I’ve never let on to be all that smart. I was a poor performer in school and I never accumulated enough merit badges to go beyond the rank of First Class in the Boy Scouts.
I’m cool with that because I never put much stock in intelligence quotients. Unless you have some kind of disability, we all have basically the same equipment upstairs. It’s all culturally influenced anyway, and different people are smart at different things. When I took my Scholastic Assessment Test, I got a 760 on the verbal and a 490 on the math. That tells me I’m pretty good with words, but really lame with numbers.
What I am is tenacious. I flunked out of college after my freshman year, but I went back and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in history and journalism. I threatened to quit Carbondale’s Environmental Board for what I saw as a lack of action, but then-chair Hannah-Hunt Wander gave me an assignment. I performed my duty with newfound enthusiasm and today I’m the chair.
General Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t the tactical genius Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were, but he hung in there when things got rough. His Union troops would get clobbered, suffering twice as many casualties as the Confederates, but at the end of the battle Grant had organized the soldiers he had left and moved them forward toward Richmond. That’s kind of the way I’ve approached my life. I’m still hoping I’ll have as much success.
My cause is climate change. As a youngster, I got into my mother’s copies of “Fail Safe” and “On the Beach” and had mushroom clouds hanging over my head. Today, I see another less confrontational way humans can be the first species in earth’s history to cause its own extinction.
We’ve had periods of global warming before, like coming out of the last Ice Age, but that took thousands of years and think of all the large mammals that went extinct in those times. Large mammals don’t do well in heat. We’ve warmed two degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution. We’re large mammals, and if we don’t kick our addiction to fossil fuels, the Anthropocene Age could be over.
Trump 2.0 presents a clear and present danger to the climate movement. He and his cohorts, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris (Mr. Fracking) Wright are promoting fossil fuels to the max.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet is running for Governor and Senator John Hickenlooper is up for reelection. Before I vote for either one of them, they’re going to have to explain to me how they could’ve voted to confirm those two oil and gas lackeys.
Trump justifies everything by declaring a national emergency and that’s what he’s done with energy, despite the fact that the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and we’re the leading exporter of liquified natural gas.
Plans to furlough the coal-fired power plant in Craig have been cancelled. Emissions reductions and regulations have been repealed. Tax incentives for electric vehicles (EVs), rooftop solar and heat pumps have been removed. Tariffs prevent the importation of high quality Chinese EVs and solar panels.
Trump seems to have a particular case of the ass for offshore wind. He’s cancelled all projects including some that are only weeks away from producing much needed energy. Trump’s justification is a sudden concern for the environment. I doubt if any wind turbine is capable of the destruction caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon fire and oil spill.
These are powerful forces we climate crusaders are up against. Do we throw in the towel? Hell no! There’s too much at stake. At best, we’ll be leaving the planet in much worse condition than we found it for our descendants.
Locally, there’s reason for hope. The aforementioned Environmental Board has become quite active. Trustee Erica Sparhawk is a former worker for Clean Energy Economy for the Region, and just may be the next mayor of Carbondale. The Community Office for Resource Efficiency is active up valley. Another organization I volunteer for, 350 Roaring Fork, is busy educating the public on climate issues with a film series and promoting solar energy.
None of this is the silver bullet required to solve the climate crisis, but they’re all part of a thousand shotgun pellets heading in the right direction.
If we fail, it won’t be from lack of effort.