A Really Good Cry (While Saving the World)

Listen above, or read below . . .

Recycled tissue. It’s the least I can do.

I had a really good cry the other night.

It was a BIG cry. I must’ve gone thru half a box of Seventh Generation “facial tissue” as I wept and sobbed on my bed while dusk descended on my bedroom. I cried so long and so hard that I couldn’t blow my nose fast enough, and my nasal passages got so thoroughly packed with congestion in the process that I could barely breathe. What is that with crying? That it produces a crap-ton of mucus in the sinus cavity? I know crying and tears are an evolutionary survival reaction that alerts our protectors that we’re not okay. But what evolutionary value does the snot have?

None, really. Turns out it’s just that when we have one of those soul-shaking cries, some of the tears roll down our faces, and some get sucked back into our tear ducts and then mix with the mucus in the sinus cavity. And that creates a MESS.

What kicked off this absolute avalanche of emotion? A lot of things, really. This was how I’d started my day . . .

I’m on the phone with my Mom in California, helping her with her email (as one does with parents of a certain generation), and I see on her computer screen, via my remote connection, an ad:

This is the ad. And I know who’s behind it.

<— First of all, it’s not lost on me that the woman in the ad appears to be pumping gas into an ENORMOUS SUV that she can probably barely climb into.

I also know that moving away from crude oil and other Earth-warming fuels is gonna hurt a little at first — especially for lower-income folks — just as NOT moving away from it is going to hurt them down the line, and way more than it’ll hurt the wealthy.

But I got a little curious. Is my home state of California trying to shut down local oil production? If they are, there appears to be a group called “Californians for Energy Independence” (see the “Paid for” message at the bottom of the ad) that wants regular people to think it’s a bad idea. Unfortunately, this political action group should really be called “Big Oil Companies for an Uninhabitable Earth.” And these guys have raised $22,500,000 (that’s 22 and a half million dollars) over the last two years to spread their subversive message.

I found this out thanks to a little Googling, which led me to a website called “Follow the Money” that posts this information for the public to see — and they name names, man. The group that created the ad is comprised of a handful of oil companies, one solo dude who donated a million and a half, and one solo dude who donated $100. The latter is an “energy consultant.” I have questions for him.

The biggest contribution, at almost $20M, is from a corporation Newport Beach called “Clean Energy Fuels,” which from what I can tell, sells natural gas. Natural gas is “clean” if you don’t count CO₂ and methane, which are full-on greenhouse gases. The 2nd biggest company in the PAC is Chesapeake Energy, an $11 billion corporation in Oklahoma City (i.e., they are not Californians). They produce 463 thousand barrels of oil PER DAY. This is their Wikipedia entry:

For a sec I thought it said “an American EXPLOITATION and production company.” My bad. The PAC does cite some good excuses on their website for California to stop its near halt on issuing permits for new drilling — like jobs, tax income for the state, etc. But they’re all temporary. Because a) we’ll eventually run out of crude oil, and b) rising global temperatures from burning all that stuff is not gonna be pretty.

(And note to self: Line up someone now for when I’m elderly and can’t figure out how to operate the next-gen technology.)

Which reminds me, that massive upwelling of grief probably had something to do with my impending birthday (this coming weekend), one that I’m not psyched about; one that I can use as a weapon to tell myself that my life is not what I think it should be. That I’m not good enough and/or that I messed up everything, and now it’s too late. Then of course there’s the constant pressure that something really bad is happening to this world, and most of us haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it — and those who do know either can’t do anything about it or won’t do anything about it. And multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel companies are making sure that it stays that way.

Well that’s not depressing. And it’s not even all of what set me off the other evening, but I thought since we’re on the topic of evil corporate villains who are literally out to destroy the world (I literally mean “literally”), I thought I’d drop another EXCERPT from my book-o (read the last one here). I’ve been kinda jammin’ on it.

It’s from the chapter I’m just finishing, Chapter 3. The Climate chapter. It’s bit lighter than the above. (For real.) The whole of it is everything you wanted to know but had zero time to find out, because we’re all just too damn BUSY.

Herewith, the first few pages . . .

In the previous chapter (the Waste chapter), I’ve just explained how it’s not so much about recycling as it is reducing. Or avoiding. Maybe even eschewing. And that our producing and disposing of a crap-ton of single-use packaging that temporarily holds all the stuff we buy is contributing to climate change, because all that takes energy. And that producers of the products that rely on that packaging have spent a LOT of money to convince you that it’s your fault, not theirs.

Then again, we are the ones buying fancy French water that’s bottled in the Alps and shipped across the Atlantic on GHG-spewing container ships. So there’s that. And I’m talking about “we” as a species; if local artisanal beer is more your thing, good on you — at least you’ve cut out the ship.

“GHG.” Raise your hand if you’re not even sure what that is. Or if you’re like, “Duh, it stands for ‘greenhouse gases.’” And maybe you even know that these gases trap heat in our atmosphere as if they were a giant greenhouse being built over the entire planet . . . but you just want to take a nap.

And if you knew those things already, maybe you’re still wondering, if the atmosphere is trapping heat, why did the term “global warming” get the kibosh?

If so, your powers of observation are excellent.

You might also wonder: How do GHGs (from SUVs, or hamburgers, or who-knows-what) bring on hurricanes that level entire towns in Florida — flattening trailer parks — and fires in California that annihilate (I’ll just say it) a lot of really nice wine? And this week, can you say “Maui”?

Like, is climate change really that bad? Exactly how hot is it gonna get, and why I can’t I just enjoy the warmer winters?

All valid questions, I think.

Especially because this is a defining moment, as environerds like me learned in the last report from the IPCC (the Intercontinental Panel on Climate Change). The real-life “Is the human species going to survive?” front-page story. It truly is an existential crisis putting future generations in a real pinch.

Trouble is, we can’t keep our eye on the ball because whenever people around here start to realize it’s become an important enough issue to actually do something about, other people suddenly do stupid shit that pulls focus away from this super-important issue onto other super-important but shorter-term fires that need to be put out. Like a handful of randos in fancy robes taking away women’s reproductive rights. Or people in regular clothes dismantling our democracy, gathering up the pieces, and firing them into a classroom. Shit like that.

But your girl here has you covered. Imma explain to you what this science-y, bodiless, scary but easy-to-ignore dull roar in the background actually IS, how it started, whose fault it is, and how we’re gonna stop it so your cute nephew (in my case) doesn’t end up wandering around a real-life Mad Max landscape looking for grubs to stuff into his hungry maw. You think I’m kidding.

Naturally, there are widely differing scenarios that are possible, depending on a) what we do now as a species; and b) who’s providing us with the scenario.

Last week (as I was writing this), I saw two conflicting stories:

The first story reported that “Thanks to real progress, we’re headed toward a less apocalyptic future.” Does anyone find “less apocalyptic” . . . comforting?

The headline for the second story was “Climate Pledges Are Falling Short, and a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality.”

So . . . the future is less apocalyptic . . . but a chaotic future is more of a reality? Is “apocalyptic” farther down on some scientific flow chart than “chaotic”? Does it go, like, “utopian,” “awesome,” “getting by,” “kinda shitty,” “chaotic,” “apocalyptic”?

And by the way, those two stories were published on the same day. Both in the New York Times. Also, climate activists are throwing mashed potatoes on Monet paintings as I wrote this, and some guy GLUED HIS HEAD to Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”

I’m so confused. And on so many levels.

I think we’re ALL a little confused. I’ve even studied this stuff — at an Ivy League university, no less. But when people get little slivers of disconnected information from the news (a recent week featured everything from lakes drying up outside of Las Vegas, putting all those slot machines at risk of losing power . . . to a big pension company (whose initials are TIAA) investing billions in oil extraction, coal & gas projects, and deforestation — all while greenwashing their image like crazy . . . to the Supreme Court (both sides this time) curtailing the EPA’s authority to police millions of acres of wetlands, delivering another setback to the enviro agency’s ability to combat pollution), when that’s the information you’re getting, how the heck are you supposed to know what to do but throw up your hands in bewilderment?

Combine that with half of the country getting completely different “news,” which whips them into a frenzy that the gov’ment is trynna to tell ’em what to do (eliciting reactions like, “They’re not gonna take away my wood-burning stove,” even if the law only applies to new wood-burning stoves), and mix that with power-hungry politicians who take payoffs — er, campaign contributions — from corporations so they can swing their cojones around Washington DC while spewing all the darn GHGs they want, with both of ’em taking advantage of the aforementioned people’s fear of regulations so they can keep all that dirty money coming in, and creating climate deniers by using effed-up PR (oh, oil & gas companies like Exxon have spent gobs of money over decades to run expensive ad campaigns to purposely mislead the public about the reality of climate change).

Add outdated laws like ye olde Electoral College and the filibuster and the Second Amendment, which is all of 27 words long and has the word “regulated” right in it. “Well regulated,” no less. I’m getting off topic, but no wonder climate change became a political issue, even though Conservatives never complained when the gov’ment said they had to start using baby seats in their cars instead of letting their offspring rattle around the back of the station wagon like pinballs. (Or maybe they did; I don’t know.) And p.s., when the Founders wrote the 2nd Amendment back in 1791, we were worried about the King of England and his Redcoats, not about some kid knocking on our front door asking for directions.

What was I talking about?

Right, being confused. [sheepish emoji]

I think we need a primer. To answer questions like “How are we heating up an Earth?” What’s really happening here?

I got you. It’s actually pretty simple.

We’ll start with “how.” The first thing you need to know is: energy in, energy out.

Remember when things were simple?

The “global temperatures” of our planet depend mostly on how much energy the Earth receives from the Sun, and how much of that energy gets radiated back into space. Easy, right? Energy in versus energy out.

These quantities change very little. That’s because Earth has been on the same orbit around the Sun for a long-ass time. Also, the planet still turns on its axis at the same rate, which is why the four seasons come and go with impressive regularity. So the climate has been pretty stable as long as we’ve been around (about 10,000 years; see the evolutionary chart on pg. X).

It’s true that ice ages came and went before that, but those took place over spans of time in the thousands of years. If we had that long to adjust to what’s happening now, we could chill out (no pun intended) . . . but time flies when your machine-made pants are on fire. Plus the ice ages are explainable — and predictable. They come and go, because every X number of millennia, the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes subtly from a circle to an oval. During the long part of the oval orbits, the planet gets a little farther away from the sun, but way colder. Then it eventually makes its way back to a circular orbit and warms back up.

Could that be why the globe is warming right now? Maybe humans aren’t narcissistic destruction machines?

Nope. In fact, right now our orbit is slooooowwly transitioning from the circle to the oval, so theoretically, we should be cooling off. The problem is that the energy that used to radiate from the Earth back out into space is getting trapped in our atmosphere. (Remember in the Introduction how I said the atmosphere is part of our planet?) Heat from the sun comes in, but not enough of it is going out. Because we’ve been filling our atmosphere with gassy substances from basically everything we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution.  

* * *

Here’s what happened. In the late 1700s, we humans decided that we were totally over our lives of farming and basket weaving and making our DIY fabric before we could even start making our DIY britches.

We were already living along rivers and other water sources, pretty much from the get-go. Then some smarty-pants figured out the water wheel, a big wooden contraption that used the flowing water of the river to drive a mechanical process like milling or grinding stuff. It was a mad efficient way to power things — in fact, we now call it “hydropower.”

No one knows who really invented the top hat, but was a sign of success for almost two centuries. Humans are weird.

But we wanted bigger and faster and shinier. So “industrialists” in Britain started building super-efficient factories, and burning coal to make steam heat that powered new machines (like the “spinning jenny” and the “power loom”) while pumping the smoke out of big smokestacks. They also made trains that choo-choo’ed around while a guy shoveled coal into a furnace, which heated up the water inside it, which turned into steam, giving you a high-pressure gas that, when let into a chamber, pushed pistons attached to a rod that turned the wheels of the train. You didn’t even need a prime riverfront location anymore. And that’s when the Earth’s atmosphere started filling up with those heat-trapping greenhouse gases, which (again) TRAP THE HEAT. Which is no bueno. But the branding was great — they called it the Industrial Revolution!

Then we started building cars that ran on petroleum, so we could go faster than our poor ol’ horses could take us, and places that the “iron horse” couldn’t go without a train track. And the temperatures rose a little more. And then somebody invented “plastic” (made from fossil fuels) — along with “marketing” — and that somebody was the same guy, a master chemist and marketeer from Belgium named Leo Baekeland. As in “Bakelite.” That was in 1907. By that point we’d moved through the Industrial Revolution and into the Age of Science and Mass Production, and Bakelite promoters were pretty successful in challenging the perception that synthetic plastics were inferior to natural materials like amber or wood, thus creating a market for even more plastics. Then came the Digital Revolution, when production of computers started, and at some point somebody came up with the brilliant idea to build in obsolescence, so now we make WAY more than we need, and here we are, a half a degree Celsius from drowning several island countries.

Clearly we have what it takes to come up with some amazing technology to use our powers to turn around this climate crisis . . . although Leo Baekeland became a recluse, growing more and more eccentric as he got older, eating all of his meals from cans, so.

[End of excerpt]

* * *

I better wrap this up for today. If you got through that, thank you.

And the thing that really set off my tears from earlier? Maybe I should be honest. I’m still a bit heartbroken. Even though it’s been an embarrassing amount of time (and part of my enviro recap of 2022 here).

It was kind of a sudden setback, after I realized that some hope I’d started to feel was misplaced. So I thought I’d be brave (or stupid), and admit it here, because that’s what writers do. I’m sure he thinks everything is fine, unless he’s reading this, and then . . . eek.

I almost texted him a week or two ago, when that INSANELY ENORMOUS MOON sat on the horizon as I drove home from a friend’s birthday party (a fellow Leo). But I didn’t. I have a strict policy of not doing things like that when I’ve had a couple of adult beverages.

The only thing I can do for now, I guess, is just let being sad be okay? Learn from the mistakes I made. There doesn’t seem to be much else I can do. I mean, I am fine. Like I said, I’ve been working on my book like a fiend, which is why this post is coming a little later than I’d like. And the audio version of the blog is super fun , and it’s really doing well. The number of listeners keeps growing! I can’t believe I didn’t think of doing it sooner. (Actually, I didn’t think of it; my friend Karina did. And I’m hoping my friend Karina does some of her “doodles” for the book.) Anyway, I’m also heading to the Cape shortly to hang with some of my oldest, coolest friends. (Don’t try to rob me, I also have very loyal — and nosy — neighbors, haha. They’ll catch you.)

Anyway, signing off for now. Feel free to subscribe to this blog (below), and listen to the audio (above) — both help me, as my agent prepares to send out my book submission packet. You can also leave a comment for me below. I’d love to know I’m not the only weirdo with a smushy heart.

xo,
Deb