocol—the 1980s treaty that successfully healed the ozone layer—as a template for a new, urgent initiative: an “Albedo Accord.”
“The Earth is now about 2% darker than it was 25 years ago,” Tulip announced, his voice carrying the weight of the data. He argued that while the world obsesses over carbon dioxide (CO2), a quieter but equally serious phenomenon is occurring.
The “subtropical clouds” over the world’s oceans are dissolving. As these white, reflective shields vanish, the dark ocean absorbs more sunlight, heating the water, which in turn dissolves more clouds. It is a feedback loop of awesome efficiency.
Tulip’s central thesis is that the environmental movement’s singular focus on decarbonization—weaning the world off fossil fuels—is noble but mathematically too slow to prevent catastrophe. He pointed to a bitter irony regarding the International Maritime Organization (IMO). In an effort to clean up the air, the IMO mandated the removal of sulfur from shipping fuels. While good for human lungs, that sulfur had been creating bright, reflective ship tracks (clouds) that bounced sunlight back into space. By cleaning the fuel, we inadvertently spiked global temperatures.
“We’re in a situation now where the collapse of albedo… is actually causing as much or possibly more warming than the greenhouse effect of new emissions,” Tulip announced.
This is where the friction arose. Richard Denton, representing the consensus view about climate action, pushed back. For Denton, the solution remains clear: remove the root cause. Stop burning things.
“I certainly fundamentally disagree in continuing on producing fossil fuels… and not cutting them down,” Denton countered. “I think that renewables are a solution and they have a proven track record as opposed to all these other treatments.”
Denton’s argument is grounded in the “Precautionary Principle.” He views the Earth as a resilient system—“Mother Nature is resilient”, he noted, citing the planet’s recovery from previous extinction events—but one that shouldn’t be tampered with via experimental geoengineering. He advocates for the transition to wind and solar, arguing that the risks of trying to artificially “re-brighten” the planet are unknown, while the harm of fossil fuels is a known quantity.
Tulip’s rebuttal was stark, utilizing a powerful medical analogy that seemed to silence the virtual room. He compared the planet to a patient in the emergency room:
“As a medical doctor, when somebody presents at the hospital with a heart crisis, you don’t say to them, ‘improve your diet and go and exercise more.’ You operate.”
In this analogy, the transition to renewable energy is “diet and exercise”—vital for long-term health, but useless for a patient coding on the table. The Earth, Tulip contends, is coding. With global temperatures breaching the 1.5-degree and approaching the 2-degree barrier, the planet has a fever.
“If you have a fever of 2 degrees… you’re confined to bed and you’re at quite severe risk of complications,” Tulip insisted. He argued for one of the most-mentioned ways of restoring albedo, “stratospheric aerosol injection”—injecting sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere to mimic volcanoes and reflect sunlight.
He acknowledged it is controversial, comparing it to statins for cholesterol: a drug with side effects, but one that saves the lives of patients so they have time to change their diet.
“The idea that renewable energy could substitute for that massive dominant source of world energy is not now realistic, unfortunately,” Tulip said, citing the immense power of the fossil fuel lobby and the sheer scale of energy demand. He is alarmed that without immediate cooling via albedo modification, we will hit tipping points—like the collapse of the Atlantic current—before enough solar panels are produced.
Denton remained skeptical about such techno-fixes. He noted that nuclear plants and homes in high-risk zones are becoming uninsurable. “It all comes down to money,” he said, suggesting that market forces and youth-led lawsuits may force the hand of the fossil fuel industry faster than we think.
The debate ended with a friendly but regretful mutual recognition of lingering tension. It is the tension between the idealist who wants to stop the pollution and the pragmatist who believes we are past the point of prevention and must now embrace radical life support. Millions of other good people are feeling that tension today.
If Tulip and Denton provided the theoretical heat, Alexei Prokhorenko provided the cold, hard reality from Warsaw, looking east at the frozen frontlines of Ukraine and even farther east, toward his former home city: Moscow.
As we approach the end of 2025, the war has settled into a gruesome stalemate. Prokhorenko described a Russian advance that is less a military strategy and more a demographic tragedy. “Putin’s troops are grinding forward, but at an exorbitantly high cost,” he reported. “It’s like a pyrrhic victory… he’s paying thousands of men for every square kilometer.”
The discussion revealed a chilling societal apathy within Russia. Prokhorenko spoke of a population so beaten down by decades of misery and propaganda that the value of human life has become “negligible.” He recounted stories of families who are almost relieved when a relative goes to war—if he dies, there is a payout. If he lives, he earns a good salary.
However, even that salary is a mirage. In a twist of dark absurdity, Prokhorenko explained that Russian soldiers are often forced to use their wages to buy their own equipment. “They have to buy all the stuff with their own money… all the armor, everything,” he said. The state provided gear is practically cardboard, hollowed out by corruption.
This led to a grimly fascinating exchange about the morality of corruption. The group considered whether corruption in an aggressor’s army should be celebrated.
“If someone’s fighting for the good cause, then it’s very painful when the corruption is there,” Prokhorenko mused. “But when the cause is bad, then the corruption… should be celebrated, oddly enough. It doesn’t enable the attacker to take over the victim.”
The conversation drifted to the “Trump Factor.” With the U.S. political landscape shifting under Trump’s influence in late 2025, anxiety in Warsaw is palpable. Prokhorenko described Trump’s policy as “consequential” and erratic—rushing from handshakes to tariff threats. There is fear that a “deal” is being cooked up behind closed curtains, involving figures like Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Witkoff, creating a “non-paper” peace plan that might sacrifice Ukrainian sovereignty for a quick political win.
“Europe has been relying on the US for the past 80 years,” Prokhorenko said. “Now, there is no way to know if the US is still there.”
While the Town Hall spanned continents, it also zoomed in on the hyper-local. Marilyn Krieger, joining from California, brought the discussion down to the soil level—specifically, an 82-acre canyon where she monitors wildlife.
Her story served as a perfect metaphor for the broader themes of the meeting. A professional expert on wild feline behavior, Krieger had spent years fighting the use of “second-generation rodenticides.” These are powerful rat poisons that work their way up the food chain, killing the bobcats and mountain lions she photographs. She had successfully convinced a local church and preschool to remove the bait boxes.
“Everything was great until two weeks ago,” Krieger said. She discovered the black bait boxes had returned, placed directly next to the classrooms. When she raised the alarm about the danger to the children and the environment, the backlash was swift. She was banned from the property for “traumatizing the kids” with her warnings.
“I’m finding that people don’t care as much as they did before,” Krieger lamented. Her struggle mirrors the global struggle described by Tulip and Prokhorenko. Whether it is the poisoning of an urban canyon, the poisoning of the atmosphere, or the poisoning of a society with propaganda, the common denominator is hostility toward those who point out the danger.
The meeting closed with the somber voice of Charles David Tauber from Vukovar, Croatia. Tauber, a psychiatrist who works with trauma victims, reminded the group that the scars of 2025 will be visible in 2075.
He spoke of the traumatization of the soldiers and the terrifying reports of Russian deserters and their families being tortured. The war in Ukraine is not just destroying cities; it is manufacturing a generation of broken men.
“Trauma is transmitted over generations,” Tauber warned. He drew a line from the massacres of 1991 in his own neighborhood to the current slaughter in the Donbas. The angry men returning from the front— maybe a million of them, according to Prokhorenko—will eventually come home to a Russia that may or may not still be under Putin’s thumb.
The question of what happens post Putin was raised, with Prokhorenko consulting an AI (ChatGPT) for an answer, only to be told that the “siloviki” (security state officials) who might replace him could be just as entrenched in imperial ideology. There is no guarantee of a liberal thaw; there is only the certainty of a heavily armed, traumatized population looking for answers.
The meeting drew to a close, the mood was not one of defeat, but of exhausted clarity. The Global Town Hall did not solve the Albedo crisis, nor did it end the war in Ukraine. But it performed another vital function: It allowed a small but worldwide community of activists to talk two hours about the human condition today. That helps!
It also reminded us that the “Albedo Accord” proposed by Tulip and the “corruption” deplored by Denton are not separate issues. They are facets of the same human dilemma—our inability to manage complex systems, whether that system is the global climate, a military industrial complex, or a food chain in a California canyon.
In 2025, the world feels darker— literally, according to Robbie Tulip’s data on cloud cover. But as long as these Sunday conversations continue, there remains a flicker of light glowing from a screen.
You can watch the whole video or listen to the audio podcast of the November Town Hall here: https:// projectsavetheworld.substack.com/p/ episode-731-global-town-hall-nov. And everyone is welcome to attend future meetings on the last Sunday of every month from 2:00-4:00 pm Eastern (Toronto) time at https://zoom. us/j/9108970203. Just keep your camera on and mic muted except when you’re speaking.