What Does It Mean To Fight Climate Change?

Below is a letter to the editor that I wrote recently, prompted by a front page headline in a local paper. In addition to its other news coverage, the Town Topics covers local sports. As an environmentalist who is also a sports fan, I sometimes think that climate change is a (very serious) game where the scoreboard is locked in the basement. Sports and the stock market generate numbers in real time for all of us to see and react to. Numbers count just as much in climate change, whether we generate them personally or collectively, but these numbers have been traditionally hidden away, depriving us of the immediate feedback we need to be part of the game. 

Dear Editor,
It was good to see that fighting climate change made the front page of Town Topics a couple weeks ago [“Environmental Forum, Sustainable Princeton Fight Climate Change,” Oct. 23]. There is a common confusion, though, between talk and action. The urgency expressed at the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Environmental Forum about the need to shift rapidly away from fossil fuel dependence contrasted starkly with what we see on the streets and barren rooftops of Princeton. The most visible evidence is pointing in the wrong direction, as internal combustion vehicles swell in size and number, and PSEG digs up our streets to install new fossil fuel lines. If news of Princeton fighting climate change were real, it would tell us how many solar panels had recently been added to schools, homes, businesses, and parking lots. It would tell us how many more teachers were hired with money saved through energy conservation. We would see trees being strategically planted and trimmed to maximize their carbon absorption and minimize their conflict with solar panels.

Along with the charismatic climate scientist Stephen Pacala, the most inspiring speaker at the Environmental Forum was George Hawkins, who spoke unabashedly of how government agencies can be innovative and efficient, and how he had made Washington, D.C.’s water, and even its sewage, a source of pride. Sewage, it turns out, can heat buildings, generate electricity, and fertilize crops. Princeton’s own “biosolids,” enriched and ennobled by its many Nobel laureates, surely deserves a better fate than to be incinerated with vast doses of fossil fuel and carted off to a landfill.

Similarly, we continue to largely spurn the sunlight striking our rooftops and parking lots, and the solar energy embedded in wood and brush from our urban forest. Wood, I learned at another University event, has an energy density 17 times that of lithium ion batteries. The greatest waste is of our own resourcefulness and adaptability, which could be summoned to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels rather than to merely react to worsening disasters.

Once people become acutely aware of their own unintentional but very real contribution to the radicalization of weather, then they begin seeking ways to extract themselves and their community from that morally-challenged role as dystopia’s lackey. Turning away from fossil fuels means turning towards the nature that resides within us and all around us. What Hawkins achieved in D.C. is an opening of minds, an awakening of creativity to take advantage of all the renewable gifts of nature — physical, chemical, biological — that have long been spurned.

Fighting climate change — a collectively created problem — requires a spirit, unity of purpose, and an attention to numbers that most people only experience in sports. For example, to track our progress, our monthly utility bills would show us five-year trends in our individual and community energy and water consumption. We would be provided the same information for our schools and government. We would take pride in producing more energy and consuming less. Community progress would spur us to do even more as individuals. That’s when we’ll know we’re really fighting climate change.

Scrapping Our Role as Climate Saboteurs

There was a time, during WWII, when patriotism meant contributing scrap metal to the war effort. Movie stars like Rita Hayworth lent their glamour to the cause. Soldiers were fighting on the front lines, and citizens were backing them up by contributing what they could and making do with less.

Memorial Day still honors those who have died while serving in the armed forces, but we seem to have lost an awareness of the continuum of service and sacrifice, of how our own civilian lives connect to keeping the country secure.

We know now that our biggest enemy cannot be beaten by an army. Bullets cannot hold back a rising sea, stop a deluge or end a drought. American soil is most vulnerable not to foreign invasion but to the catastrophic melting of ice caps. Despite all the positive ways we spend our days, each one of us has been recruited as an unwitting soldier in a war upon our shared estate. As civilians, our struggle every day is to limit our roles as unintentional climate saboteurs.

There are political elements that strive to slow progress, and keep us armed with tailpipes and chimneys gushing global warming gases for as long as possible. The tide is turning, though. Renewable energy and the batteries to store it are dropping rapidly in cost. One of our neighbors recently bought an electric car that runs 230 miles on a charge. In time, and let's hope it's soon enough, scrap will be doubly patriotic because it will include the star-crossed machines of combustion. Gas stations will be obsolete. We'll scrap the war on our land, our climate and our future, in a global disarmament as our machines are silenced of their engine groans and fossil carbon sighs. Our cars and homes will run on the sun and the wind. At last, our civilian lifestyles will be supporting our troops' mission to protect American terra firma, rather than working against it.

This year's Memorial Day parade was brought to us by gasoline. There's no question about the grip it holds on our lives, our hearts, our memories. I made models of souped up cars like this one when I was a kid. Can still smell the plastic and the paint. But gasoline's grip will loosen. Maybe Memorial Day will still be a day to smell the bite of exhaust in the flag-filled air. But the other 364 days of the year, we'll have moved on, despite ourselves. May the future be welcoming despite our long delay.

Giving to the Future

My daughter saw this shadow play on the Princeton Shopping Center sign. The present, like the lettering, is not alone, but has the shadow of past and future play upon it. In this giving season, I am learning to appreciate the gifts the past has bestowed upon us, and to give to the future I wish for. A simple way is to shop in the local stores one wishes to have around for a long time to come. The 3/50 Project promotes the concept of spending $50 every month in three of the locally  owned businesses you'd miss if they disappeared. The holiday season deepens the meaning and satisfaction of doing this.

Last night, feeling an early fatigue, I lay down and turned on the radio, upon which Dickens' A Christmas Carol happened to be getting a reading. Confronted with the sight of his own grave, by the Spirit of Christmas Future, Scrooge cries out, "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach."

Over this past year, when portents of the future have spoken so loudly to the way we live in the present, it can be satisfying to find more ways, usually involving no money at all, to give to the future we wish for.

At my house, in this present era awash in deceptively cheap energy, we keep our home lights soft and low, enough to do what we need to do, with some lamps that have some beauty to them.

I used to think I was being stingy when I turned off a light in a room no one was using. Light is associated with life and good cheer. But now I see that pause to flick a switch, that selective powering down, as an act of generosity, a gift to those who will follow us on this planet. "Here," my gesture says, "You can have this light, this energy. I don't need it." There's pleasure in being able to give something as beautiful as light and energy, and connecting in some imagined way with generations future.

Leaving the electric clothes dryer idle in the basement is an even greater gift to energy users future. When it's on, it consumes even more than a central air conditioner. We busy an idle
guest room instead, letting air and time do what they do so well, using mostly racks found free for the taking at the local curbside kmart. It requires a few more minutes and manipulations than simply tossing them all in the dryer, but that's the giving part--a peaceful, meditative activity--and the fabric is said to last longer, too.

"Assure me," Scrooge says, hands shaking,"that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!'' The giving season speaks to all days to come.

Quotes taken from the literature.org website.

The Titanic: Lessons for Avoiding Future Tragedies

I've recently written about climate change for the Princeton Packet, PlanetPrinceton.com, and today I had an opinion piece published in the Trenton Times, entitled "Earth's passengers should learn from the Titanic." Though the issue of climate change can seem grim, for me it is intriguing--a slow-motion drama with so many dimensions that reach to the core of our being and our fate, as individuals and as a civilization.

Today's oped starts like this:

"The good ship America is steaming full speed ahead toward the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s demise — the biggest symbol of avoidable disaster ever to sail the seas of human discourse. Given concerns about where we are headed, as a nation and as a planet, it’s worth asking what were the ingredients for disaster as the Titanic approached ice fields on a moonless night." ........

Note, April 15: If the link to the Trenton Times stops working, the piece can now be found at NewsCompanion.com.