dkannapan - Deepti Kannapan

Skimming the Climate Disclosure Rule (Research Days 1 and 2)

My research batch for April-June 2022 is in full swing. I’ve been finishing up the blog posts from the last batch, which I’m listing here. (The posts themselves are over on my Medium page.)

It’s possible that I bit off a bit too much this time around. Considering that I have blog posts from last time to complete, and I selected more reading materials this quarter than the last.

However, there was a long stretch in the middle of last quarter where I was waffling around and being stuck, until I figured out a better reading process and really picked up speed towards the end. I’m hoping that I can get more done this time by avoiding the waffling stage.

I guess time will tell.

I started with skimming the longest document of the batch: the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule.

These are the questions I usually ask myself while I’m skimming:

What is the document, in simple terms?
When is it from?
What type of language does it use – legalese, engineering-speak, or layman-friendly?
What am I looking for in this document?
How many (readable) pages is it, excluding appendices and references?
What cited resources do I want to add to my TBR (‘to be read’ as the Booktubers say)?

I don’t have the answers to all of these questions for this document yet. Here’s what I have so far.

What it is: The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is proposing a rule that requires publicly traded companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, so that investors can make informed decisions. This document describes that rule in detail.

When it’s from: March 2022.

Type of language: Lots of finance-talk.

What I’m looking for:

An interesting aspect of this rule is that even though it’s mainly about companies’ risks from climate change, it also asks about their effects on climate change, such as their greenhouse gas emissions and emissions targets.
- That’s because being a high emitter is actually a risk to the company as the economy transitions to being lower-carbon. New regulations may force a company to cut its emissions.
- I’m looking to understand what kinds of information we can expect from companies about their emissions, and what we can do with it.
Secondly, the document says that this change was made because large numbers of investors use climate impacts in their decision-making, and want more detailed and consistent information.
- I’m looking to learn more about this trend and how we can be a part of it.

Number of pages: 490, which is long, though part of that is because it’s double-spaced. I’m not sure yet how many of the pages will be relevant or readable.

And that’s all for now!

A Quick Backstory For My Novel – Part I

Way back in 2019, I was traveling a fair bit by plane and train. People-watching on the train especially got me inspired to write because some of my favorite stories are set on trains.

I came up with a challenge that every time I got onto a plane or train, I was going to write a short story.

I’d spent the previous year or so writing a near-future dystopian political technothriller thing that I had started in early 2016.

That got less and less fun to write – as real-life turned into a dystopian political technothriller.

I reluctantly shelved that project as my motivation flagged, and began casting around for new story ideas.

The ‘travel short stories’ were an easy and low-pressure way to experiment with fiction. Soon, I had a stack of stories collected as stapled-together ruled pages in a small cardboard box.

November 2019: I was flying back to California from India. I boarded around midnight, well-caffeinated and determined to stay awake if I could to preempt jetlag when I got home.

I noodled around with pen and paper on the flight, and arrived at the beginnings of a story. I’d been watching Avatar the Last Airbender and Frozen 2 on repeat for a while, and I was drawn to the idea of a magical wilderness setting for my story.

Very quickly after that, I arrived at my main character, magic system, and a few scenes close to the climax of the story. I scribbled down a couple of pages before finally going to sleep on the plane.

When I got home, I took a few days to settle back in after my trip. I remember being up at around dawn because of jetlag and sitting at my kitchen island reading the half-finished scenes. Over the next few days, I wrote down everything I knew about the story.

That excitement about the idea didn’t go away. And there was something about this fictional world that felt like a breath of fresh air, and I wanted to keep exploring.

I let it sit and keep simmering in my head for a while. I kept having ideas for it and jotting down notes.

January 2020: I started writing a ‘discovery draft’ by hand in a dedicated notebook.

I put in bookmarks I made out of construction paper to mark the quarter, half, and three-quarter waypoints in the notebook, to signal where the three-act structure milestones needed to be.

The notebook I wrote my discovery draft in.

Aside from that, and taking some brainstorming breaks when needed, I completely winged it, starting from where I thought the beginning of the story should be.

I wrote about 25,000 words in 6 months and got to the end of the story.

I now had more of a sense of the story arc, more of the forces working against my main character within the story, and more of the theme.

I also got my first glimpses at the side characters, maybe their names, and just a few key moments for each of them.

I was ready to start typing and make my first ‘official’ draft. Though draft numbers don’t really mean anything to me.

June 2020: I signed up for a writing class where we all made book plans and set word count targets for each week. Then we tracked our word counts together for three months, shared statuses, and cheered each other on. This class turned out to be pretty helpful (though unfortunately, the second time I signed up, it didn’t work as well with my process).

I made a word count tracker in Excel and intended to write about 70,000 words over three months. The plan here was to weave together the various plot threads, arcs, and random elements I had collected into a coherent narrative.

I think I wrote 50,000 words and reached the end of the story, which continued to take shape and yet kept raising more questions.

That’s when I started to arrive at my writing process (which I now use in all forms of writing): to go through multiple passes of the story, and keep adding material until it’s finally time to start cutting or rewriting.

To be continued.

My Sustainability and Climate Research Lineup for Q2 2022

I’m riding the high of having just finished up my first-ever sustainability reading project. So, this lineup for my next one might be insanely ambitious and a bad idea.

But am I going to do it anyway? Of course!

This time, I’ve picked some books and websites as well as the usual UN/government report-tomes.

The SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule (March 2022)
New IPCC report AR6, from three working groups – 1, 2, and 3 (2021-2022). Especially prioritizing Working Group 3, which focuses on Mitigation.
October 2021 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) about Curtailing Methane Emissions from Fossil Fuel Operations.
UNEP Six Sector Solution
FTC 2012 Green Guide
Inconspicuous Consumption by Tatiana Schlossberg
Speed and Scale by John Doerr
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Web Survey (of useful websites for climate and sustainability data)

The first two texts above are recent news and developments in the climate space that I want to keep up with.

The next two are continuations of themes that came out of the last reading project, namely, methane mitigation, and what each sector should do about climate change.

Number 5 above has to do with the rules against greenwashing (that is, making false environmental claims when marketing) – a topic I’ve been curious about, and meaning to write about, for a while.

The next three are books that I’m hoping will help me form a big picture understanding of climate strategy. The reviews I’ve read of them piqued my interest.

Lastly, there are a few websites that keep coming up as sources in articles about climate change, and I want to do a quick survey of what they are and when they might be useful in my own writing.

Recapping My (First) Sustainability Reading Project! (Jan – Mar 2022)

My reading project is finally done! Or at least, the ‘reading’ part of the reading project. The associated blog posts will continue to come out as I finish them.

So how did I do? Well, I managed to read all the materials I’d set for myself, except the two I wanted to reread. When I was running short on time, I decided it was better to forge ahead than retread old ground.

Shockingly, I also finished up my project approximately on time. Unheard of.

I ended up cramming a lot of them toward the end, and that was fun in its own way. I’ve got a bit of a process going –

first I skim everything,
then I load the reports onto my tablet.
I read a report and mark it with a stylus while dictating a voice memo with my real-time reactions,
transcribe the reactions using a transcription program,
paste a bunch of quotes from the report into my notes,
and then write the post about it.

Which sounds complicated, now that I’ve written it down. But it isn’t, really, it just lets me do a lot of different modes of learning – visual, auditory, etc., at once.

Now for, the recap. Here is how the project started:

Sustainability Research: Where to Start?

My Sustainability Research Lineup For Q1

Researching to Find My Place in the Climate Movement

Here are my real-time updates:

Research Day 1: Skimming the Longest Tomes

Sustainability Research Project Days 2-3: More Skimming

Sustainability Research – Days 4, 5, 6 – Bigger Bites

Here are the blog posts I wrote about each report. (I will continue to update this as I add blog posts.)

#	Title	Posts
1	2021 UN Emissions Gap Report	skim, intro chapters, methane chapter, more coming soon
2	Taking Stock 2021 by Rhodium	skim, more coming soon
3	HBR article – What Supply Chain Transparency really means	skim, post.
4	Initiatives that came out of COP26	skim, more coming soon
5	US 2021 Aviation Climate Action Plan.	skim, more coming soon
6	2015 Paris Agreement (reread)	Skipped
7	Green New Deal (reread)	Skipped

I also made a To-Be-Read (TBR) list, including references in the reports that I want to follow up on later.

So, what’s next?

This was a project I really enjoyed since I was able to quickly learn subjects I’d been meaning to for a while.

I want to do another one! I’m going to have to give the Sustainability Reading projects names to keep them from being mixed up.

I’m working on coming up with a Research Lineup for April-June 2022.

Research Dispatch

All the sustainability research posts.

Blue Carbon [Ocean Ecosystems that are Promising Carbon Sinks]

The Internet Needs to Go Green, Just Like Everything Else. [Digital Sustainability]

The UN Climate Meeting, COP26, was a Huge Step Up from Previous Years [just what it says]

Researching to Find My Place in the Climate Movement [Setting up my Sustainability Research Project]

How Can We Know We’re Buying Sustainable Products? [Supply Chain Transparency]

How Much Farther Do We Have to Go to Solve Climate Change? [Emissions Gap Report, Introductory Chapters]

Managing Methane Can Buy Us Time [Emissions Gap Report, Methane Chapter]