Several large signs are affixed to the fence around the construction site at Massachusetts General Hospital, each one declaring what’s going up and who’s footing the bill. Passersby, when not staring at their phones, glance at these messages about the Phillip and Susan Ragon Building, the Herb Chambers Tower and the Irving Oil Limited Center for Urgent Cancer Care.

Yes, indeed, Irving Oil – a Canadian fossil fuel company that sells products definitively linked to higher cancer rates and a slew of harmful respiratory and reproductive health outcomes – has given $35 million to Mass General Brigham (MGB) for construction of a cancer care center as well as a second facility named the Irving Oil Limited Healing Garden. 

Obviously, noxious emissions from burning oil are not typically associated with the healing grace of flowers. Beyond this discordance, however, what’s the big deal? Money is money. If the devil himself wants to crack his treasure chest in service of a good cause, so be it. Besides, most of us drive gas-powered vehicles and heat our homes with natural gas or oil. 

Such arguments are at best glib; at worst, they’re the crudest form of amoral transactionalism. Middle and low-income people – the majority of people, that is – are trapped within a system that requires the use of fossil fuels. That fact doesn’t free up a nonprofit healthcare provider like MGB to enable blatant greenwashing by a major polluter like Irving Oil, which operates gas stations in Canada and New England, oil refineries in Canada and Ireland, and a bulk petroleum terminal in Chelsea, Mass.
 
Our society’s fossil fuels predicament is not an excuse for MGB to convert the edict “Do no harm” into “Greenwash harm into greenbacks.”

The transaction is simple. MGB gets $35 million for their new building project. Irving Oil gets a reputational makeover (see the gauzy Facebook video touting its gift) and easy access to the MGB Board of Directors.

A great many of the board’s 25 members come from the dealmaking worlds of high finance and private equity, as well as the realms of construction, telecommunications, business software and data management, liquor distribution, and weapon systems; only four board members are physicians, including Reshma Kewalramani, president and CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, whose executive compensation came in at $21.4 million in 2024, and MGB’s president and CEO, Anne Klibanski, who collected a salary package of $8.4 million in 2024. ​

If, in the name of hardheaded utilitarianism, MGB insists on attaching Irving Oil to cancer care and healing gardens, then where should the line be drawn? One hopes that gifts from Vladimir Putin and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein will be declined. Other than that, perhaps nothing is out of bounds. Through lucrative corporate sponsorships and naming deals, MGB can boldly rechristen many of its existing departments and institutes.
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Behold, the Roundup Weed and Grass Killer Occupational and Environmental Disease Service; the Entenmann’s All Butter Loaf Cake Center for Weight Management and Wellness; Tito’s Handmade Vodka Center for Addiction Medicine; the DraftKings Instant Prop Bet Addiction Recovery Management Service; and, the topper, the ExxonMobil Center for Environment and Health at Mass General’s Institute of Health Professions.  

Irving Oil is not a greenhorn to the greenwashing game. In 2016, the company donated $80 million to Dartmouth College to establish the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, an organization that professes to champion sustainability. The gift has spawned ongoing controversy on campus.  
 
It’s also telling to note that the new cancer care center and healing garden at Mass General were not simply named after Arthur L. Irving, the company’s deceased founder who was a patient at the hospital. Instead, Irving Oil shamelessly and strategically sought to deploy the gift in service of corporate public relations, a goal that seems to hold precedence over giving back in memory of care provided by devoted doctors, nurses and staff.

They want to rebrand themselves and MGB replies: great, fine by us. Let’s not worry about the health damage from the witch’s brew of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons produced when gasoline is burned. No more tut-tutting over climate change and the fate of our children. And really, so what if oil dependence renders us hostage to the actions of dictatorial petrostates? Anti-fossil fuel rhetoric is so pre-Trump, so reeking of moral considerations.   
 
The building is unfinished. The construction fence can hold different signage. It’s not too late for MGB’s leadership to reconsider the splattering of Irving Oil on one of the country’s finest hospitals. Moreso, finding a less compromised funder shouldn’t be too hard. In this gilded day and age, there are more than enough mega-millionaires and billionaires out there looking for ways to reduce their taxable incomes through philanthropy.    

In the meantime, I visited a spaceship at Disney World.

The world’s most famous geodesic dome, dubbed Spaceship Earth, appears like a huge, white bauble, or ornate golf ball, inside Disney’s EPCOT theme park. Within that dome, I boarded a very slow pod and took a corkscrewing ride past scenes of man’s civilizational progress. Via the herky-jerky wonders of animatronics, cavemen painted horses on walls, Romans built roads, Irish monks copied books by hand and whiz kids invented the PC in a garage.
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Then, at the top of the dome, a luminous Earth appeared and the ride’s narrator, Dame Judi Dench, announced that we “stand on the brink of a new Renaissance.” Well, Judi, we’re on the brink of something, I grumbled, and the pod slid backwards down a starry corridor and deposited me into the Florida sunshine. 

Disoriented, I sat next to a statue of Walt Disney, at aptly named Dreamers Point, and looked across EPCOT’s lagoon, its banks studded with pavilions idealizing a handful of countries.
   
Buckminster Fuller, born in Milton, Massachusetts and buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, coined the term Spaceship Earth in the 1950s. In his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), he presented an engineer’s vision of the planet as a highly complex machine that we, as crewmates, must care for through the application of sustainable design and technology. On the surface, it’s a lovely metaphor: Earth as celestial vehicle for our lives and history.

In her book Spaceship Earth (1966), the anthropologist Barbara Ward referred to the human race’s “pilgrimage through infinity” on a precarious planet. With great hope, and a dose of naiveté, she stated that “we have become a single, human community. Most of the energies of our society tend toward unity.” Like many of us back then, Ward believed that the Space Age could usher in a golden era. Yet, in a sober moment, she also foresaw calamity “if we cannot, as a human community, create the institutions of civilized living.”

The spaceship metaphor gained its most poetic traction when the astronauts of Apollo 17 took the Blue Marble photograph of Earth floating alone in space. In that endlessly reproduced image, our shared home seems beautiful and indomitable, yet vulnerable, too.

Fragile, even.     

On second thought, however, the Spaceship Earth metaphor doesn’t work very well. A spaceship is supposed to go somewhere. It has an exploratory mission, a purpose. Earth, by contrast, just orbits the sun, tracing the same ellipse over and over again. It’s going nowhere fast. Moreover, the purpose – or pointlessness – of riding about on this merry-go-round rock continues to be a matter of intense debate.   

A better metaphor, perhaps, is Space Station Earth. Just as astronauts on the International Space Station have conducted experiments in low Earth orbit for the past 25 years, the human race has been running a series of massive, uncontrolled experiments on itself and the planet for thousands of years, but especially since World War II ended in 1945.

It’s as if we woke up one day and said, hey, let’s see what happens.

Let’s stockpile nuclear bombs that can decimate nearly all life, let’s increase world population from two billion to eight billion in just eight decades, let’s burn fossil fuels to such an astounding degree that global temperatures spike, let’s inundate ourselves with advertising and addictive social media, let’s throw away democracy for the iron hand of authoritarianism, let’s turbocharge income inequality and let’s release the AI genie in the bottle – and see what happens.

Yes, we live on Space Station Earth. And we’re all mad scientists.

Oh no, there’s that world-heaviness on my shoulders again. That crushing sense of 21st century gravity. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and imagine Artemis II rising up, up and away.  

                                                                         @@@
 
The Artemis II mission is now scheduled to launch no earlier than April 1st. 

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​



​If you read about climate change, you've probably come across the hopeful term "energy transition." Generally, it refers to a national or global shift from a reliance on fossil fuel sources of energy to renewable forms of energy. For the purposes of addressing climate change, this means that over time a smaller amount of fossil fuels is burned while a greater amount of renewables are employed. Eventually, renewables dominate and fossils fuels are a minor input. That is the essence of any transition, the movement from one state to another.

Mainstream media in the U.S. uses the "energy transition" term prodigiously as they report on the growth of renewable energy, which has been remarkable. Publications by corporations and nonprofits toss the term about like a frisbee on a college lawn. It's tripping from the mouths of scientists, activists, politicians, PR hacks and lobbyists. From David Wallace-Wells, the high priest of climate change punditry at The New York Times, and from the oil company Shell which, by the way, is burnishing its green image by helping to fund climate start-up companies at Greentown Labs, just down the street from my home in Somerville, Mass. Google it for yourself: energy transition. You'll find lots of cool logos, illustrations, dioramas and videos, too. 

Here we go, the energy transition!

A key question, frequently invoked, seems to be if the energy transition is moving fast enough to restrain the rise in global temperatures. The transition itself is presented as an ongoing event, a fact -- even though it doesn't exist. It might, some day. But it doesn't, not now and not soon. Let me repeat the headline: There Is No Energy Transition. World greenhouse emissions soared in 2023, making it the hottest year on record. Optimistic scenarios see world greenhouse emissions increasing throughout the decade and then plateauing from 2030 to 2050 (see previous post on this site). Yes, carbon emissions may dip a bit in developed countries like the U.S. (although the data often fails to count massive methane leakage from pipes and ports), but those effects are likely to be swamped by increases from countries, such as India, that are using fossil fuels to pull themselves out of poverty.  

But why, you might ask, does all this picky-picky accounting matter? We're going green and the rest will fall into place, right?

No, it won't. Maybe it can be made to "fall into place," but that won't happen if everyone is engaged in a mass delusion that we're on some wonderful, green transition road. The accounting matters because it's irresponsible, as well as a pathetic lie, to assert that something is happening when it's not. A lots at stake here, after all. Millions of lives, modern civilization, that kind of thing.

And if that's too general, let's put it this way: your adorable children or grandchildren may die horrible deaths from the effects of climate change.  

All right, back to basics. A transition has two moving parts, the increase and the decrease. Therefore, a transition doesn't occur by only adding to one part. You’re not transitioning away from a golf addiction by continuing to golf 18 holes per day but adding a half-hour of yoga or mindful listening to your spouse. You’re not transitioning away from junk food by keeping your diet the same but scarfing down celery sticks. You’re not transitioning away from smoking by inhaling your usual three packs but also doing 40 or 400 or 4,000 jumping jacks. And, drumroll, you’re not transitioning away from fossil fuels by keeping carbon emissions the same (or higher) while building up an impressive, parallel renewable energy sector.

​Renewable energy does not dilute the effects of  greenhouse gases. It's a necessary component of the energy transition -- just as eating healthy food may lead someone to cut down on junk food, just as exercise might be a key step in preparing to quit cigarettes -- but by itself renewable energy does nothing, nothing, nothing to address climate change. 

In all of the above examples, the pie is growing. There are more hours in a day for activities. There's more food you can ingest. There's...jumping jacks. As the population grows and energy use per person grows, there's greater demand for energy products. And that's where all the new renewable energy is going, to new demand. Simple as that. Now, don’t be fooled by the percentage argument. With dangerous activities, such as taking heroin or burning fossil fuels, it doesn’t matter if the "use percentage" of that activity decreases as the pie increases. The gross amount, not the percentage amount, is all that matters. Again, if someone is pounding your head with a hammer, it really doesn’t matter if that perpetrator starts giving you kisses, too.   

There is, alas, no energy transition. There will be one, however, when the world starts to cut back, and cut back drastically, on the use of fossil fuels. Accomplishing that will be an epic struggle.

​Happy 2024!  ​

This week, the International Energy Association (IEA) released a report that predicted the leveling off of world demand for fossil fuels in the year 2030. An intergovernmental organization founded after the oil shocks of 1974, the IEA included the prediction in their recent 354-page World Energy Outlook. The upshot is that the remarkable ascendancy of renewable energy makes "peak fossil" a near certainty, and soon. Indeed, it's a major development, a necessary step on the way toward a world energy system that's not dominated by the burning of fossil fuels. Accordingly, the report became news around the globe. 

In The New York Times, an article by Brad Plumer remarked that the "peak in fossil fuel use won’t be enough to stop global warming," an accurate statement if a bit droll. In fact, achieving peak use will do absolutely nothing to address global warming; in fact-fact, peak use will continue to make the situation catastrophically worse.

So, what will "address global warming?" Drastic cuts in use, and nothing else. That's it. Stop burning fossil fuels. A vast profusion of electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines to service the swelling needs of the additional 1.7 billion people on Earth in 2050 will make no difference if fossil fuel "use" is not quickly and decisively curtailed. And what does the IEA say about the post-peak world in their report? Brad Plumer's NYT article again: "Oil and gas demand would most likely plateau at slightly above today’s levels for the next three decades, expanding in developing countries and shrinking in advanced economies. Demand for coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, would start declining, though it might fluctuate year to year." 

In other words, according to the august IEA -- whose report is based on demonstrable trends and stated policies, not airy pledges from the greenwashing brigades -- we are totally screwed given our current approach to "addressing" the existential threat of global warming.

​Now, Mr. Plumer is not an opinion writer and it's not his job to connect the dots in a standard report on a report. But he has, I believe, buried the lead. Hopefully follow-up articles will provide context about the pesky matter of the three-decade plateau that would spell disaster for human society. Here's a possible headline: IEA Report Predicting Three-Decade Plateau in Fossil Fuel Usage Will Allow For Catastrophic Temperature Increases. And here's a subhead: Current Global Climate Change Initiatives Are Woefully, Even Criminally Inadequate, Say Alarmed Climate Scientists.   

Simply put, the pending fossil-fuel peak is important but it's not the big story. This is the news of epic consequence: given current trends our Earth-abusive behavior is likely to continue at a very high, self-destructive rate for decades after the predicted peak. However, most readers of the NYT probably came away from Plumer's article thinking that the green energy surge is putting a dent in climate change, once and for all. Good news, how about that! Except, no, not really. The IEA report contains bad news, very bad. Good news would be our hitting the fossil-fuel peak and then rushing immediately downhill. 

When it comes to the civilizational destruction that may result from climate change, we can't be fudging and shading and looking on the bright side. We need to be clear-eyed. We need to know the difference between what's good and what's bad. Our lives, and our kids' lives, depend on it.

​Otherwise...

       War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is strength. 
                                                   --- George Orwell, 1984

It's Earth Day tomorrow and the world is warming. We're being buffeted by more intense floods, wildfires, storms, and heat waves like the one assailing Asia right now. Coral reef destruction, sea-level rise, and species extinction are accelerating. And so on -- the list of negative effects is quite lengthy. It's a real doomscroll. Fortunately, most reasonable people agree that climate change is a major problem, one that needs to be aggressively addressed on a global basis. Many governments, corporations and individuals are adopting renewable energy and other green practices, or announcing plans to do so. Are such efforts enough? Are we on track to curb climate change? 

Before these questions can be answered, we need to know where things stand right now. There's a consensus among world leaders, and in the mainstream press, that it would be a bad idea to allow temperatures to increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, if that firewall is breached, it's generally believed that extremely dire or calamitous effects can be averted by limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius. These views are derived primarily from reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which collects recent scientific research and produces a document every year or two (here's the 2023 one).

For a report to be issued, all IPCC member countries must agree to its wording. Among the 195 IPCC member countries are authoritarian petro-states Russia, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. No wonder that IPCC reports are play-it-safe, committee products. The IPCC's assertions are inherently conservative, driven as much by the dictates of consensus politics as by science. Every sentence is argued over. Every statement is sanded down and qualified. Rest assured, the IPCC is not a radical organization.  

Currently, we're fluctuating (upward) somewhere around 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. If the world carries out substantial cuts in fossil-fuel emissions during this decade, to paraphrase recent IPCC reports, we have a decent chance of limiting the increase to 1.5 C. The IPCC presents a number of pathways to staying in the 1.5 C neighborhood. In short, there's hope -- if we get our shit together and fast. 

​That's nice to hear. Just one problem: it's probably wrong. Very soon, temperature may approach 1.5 C degrees. See this recent article by eminent climate change researcher James Hansen, of Columbia University. Hansen and colleagues have calculated that this year's resumption of the El Nino global weather pattern, combined with the recent reduction of sulfur levels in fuel emissions -- sulfur not only causes terrible air pollution, but masks temperature increases due to global warming -- will bring us to 1.4-1.5 degrees C in late 2024.
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​Okay, then. That kinda sucks. But we still have the 2 degree C goal to rally around, right? Well, actually, we may not. And here I refer to an earlier blog by yours truly, on August 24, 2021. It concerns "timing issues" and cites a paper by Katherine L. Ricke and Ken Caldeira: Maximum Warming Occurs About One Decade After A Carbon Dioxide Emission. Translated: fossil fuel emissions are lazy creatures that take roughly ten years to fully set up shop in the atmosphere. They don't kick in right away. Therefore, the last ten years' worth of emissions -- a staggering amount, far higher than the previous ten years -- are only partially affecting current temperatures. Time to do a little arithmetic! According to IPCC projections, the "no emissions cuts" pathway produces about .4 degrees of warming per decade (see graph above). That pathway charitably describes the past ten years; in fact, 2022 won the prize for most CO2 ever disgorged: 38.6 gigatons. If we estimate that roughly half of the temperature effect from the past ten years' emissions has already kicked in, then we have another .2 C baked in and yet to register, based entirely on past behavior. 

Recently, we started paying an electric bill again. It's a creeping case of too many devices -- water heater, stove, car, fridge, lights, toaster, blender, space heaters, humidifier, dehumidifier, computers, TV, hair clippers -- grabbing too few electrons from our rooftop solar panels. So, in order to stay on the renewable-energy train, I signed us up for the 100 percent green option in the Somerville Community Choice Electricity program. Now we pay a little extra per kilowatt-hour in exchange for clean energy.

Of course, the electricity powering my wife's electric toothbrush is not actually 100 percent green, but derived from a soup of sources including coal, methane gas, oil, large hydro-electric, nuclear power, solar, wind, geothermal, small hydro and anaerobic digestion of cow poop, among others. However, through a convoluted digital tool called the Renewable Energy Certificate (REC), I can now lay claim to purchasing the beneficent environmental attributes of an amount of renewable energy exactly equal to what we use at home. Simple as that. Easy-peasy. 

Nah, it's confusing. And I'm skeptical. So I searched the Interweb, trying to figure out if purchasing RECs propels new construction of renewable-generation facilities or if it's a largely useless exercise in swapping green electrons and padding the profits of energy developers. Or somewhere in between, depending on this and that. A REC, I learned, is a market-based instrument that...well, read this analysis and watch this video from the EPA. In layman's terms, a REC is a virtual merit badge. When I was a Boy Scout, my mother sewed my badges on a green sash that I wore diagonally across my chest. Oh, how I prized my merit badge for orienteering, a sport sadly neglected by the International Olympic Committee, and wait a second! I pay MORE for green electricity, even though renewables are now cheaper than coal and oil? While most of my RECkless neighbors shell out LESS for the polluting stuff that's causing asthma attacks and summoning the gradual catastrophe that is climate change? That's ass-backwards, isn't it?

Yes, it is, and so is born another blog for another day. 

"Additionality, by the way, makes me think of Wessonality! Ah, the good old days, when all we had to worry about was oily salad oil and nuclear Armageddon. Anyway: is it or is it not worthwhile to join your town's green electricity team, at a small premium? Would you be putting your money on the Right Side of History or getting gently scammed by well-intentioned do-gooders? Alas, I'm still waiting for a call-back from the smart, young woman at Green Energy Consumers Alliance (GECA), a non-profit that handles REC transactions for communities. She listened with great patience to my rambling REC inquiries and is now "checking with her manager" regarding the status of my particular RECs as bundled or unbundled or kept in a kind of loose swaddle...but in the end, what will that data point really tell me? The answer to all my questions, as usual, appears to be somewhere in between, depending on this and that.

​I'll just have to accept that for now, I RECkon. 

P.S. Several days later I heard back from my industrious contact at GECA. My RECs, indeed, are unbundled, "but they are from New England generation, so they have a positive impact on our grid." She continued: "What we don’t like is when a company in New England buys cheap unbundled RECs from Texas or some other place where the supply of RECs far exceeds the demand for RECs. Buying those RECs doesn’t change the market. No one in Texas is building projects to earn money from selling the RECs to New England, but they will happily take the money."

Regarding Eversouce's accountability to the RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard, mentioned above): "If they cannot find enough RECs, they...have to pay an Alternative Compliance Payment (ACP) to the state. The state then uses that money to pay for clean energy projects." Okay, the acronyms are really piling up here, so I will leave the question of whether it's cheaper to pay an ACP than follow the RPS to a DFF (Day in the Far Future).  

​For social, political and economic reasons too numerous and, frankly, boring to enumerate, the new climate legislation – inanely dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act – depends almost entirely on subsidies. There are no carbon taxes, which would dissuade people and corporations from burning the fossil fuels that produce GHG emissions. Instead, a great, green giveaway has been instituted: tax breaks and tax rebates and hundreds of billions in federal funding  for all things clean and renewable. It's like those wacky 1970s TV commercials for the discount electronics store Crazy Eddie, but now it's Crazy Green Eddie and the prices are INSAAANE! Well, not quite, but maybe low enough to make your average Joe and Josephina consider an electric car and solar panels.

This plucky country – yes, it's our United States of America – is now running a very big experiment. Can we achieve such a massive undertaking, a revolution within our energy sector, with a painless all-carrot and no-stick approach? And will this strategy become a workable template for other countries? Some say yes, some say no, some say it depends. Others point out that it's a planetary problem requiring a planetary solution, and that we should, once more, get over ourselves. But, at any rate, the deed is done. There will be no new U.S. climate legislation for a while, so it's wait and see.  

​But wait for how long? If our green gambit isn't producing the 2.5 percent per year reduction in GHG emissions that models project, at some point we'll need to unleash the stick alongside the carrot. We'll need to levy taxes and fees to raise the price of behaviors that propel climate change. So, when exactly do we admit failure – a hard thing to do, in politics and life – and adopt stronger steps to help keep global temperature increases in the industrial era below 2.5 or 2 degrees Celsius? (Temps are currently at 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels and soaring; sorry, the 1.5 degree goal is utter fantasy.) 

Of course, we have to give the legislation a little time, a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, we can't go all the way to 2030 if yearly reductions are lacking. Yes, there may be a learning curve, a period of adjustment, and yes, technocrats will always urge a tweak to this subsidy and a twerk to that rebate, but the Earth's physical systems don't care one fig for our flailings. There's too much at stake to be prideful. If this "really big green sale" attempt at lessening our contribution to a gathering global disaster isn't sufficient – and, alas, it probably won’t be – then we have to be brave enough to admit it.  

So, I say, let's give it three years and a few months. It'll be the spring of 2026, with mid-term elections on the horizon. There's a decent chance that Congress and the presidency will be controlled by Democrats. At that juncture, we may be gifted one last, blessed chance to get serious, really serious about climate change. Now, if denialist Republicans are in control, it's "Katy bar the door!" and let's hope the rest of the world are doing better than us.     

I like wine – red, especially. A nice Bordeaux at the end of the week is pure pleasure. I also enjoy the ritual of opening the wine bottle with an old-fashioned corkscrew. Ceremonially, I spiral the curvy metal thingy into the firm but forgiving body of the cork. Twist, twist, twist, pull and pop! Out it comes, a bit scraggly from the puncture, red-stained at the butt end and trailing wine fumes. It’s a rare cork that doesn’t have some version of the wine’s name and logo printed upon it. Finally, I give the near-weightless cylinder a sniff, then roll it, magnifique, onto the table.  

A pox, by the way, on synthetic (polyethylene) corks, as well as the dreaded metal screw-top. Not only do these devices violate centuries of wine tradition – tradition! – but they have higher carbon toeprints than a real cork made from the peeled-off bark of the cork oak tree. That harvesting process, captured in this video, amazingly does not hurt the tree. 

Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of wine corks in plastic Talenti ice cream jars. The other day, while cleaning out the pantry, I decided to recycle those corks (I’ll keep the Talenti jars, which are better than Tupperware). Completing said eco-task took a bit more effort than expected. And cue Kermit the Frog singing, “It’s not easy being green…”

An InterWeb search revealed corkclub.com, sponsored by WidgetCo. They don’t actually make widgets, whatever they are, but a bunch of cork products, and they promise to recycle the corks you ship to them (your dime) and donate two cents per cork to a non-profit protecting oceans and forests. It sounded nice, if unverifiable, but I didn’t feel like packing a box and going to the post office, or paying shipment. So, Google, Google, I found the good folks at ReCORK, who set up collection sites at businesses, then divert the popped corks to companies like WidgetCo that make cork boards, cork flooring, funky shoes, and coasters.  

ReCORK’s website identified Social Wines in South Boston as a partner; I called the store and was told otherwise. “We used to do it with ReCORK,” said a friendly young lady. “I don’t know what happened to them.” Whatever, back to the digital data mine. A group called Cork Reharvest partners with Whole Foods. Hence, I called a few Whole Paychecks (ha ha) and discovered that the Amazon subsidiary does, indeed, recycle corks, but only at stores that sell wine. I found one, in nearby Cambridge. It was raining, so I drove there – a carbon expenditure, I know, if I weren't driving an electric car powered by solar energy.  

The hipster at the customer service desk took my 140 corks (14 per Talenti jar). “It’s a great thing,” he enthused. According to Cork Reharvest, 13 billion natural corks are produced each year, and now 140 bad-boys were off the mean streets. Planet saved! I patted myself on the back (literally, I have long arms) as I purchased two new bottles of wine, organic marmalade and a package of puffy pita from New Jersey that, like most American pita, will be meh. All those things, of course, were shipped to the store by ecologically friendly magic carpets.  

Why recycle wine corks? So what if they go into landfills, inhabit old jugs in basements and morph into oddball art projects? Global wine demand continues to escalate – my state of Massachusetts is fifth in the nation in per capita consumption – but recycled cork cannot be made into new wine corks because of bacterial concerns. The biodiverse, cork oak forests of southern Europe and northern Africa will live or die according to factors beyond recycling, such as development, desertification and efforts to eliminate pesky “cork taint” associated with natural cork.

I guess it comes down to this: recycling and reusing cork – as well as myriad other natural materials, from cotton pants to wooden corkscrews – may result in fewer things produced from plastic. (Even though, alas, plastic consumption is rising.) Plastic is basically oil, and oil companies are prime authors of our climate crisis. Moreover, plastic manufacturing emits high levels of carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants, and plastic waste is often dumped into the oceans. There it’s whittled down into microplastics ingested by marine life. These fragments get into your fish fillets. Bon appetit!  

On the ride home, however, a doubt wormed at me.

​Will my 140 corks really be recycled? I mean, hipster-guy was reassuring but it’s not like he’s going to escort them along the supply chain to the cork-crumbling machine. All it takes is one tired, ambivalent worker, not to mention one MAGA hat-wearing climate change denier who's mesmerized by FOX News and deeply resents wine-guzzling coastal elites, to toss them in the trash or into the general recycling stream and the next thing you know my corks are powering furnaces in India that make a popular sugarcane goo. That strange outcome from this excellent Bloomberg story about the dirty diversion of recyclable products.  
 
It's all about trust. I should put a cork in the paranoia, right? 

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about those young Just Stop Oil activists who, in late 2022, threw food on the protective glazing over famous pieces of art. Their actions, they stated, were meant to force us to confront out absurdly lackluster response to the climate crisis. This upsets you, they proclaimed, our pretending to destroy van Gogh’s Sunflowers with tomato soup? This makes you outraged, but the wholesale, systemic destruction of the biosphere is nothing to get too worked up about?
​
Can’t you see that our future is melting?  

From the start, I’ve thought: hooray for these smart, brave kids, willing to endure ridicule for a righteous cause. Now that I’ve come back to this blog, abandoned for more than a year, I find that a tsunami of words about their civil disobedience has crested and crashed already. These kids are monsters! No, they’re visionaries! Well, maybe their intentions are good, but assaulting art turns people off. There are better ways to protest. Blah, blah, blah, here, here, here, and here. It’s all been said – almost. But first, a splash of words on my blog sabbatical.

While away I wrote a science fiction novel called Shipworld. The just-finished novel chronicles the 360-year journey of a generation spaceship containing 600 humans in flight from an Earth in deep ecological crisis. Also onboard are two non-fictional artworks. One is a rare Olmec Head, now squatting in a museum in Jalapa, Mexico, and the other is Albrecht Durer’s 522-year-old self-portrait, hanging without fanfare in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

About these two treasures, which play key roles in the story, I’ve done a great deal of thinking. I’ve stood before them, gazed and wondered. I suppose I’ve fallen in love with them. Nonetheless, they’re just things. I'd gladly accept their desecration – as well as the destruction of entire museums full of Monets and Rothkos and Rembrandts and O’Keeffes – if it would help jolt us from our climate-action slumber. New art can always be made, but the damage caused by climate change on our living planet is effectively irreversible over the next several hundred years. By the way, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil recently stated that they may soon start slashing paintings for real, “in order to get their messages across.”

​When that happens, I'll still say good for them. 

One argument against the “art terrorist” kids holds that their actions are counterproductive. Articles in The New York Times and elsewhere have sited a survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. It finds that the American public is wary of these non-violent climate protests, with 46 percent agreeing that such tactics "decrease their support for efforts to address climate change." Forty percent record no effect on their support, while 13 percent reported increased support. Hence, tossing fried eggs on the Mona Lisa is a very unsavvy idea. Until, that is, you actually look at the data and realize, once more, that even prestige media outlets can be lousy at interpreting survey results. 

First problem: the posed question wasn't just about food on art. It referred to "disruptive non-violent actions including shutting down morning commuter traffic and damaging pieces of art." Anyone with a car knows that getting stuck in traffic on the way to work is a very different kettle of soup than learning about a fake attack on some stuffy artwork you've probably never seen in person. Hold on, there's a second problem here. The question implies that the artworks were actually damaged, when they were not. 

Third problem: who exactly are these 46 percent of Americans whose deep and abiding desire to take action against climate change is suddenly squashed because they don't want to be on the same team with a bunch of snot-nosed kids causing a fuss at the Met? Such an association, presumably, makes them feel squishy, and so they jettison their beliefs that were built on solid research and facts. Oh, c'mon! These 46 percent, as the survey data indicates, are primarily white, older Republicans and Independents whose supposed support for climate change action was either a lie or thin as tissue paper. Permit me to suggest this headline: Fancy Ivy League Survey Shows that Americans Who Barely if at All Support Climate Change Action Profess Even Less Support After Hearing About Non-violent, Disruptive Climate Change Protests. 

Maybe it's kinda cool that 13 percent of respondents reported increased support for addressing climate change. Maybe a bunch of these folks weren't hippies already. But it's definitely not cool that Michael Mann, a luminary in the climate change movement and director of the aforementioned center at Penn, goes to great lengths to defend the study and its popular interpretation. After all, his kind of activism is writing books and giving congressional testimony. That's all good, if largely ineffectual. Mann might consider that unorthodox, even destructive climate action could play an effective role in the great climate fight that's building -- even if it makes him uncomfortable. He may want to cut the kid activists some slack.         

Let's return to the art museum that I frequent, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A few weeks ago, my wife Elahna and I were there for a Hanukkah celebration in the enclosed Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard, designed by the renowned architect Norman Foster (also known as Baron Foster of Thames Bank). A klezmer band played the same three songs over and over, and the latkes tasted neither of potato or oil. How is that possible? But still, it was fun. We sat at the bar and I alternately beheld my beautiful wife and Dale Chihuly’s 42-foot tall glass sculpture, Lime Green Icicle Tower. It’s, what, one of seven million Chihuly pieces gracing the globe, churned out of his mega-studio by the master and his 3,000 assistants.

Lime Green Icicle Tower first came to the MFA in 2011 as part of a Chihuly exhibition; folks liked it so much that the MFA took up a collection. Schoolchildren, so goes the legend, dropped their pennies in a box next to the sculpture. Add in a major gift from Donald Saunders (fashion tycoon and husband of Liv Ullmann) and soon the Chihuly was purchased for an undisclosed price somewhere beyond million dollars. Hmmm, I wondered at the MFA bar, how could those climate protestors effectively employ Lime Green?

Fling chocolate syrup at it, using squirt guns or turkey basters. Hurl anti-latkes at its pointy branches. No, too easy to clean up. Lime Green isn’t protected by glass; it’s made out of glass. How about a drone strike? Bam, right through the Baron's elegant roof into the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Family Courtyard. No, too messy. Collateral damage and all that. They could smuggle in a chainsaw. Gas or electric powered? Either way, thrum, thrum, just saw the artsy, pseudo-tree down. What, you got a problem? This bothers you, while Greenland melts and the Amazon burns? This gets your dander flying while the parts per million measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide hits 418 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii? Maybe attach a Mission Impossible device which creates a vibrating wave that resonates up and down the sculpture and shatters it apart! Even better, if only Yoshitomo Nara’s giant and very expensive fiberglass puppy – 20 yards away in the courtyard, the gift of local billionaire and Dexter Shoe heir Theodore Alfond – would amble over, lift its back leg and pee on Lime Green, issuing forth a stream of corrosive Pop-Art puppy juice that causes the tower’s icicles to go limp and fall away. Happy Hanukkah!

​I haven't shared these musings with Elahna. She generally frowns on my flights of anarchic fancy. 

​​​A word about George Saunders, the big funder behind Lime Green. He’s a high-end real estate tycoon and the former owner of the Boston Park Plaza hotel. In 2013 he and partners sold that faded gem for $250 million to Sunstone Hotel Investors. Nice cash out! Take a look at his benefactors, the executive team at Sunstone. About what you'd expect, but the issue isn't that they're all middle-aged and older white men, or that there's something a bit icky about them. The thing is, they're rich dudes who generate some of the ridiculous streams of money that find profitable harbors in artwork investments – Nara sold his painting Knife Behind Back (see below) for $25 million – and they're also the kind of people most of us will never, ever meet. Or even pass by. The upper echelons of the one percent live in a parallel, luxury world. They reside in different neighborhoods, shop in different stores, and eat in different restaurants. They go to different schools. Yes, they have to ride on the same roads, but in limos and Lamborghinis; they fly the same airways, but in first class and private planes.   

Which all takes us back to the art museum, and perhaps a deeper understanding of why the Just Stop Oil activists target famous artworks. An art museum is one of the few places where a regular person intersects with members of the wealthy power elite. No, we won’t actually see the super-rich there (they only attend VIP events), just as we won’t notice them at a Boston Celtics game (they’re ensconced in a luxury box, equipped with its own toilet and catered food), but we will be able to look at the bizarrely expensive stuff they’ve donated or loaned or sold to the local art barn.
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Both prole and plutocrat stare at the same paintings, sculptures, and engraved Paul Revere punch bowls, and it may be the only thing they have in common. It may be their sole point of intersection. Ultimately, the art museum is where, outside of banks and gated compounds, the money is. And so it becomes the most available place to strike back at the ultra-rich, to threaten what they care (or pretend to care) about. In these climate-controlled, exquisitely lit rooms, patrolled by lowly paid security personnel, eco-activists are signaling disdain for the elite's ridiculously high carbon lifestyles (the average carbon footprint in the top one-percent is 75 times higher than in the bottom 50 percent) as well as their nihilistic embrace of a devasted future from which they expect to be wealth-insulated. Here, at the MFA and Tate and Guggenheim, the Masters of the Universe can be vicariously humiliated, a little bit, for their callous disregard.  

Nara’s little girl with the knife behind her back? Soon she'll be slashing paintings, and good for her.     

Two of the most powerful tools in the climate activist's toolbox are protest and divestment. 

Protest is a constitutionally protected activity that seeks to influence the behavior of powerful groups such as governments, universities and corporations. Andreas Malm, a human ecologist who teaches at Lund University in Sweden, has written a provocative new book about the role of protest in the climate movement: How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

But first, here's a few notes about Malm and his books. His earlier Fossil Capital is an interesting exploration of the reasons why Britain moved from a reliance on water power to coal power at the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Malm makes a strong case that the switch occurred not because of cost differential, but due to capital's insatiable need to control and crush labor. It's fair to add that Malm's a Marxist who tends to interpret every scenario according to that dynamic. Also, the book is an expansion of his Ph.D. dissertation and therefore a bit dry in places. Beware the equations. For $9.99 on Kindle, though, it's not a bad buy. Secondly, How to Blow Up a Pipeline doesn't actually include instruction of pipeline destruction. The lurid title may be an attempt to goose sales. That gambit failed with my library system, which has chosen not to carry Malm's explosive book.  

Successful protest movements, Malm argues, succeed not because of their devotion to peaceful protest in the style of Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King. In particular, the American Civil Rights Movement succeeded because of MLK and rabble-rousing, violent groups led by individuals such as Malcolm X. Malm believes that radical protestors functioned as a powerful counterpoint, compelling the protectors of the elite status quo to make concessions to the peaceful protestors. Historical hagiography, he contends, has largely erased the key function of these extreme groups. 

Hence, regarding climate activism, Malm rejects the single-minded recipe of non-violent protest espoused by many climate leaders. (He seems to revel in taking potshots at the self-righteous invocations of Bill McKibben.) The Climate Movement, evidently, needs at least the threat of exploding pipelines and violent street clashes in order for fossil-fuel addicted interests to pay due attention to the demands of "reasonable" protestors.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a lively, quick read, available on Amazon. You decide if the passionate Swede has a point. Just be careful reading this book on a park bench in Red America.  

Climate activists, such as McKibben and his 350.org group, have made progress convincing hundreds of organizations to divest fossil-fuel stocks from their investment portfolios. Success has come mostly with universities, non profits and left-leaning states and cities. Low-hanging fruit, certainly, but if you can't convince entities sympathetic to fighting climate change -- Harvard, Yale, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Anglican Church of South Africa, New York state's pension fund, my very liberal city of Somerville -- what chance do you have with mainstream or conservative enterprises?

In the process, a natural sorting takes place between organizations who care about the crisis and those, ultimately, who don't. The same occurs on the micro level, as individuals decide whether or not to purge dirty stocks from their retirement funds. Fortunately, in recent years, renewable energy stocks have largely outperformed the likes of Exxon (oil) and Peabody (coal), so that makes the act of conscience somewhat easy to enact. 

But how, exactly, does climate divestment impact fossil-fuel corporations? Green groups contend that divestment "sends a message" and "raises awareness," and that's all well and good if hard to quantify. But does divestment hit target corporations in the pocketbook? Do their stock values suffer after an enlightened retirement fund here and a liberal arts college walks away? The money doesn't just disappear; when a green-virtuous person sells a stock, someone with a different set of scruples may buy it. The ups and downs of the stock market are a tangle of curious causes and effects, divorced in mysterious ways from the real economy.

​So the answer to the cold-hard-cash question is maybe, maybe not. 

What's certain is that private equity groups, controlling mega-billions in capital, are very invested in fossil fuel companies. They're betting on them; shorting the planet, so to speak. For a scary read, see this recent article in The New York Times detailing how private equity, by "bottom fishing for bargain prices...are keeping some of the most polluting wells, coal-burning plants and other inefficient properties in operation."

They simply don't care; private equity operates as a kind of financial Borg from Star Trek, strip mining sectors from real estate to nursing homes to fossil fuels for profit. The slim-suited mandarins in charge of these amoral organizations will not be amenable to the "think of your grandchildren" rhetoric of divestment enthusiasts. Nothing short of brute-force government regulation and taxation -- or to channel good Dr. Malm, world revolution that collapses the capitalist system once and for -- will bring such creatures to heel. 

Now that a great many corporations, even oil companies, have acknowledged the existence and danger of human-caused climate change, you'd think that progress might occur in reducing worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. And you'd be wrong. Why? Because the next step after denial in the capitalist handbook is not positive action. Oh no, there are many more ways to wriggle away from responsibility. After denial, in a profit-driven-crazy world, comes obfuscation. 

A heckuva word, obfuscation. Synonyms for the verb obfuscate are bewilder, trivialize, perplex, confuse, muddle, subvert, blur, obscure, stupefy and darken. Hooray for obfuscation, the PR hack's best friend. See campaign to defend cigarette industry and Trump press secretaries. 

Specifically, with climate change, you admit the problem but assert both the economic infeasibility of not burning fossil fuels and the intransigence of path-dependent consumers struggling to put food on their children or breakfast tables on school buses or something homey like that and then you call for the government to build really tall and really cool sea walls around coastal cities and/or perpetually seed the stratosphere with sun-blocking sulfur. What could possibly go wrong? Chemistry and engineering to the rescue! 

Or admit the problem and then trumpet a series of trivial sustainability measures. Tin-can recycling, water-stingy shrubbery, minor research project into kelp or algae as source for next-gen jet fuel, that kind of thing. At minimum have your doe-eyed sustainability officer say the word sustainable a lot. Like, in every sentence.  

Or announce that you're swearing off carbon, for sure, by some distant date. 2050 has a good, round ring to it. Eversource, my local provider of natural gas, has dared to go carbon neutral by 2030! In perusing their slick materials, you may notice that this calculation doesn't technically include the carbon-intensive product -- a fossil fuel! -- which they sell. But then again it's not their fault you buy it to keep from freezing in the winter. 

VENT: The Glasgow climate conference, known as COP-26 or the 26th annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties, is winding down. The Scottish bagpipes are playing as world leaders pledge to strengthen pledges they made at COP-21 in Paris. You know, the curve-bending, paradigm- shifting action-steps that their countries have barely begun to fulfill over the past several years. But this time, we're told, this time is different because blah, blah, blah. 

​A late-night comic called it COP OUT-26; that's pretty funny and accurate. Hey, did you know that COP-OUT pledges are 100 percent voluntary and unaccompanied by any device, financial or political, that compels or even motivates compliance? I wonder why they don't work...and did you hear the one about countries submitting pledges based on inaccurate data regarding emissions and carbon-sink capacity? It's funny how that inaccurate data always underestimates emissions and overestimates the ability of forests and wetlands to absorb carbon, much like mistakes at grocery-store checkout always seem to be overcharges...

Honesty is so old-fashioned. As is short-term planning. Mere five-year plans are for suckers and Soviets. At COP OUT-26, India has gone long by pledging to reach net-zero on ALL greenhouse emissions by 2070! In that magical year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be a sprightly 120 years old. Let's start planning the parade. By the way, global carbon dioxide emission are slated to rise five percent this year, a near-complete rebound from the Covid-related dip of 2020. So that's troubling. But there's always 2070! Yay! 

GET REAL: What, we should stop trying? Without these annual gabfests, climate change trends might be worse. Partial progress, even puny progress, is better than none. In the U.S., more than 80 percent of new power generation is now from renewable sources. And we've reduced carbon emissions 20 percent since 2005 (see below). Okay, that doesn't count the extra methane produced as electric utilities switch from coal to natural gas, and methane is actually a far more potent if less long-lasting greenhouse gas. But still, it's something, right? Just this week the U.S. joined dozens of countries in pledging really, really hard on a voluntary basis to cut methane emissions and stop ALL deforestation by 2030. Okay, ALL is clearly ridiculous, a total over-promise even for pledge-drunk pols. But an actual reduction of 25 percent wouldn't be awful.    

So, as the song goes from a certain animated Christmas classic, let's keep putting "one step in front of the other, and soon we'll be walking out the door." See you at COP OUT-27 in Egypt!​

VENT: 

A fascinating academic paper was published seven years ago this August -- it took that long for it to reach my wandering attention -- regarding the time lag between an emission of carbon dioxide and the maximum amount of warming caused by that emission. The paper, by Katherine L. Ricke and Ken Caldeira, gives the answer away in the title: Maximum Warming Occurs About One Decade After A Carbon Dioxide Emission. 

What's with the time delay? It has something to do with uncertainties related to the carbon cycle, climate sensitivity and thermal inertia. More specifically, with the uptake of CO2 by the oceans and biosphere, with radiative forcing and feedbacks and heat exchange and, oh, just read the paper and pretend you understand it.

So, ten years. From a geological perspective, that's nothing. It might as well be instantaneous, like a punch -- pow! -- and the resulting pain -- ow! But from the perspective of a human life, a ten-year gap is a significant cause and delayed full effect. A case of crime and gradual punishment. After all, air pollution can travel from tailpipe to bronchial sac in a matter of minutes, and water pollution can destroy a duck within days. Radiation from a nuclear explosion takes between a few hours and several years to kill a human being, depending on proximity and potency. Now think of how we talk to each other. An angry word can injure instantly and then fade away. Or it might fester, poisoning a relationship. A loving word or caress, applied at the right moment, can last a lifetime. 

Let's take your typical U.S. citizen, one who claims to be concerned about climate change. What might she guess about the time lag between emissions cause and warming effect? Every morning she starts up her fossil-fueled death mobile (kidding, sorta) and when, exactly, do those ejected CO2 molecules wreck full havoc? I'm guessing that most people imagine the effect as fairly immediate -- a few days or weeks maybe for the gaseous gunk to fly up and meet its chemical destiny, but certainly not a gradual process taking ten years. 

​But that's all speculation. And what does it really matter? 

It matters because matters of timing may influence public attitudes and the enactment of policies to address climate change. For instance, the realization that today's climate mayhem -- heat waves, wildfires, melting glaciers, souped-up storms, and so on -- is a function of yesteryear's emissions, that everything we've spewed since, say, the Year We Elected Trump has yet to come due -- well, isn't that a bracing thought? Might that spur action? On the other hand, if we believe that today's emissions won't reach maximum warming power for forty years -- a position once held by many scientists -- then the temptation might be not to worry so much about such a distant threat and, besides, someone's bound to invent a super CO2-sucking machine by then. 

Before proceeding further, let's consider another timing aspect of climate change: how long does carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere doing its warming thing? A couple of years? No. A decade or two and then it washes out? No again. A century, could it possibly stay up there that long? NO AGAIN. The answer is 300-1,000 years, according to NASA. For historical perspective, a thousand years ago Thorkell the Tall was banished from England, probably because Cnut the Great suffered from little man's syndrome. In 1021 most people's lives were nasty, short and brutish, if they were lucky, and bleeding was considered the standard of care among medical professionals. 

Effectively, we're stuck with what we've done. This is hard to grasp and harder to accept. The persistence of climate change runs counter to our lived experience of cause and effect. People expect that if they stop doing something bad, things will get better. So if you stop procrastinating and fix the roof, water will cease leaking into the kitchen. If you reduce salt intake, your blood pressure will go down. If you and fellow citizens cut down on nitrogen oxide emissions by embracing renewable energies, the air will become less smoggy. One more: if you cease buying junk you don't need, you'll probably not go broke. And all this is true -- just not with climate change.

Climate change is not reversible within time frames that are remotely relevant to human civilization. A useful metaphor may be quitting smoking; when a smoker quits, his lungs don't heal over time. He has to live, or die, with the damage done. By this way of thinking, we've scarred the Earth's lungs and humanity will have to deal with the results for scores of generations.

(Kids to parents and grandparents: thanks for screwing us over so royally. Take care of yourself in old age.) 

In fact, if in some eco-fantasy the human race suddenly stopped all greenhouse-gas emissions, we'd still get several more years of increasing warming! (See discussion of timing lag at top of blog.) So, it's like this: we can't even declare that when we stop doing something bad, things at least won't get worse!

Yes, it's screwy, FUBAR, a real balagan as the Israelis say. It's positively upside down like those trees that my wife and I recently viewed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Hung by their root-heels in a courtyard of the museum, which in previous lives was both a textile and electronics factory, they nonetheless continue to grow toward the sun and away from the earth. Therefore we are compelled, according to the artist's statement, to redefine the tree not merely as a source of building materials or generator of oxygen or lovely home for birds and squirrels, but as an unstoppable growth-response system.

Similarly, I wonder, in order to face the daunting counter-calculus of climate change, shouldn't we redefine our perspective about ourselves in time and space? 

Make of that what you will. My visceral reaction on first beholding the artwork: it seemed a pretty cruel thing to do to a tree. I looked away. A while later we got hungry and went to lunch; the French fries in the MOCA café were awfully good.

Yesterday I rose early and headed over to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge to look for the graves of two key figures in the 1846 discovery and implementation of sulfuric ether, which rendered surgery painless and ushered in a new era of medicine. It was about 80 degrees at 8 a.m., so with a minimum of dilly-dallying I located the burial sites of W.T.G. Morton and Charles Thomas Jackson, M.D. Instrumental in this search was a map found in a 2011 issue of the Bulletin of Anesthesia History.  Just another Sunday morning ramble...actually yesterday's adventure flowed from a book I had just finished, Ether Day by J. M. Fenster (2002), as well as my personal experience of having undergone several surgeries, most recently a spine operation called a laminectomy.

​Next I scooted to Trader Joe's and then home. Soon enough, temperatures hit 93 degrees, pretty hot in these parts but not a record. On June 6, 1925, Boston wilted in 100-degree air. But records were broken yesterday in Burlington, Vermont; Newark, New Jersey; and Syracuse, New York. The day before, Minneapolis soared to a daily record of 99 degrees, and before that Las Vegas broke its June 3rd record with a reading of 108 degrees at 4:45 p.m. at the airport where tourists get off air-conditioned planes to ride air-conditioned transport to air-conditioned hotels and casinos where they are plied with alcohol and gently separated from their money. 

Yes, such records are at least partly related to climate change. (Here we pause for a data point: the recent all-time high reading of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 419 ppm, taken by instruments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.) And, of course, more frequent and intense heat waves only induce folks to crank more air conditioning which means more burning of fossil fuels, which produces higher temperatures via climate change, and 'round and 'round we go on the Armageddon Carousel. 

But that's not the gist of what I'm struggling to communicate here. I'm wondering, actually, how major changes occur.

​Sometimes it's sudden and surprising, as with anesthesia. One day, surgery exists as a painful and often fatal horror show. Then, within a very short time, a few plucky people harness the power of existing chemical compounds and surgery becomes a painless procedure with boundless potential. Human suffering is lessened greatly. No matter that the major players scrapped so desperately over credit for the epic discovery that they destroyed themselves. No matter that Jackson was an obnoxious snob, Morton a scheming conman. And to heck with their motivations: they did it. They unburdened multitudes, born and unborn. We should note, too, that the rivals received help from several fascinating and faulty characters also buried in the leafy confines of Mount Auburn Cemetery.

But it's not likely, alas, that climate change will be solved with a "game-changing" discovery; sorry, John Kerry. The clock is tick-tick-ticking; temps are rise-rise-rising. Waiting for some undiscovered technology that will, say, whisk greenhouse gases from the atmosphere seems a sucker's bet. More so, while 19th century surgeons eagerly adopted anesthesia, 21st century protectors of the fossil-fuel status quo have so far failed to end their destructive practices and embrace existing and affordable clean energy solutions such as wind and solar.  

If this scourge is to be tamed, we may well need millions of Jacksons and millions of Mortons, all over the world, each doing their small part. The alternative is pain, and more pain.    ​

There we were, at a table outside the Spring Street Market & Café in Williamstown, Massachusetts, enjoying a wonderful lunch on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in May, and this truck hauling a tangled load of uprooted buckthorn pulls alongside us. The engine, alas, does not turn off. Just a few feet away, it idles, belching  blue-black diesel fumes. Soon the driver's window rolls down and I can't make out the face from my vantage point, but I can see a meaty, tattooed arm protruding from the cab. It holds a cigarette, with almost dainty flair. Once, twice, it taps the ash. Then the arm retracts, the windows rolls up and the loud, noxious idling continues. Altogether it's a big Trump You to the tourists from the big-bad city as well as the entitled kids attending elite Williams College, this town's major employer.

A few more minutes pass. I want to get up and knock on the driver's-side window and ask him to cool it, but I don't because I'm a flatlander/out-of-towner and I've already passed my confrontation limit for the month. Besides, we were almost done eating when the truck showed. The flavor of the fossil-fuel fumes only marred my last savorings of turmeric rice, avocado, poached eggs, black beans, Vermont cheddar and green chile sauce -- the gently melded ingredients making up the sublime Brunch Bowl. 

The guy in the idling truck, I bet, harbors a good bit of anger. He's found a clever way to release it on a bunch of pansy-assed, vegan liberals who deserve it because we want to stop him and other patriotic Americans from owning guns, praying without masks, building walls (which make good neighbors) and burning stuff to make the world go around. Plus, he's supposed to feel bad now for grilling animal meat and gnawing on it, like that's destroying the world or something? He's supposed to eat a goddamned Brunch Bowl?! Well, fine, isn't that America today in all its red vs. blue glory. Or gory. What interests me isn't so much the man's unneighborly behavior, but the load of buckthorn that, we'll assume, he'd spent the morning yanking from Mother Earth.   

Buckthorn, in the USA, is considered a non-native invasive species, a degrader of ecosystems. It's often referred to as common or European or glossy buckthorn, of the Rhamnacae family of flowering plants. According to the Friends of the Mississippi River, who regularly organize parties to pluck the buck, this tall understory shrub is "extremely hardy and able to thrive in a variety of soil and light conditions." Indeed, it's apparently evolved to both grow wildly and resist predators, with masses of leaves that hang on through fall and black fruit that makes most animals and birds wretch or get the runs (buckthorn is a mean purgative in herbal medicine). When reduced to stumps, buckthorn will shoot back up, phoenix-like, which is why buckthorn hunters are advised to cover stumps with a black plastic shroud.  

Extremely hardy, indeed. In fact, they remind me of a certain stubborn species I've encountered...humans! Hardy humans, expanding madly across the planet. Indeed, perhaps the human species has become the most invasive species on Earth, unnaturally expert at overwhelming biospheres with powerful growth and defensive powers. Buckthorn, however, is invasive by virtue of having been moved by Homo sapiens from its original habitat, where it coexisted in relative balance with the flora and fauna with which it co-evolved. Here it doesn't fit and runs amok. Humans, by contrast, are invasive by virtue of our intellect and opposable thumbs, not necessarily in that order. We run amok everywhere. And so far, plants and animals have displayed no ready response to our vigorous dominion, unless you consider climate change as a total-systems response to our onslaught. It'll take awhile, but we'll cook them out. For more on these theories, see two provocative books: The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (2006) and Defiant Earth by Clive Hamilton (2017). 

Back to buckthorn in Vermont, as well as other misplaced and therefore invasive plants and animals such as kudzu in Georgia, Asian carp in the Great Lakes and cane toads in Australia. Eradicating these fiends is considered a green-virtuous deed, one that even employs people, such as our idling truck driver, who probably don't belong to the Sierra Club. If you've gone on an invasive species hunt, you know there's something satisfying about ripping the interloper from the soil or knocking the troublemaker on the head. It's a job well done, indeed, and then we all return to our regular occupation of acting a lot worse than the fiend we just slayed. 

It's also worth noting that buckthorn can't help but act like buckthorn. It doesn't realize that it's dominating and destroying its unfamiliar surroundings. It can't stop itself. Humans, on the other hand, now have a very good idea of what we're doing to Earth's biospheres and civilizations. We can stop ourselves. But, so far, we won't. We just won't.