If you're a just a casual newsreader who keeps eyes peeled for news about climate change, it can be depressing. If you contemplate in any depth humanity's woeful response to the gathering crisis, it can make depressing seem like a sunny skip along the summery seashore. That's no fun, no way, not even with serotonin re-uptake inhibitors to blunt the blow. So, let's go a'lookin' for some good news about climate change -- even if we have to dig through the bad news to find it. 

Perusing The New York Times over the last few days...oh dear, wildfires are going wild in California again. The Getty Museum is under fiery siege, an evacuated Lebron James and family roam the Santa Monica hellscape seeking lodging (wondering why he ever left Cleveland, twice) and the good news is...well, climate change is actually cited in the NYT article as a contributing reason for the conflagrations. A second piece goes into detail about winds and soil dryness. That's progress, right?

Okay, here's an interesting article about how several populated coastal cities will be inundated by global sea level rise by 2050. It's three times worse than previously believed, according to a study appearing in Climate Communications.  So Mumbai, goodbye. That's 19 million people displaced. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Alexandria in Egypt -- gone, too. We're not even talking about little cities washed away, like Miami and New Orleans. The really populated ones lead the underwater erasure list -- Shanghai, Bangkok, Basra in Iran. At least 150 million people "are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by mid-century," according to the article. And the good news portion of this news nugget is...well, you've been warned! Sell high, move inland. And for those who are just scratching out a living -- most residents of most cities -- stock up on flotation devices. Sporty new models are available for the kids.  

Sorry about the sarcasm. All righty, here's something uplifting: Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil and Secretary of State/Whipping Boy #7 for President Trump, is testifying in a lawsuit against his former company. The charge: conspiring to hide the facts about climate change from shareholders and the public. Good news: the prospect of justice is always good news. Yes, it's about past misdeeds, what's done is done -- but on the other hand maybe a truly massive fine could induce Exxon Mobil to stop hunting for new sources of oil and pour money into renewable energy...and we wake up from our dreamy dream. We keep scanning...GM and Toyota side with Trump in fight to get California to lower its vehicle emission standards. Good news: Ford and Honda say screw you! 

I'm stretching, I know. So let's be more direct, let's go to the Google! Siri, or Lexi, or Jeeves (remember him?), give me some honking good news about climate change. The first website up is Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. They've got a slick video praising humanity's response to climate change and it's kind of uplifting  until you notice it was made five years ago, before President Trump started to actively dismantle U.S. contributions to the effort. 

Okay, next up: goodnewsnetwork.org. Here we learn that Scotland is planting million of trees, someone developed a seaweed drink for cattle that reduces their methane emissions (burping, farting) by 99 percent, and a member of Pink Floyd has auctioned his guitar collection, raising $21 million for climate change. Okay that's more like it. Little stuff, granted, but good. (All in all another brick in the wall...) And off we go to the third curated item, dailyclimate.org/good-news/, for hopeful stories about rooftop meadows, a cleaner marine bio-fuel and Tesla's new solar roof that may actually work this time. 

Excellent! Feels good, huh? Now go take a walk but first make sure you don't read this, unless you want to get back on that bummery bad-news train. (Hint: the climate techno-fix that the rich guys want to employ, and make us poor schmucks pay for, will probably just make things worse.) 

A while back I walked to the local library. It's a few miles, mostly uphill coming and going. My mission was to return David Wallace-Wells' grim but fascinating book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth, and find The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The latter was next up for the library's monthly sci-fi/fantasy book club. I don't usually attend because I 'm either busy, traveling, forget about it or didn't finish the book, but I keep lurking along with the selections. The Master and Margarita was a Russian slog featuring starving poets, the devil, Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilate and a snarky, talking cat -- I skimmed most of it -- and then I forgot to go to the book club, probably on purpose. I may have been busy or out of town, too. Anyway, up to the second floor of Somerville's main library I climbed to retrieve a copy of Bulgakov's bulging masterwork from behind the reference desk, and here comes the part that relates to climate change, kind of. Please be patient. 

Two librarians, a man and woman, stood behind the desk. I asked for The Master and Margarita and the man swiveled to the shelf behind him. Two copies were left. He pulled out both. One copy was tattered, the cover ripped and taped back together. The other copy looked newer, cleaner, less abused. He considered, for a micro-second, and handed me the crappy copy. I didn't take it. I said, "I'd like the nice copy." I think I said it nicely, who knows. Without a change in expression he handed me the decent book and I nodded and started away. That's when the woman said to her colleague, in a flat tone: " It's too bad he has to ask for the nicer copy." I hesitated, glanced back, saw them doing their librarian things, and continued downstairs to check the book out at the main desk. 

What'd she mean by that? 

• Oh, what a world we live in where all book copies aren't equally nice.
• What a schmuck you are, handing him the torn copy. 
• What a schmuck he is, not accepting what he's given.
• Two of the above three.
• All three
• Something else I haven't considered. 

Next I walked to Bloc, a hipster coffee shop in an old bank building. It's very popular, with its bitter coffee and expensive baked goods. I ordered a small coffee and the cheapest cookie, a lemon-frosted thing, $2.95. (Remember those tubes of cookie dough you could just slice onto a tray and pop into the oven? Did they cost $2.95? Do they still sell them?) So the clerk, a young woman with a plastic smile, grabbed a pair of tongs and reached for a tray holding four glazed lemon cookies. Three were identical, of medium cookie size, and one was clearly smaller. A bit overcooked. The runt of the litter. She's gonna give me that one, I thought, it's that kind of day. So the tongs closed on its prey. And she picked the runt, of course. This time I didn't object, but I didn't tip either. The cookie was dry. 

Why'd she do that?

• She hates men. She hates tall men. She hates tall, white men. She hates tall, white, middle-aged men who remind her of her father who, oddly, she loves most of the time. 
• The last two customers refused the small cookie. It's driving her crazy, sitting there all day. 
• That's life: accept what you're given. She knows this and passes it along. 
• Two of the above three.
• All three.
• Something else I haven't considered. 

Why we do things, it's hard to figure. But, regarding my little misadventures, I'm going with option three as the biggest factor. In this 21st century world of monopolistic corporate power, ultra-fractured politics and ad-driven hyper-consumerism, it's all about taking what you're given and pretending you're given what you really want. Sure, fine, maybe climate change is here, and maybe we're bequeathing our kids and grandkids the rawest deal in history -- but hey, get used to it. Get over it. Like Coach Belichick says, It Is What It Is. Besides, there's not much we can do, not without the iron hand of socialism choking all that's good and growing in this great land. 

Now eat your shriveled cookie, read your tattered book and shut up. 

A few days ago, after a wonderful vacation lull, my wife and I found ourselves waiting on the platform at Paris' dark and dingy Gare du Nord (Station of the North) for a train to the airport. On the walls beyond the tracks hung 42 colored panels featuring mathematical equations. Not for sale, but for your consideration. It is, we learned, an artwork by Liam Gillick and it's been there underground, gathering grime, ever since the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference at which the Paris Climate Accords were signed by almost every country in the world. Great cheers went up, a florid fleur-de-lis of hope and camaraderie between nations bloomed.

These train-track equations, it turns out, are selections from the scientific pursuits of Syukuro Manube, a pioneer in developing computer models for the Earth's climate as it undergoes changes wrought by mankind. In a 1967 paper, Manube and Richard Wetherald presented a model of the interacting atmosphere-ocean-land systems that predicted today's degenerating state of affairs with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Genius graces the walls. 

I don't pretend to understand the math. I don't even understand people who do understand the math. But I do understand dirt, a little bit, as it slowly accumulates on surfaces. The 42 number-strewn billboards, once shiny and new, are now fairly dirty. Getting to filthy they are, four years on from the big climate pact that has yet to produce any reductions in worldwide emissions of CO2 or other greenhouse gases. In fact, we keep adding greater amounts every year. We keep making it worse. 

Why? What's wrong with us? It's safe to say that we're screwing up for reasons related to human nature and our path-dependent institutions, but the Paris treaty itself is flawed for being entirely unenforceable. It operates like a team of basketball players who huddle up, stick their hands together in a messy mass and yell "Hustle!" Then the players jog around the court like it's Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and the coach isn't allowed to take them out of the game. 

Time goes by, as Sam sang in Casablanca. Dirt coats the math. And the climate goes haywire according to principles that care not one ripe, juicy fig for politics, economics or the next train to the Charles de Gaulle Airport. Oh well, what was it Rick said to Ilsa at the end of the movie? 

​We'll always have Paris. 

When considering the high rate of climate-change denial among senior citizens -- see previous blog post -- it's easy to dismiss them as out-of-touch, preoccupied with their signature issues (protection of Social Security and Medicare, primarily) and, in the case of the conservative elderly, wedded to the science-doubting policy positions of their political tribe. While those assertions contain some truth, they're also glib and superficial, lacking in context. As we know, or should, context is crucial.

​How do most senior citizens in the United States actually live? Not together -- only seven percent of seniors live in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and supportive retirement communities. Not with their kids and grandkids -- only 20 percent of seniors live within so-called intergenerational families, dramatized for this viewer by 1970s TV shows such as The Waltons. Today, almost three-quarters of seniors live alone or with a spouse/roommate in a house, condo or apartment. 

And then the spouse, friend or sister dies. Another person is added to the nation of solitary elderly, segregated from mainstream society. In fact, half of women over 75 live alone. Alone, watching TV for an average of seven hours per day. Alone, struggling to care for themselves and their property. According to a 2019 Pew study, Americans over age 60 exist alone for more than half of their waking days, not including time for personal grooming. Alone, with their thoughts and memories. Alone, with their anxiety and grudges.  

​Is there a TV show that dramatizes this sad reality? Who would watch it?   

You might say that many seniors don’t want to live with their children. They want their independence, don’t want to be a burden – and I understand that. That's how my mother felt as she moved from house to condo to independent living facility to nursing home. But here's the flip side of that equation: who wants to live where they’re not wanted? Where they're considered incompetent, helpless and complaining. It's no wonder Gram and Gramps have been nuked from the nuclear family. Perhaps it's also no wonder that many seniors are not inclined to embrace grand initiatives, such as preventing further climate change, that will benefit the very people who have exiled them.

​On a simmering, subconscious level that's just too painful to access, many senior citizens are angry at their children and grandchildren. Screw 'em. Let 'em figure it out, invent some fancy App to fix the planet. Then the big shrug: what's the difference, I'm gonna die soon anyway. Such feelings are understandable, but also run counter to the powerful, universal urge that motivates most parents: to create a better future for their children. Moreover, abdicating responsibility violates the rules of courtesy, a virtue prized among older generations. You clean up your mess before bugging out.  

Screw 'em, help 'em. Screw 'em, help 'em. As the Israelis say, it's a real balagan. Oh, what churns beneath the surface of every long-lived human being! Now, I don't pretend to know how to resolve such dissonance, to bridge a generation gap swirling with mixed emotions, but I do know that discussing these dynamics is a good start. Sometimes it can be liberating to reach across the divide and acknowledge our motivations and behaviors. 

Yesterday, after visiting my mother at her nursing home, I stood in the lobby waiting for my ride. Grimly I mulled over the difficulties of getting her the hearing aid that she needs and will probably reject. Nearby I spied Rose, one of my mom's bingo pals, in her wheelchair. Across from her sat a young man in his twenties. He was dressed in black, his hair cut in a slant that seemed both futuristic and retro. His arm was stretched out and in his hand he held Rose's hand. He looked into her eyes, nodding as she talked. No glances at his smart phone, nothing else but her.

Okay, I thought, there's hope yet.   ​

Senior citizens have the highest rates of climate-change denial of any demographic group in the United States. But it isn't primarily due to stubbornness, a quality that old folks are unjustly tarred with in the meme-ridden judging chamber that is popular culture (which means youth culture). There are, I believe, many reasons for old folks' reluctance to accept the facts about climate change, ranging from political affiliation to personal struggles that are exclusive to their group. As my mother-in-law Hadassah Paul, dearly deceased, used to say: getting old ain't for sissies. It's a distinct and challenging life phase, and I write these words with a bean-baggy heating pad, inherited from Hadassah, layed across my right trapezoid because it aches today for no apparent reason. 

Let's compare the Millennial Generation (ages 23-38) to the Silent Generation (ages 74-91) -- young people and their grandparents, roughly. According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Millennials agree that there's solid evidence of global warming caused by human activity, compared to only 40 percent of Silents who concur. Among Millennials, one-third declare positions of climate-change denial: that the world is not warming, or that it's warming but due to natural phenomena unrelated to the burning of fossil fuels. A whopping 56 percent of Silents, however, display climate-change denial. Altogether, that's quite a spread between grampa and grandson, a generation gap if you will. 

​Ignorant old folks, you might scoff. But how is scoffing going to help?​   

Unfortunately, climate change has become a political issue -- not so much what to do about it, but whether it exists and is in fact caused by people. So let's dig down a little further. According to the Pew study, only 12 percent of Millenials who are Democrats (or lean Dem) are climate denialists, while 87 percent see solid evidence of human-caused climate change. At the same time, in the same country on the same planet, 78 percent of Silents who are Republican (or lean Repub) are climate denialists, while only 17 percent acknowledge human complicity with climate change. Those are close to inverse realities! That's a yawning, nearly unbridgeable generation gap -- one that even Evel Knievel might have had a hard time jumping across on his turbo-powered motorcycle. How do people with such divergent views even talk to each other? Is there room between them for mutual respect?    

A few more political stats and I'm done for now. Seniors citizens (over age 65), not surprisingly, are more conservative than young people. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 43 percent identify as conservative, with 30 percent as moderate and 22 percent as liberal. So, clearly, conservatives are the biggest group among the 54 million senior citizens in the USA (a number slated to rise to 83 million by 2050). Moreover, old folks have an outsized influence at the ballot box. In the last presidential election, 71 percent of seniors turned out to vote, an especially stupendous result when you consider how many are disabled, live alone or spend their days in nursing homes. In contrast, citizens aged 18-29 dropped their Xboxes to vote for Trump or Clinton at an underwhelming rate of 46 percent.  

Politics, however, is just one way to understand seniors' often misguided attitudes on climate change. As I mentioned above, several profound and deeply personal issues appear to be at play, and it is in that realm that we may find the opportunity for education and outreach. Stay tuned.   

It's different than filling up at a gas station, that's for sure. Here are a few personal stories about charging electric cars outside of our home's driveway charger, which is fueled by rooftop solar panels and provides a slow, level-one charge of about five miles per charging hour.

1) ChargePoint says its the largest network in the world, with over 100,000 places to charge your EV. They provide level-two charging at 220-240 volts, with a rate of about 25 miles per charging hour. ChargePoint is free to members, which is nice; in our town of Somerville, I now and then use the ChargePoint charger at a cramped parking lot in Porter Square, as well as one near the Community Path at Davis Square. Alas, one of the two Davis Square chargers has been broken for months now. My wife Elahna and I have contacted ChargePoint, as well as the town, but to no avail. At the same time, Somerville likes to call itself Sustainaville and frequently holds meetings about making the town carbon neutral by 2050. Great, Mayor Joe Curtatone, but how about getting those chargers you've boasted about working in the meantime.   

2) One day at the Davis Square charger, I was stymied from juicing up my EV by a non-electric car parked in the spot reserved for ChargePoint customers, Not only that, but the hulking SUV (boo!) was parked at an angle, dipping one of its back, rubber toes into the adjoining handicapped space. A double atrocity! I got out of my car, glowered, hands on hips, and by serendipity noticed a police car about fifty yards away. I walked toward it, waving. The policeman rolled down his window, and I proceeded to point out the glorious two-fer, a vehicle violating the rights of both the disabled and the green. He nodded, but didn't look very enthusiastic. So I waited. By and by, he sauntered over to examine the situation. He looked at me watching him -- I waved, smiled -- then back at the dastardly SUV. And ever so slowly the ticketing book came out. He looked at me again and I figured it was probably a good idea to move along. 

4) Finally, a quick shout-out to EVgo chargers. They're level-three, capable of filling your electric tank from empty to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes (with a 200-mile battery). Ironically, EVgo chargers tend to be found in sprawling shopping malls -- flat cathedrals built to service a world powered by the internal combustion engine -- so there's time to take a walk for coffee or ice cream while your EV refuels. In Nanuet, New York, Elahna and I found the shopping mall Friendly's. We sat together on swively red counter seats and woofed down a Jim Dandy. 

If you're over fifty you may remember old telephones -- not flip phones or Blackberries, and not the multicolored, slender touchtone models so easy to knock over, no, I mean those really old, black, squat ten-ton phones that rang like banshees and you'd go running to them. They beckoned you. No caller ID, no voice mail. Pick up or not. Rotary phones were industrial devices and we were their industrial operators: insert index finger in the numbered hole, spin the dialing mechanism clockwise until it stops, release, wait ever so patiently in a way few humans could do today for the mechanism to reset, one down and six numbers to go, then insert index finger in another hole...I liked those phones. I miss them. But don't tell my students. How lame, they'd say. What can we, children of the limitless technological now, possibly learn from you?​ 

I got to thinking about rotary phones after reading David Wallace-Wells' climate-change book, The Uninhabitable Earth, specifically after tripping over an insight in the middle of a very long sentence, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez-long sentence listing a multitude of reasons why most people haven't taken climate change seriously, and it goes like this: “...because we felt so ‘postindustrial’ that we couldn’t believe we were still drawing material breath from fossil fuel furnaces...” 

The other reasons in his uber-sentence are weightier, but that one stuck with me. The most postindustrial object we almost all possess in the developed world is a smart phone and we think we're so cool and sleek and clean, don't we, slouching around with brushed-steel rectangles in our clammy hands, the glass gleaming, the corners smoothed, our little devices so seamless, so futuristic, so Steve Jobsian in their arrogant attentiveness to our supposed needs and so very far beyond the world of coal barges tied to wharves and power plants polluting the dirt-poor sides of town and oil rigs far out at sea, squint and you still can't see them, and fracking platforms on former hay fields in flyover country and cattle by the billions burping methane in feedlots G-d knows where if G-d cared to know, and so on. 

Of course, that's not entirely true. Homeowners have furnaces in their basements, but they're in the basement not in the living room next to the slick miracle that is your flat-screen entertainment system. David Wallace-Wells, later in his bludgeoning book, quotes the singer/poet Kate Tempest: "Staring into the screen so we don't have to see the planet die." We're "atomized," she raps, "thinking that we're engaged when we're pacified." And now maybe you're staring at the screen of your phone-friend, thinking it's no fun considering such jagged things by the light of my Super Retina HD Multi-Touch display with 2436-by-1125-pixel resolution, and by the way who's Kate Tempest? I didn't know either and so off to iTunes I clicked and swept, so effortlessly, so seamlessly, and I played a few samples and downloaded a few songs straightaway. She's awesome, it turns out. The lyrics above are from her epic "Tunnel Vision." We're born with it, you know, tunnel vision between baby and parent. It's good for development, for awhile at least.        ​

Recently I finished The Uninhabitable Earth (2019), David Wallace-Wells' powerful best-seller about climate change. The book's a real slap in the face, which is exactly what the reader is promised in the first line: "It is worse, much worse, than you think." And then DWW tells you how much worse, from the vantage point of a journalist -- not an environmentalist -- who felt compelled to look deeply into the coming consequences of climate change and came away aghast, exclaiming holy shit, look at this, it's really bad.  

There's science here, but it's not a science book. It's a global warming wake-up call, a polemic on what's happening and why humankind is reacting so poorly. You can find many reviews and excerpts online; here I'd like to type a few words about the book's cover, specifically the title, subtitle and graphics. That's beyond the author's sole authority, of course, a construction emanating from the marketing department. In this case, the cover functions as both a lure for readers and a commentary on the difficulty of communicating the dangers of global warning in the decades ahead. 

Even according to worst-case scenarios, the planet will not actually become uninhabitable in the 21st century -- at least not due to climate change. Our little home on the edge of the galaxy may well become The Extremely  Unpleasant, Turbulent and Depopulated Earth, but that's not a very catchy title. So I guess they dropped some "shock and awe" on the cover, boom, everything dead. Such a title certainly captures eyeballs, as they say in the trade, but it's also an exaggeration. In fact, DWW strives not to exaggerate in the text. So I wonder: if you start with an exaggerated title, aren't you opening yourself up to the general charge of hyperbole from the very people -- the skeptical, the apathetic, the ignorant -- who you want to convince? 

Next, the subtitle: Life After Warming. Just awful. So milquetoast. (By the way, what exactly is milquetoast? Toast dipped in milk? Anyways, it sounds soggy and blah). While the book presents many scary scenarios for 2050 and beyond, it doesn't spend much energy considering the nature of existence "after warming." And, as DWW notes, there may be no "after" for a very long time, since the effects of climate change will continue to accrue unless we radically amend our behavior and global economy. The British edition of the book goes with A Story of the Future for its subtitle. That's better, understated and a bit cheeky. Keep calm and carry on.  

Finally, the rolled-up-dead bumblebee. Or is it a honeybee? Honeybees are under threat from mites and pesticides, not climate change (as far as we know). Bumblebees, however, are getting the bum's rush from climate change, along with many other species. So let's say it's a dead bumblebee. I've seen them on my front walk. I don't like the way they buzz about as I'm digging in the garden. Sure, this image may evoke a pang of guilt for a moment, but ultimately it's as easily dismissed as the ubiquitous polar bear on the ice floe. No, there shouldn't be a dead human baby on the cover, and spare me the Statue of Liberty up to her neck in water, but the croaked bee doesn't do it for me. 

So on the cover we've got an overstated title, milquetoast subtitle and understated image. Those quibbles aside, I recommend digging in. The Uninhabitable Earth is a fascinating book. 

Driving along the other day -- hands on the wheel at ten and two, as per the instructions I received in 1976 from the Harold L. Smith School of Driving -- I listened as some expert/pundit/poobah on the radio referred to "reversing" climate change. Hah, what a laugh! As a global society we can't stop increasing our yearly emissions of greenhouse gases. According to the World Resource Institute, 37.1 gigatonnes of CO2 from fossil fuel energy sources was emitted in 2018, up 2.7 percent from 2017 and 12 percent from 2010. Hey, let's work on leveling off emissions and heading down ten or twenty percent before spouting reversal pipe dreams. So, like I said, I was driving along, across the traffic-jammed Tobin Bridge from Boston to Chelsea, my electric vehicle vastly outnumbered by its fossil-fueling burning cousins -- EVs comprise less than two percent of the U.S. auto fleet, though sales are rising -- and there to the right was the new Encore casino visible through the emission towers of an electrical power facility burning natural gas. The garish, brown-and-gold casino can be seen for miles around; the greenhouse gases spewing from the gas plant are invisible.  

At the same time, my right hand clamped at two o'clock on the steering wheel felt stiff and weak. I shook it, stretched the fingers, and resumed responsible driving. In a few minutes I'd be with my 96-year-old mother in her room at the nursing home, and she sure as hell has it worse that me. Stuck in that wheelchair, legs useless, hands gnarled with arthritis. Her alertness fading as she drifts into an elderly twilight of confusion and boredom. How long, she asks me every time, am I going to be here? Next to that it's nothing that I have cubital tunnel syndrome from an entrapped ulnar nerve in the elbow. My right hand, my dominant hand, is now at 80 percent strength compared to the left one. The hand-doc at Mass General says I need surgery. No, he answers my next question, the procedure won't bring any strength back, but it should, probably, arrest the continued decline that will happen without surgery.     

Our bodies fall apart as we get older. We try to delay and deny, but, well, everyone knows what comes after the but...so now I'm exiting the Tobin Bridge, under endless construction it seems, and the casino and the power plant are behind me, monuments to American exuberance, and the silence of my car battery is a sweet, green song. My mom's room has a view of the bridge, so maybe she's watching for my car. About then, let's say, it occurs to me that my slowly dying right hand is kinda like climate change. Bear with me, here comes a strained, highly imperfect analogy.

​You've got a problem, see, and the fix for that problem won't make things better. No reversal is in the cards. In fact, the fix is a hassle and there could be unpleasant side effects. The only payoff is the knowledge, imparted by experts in fancy white coats, that you will be stopping matters, probably, from getting much worse. Well, for a lot people, it's hard to get psyched about that kind of choice. It's easier to say, Can't I just do those exercises with the squeeze ball instead of getting cut open? Can't we just drive less and use paper straws instead of performing surgery on the entire economy? 

​No, we can't. Get the surgery.