Listen above, or read below…

As is my habit, I left this til the last minute, and now I’m late. So . . . Happy Day-After-Earth-Day!!

Yesterday’s theme was “Planet vs. Plastics.” If you missed the celebrations like I did (my day included running some errands, playing ball with my neighbor’s doggo in the backyard, reading a few pages of Silent Spring “for fun” — oh, and getting Wordle in two), here’s a spoiler alert: We’re losing the above match-up.

Lately I’ve also been trying to finish Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I keep lagging . . . because I know it doesn’t end well. But now that I think of it, a dawning-Industrial-Era novel about man battling his own creation is so freaking appropriate to what’s happening with our climate that I should’ve treated myself to reading that yesterday. I mean, a dark story of life, death, man versus nature? Come on.

That said, my brother texted me a link to an article last night from USA Today titled “Why You Should Celebrate Climate Change Optimism.” Neither of us are USA Today people, but it was nice to see a little good news collected into one story. I just wish it wasn’t “news” like, “Hey, remember 35 years ago when we banned chlorofluorocarbons to repair a big hole in the ozone layer, saving our population of 5 billion (at the time) from a dire future? Maybe we could do something like that now, for climate change. Anyone . . . ?”

The phasing out of those CFCs was thanks to the Montreal Protocol of 1987, signed on behalf the U.S. by Ronald Reagan, back when Republican politicians got that we need to take that stuff seriously.

(Take my fun quiz on which environmental rules the MAGA party rolled back during the Trump Presidency.)

More recently than 1987 — like January 2024 — the state of Hawaii, after declaring itself “Coal-Free by ’23” and legally committing to 100% clean energy within 21 years, put a ginormous battery near Honolulu into full operation. The “battery,” sitting pretty on industrial land, stores clean energy, and looks a bit like 157 clean white shipping containers. Aloha!

And this very month, the EPA set “unprecedented” limits on the toxic “forever chemicals” (aka PFAS) in Americans’ drinking water. What do these chemicals do to the human body? Oh, ya know, cardiovascular disease, bladder cancer (which took my dad out), strokes, heart attacks, preeclampsia and low birth weights, to name a few. Of course, 3M and DuPont hid the health harms of PFAS for decades.

(And FYI, one group of these toxins is known as GenX chemicals, and I don’t know how I feel about that. Apparently, when GenX contacts water, it becomes a strong acid that deprotonates into its conjugate base, which can then be detected in the water.)

Lemme say that again: GenX deprotonates into its conjugate base. Take that, Gen Y. Of course, now the actual phasing out begins.

It’s hard to believe that the first time I wrote about Earth Day on this blog (“It’s Earth Day, Bitches“), Greta Thunberg was just a kid. We still have a lot of work to do. Hopefully the climate will get some cool, legally enforceable rules in the other 49 U.S. states soon.

Unlike the story of Frankenstein, we have a chance to change the ending to this story.

xo,
Deb

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