Infidelity to Reality Does Not Change Reality
"Everything must cost us, because everything costs us."
(No. 81, an ±07 minute read)
We in the United States are well-familiar, historically, with the cost and consequences of pollution. New York’s Love Canal in 1978 gave us the “Superfund” site paradigm; Los Angeles — Smogtown — in the 1970s and 1980s allowed for air quality regulation unique in the nation; 1989’s Exxon Valdez oil spill in the Alaskan waters of the Prince William Sound led to double-hulled tankers, though it took until 2015; Southern Pacific’s derailment pesticide spill into the Sacramento River killed every single living thing downstream for 41 miles in 1991 and gave rise to what, really, I am not sure; Massey Energy’s 2000 coal slurry spill in Martin County, Kentucky showed us the extent the federal government would side with industry in the face of adverse whistleblower evidence; the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Gulf of México oil spill off the Louisiana Coast was the larges oil spill in U.S. history and led to more stringent offshore drilling regulations.
And these are just the big ones, the stand-outs. There are near countless slow-motion pollution events lurking just over our collective viewing horizons — Cancer Alley, the petroleum and chemical industries’ polluting of the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and Louisiana’s River Parishes on the Mississippi; mercury thoroughly mixed through our oceans and concentrating in the fish we eat thanks to industrial and fuels pollution; the health outcome realities that residents near the Port of Los Angeles deal with thanks to extraordinary diesel exhaust concentrations; for that matter the high levels of air, water, and environmental pollution that residents all over the country live with day-by-day thanks to proximate industrial land use; be it by petroleum, chemical, agricultural, or manufacturing industries. Industry has shown us repeatedly that safety and pollution corners will be cut when profit is at stake, while we understand that just about every aspect of what we take for granted as our modern conveniences yields environmental toxins impacts. Mod cons kill.
We accept this as consumers while public health professionals track the human outcomes of living cheek-by-jowl with smog, chemical exposures, even the noise impacts our contemporary world compels (typically of poor people of color). Ecologists, biologists, and environmental activists (among many) report to us the effects of our industrial and commercial impacts on the plants, animals, and other organisms we share our nation’s land, waters, and air with. Today, overarching the many ways we pollute our world, hovers the global warming caused by our burning fossil fuels and loosing greenhouse gas pollutants into the earth’s atmosphere. Global warming has a monetary and social cost and that cost of carbon was, until last week, something that federal regulation reasonably, but arguably not commensurately, required reckoning with.
The “social cost of carbon” had most recently, as far as federal regulatory concerns went, been calculated at $190/ton. That is, society paid a cost in impacts to health outcomes, and other consequences of a carbon fuel-heated atmosphere, of $190 for every ton of waste carbon sent aloft. As of last Monday that burden now is said to cost $0.00 — nothing — per a Trump administration memo written by the acting administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Jeffrey B. Clark. For necessary context Clark went on record as an election-denier working to overturn Biden’s victory, believes there are so-called “uncertainties” as to whether climate change has an anthropogenic cause. He wrote as much in his memo.1
These sorts of regulatory changes plainly deny the widespread reality that carbon pollution costs the nation. Its costs range as far as Alaska, Hawai‘i and the West Coast, all the way to the Eastern Seaboard, through so-called “flyover states” and the South in between — in short, everywhere. I’ve written here about last year’s Atlantic hurricane season, every single storm, being made substantially more intense thanks to the influence of a heating climate. I’ve written elsewhere about climate change-influenced fires, the insurance industry’s bailing on markets affected by increasingly frequent — and costly — floods and fires. The verdict has long been in; global warming is costing us. What more buttoned-down of an industry than the insurance industry needs to tell us this, and in the market?
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Decisions like Clark’s are a stunning, but not surprising, example of today’s federal rapaciousness and its intersection with nihilism. I hate coming back to what is apparently becoming my go-to take on capitalism under a new, dangerous, climate regime but here we are again; watching the scaffolding buttressed so that wealthy corporations in extractive or polluting industries (or both) might profit all the way up to a climatic last call. A last call that will tip our historical understanding of our human occupation of the earth into chaos.
And this befouling, cynical profit-making while final drinks are being served guarantees the problems of greenhouse gas pollution will be still more calamitous, hastening worse reckonings with sea level rise, drought, persistent wildfire, heat-driven habitability issues in our cities, and increased numbers of deadly storms; be they hurricanes, tornado-spawning thunderstorms, or flooding atmospheric rivers and Nor’easters.
Whether or not the reality-dodging paradigms the administration implements — like its abandonment of regulating carbon pollution’s cost — are lasting will be the big question ahead, with much hinging on our answer. In the interim, the Trump/Musk administration’s regulatory/agency pogroms will be dangerous to us, as a society and individually. It will cost us deaths, property, human health, ecosystems destruction, economic stability, and more. Meanwhile, our tech billionaire overlords are planning their escapes, either to bunkers or Mars; technologists are concocting ever-more fantastical methods of sequestering carbon to maintain business-as-usual living beyond the means of our earth’s finite resources, and national governments worldwide are failing to capably reckon with the reality of a waste carbon-driven ecological-holocaust bearing down on us — one which scientists have been warning us of for years.
I have repeatedly banged these drums in print and pictures. Obviously I am only a small voice; one member of many in a chorus infinitely smarter and better-pitched, but still comprised of small voices. And so we are all but small voices. In the aggregate though, we are enormous. And we are not, hopefully, all nihilists looking ahead to our era’s increasing climatic and environmental reckonings with the glee of a Mister Burns. As friends write their DOGE-required lists of five things they have done, lose federal grants, fire people doing good and important work to society’s benefit, face the interruption of their own vital work in response to the acts of, and at the behest of the nihilists in power today, I repeat to myself the statistic that a mere 21% of American voters cast for Trump.
Not even a quarter of us voted for the cynics who seem to believe fervidly in their ability to rule above the law and live lives above the ecological fray, eventually hiding away in their bunkers, on Mars, or cloistered in gated communities and insulated by their wealth. But they too live on earth, even as they appear to be abandoning it — with the higher profile among them publicly revealing their plans to dodge the consequences of this abandonment, be their preparations spiritual or survivalist.
Our earth is a miracle, likely to be unique in the universe, and we know carbon must cost us on it, because it is already costing us.2 This is inarguable. Just as is the fact that our earth is not a place we can walk away from, neither into bunkers, nor into space, no matter how many memos Clark and this administration write denying the plain reality in front of our eyes.
By all means understand our planetary miracle however you choose to; as the divine work of a creator, as an evolutionary wonder, or as the conceit of a cosmic video game designer, but understand it as that which gives us life, and our only perspective on the universe. And, as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write in a must-read essay, please understand our earth as that thing we might rally around to fight back against the nihilistic autocracy that we now, absolutely, live under with “Donald Chump” shamelessly, and often embarrassingly, at the helm.3 4 Klein and Taylor call out “the forces we are up against hav[ing] made peace with mass death.” The pair identify today’s cynical right-wing cohort of the powerful and wealthy as “treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”
‘Our earth is our life, all who would abandon it are traitorous.’ It is a simple axiom with its corollary. Maybe, as Klein and Taylor write, this is the idea that might unite the disparate Americans impacted by today’s autocratic, patrimonialist leadership and who are among the 79% who did not vote for such a future — and likely want no part of it. It is the best rallying viewpoint I have heard so far in these last harrowing hundred-odd days.
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Postscript:
In other news; last week we lost our masthead cat Manapua.5 She must be at least a little familiar to email subscribers by now, the three “watercolor” sketches I made of her perfect (purrfect?) cat-head having landed in your inboxes as many as 80 times since this newsletter began. On Saturday I scheduled Manapua’s last visit to the vet. I am still wrestling with the power we have to schedule a beloved animal’s death. Though cancer was Manapua’s undoing and its ravages are often painful, her last days were mostly easy-going ones filled with Churu and homemade miso salmon skin as the cancer she bore filled her lungs.
Manapua came to us as an older, unwanted rescue cat having spent over a year seeking adoption, or more accurately, having adoptees sought for her. She was a good cat — among the best — but all pet owners believe that about their non-human housemates. Like all good animals in our lives she chose us, materializing from hiding to stand at my feet and willing to lay in my lap amidst the insanity of a cat cafe stocked by local animal shelters with kittens and rambunctious teen cats. Arriving in our lives during her waning single-digit years Manapua never lost her feral suspicion of other people; any who was not one of her regular human encounters she hid from, or occasionally hissed at.
She met the kitten Pork Hash’s arrival with thorough disdain even as Pork Hash merely desired a feline pal and received in turn mostly scabs. Over and over again. Ultimately the two slept afternoons adjacent to one another through the period of Manapua’s last days. I was never sure if it was an end-of-life lack of resolve or slight balm to be near another cat. In any case, Manapua is now gone. Losing a pet, though experienced repeatedly in my life since I was just out of single digits myself, never gets easier.
Maybe it only gets harder as the present loss drags other of life’s griefs back to be reckoned with — never satisfactorily. Grief of loss is never finally and wholly resolved.
I believe, in part, that my love and wonder for the animals of our larger world derives from my experiences of living with cats and dogs, dating to my first unsanctioned adoptions of feral kittens as a child In Moi‘ili‘ili. No person, I should think, can look a beloved pet in the eye and not in turn feel for all the animals of the world who, understand it our not, face futures largely — if not entirely — dependent on how human beings conduct themselves on earth. This is a burden we have assigned ourselves, by our profligacy with and estrangement from so-called “nature.” It would be better if we just called it “life.”
Goodbye Manapua, you were and are deeply loved. And you were a very good cat.
From the memo: “Numerous uncertainties afflicting attempts to monetize impacts of greenhouse gas emissions include, but are not limited, to the following:
a. Whether and to what degree any supposed changes in the climate are actually occurring as a consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions”
Jeez, have I covered this, and the procrastination and techno-optimism that serves to entrench our denial of the reality of carbon’s cost. I suppose that is why Clark’s directive is so enraging.
A test for autocracy: Do citizens have cause to fear expressing opinions counter to a president’s favored narrative? Yes. We have seen the consequences as authoritarian theater intending to make an example of stepping out of line, of expressing disfavored ideas.
From a caption in last year’s round-up of my pictures of the year: “…the long-time romantic partner of a Mob capo speaking all that needs saying. From one of the best photo books published this year, by Barbara G. Mensch, The Falling-Off Place, The Transformation of Lower Manhattan, the anonymous woman responds to a question about accountability, ‘Back then he was considered 'Donald Chump' [by wiseguys]...someone easily taken advantage of, someone who is a lightweight and perceived to be a weak negotiator.’”
Her name is explained, sort of, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manapua. As kids we used to joke the local manapua man’s wares were made from cats. We were sick kids, I know. Maybe naming a kitten “Pork Hash” means I’m still a sick kid?