The Trifecta
climate fatigue anyone?
“Why Living Today Rocks” takes a vacation for a week. See you again next Tuesday, August 16th. I noted that my last post was TOO LONG! I will make a conscious effort to shorten these to eight minutes or less of reading time. Also in deference to starting your day right, I am shifting to a 5 AM release for the early birds. Now if you click all the links, that is your problem. I still hope you will all play along with the polls. I try to make them fun each time.
When you go to the racetrack, picking the trifecta is very difficult as it means choosing the win, place, and show horse in order. I have never been a great bettor but love to watch the horses run. The news seems to get wound around talking about one thing until we are blue in the face. If you are a news consumer, climate change seems to be the top choice of most bettors. Tonight, in about eight minutes we are going to talk about three things.
It is hard to avoid discussion in the news about climate change. Put simply, scientists believe from significant evidence that since the last Ice Age (it lasted about 100,000 years) ended about 11,000 years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has remained around 275 ppm UNTIL the last two centuries. The last 250+ years have seen it rise dramatically to now about 420 ppm. Experts believe at those levels, the climate will begin to fluctuate. Lots of CO2 has been sequestered in the earth as coal and oil for millennia. We mastered the Industrial Revolution by bringing it out of the ground and burning it. It is a simple and non-controversial explanation of what is going on.
Is this worth being alarmed about? I don’t know. I guess I care because I have three children navigating through this world and they will be in the prime of their lives around 2050. It seems some SO MANY PEOPLE are just sure that human behaviors are not causing any of this. They often might reference cows farting and volcanoes as reasons to discount the human role. If we conclude as a planet that we lack the will to action, analysts say we will approach 650 to 700 ppm in 2050 around my 90th birthday.
Today my title is “The Trifecta”. I think we are going to concentrate as a planet on reversing the worst impacts of the burning in the coming decades as we come to terms with what happens when we moved all that CO2 from under the ground to up in the atmosphere. “The Trifecta” is about what else have we been doing that might also be disruptive to life on this planet. I guess that while climate change is going to require a lot of effort to mitigate, it is not the only problem that is man-made and peeking over the horizon. [Editors note:: It sucks when humanity gets stuck with all this bad stuff and it is referred to as man-made]
Steady readers know I believe almost all of human existence was a slow grind until the last 500 years or so. Element number two of the trifecta is the amazing amount of nitrous oxides we’ve also parked up in the atmosphere. Where did they come from? Fritz Haber, about one hundred years ago made the breakthroughs that led to nitrogen-based fertilizers and later pesticides. Because of Fritz, we’ve been able to grow the flock on this planet from about 1.5 billion to nearly 8 billion in the intervening period at the price of the underlying quality and diversity of the soil. We require a lot of food and in the first world, we don’t eat that much of the grain directly but rather feed it to animals to raise meat. We don’t have a sustainable way for all 8 billion of us to eat cheeseburgers anytime soon.
For the first two million years, we just caught and killed animals and ate them. They grew slowly and naturally. We ate lots of animals to extinction and have probably tapped out 65% of large ocean fish in the last 100 years. There is no reason to believe that harvesting free protein out of the ocean is going too slow. My recurring premise is humans are pretty selfish. Asking everyone on the honor system to not eat all the scallops is not going to work. It was in the last 100 years when we flipped the script and figured out how to go from chick to frozen skinless chicken breasts in 36 days that the pressure on the environment got turned up. Despite all of the awareness, only about 1% of beef is grass-fed finished. The other 99% go to the all-you-can-eat corn at the smorgasbord. The only question is what level of change will be required to keep the show running.
Element number three of the trifecta has only been around for 75 years and has to do with plastics. The discovery of oil, how to refine it, and make a multitude of products from it is a VERY RECENT affair. While we burn a lot of it and pour a lot of it as asphalt, it is the production of plastics in the last 75 years that completes the trifecta. A voracious and growing appetite to refine and burn as fuels brought with it an inconceivable byproduct of “unusable” waste. So you might think I am going to riff about pollution and landfills and the sort. While none of that is thrilling, I am trying to focus on the true and existential threat to life as we know it in my trifecta.
We have only been making plastic for about 75 years. As Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” came to understand from the wise Mr. McGuire, “the future is plastics”! So we are talking about a pretty dangerous experiment that only commenced at 99.996% of the human clock on this planet. The never-ending search for new uses for plastic reached our showers about 15 years ago with the “wonder” of microplastics. People used to use bars of soap but the new and improved way to be clean was body wash. Did you know that body wash contains ultra-small balls of plastic that provide the grit to clean our bodies? Such wonder plastics are too small to be managed in municipal water systems. They are everywhere. What do I mean by everywhere? Recent health studies have identified that humans (on every continent) now have an increasing concentration of plastic in their bloodstream!
What is the consequence of putting substances INSIDE our bodies that our immune system cannot recognize and remove? The horrific impact of silicone breast implants provides a preview of the impact of this sort of thing. While the science is far from final, there is mounting evidence that the rising concentration of plastics in our environment has accompanied the alarming increases in auto-immune disorders, especially in first-world countries. All of the early studies point to an alarming tendency of this plastic to cause lung infections and inflammation in general. We have finally figured out smoking isn’t the best thing for us and now it may be plastic that will choke our lungs. Yikes.
I think that because the press seems most focused on fossil fuel burning, clowns like Q-Anon have not formulated their conspiracies yet about the other two legs of the trifecta. I do not doubt that equally inane theories will emerge as the scale of these challenges begins to be discussed by folks who might understand it. When I meet people with dug-in conspiracies about climate change, I find if I mention the others and say what do you think, they often say I haven’t thought about it. For me, that is code for I don’t currently see Facebook & Instagram Ads explaining that in more detail on my current newsfeed. That just means an influencer (a more famous person with no intrinsic knowledge) is not repeating it just yet! My narrow interest is to take them off the scent of their current obsession, at least until I can escape their forcefield.
Getting back to the plastic in our bodies, a while back, a fellow Substacker wrote about Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTP). Hers is an entertaining tale every week. If you want to laugh instead of cry about WWTPs, read her Newsletter about it here! Our current plants cannot do anything about these microplastics as our screens and filters are not fine enough to capture them. That means they just might be building up inside us as we speak.
How big of a problem is this? While the number grows every year, it is estimated that Americans produce about 225 pounds of just plastic waste per year. The way my mind works is challenging. When we die, more and more of us choose cremation. Imagine, in my case if I make it to 90, next to my 185-pound body, we added a pile of 20,000 pounds of plastic waste. That doesn’t sound like a great legacy :(
The Poll & Music
So there you have my challenging trifecta that we all face. Here’s a tune to lighten the mood. When I was looking for the right song, I came upon this on YouTube. Worth a listen. What can one person do? Start using bars of soap instead of body wash. Ask your municipality if microplastics are a problem in the water treatment system. I bet you may be surprised enough to change.
What’s Next
My next post is titled “Deep Thinkers Part 1”. I’m taking this 8-minute read goal seriously so I split this one. I recently saw that Saudi Arabia is talking about a 100+ mile-long horizontal skyscraper. If a restaurant offers a double burger, someone will offer a triple. We seem obsessed with going big or going home. I did a post about the first Honda Civics a while ago. They were just right and most people drive alone. Now Americans, who mostly drive alone, seem to yearn to drive in dump trucks with leather seats. If the answer to every question is bigger, deeper, or heavier, maybe you are asking the wrong questions! That is what my next post will delve into.
Our problem is we have so many environmental issues that need to be dealt with quickly, which is difficult when 50% of US citizens have their heads in the sand and are only interested in accumulating wealth.
Looking forward to the 100-mile skyscraper. Nothings more fun then a good architecture stunt.