The chapter from hell
Looming Void, February 1, 2025. Chapter news. Trump climate skullduggery. Alcohol.
10,000 minutes
As with most troublesome writing issues, this one can’t be explained fully but… How does one write up a chapter on the history of the SAFETY of a new technology over a limited number of years? Typically scribes writing in, say, 2025 will absorb the entire history of SAFETY and bundle up the history in a convenient package, using obvious events (legislation, regulation, accidents) as plot points. Typically entire historical decades get glossed over. I’m trying to write up the history of reactor safety over its first fifteen years. I came up with a “plot” involving “things that happened” in various countries, and I came up with a way of presenting that “plot” using a convenient middle point of 1955. But for a reader, what I wrote offered no illumination at all. Who thought what about safety? What did they do about it? What did emerging issues and accidents reveal? Most importantly, what was left unsaid (because industry insiders always have their own worldview about SAFETY that cannot change, otherwise why are they there?)?
So … back in the middle of January, I allocated seven days of work to writing up my “plot points,” but soon found my days to be horrid blanks of meaningless words and random thoughts. I went through years of project notes on the subject, extracted bits, printed out my extractions, scribbled on them. I drafted drunken pages (I rarely drink now so didn’t imbibe while drafting, but I tried to write in the spirit of drunkenness). I grimaced. I rose, restless as restless can be, in the middle of nights. Some days I gave up and read the Murderbot sci-fi series. Life around me was sweet and I had no cause to complain but oh, it all felt relentlessly tough.
In the end I progressed through my “plot points,” adding random verbosity with thematic and narrative connotations, until now I have, at last, a chapter draft that omits nothing that “happened” (at the public level) but possesses a skeleton of narrative and thematic clarity. I’m sighing with pleasure. I’ll give myself a couple of days to reshuffle and rewrite and hopefully—give me some hope, please—this will be my last major chapter (and my most difficult one). A couple of weeks late, I am, but I am.
Monsters
You don’t need me to point to and rail about the new Trump administration‘s ravaging degradations of any climate mitigation actions that are open to attack. Or, put it another way, if you do need illumination on this issue, well, shame on you.
In spite of my New Year’s resolve to avert my gaze for the first months of 2025, I’ve been unable to. The only good news continuing to emerge on the climate front is the unequivocal relative cheapness of wind and solar, and their continued rollout as fossil fuel replacements. That rollout looks to be irreversible (Trump will try) but, sadly, nothing tells me that it even approaches the global actions needed to get to zero (even net zero) before the second half of this century. James Hansen, the original climate here from the 80s, has just published a report proclaiming that even +2C is now dead. (Yes, yes, I know, we still can’t officially declare that +1.5C is dead because it is meant to be based on longer term averages but honestly, no one is saying there is a pathway there.)
Where does that leave each one of us? For me, I’m suddenly as bewildered and anxious as I became three years ago. I’m repelled by the idea of reading the bad news and passing it on (for who is listening anyway, only those already fully aware). I’m angry as angry can be at global politicians and businesspeople cashing in short term, knowing full well the consequences, but my anger has nowhere to go in my insulated, complacent world. I’m furious at the generation below me, at their lack of furor, but who am I to berate them, given my generation has power and does nothing much. I wish to shrink from this world and focus on my “work” and “art,” and of course that’s defensible, noble, and (in my case) necessary, but whenever I have that thought, it offers no comfort because the information barrage sends me back round the loop. I am stuck and maybe, just maybe, that’s a good thing.
Mortality
This will be a familiar anecdote to many of you. What if you have a health scare and then resolve to do all you can to forestall mortality, indeed to “maximize healthfulness,” which is a modern term for staying healthy for as long as possible amidst age’s ravages? You adopt an extreme vegan diet with very little SOS (sugar, oil, salt). You give up alcohol (haven’t you been reading what health authorities/experts have been saying, the demon drink eventually hits you physically and mentally, even if you drink a glass of wine a day?). You see all the benefits they promised: more energy, better skin, easier movement, improved robustness, no vestigial fat, sounder sleep. Then one week your spouse drives away to help out with country-residing grandchildren and on the final evening of aloneness, something in you breaks and you find yourself at Gibson’s Wine Bar.
A glass of Côtes du Rhône? Of course. And another, please. The din deafens but it’s that human, humane buzz that enriches, and you bury yourself in a book as you sip (no guzzling here). Something to eat? Why yes, the vegetarian (but oily and cheesy) pizza on a platter, thank you very much. Will that be all? Hmm (cupping an ear, the noise!) … why not a final glass of Bordeaux?
Walking home on a cool summer’s night, your head swims, just a tad. And your weight is up by over a kilogram on the scales the next morning.
Why oh why?
So for me the sizzling edge of mortality’s shadow has receded, perhaps only because of familiarity. I think I’m now aligned with author Jennifer Weiner (in her recent essay “And just like that…”):
Am lifting: weights, three times a week. Just trying to get strong enough to survive the next four years and/or the zombie apocalypse.