With six weeks to trial, the depositions still under way, I head to Colorado to meet Nick Venner, the seventeen-year-old asthmatic who is litigating, among other things, the relentless wildfires that make it hard for him to go outside.
I’m like a lot of people when I travel (a lot of green-leaning people, anyway)—overwhelmed by how much garbage I’m responsible for, how many plastic containers, how many straws. The travel involved in reporting this trial hits that home. I haven’t left the Denver airport before agonizing over the bottled water I bought there—no water fountain in sight and no refillable bottles on offer, lest we destroy the market for single-use plastic at Denver International. Breakfast comes in disposable cardboard with a plastic fork. And by lunch there is a yogurt container I don’t know how to recycle and a plastic wrapper from string cheese.
My rental car—a midsize SUV—also layers on the guilt, guzzling gasoline while I drive to Nick’s hometown and to some of the wilderness Nick aims to defend. By day two, even the egg whites at Starbucks come in a cardboard container. Another day, another plastic fork. I think: I’m doing this work for a reason, but I’m doing it wrong.
So it’s a relief when I finally meet Nick, because he assuages my consumer guilt in a few words: “I’m kind of of the belief that one person shouldn’t have to worry about this. This is not a problem individuals can solve. It’s not caused by ordering straws in restaurants.” It’s our systems and the related industrial processes that are to blame for climate change, he says. This is what the Juliana plaintiffs want to address, and why they’re suing the government instead of suing the rest of us. They’re not out to change people’s personal habits. They’re not telling us all to live differently. They’re making a case for a better society. One in which the health and survival of our civilization is the thing we prioritize first, not a political second to taxes and school bonds, or an obstacle to religious and political beliefs that align themselves with denial. This means living in systems that foster a stable, safe environment, and not torturing oneself about daily habits.
I like hearing this from a teenager. Like he’s letting me off the hook. Which he hates, by the way. Most of the plaintiffs hate this idea: that it’s all up to them. As if the rest of us can just sit on our hands.
“Do you know what an axiom is?” Nick asks me. He is a lover of math and science, addicted to chaos theory, and very quickly it is clear how much he can talk about numbers until I do not know what he is talking about.
We’re on the backyard patio of his home, a contemporary ranch with a shade roof over a concrete slab. The chairs rock, and when Nick’s emphatic, he bounces in them. So does his voice—it has a higher pitch when he is thinking out loud or surprised by a question, which gives the impression of someone who is always upbeat, always ready for what’s next. I find it endearing, but it bothers him. Nick’s vocal shifts are symptomatic of his Asperger’s syndrome, and they make it hard for him to give more public talks about climate change, something he wants to do.
This sitting—it wasn’t our original plan. Our original plan was hiking. But when I knocked on the door of Nick’s home in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, he apologized for the weather right away. Which was his way of saying that he didn’t want to go hiking anymore. It is roughly 90 degrees outside, and Nick hates the heat. Hates that it persists even though it’s September. There used to be more snowstorms than heat waves in Colorado this time of year. Now the heat is unceasing. Last year too. Nick likes to ride his bike—it’s 3 miles to school—but says the weather keeps him from doing it. He has exercise-induced asthma made worse by the higher temperatures and the smoke, which accounts for his being, in his own words, “Kind of unfit, typically.”
It’s been like this in 2018: fire season is still vicious in parts of the West, the air thick and tinged with the smell of burned timber. Even in the cities, there are days when the waning moon hangs in the sky like a pink fingernail, dusk seems to fall at 3 p.m., kids are kept indoors, and normal chitchat takes the form of complaining about the air. Colorado is getting the nastiest of it, having the worst fire season in the state’s history, with more than fifteen hundred fires this summer. This is life in the West now. Longer, hotter, drier seasons; more flame. And for Nick, that spells a lot of hiding indoors, his mother’s air purifiers whirring on the second floor.
He says the smoke here has been awful. Dense and heavy. And that even though he thinks the benefits of going outdoors vastly outweigh the benefits of avoiding air pollution, he has been unable to cope with it because of his asthma. He’s had trouble breathing, and even when he braves it, he can’t move as fast as he otherwise does, and as a result can’t calculate how long things take and whether they are safe for him to do.
“It’s been really bad,” he says. His mother, who is similarly afflicted, has hardly left the house. Now, Nick just wants it to be autumn so he can ride his bike to school, hike whenever he wants, sit outdoors and not feel like the sun is slowly roasting him.
I know what he means. A day earlier, when I first arrived, I took a short tour of Lakewood—the seven-lane roads and the strip malls sprouting alongside housing developments—and stopped at Sloan’s Lake, a park near Nick’s home. The grassy meadow looked dry enough to ignite with a hot breath. There was a light breeze, but it was arid and warm and offered no real relief from a sun that scorched the skin in minutes. Though the lake still held water, trees were standing dead in the meadow in clumps of dry, twisted bark, giving the strange impression they could simply combust. Looking around then, from the lake to the nearby Rockies and the timber-covered foothills, it was easy to see how the most innocuous flint could set the landscape ablaze. Even the soil was parched and dusty. I could imagine it whipping an untamed flame onto wind.
Until he can vote, Nick says it helps to subscribe to chaos theory. The idea that a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a typhoon somewhere else in the world, maybe years later. After all, there are other ways to make a difference in climate change. The idea that one’s actions can have ripple effects and that you can’t really know what it is you will achieve, only how to act with intent, there is power in that. Whether suing the federal government, talking to that one person who becomes a politician later, becoming the scientist who writes the reports that policy makers then read, or talking to a reporter who doesn’t know what an axiom is.
I ask him to explain. Nick says axioms are the bedrock of mathematical systems. “If you’re coming up with, like, a mathematical construct of things, what it essentially means is that axioms are the core, the fundamental beliefs and values.”
This is the problem with the way in which a lot of people relate to climate change, he says: they subscribe to a fundamental belief that is not as sturdy as it seems. “Humans developed scientifically in a time where the climate was unusually stable,” Nick says. “We’ve built a human civilization on the fact that, well, grain will grow on the same field year after year, that the sea will not rise and flood the homes, that the trees will still continue to grow, that the weather patterns will continue to remain the same, and temperature will remain the same. It’s an underlying axiom of sorts. . . . That’s why we build farms and we cultivate the land. We assume that each year is the same as the last. Each year will bring the same amount of rain at the same time and it all will be predictable. That isn’t really the case.”
His cockatiel, Manu, is perched on the table in a modified cat carrier, Nick having tried a smaller carrier moments ago. The bird is gray with a yellow head and bright orange circles on its cheeks. Nick thinks the color combination is called pearl, if you want to know. And throughout our talk, as he did just moments ago, Nick defers to the bird. He can tell by its tweets and warbles, by the angle of its crest, by the way it swings its body side to side, whether it is agitated. He takes several breaks to acknowledge this avian commentary: loud chirps over the sound of a lawnmower, a stiffened crest—possible predator? Nick turns in his seat.
While a lot of people think it’s hubris to assume a human can change the planet, he says, humans, together, have plenty of ability to change ecosystems, and they have. “It isn’t really one single person’s actions that make that happen. It’s that by living in a system, you’re essentially contributing to the entire thing.” That a person’s actions become inconsequential if you break them down small enough “is actually a reason why I’ve always tried to avoid saying the key to fixing climate change is to not get straws at restaurants and recycle more.” His family has done all it can. They have EVs, solar panels. But they’re still contributing, too, Nick says. “By living in a system, you are perpetuating that system. We still get electricity. We still get water.” Thus his line that climate change is not caused by people ordering straws in restaurants. “It’s caused by systems. It’s caused by the industrial processes which make those straws. It’s caused by the power generation that makes these lights.” This is what he most wants people to recognize: that wholesale success means shifting focus from personal habits to the more destructive collective habits we all share.
He rocks back in the chair. He is wearing one of the button-down patterned shirts he favors, a nod toward Hawaiian but with a more professorial flare. “I’m a kid,” he says. “All I can really do is influence my parents’ financial decisions and educate other people so they will take on action for me.”
This is how Nick has gotten so good at haranguing his parents, has almost always been good at it. His mother, Marie, tells me Nick has been obsessed with environmental causes for so long that she can remember noticing it when he was still small enough to ride in a booster seat. One day she was listening to a lecture in the car by Richard Rohr, the ecumenical teacher and environmentalist, when Nick piped up, to her astonishment, and declared from the backseat: “This really makes sense!”
Ever since, he has been so unrelenting in his pursuit of activist aims, he once lectured his parents all the way from Aurora to Lakewood over their choice to buy a gas-powered vehicle instead of an electric one. He was so offended by this impending purchase, his critique so unceasing, that his parents ultimately scuttled the plan and sold their second car to afford an EV. Now they have two EVs. And the solar panels. And in between Nick translated Laudato si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the care of the environment, from Italian with Google’s help because he couldn’t wait for the English translation. He also made climate presentations at a school full of doubters, often at the expense of social ease. And by the time I meet him on the back porch, he has forfeited a lot of social acceptance, plus his former church congregation of climate skeptics and vast territory in his brain for climate justice. It is not so much that they raised him this way, Marie says. It is more like they couldn’t stop him.
Nick says he came to understand the more specific threats associated with climate change when he first began learning about it in 2008, when pine beetle damage was at an apex in Colorado forests. He remembers the month because Obama had just been elected. At the time, Nick belonged to an environmental club, but when he tried to introduce climate-related issues, “they wouldn’t have it,” he says. The era was such that “people could deny climate change and you kind of had to respect that as a difference of opinion.”
But when he first took stock of pine beetle destruction, “what was kind of immediately striking was I’d seen these impacts before. Like, on this one route, I’ve seen these dead trees before and I just never thought what the cause would be.”
Nick’s pleadings in the Juliana case include the charge that pine beetle damage, along with wildfires, has forced him to stop visiting some of his favorite places. Now so many years later, the pine beetle problem is worse. Just how much worse is best witnessed by traipsing outside, something I decide to do without an asthmatic kid in tow at the peak of the fire season.
———
Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the places hard hit by pine beetles. On the day I visit, the sign at the entrance gauges fire danger at very, very high. It is September 18 and the aspens are finding their fall yellow, a few leaves drifting on the breeze. This scene is every bit as picturesque as any brochure would portend, save for the drought-stricken grass and this quest to take in the views of beetle wreckage, which are supposedly optimal from the main road.
Earlier in the day, when I asked for tips on where to look, a ranger kindly offered intel. From behind a counter, she proffered a visitors’ map, then pointed to a spot called Timber Creek. It got its name from the massive lodgepole pines that used to stand there, campsites nestled underneath. But when pine beetles claimed the trees, and the dead husks loomed over campers like a catastrophe waiting for a breeze, the park service cut them down. A massacre of another kind. Ever since, the rangers have had a new name for the campground, an inside joke: Timberless Creek.
The route to this capstone ought to say it all. The ranger marked the map for the particularly ugly views and also suggested a trail along the Colorado River to get up close with the beetles. Now, I need only drive the one-way route through the park to understand the parasitic bugs that have overtaken some of its parts.
Finding this carnage is actually kind of hard. Not because it’s difficult to spot the barren vistas of needleless trees, their spindly branches outstretched like the sad wings of featherless birds. Those are right there. But anyone who has spent time in the West has unwittingly seen so much pine beetle damage that, as Nick says, it fades with familiarity like the details of a wallpaper print. In the Coast Range, in the Cascades, the Siskiyous—it’s easy to mistake these naked trees as singed by wildfire, damaged by floodwaters or by drought. In other words, for the things we already understand. But to look again, knowing. The devastation is stupefying.
The first signs are just a few solitary dead trees—lodgepole pines—as the road starts to climb toward Sundance Mountain. Then there’s an isolated clump interspersed with swaths of otherwise green trees, gray smudges on a forested hill. Deeper into the park, as the pines rise up all around, I see a bare tip here, another there, this touch of gray against green. The damage seems minor. But then around a bend, suddenly the gray overtakes the vista. The whole of the hillside descends into the valley like a moonscape—rock and dusty soil—with a cover of zombie trees. The trees are still standing, still bearing their needleless branches, but they’re dead, done for, over.
Look closer, and the bark is dark, much darker than the bark of live pines, save for being covered in the bits of goo that from a distance look like natural sap. It’s not, not entirely. Instead it’s tree pitch, the stuff trees push out through their own bark as a defense against the beetles that bore through. The temperature is 74 degrees Fahrenheit outside, hotter at the lower elevations. But even at 12,090 feet, far above the Continental Divide, where the wind is relentless and the trees don’t grow, the temperature is still 66, about 20 degrees higher than past averages. The relative warmth, of course, is part of the problem.
It used to be cold here. Very cold. And year after year as winter set its teeth into this wilderness, the penetrating cold and the snow would kill the beetles, keep their populations down and their infestations seasonal. But it takes temperatures colder than –35 degrees Fahrenheit to kill a bark beetle. And temperatures that cold haven’t befallen these wilds since the mid-1980s. As a result, bark beetles live and live and live. They infect a tree and breed, and those beetles live, too, and generation after generation, they infect tree after tree. Between 1996 and 2013, mountain pine beetles infested 3.4 million acres of ponderosa and lodgepole forests in the state of Colorado alone, or about 81 percent of the state’s such forests. Lately, a fast-growing spruce beetle problem has killed—in just a few years—about half the number of trees that pine beetles killed over decades.
The frequent droughts don’t help. Dry, weakened trees can’t fight the beetle invasions off. And when fire strikes, those infected trees burn hotter. Of course, bark beetles are native to these forests, and they do have a job: cleaning up lightning-struck and diseased trees, helping them fall and regenerate soil for the next iteration of growth. But when the beetles are so rampant that they start to attack healthy trees, and when even the fire and the insect-loving birds that co-evolved with them can’t keep them down, that’s trouble. Forests all across the West are at risk for this fate now, and more than 100 million acres from British Columbia to New Mexico are already infected.
Dan West, the state of Colorado’s bug man, says this is all bad news only through an anthropocentric lens. In other words, things are going great by the standards of the bark beetle. They like big round trees, and there are plenty of them. And if you consider that it is baked into their species to leave something for their grandchildren, it is hard to argue that we humans have the higher evolutionary ground. The beetles leave trees untouched if under 4 or 5 inches in diameter—they’re after the sugary phloem beneath, and the little trees have fewer carbs. Thus, the forests will regenerate and regenerate no matter how many times the beetles infest them. Good news: new forest. Bad news: these will not be the forests we humans hoped to preserve when we set these lands aside as a national park.
For Nick, whether these forests regenerate into something of human benefit later is only one part of the story. In between the brutal conditions of today and that future, nature does not simply cope. There is wildfire, species extinction, tons of ecological damage. “If it’s possible to preserve the forests that we have now,” Nick wonders, “why would we put ourselves through—for lack of a better word—the pain of going through that?”
I feel him. Even though I am like most people in that the parts of this particular wild that I can see come with pit toilets, this mess is gutting. These western forests are the ones that swallow you in their quiet, in canyons carved by glaciers, on mountains where time is longer than a human life, trees towering above the ferns and moss that thrive at the feet of giants. To think that they are all at risk now for a bunch of bugs gone rogue in the heat—the thought of it is almost too big for my head.
That is the problem with all of this, isn’t it? Climate change? It is too big for our heads.
On the Colorado River Trail, one doesn’t have to travel far to see this devastation up close. Right away there is a little stand of trees with bulbous, gooey drips covering the trunk of a pine. There are teeny holes throughout this goo; exit holes for beetles that have done their damage and moved on, leaving bits of sawdust on the forest floor, bits of tree that have been burrowed out from the inside. These holes look like portals to a never-ending bug kingdom. And they are. The farther I walk, the more there is to see.
Lodgepoles again, and ponderosas too. Many of the trees infected. But because the branches seem to die from the ground up, and the lodgepoles are often bare trunked near the ground anyway, the situation, dire as it is from the road, looks worse up close. Once inside it, walking among the wreckage, I see that far more trees are covered in pine beetle damage than is obvious at first, some fighting so hard to stay alive they look for all the world like they’ve been dipped in vats of glue. Pitch-covered bark is everywhere. Yellow glue, orange glue. Sometimes it covers a tree, and sometimes it just drips down a side like wax down a candlestick. Some of the trees are valiantly hanging on, with just a few last sprigs of needled branches at the crown. Others are only beginning to die, the low branches turning from needle-covered limbs into dry, curling brambles. The dead ponderosas look from afar like oversized kitchen brushes, something to clean a jar with at a sink. In the vista are ponderosas with red needles—signs of a first-year infection. By next year, those needles will fall too. The husks of their trunks have faded to red, the lodgepoles taking on a gray, burned-looking cast.
Almost everywhere else, these trees seem to be shrinking, falling, making way for other trees that can live. On the route out of the park, a hillside of denuded trees climbs up toward a ridge. At the top, stark across a backdrop of green, a row of dead trees stands at stiff attention like somber clothespins. At their feet are more where others fell. Some have tipped into their neighbors and not yet struck ground. They are not very old, not very large, just lying in a mass of useless timber.
The exit is by way of Timber Creek, Timberless Creek, where the bewildered campers shuffle among tents in the heat of the sun. The tops of their vehicles make for the high points in this landscape, replacement pines only just dotting the space in between like chubby Christmas decor. The roofs of the cars and trucks and RVs run off into the fading light, reflecting it back to the surrounding hills. They are stuck with each other, these campers, with little greenery or bark between, just a few baby trees and picnic tables scattered in the low scrub. They look hot, unsheltered, confused.
———
To see humanity struggle with things like straws instead of this scale of devastation—or the root causes of the devastation, like warming temperatures, lack of snowfall, and drought—is, for Nick, to see humans suffer from a kind of blindness.
We are still on the back porch, listening to the whirs of his neighbor’s lawnmower from our safe zone inside the wooden fencing of the yard. A chicken coop stands empty in a corner, and Manu is still perched on the table in his cat carrier.
This blindness, it’s a rerun of a type of human struggle that, in Nick’s experience, has its worst example in his religion. He knows that fellow Catholics have ignored the sex abuse scandal in the church or dismissed it as unimportant, that they need this denial because it helps them get on with life and still go to church. He understands why it’s just easier this way sometimes, even when people have all the proof in the world. “It’s a similar reaction to climate change. ‘I know it’s happening. I know it’s a big deal, I should probably be getting more upset but it’s easier to not do that,’” he says. This is the piece he wants to change. Not anyone else’s habits. He doesn’t want to give people guilt. He wants to give them conscience, and the will to push for a society reformed.
I like this example. I like it because it illustrates how a very serious problem can get bigger, and how inaction can combine with denial until a crisis threatens to destroy a thing that once seemed too big, too sanctified to fail. Similar, say, to failing to prepare for the pandemic that will soon be upon us, even though history and science tell us it is coming. The solution is similar too. It lies in the reaction of people, a common faith in a renewed journey forward, and the support of a congregation to do better the next time around. Climate change walks a comparable path.
“Fundamentally, it’s a problem, and it isn’t any more difficult from any other problem. It isn’t unfixable or unstoppable. It’s a relatively simple problem: humans are causing the climate to change based on pollutants. The most efficient way to stop that is to stop pollutants. If you start looking at those and the way to address them, you can get bogged down fast,” which is why Nick thinks climate change is forever being set aside by political leaders in favor of more populist issues. But in the end, it’s just a problem in need of a fix.
Here, Manu chimes in. And Nick is briefly quiet.
He says he knows people have other things to worry about. Work and school and those big, capital-R Responsibilities. “It’s very easy in that stew of craziness to forget about some things. And I feel like climate change and a lot of other social justice issues kind of get excluded outside of that things-you-can-actually-care-about circle.”
Then he says if people stop thinking about climate change as an impending crisis, as anything other than a problem that needs fixing, the inertia could give way. People could embrace that their individual role can be to push leadership on fixes, prioritize remedies at the ballot box, and support youth like him who know that change will come from reimagining the world around us, not fighting about the one we already live in.
The straw boycott, it’s been a headache for him.
“I find straws annoying,” he says. And for a few minutes he struggles to say why until he talks about the amazing, stirring speeches he has heard people give about the evil of straws and how the subsequent call to action has only the one predictable response. Here he imitates: “What do you want? What do we do?! Don’t get straws.” He frowns, “Like at that point in time I go in the car and tear my hair out.”
He knows tiny actions like these aren’t enough to address the very serious environmental problems affecting the planet. And his summary of the attempt makes me laugh, makes Nick laugh too. The straw boycott, as the latest in environmental fads, can be especially grating. It has come on strong this summer and is at a pitch. Suddenly people who came of age with fast food franchising have seized upon the straw with a kind of venom.
On the surface, it is reasonable enough. For those who don’t need them—for example, people with disabilities or lying in hospital beds—straws are useless anyway. And the number of plastic straws used daily—500 million, cluttering the oceans, littering beaches worldwide, even found up the nose of a sea turtle—is a sad commentary on humanity’s trash. Why not put an end to the ubiquity of a thing people mostly don’t need? It’s a quandary we can all handle. But that is Nick’s critique of the straw boycott too. That it is a distraction from the scale of the crisis we really have with the health of the planet. And the vigorousness with which the straw is being attacked is also a hat-tip to a cultural preference for ease in solving such predicaments, and to the persistence of the belief that environmental dilemmas can be fixed by either buying things or not buying things.
These boycotts, they always seem to go like this. One day straws exist in unwitting culpability along with the rest of our trash, as they have since the 1950s. Then another, it is as if straws have called in a bomb threat on all of us. Suddenly you have to hate the straw, hate the place that serves the straw and the person who serves it to you. And to join in the hate is to declare oneself of a stripe, of a moralist breed, while others remain in league with the straw, want it, expect it even. These are the people to be judged. I can only imagine the waiterly paralysis that attends this: to straw or not to straw. Either way is to risk an upbraiding, and to questionable end. No similar hate is levied at other ubiquitous plastics like the plastic bottle or its lid, more prevalent than the straw in beach cleanups worldwide. And there is still no call to oust the shampoo bottle or the kitchen trash bag, the daily plastics we cannot seem to do without.
Yet this is the way in which mob mentality has governed not the environmental movement itself but the mainstream acknowledgment of it. There is less sense to the approach than a kind of collective convenience. And to Nick’s point, straws are an easy mark. So, too, are plastic grocery bags and the plastic rings on six-packs. We can live without them and we do, soldiering on in the crusade against things that are easy to hate. We never seem to target the actual enemy. Or choose our enemies with the kind of logic and cooperation that the climate crisis demands. The humans are still in charge, after all, and often guided by emotional impulse and sometimes, it seems, increasingly allergic to reason.
By the way, Nick says, if everyone avoided straws and recycled as much as they could and did their best to reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions, we would cut 1 or 2 percent of such emissions. In other words, almost nothing. If you really want to make change, do it this way, he says: put some solar panels on your roof, buy an electric vehicle, then go vegetarian. After that, you can ride your bike more and buy your food closer to home. And definitely, always, work toward wholesale systems change. Avoiding plastic straws? He hasn’t ranked that one yet in terms of its ability to halt the rising temperature of the earth. But he guesses, sarcastically, it’s about 12,036 on the list.
It is astounding, then, to know what the number one enemy actually is. When the Drawdown Plan—“the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming”—was released in 2017, it named unregulated refrigerants as the top target of the climate fight. Try boycotting refrigerators.
The plan was compiled by an international collaborative of researchers, scientists, and professionals. Its objective was to identify the combination of steps that policy makers could take to halt the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and reduce carbon dioxide levels over time. Its authors looked at any and every possibility, examining things like transportation, building, planning methods, energy sources, and livestock grazing. Even seemingly innocuous things—like making it easier for people to bike or walk—got play. The Drawdown Plan lists wind and solar development, the maintenance of tropical forests, and a shift to plant-based diets among the top ten solutions to the climate crisis—in other words, the very places Nick suggests individual action can really make a difference. But many of the proposed solutions target problems that lots of people don’t even realize are problems. For example, regulating food waste is among the top ten priorities identified, with scientists having found that decomposing food is so abundant it is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Nick gets most of his information from a diversity of other sources. The gist of many proposals, he says, “is all really about what’s economically practical to do first. You do the economically practical stuff and then you do the increasingly impractical stuff.” If he were familiar with the Drawdown Plan, likely he would take to it like a monkey in a banana tree. It is full of math.
Drawdown offers a kind of tablature with its proposals, numbers listing possible carbon reductions in gigatons, along with the costs of deploying the ideas in US dollars, then a financial prediction of what doing nothing might cost. The complicated math of it is enough to upset my tiny brain. So fortunately there is a narrative, the one that names unregulated refrigerants as public enemy number one.
Reading this, I felt a kind of shock.
Who could have guessed the sneaking subversiveness of the refrigerator? I had known it only as a place to put food and to avoid getting trapped in, thanks to the childhood PSAs that warned of refrigerators roguishly disposed of in fields. But disorganized disposal was meanwhile also ushering in the end to us all. Turns out, since the world ended the use of ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (remember when we hated them?), the hydrofluorocarbons that replaced them traded ozone degradation for big-time atmospheric warming. Before 2016, there wasn’t a way to dispose of this new enemy that didn’t warm the atmosphere a few thousand times faster than carbon dioxide. They were used, as well, in air conditioners, which was ironic since the developing world was already responding to the climate crisis by buying more air conditioners.
Home Depot was, in fact, betting big on air conditioners. Executives said as much in response to a survey by the international nonprofit CDP about the company’s climate readiness. This response, among others, somehow qualified Home Depot for billing as corporately responsible, or sustainable, or whatever it was we were calling environmental profiteering these days. In another six months, this fact would inspire the twelve-year-old fellow Coloradan who would cofound US Youth Climate Strike to spend one of her early demonstrations picketing not the state capitol but a solitary Home Depot in Denver. Because fuck Home Depot. But chiefly, it is the refrigerants that menace us.
None of the ideas proposed by the Drawdown Plan are as easily adopted as a straw boycott. And most need government support and a lot of money to implement. But the good news is that it’s not really our fault. Which is what everyone wants to think and what Nick wants you to think too—to a point. The point at which you no longer feel overwhelmed and just want to care enough to make sure that your representatives care enough to prioritize fixing things along with all the other “big, capital-R Responsibilities” that the people in charge and you yourself are tasked with. This does not mean giving up electricity, turning the clock back to the days of churning one’s own butter, or shearing sheep out in the yard. Solutions are not about self-sacrifice, even though American life must change. And Nick is keenly, acutely aware of how much he needs to stress this point, and of how easy it is to alienate people when he does not. Self-preservation and protectionism can be reflexive in this conversation. And it’s important that people understand that when he says he and his co-plaintiffs are doing this work, he is not saying that others ought to be doing it, too, or that it is their fault, or that they have to give up modern life to support the youth.
“That’s not what we’re saying.” The straws, the coolants, the electricity? “All we are asking for is a change in the ways those are made.” They’re not asking for people to quit things. Or for people to accept the reality of climate change just so they can feel guilty as they go about the daily business of being a person. “If you’re going to do anything, you have to think of changes of global effect. . . . The only way you can really change the system, the only way to do it, is by asking for systemic change.”
This does not mean that consumer choice doesn’t matter. People have influence. Voters have influence. And “if every single person in America said, ‘I want clean renewable energy and the only thing I am going to do to accomplish this is to vote in people who will make it happen,’ the entire climate crisis would probably be solved in like a year.” But that people otherwise find this problem so big that they only either feel overwhelmed or take action too trite to matter is almost as large a problem as climate change itself.