Bracing for heat.
The world burns; Joe Manchin gets what he wants; I frolic and fret in the desert.
Last night in Cathedral City CA at about 7 pm, I sat outside for dinner despite 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and I loved it. It helped that the restaurant’s overhead misting units spritzed and cooled us gently through the evening, but I would have been happy even without that feature. For some reason, despite being a born-and-bred North Easterner, I am a creature of the desert.
I wrote about this with a bit more emotional edge late last fall when I thought my mother was about to die soon, but even today in a less fraught moment, I am rendered spiritually blissful in the dry heat.
That said, I’m aware that at this stage of ecological history, loving the desert is a form of willful denial. I’m in my element in a desert town, but would I ever frolic here without air-conditioned spaces in which to hide out from the midday sun? More to point: large swaths of California are engulfed in wildfires, many regions of this continent and several others are suffering deadly heat waves, and yet other places are drowning in torrential rains. To adore a place of high heat seems like a climatic version of Stockholm Syndrome.
Then again, maybe I’m in the process of prepping myself for our Mad Max future.
I can’t find the article now, but several years ago I read about a research project claiming to show that most human beings are terrible at thinking about the future. I believe the study controlled for situational stressors such as poverty, war, political oppression, etc., and was trying to point specifically to hard-wired personality types as opposed to temporary states.
At some points in our lives or even specific moments of every day, we have no choice but to focus on the here and now, whether it’s for positive reasons—simple, enrapturing joys among family and friends—or negative—money worries, romantic distress, illnesses, etc. And while all of us also have hopes and dreams and perhaps even some small visions and expectations about our own futures, thinking long-term about the world at large is not just challenging but often impossible, for individuals on their own and for large groups of the differently opinionated.
Then again, maybe that’s letting too many powerful people off the hook for being greedy in the here and now while also deliberately not caring about what will happen to human beings after they die…presumably even their own family line. Get a load of this news in Monday’s New York Times:
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia has secured a promise from Democratic leaders and the White House to complete a highly contested 304-mile gas pipeline in his state, his office said, a major concession won as part of negotiations over a climate and tax bill.
Mr. Manchin, who clinched a surprise agreement last week among Democrats to pass landmark climate legislation, made easing permits for energy projects a requirement of the deal. On Monday, his office made public details of the side agreement he struck with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden.
It would ensure that federal agencies “take all necessary actions to permit the construction and operation” of the gas line, known as the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The project — which has been opposed for years by environmentalists, civil rights activists and many Democratic state lawmakers in Virginia — would carry natural gas from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia across nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands before ending in Virginia.
In terms of a greener energy future, Joe Manchin giveth, Joe Manchin taketh away (and no doubt lines his pockets and campaign war chest in the process). Politics as the “art of the possible” will eventually be the death of us all. Even a supposed “trifecta”—Democratic White House, House, and Senate—can’t make significant progress without significant concessions.
It’s profoundly disheartening. Even those of us with the most evidence-based prognosis of the world’s fate and best of intentions don’t really know what we as individuals can do to address the climate emergency if our political reality is stuck horse-trading with the enemies of self-rescue. Lists like these are helpful to follow but the various actions feel, to me, like so much spitting in the wind. There will be no mass movement of people who voluntarily calculate their carbon footprint, practice sustainable fashion, or take pictures of pollinators. Without all the world’s governments banding together to solve this global problem that dwarfs all other global problems, our actions are puny.
I want to be angry, as angry as Greta Thunberg, but like many of us, I’m demoralized, tired, and too worried about my own future and my son’s future to think very clearly about humanity’s future. I’m also resentful AF that we the relatively powerless have to stress about our own fates and that of our families while the Joe Manchins of the world frolic in the seemingly unstoppable, fossil-fuel cash pipeline.
Of course, it’s also possible (likely?) that men like Manchin and his many Republican/corporate donors see a deadline looming. At least one study suggests that as governments around the world get serious about decarbonizing, half the world’s fossil fuel assets could become worthless within 15 years.
I hope I don’t sound too punitive when I say I hope all these too wealthy and too powerful people screw up their attempts to time the market and instead see their coal and oil wealth collapse in an instant.
Meanwhile, I remain half guilty, half joyful that I’ve needed to travel west several times a year for business, pleasure, and the duties involved in being my mother’s medical and financial attorney-in-fact. I am in love with the desert, that borderland between thriving and stroking out, living and dying. I know there’s something a bit perverse about it these days, frolicking while the world burns.
I buy carbon offsets for my travel and cross my fingers that I’m not being as selfish and self-justifying, in my own small way, as the CEOs, stockholders, and politicians made myopic by greed. And also blinkered by fear, I suppose. They say a person’s anxiety about things to come only increases when they’ve got more than enough to keep them “safe” from the future—and therefore much more to lose.
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