#it was peak 2020 existential crisis | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mrgammakay · 1 year

Text

Remember when memes used to be questionnaires instead of gifs??? I AM ANCIENTTTTTT. @imindhowwelayinjune has placed a curse upon my house and now I’m honor-bound to dispel it.

Last song: Burn by 2WEI & Edda Hayes

Last show: The English was the last show I watched all the way through. I’m here for a good western and gotta use that accidental Amazon Prime 30 day free trial while it’s there.

Last Movie: I honestly can’t remember. Last time I was on a plane with in-flight entertainment, I watched Jurassic World: Dominion. It was terrible. But, hey, there were dinosaurs eating people.

Currently watching: I’m making my way through Rise of Empires: Ottoman Season 2. Work is holding me back but I WILL watch ancient political corruption, thanks. If all documentaries were shot like historical dramas, they would be my dragon hoard and I’d roll in a pile of them like a cat in catnip.

Currently reading: I’ve been trying to finish Women of Troy for over a month now, but I got distracted by a strong desire for magic ninja content. I also have A River Enchanted and Babel queued up in the reading roster.

Current obsession: I will never be able to escape my preoccupation with Uchihas. At this point, they’ve haunted me for over two decades and will haunt me for decades to come. I’ve been rereading the manga since Christmas. My DnD group has listened to 45 minutes of dissertations on power scaling problems in Naruto canon. Kishimoto continues to drag me to emotional narrative peaks joined together, not by sensible plot arcs or logical character motivations, but decimated, wasteland valleys of absolute plot fuckery.

Anyway. Sasuke’s a bitch, Itachi’s a god, and Shisui is a pure tragedy. I’ll be in this hell for the rest of my life.

------

Five books I’ve enjoyed since September

Okay, I basically didn’t read in October or November but I sprinted through about 10 books in December to try to reach my reading goal for the year (unsuccessful).

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. New favorite book of all time. It’s got all my kinks: war, ancient history, swords, horses, deep-seated loathing (self and otherwise), vague mythological magic systems, khans. Never in my life have I connected with a character in a more visceral, unwanted way. My existential crisis was full-blown. I didn’t want to identify with a eunuch on a profound level, but here we are.

Greywaren by Maggie Steifvater. I reread the whole series before going into the final book, so I can’t remember if Greywaren was my favorite. But I’ve never read a magical world similar to the nonsense that goes on in the Dreamer Trilogy. It’s real good. Ronan is also a peak character. Aggressive goth Gryffindor farmboy representation matters.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe. Like true crime but don’t like gory details? I don’t understand you, but this is the book you’re looking for.

Furysong by Rosaria Munda. I found the character arc resolutions a little unsatisfying in the end but overall, this is probably my top young adult fantasy series. Dragons. There’s so many dragons.

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. What a ride. I saw a lot of her interviews about this book before I read it, so I knew exactly what I was getting into. It’s powerful for someone to talk about their bullshit in a way that doesn’t sugar coat it.

-----

Last line written

I wrote almost nothing this year, but somehow this question caught me when I’ve just started working on a project again. The rust on this keyboard has been corroding since 2020.

“Still alive?” He asks. Irunae looks remarkably better than Énkava feels. He’s sitting up, for one. “So you’re not completely useless, then.”

#gammanigans #ask meme

7 notes · View notes

pickledpascal · 1 year

Text

Love’s Train

Chapter Four: 2020: A Semblance of Normalcy

Warnings: existential crisis, sneaking out.

A/N: pandemic doesn’t exist, fuck that

Word Count: 1.4k

Love’s Train Masterlist

Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Two years passed and Quinn was slowly starting to become a normal girl again. Besides the fact that her best friend was a yellow and black robot that could transform into a Camaro and, well, she certainly didn't look like a normal government official. At twenty-one, her arms were covered in various tattoos and her hair was dyed blue at the tips. She had a handle on all the Congress stuff after a while. As it all calmed, she wasn't needed as much, so it was the perfect opportunity for her to apply to colleges. She still wanted that degree, hoping she'd get a cool job with inventing.

Who could pass up accepting the woman who spoke for the Autobots in their college?

Which meant Quinn had her choice among what felt like hundreds of different colleges but her parents wanted her to be somewhere close. Preferably in-state. So she did. The college she chose was a two hour drive away from the five acre piece of land her parents owned. Far enough for Quinn to feel independent but close enough that she could drive back for a weekend if she wanted.

To celebrate Quinn going to college, her parents threw a party. They invited friends and family from all over. Not that Quinn ever really met them but she appreciated the gesture.

She made her way outside the two-story home, through the porch door and sighed as she stared at the setting sun. Most of the party-goers were inside, getting drunk and laughing with friends. Quinn looked back inside for a moment, catching a glimpse of her brother clinking a beer with someone. She let out a light laugh.

Seeing Jake drunk was always fun to watch. Especially when he wanted to challenge Quinn to a beer pong game. He'd somehow win yet be leagues drunker than Quinn.

A horn honking grabbed Quinn's attention. She realized it was Bee when his car door opened. Skipping her own party? What was more Quinn Harlow than that? She glanced back at her house before she stepped down from the porch and quickly got in Bee's driver's seat. The car moved as soon as Quinn got in, traveling down the dirt road that was shaded by tall trees.

"Where we going Bee?" Quinn asked, cocking her head as she looked around. She'd played in these woods when she was younger, even went camping with her family since it wasn't too far from the house.

Bee didn't respond, just the sound of his engine purring and his tires moving against dirt. That wasn't like him….

Soon, Bee stopped. He opened the driver's side door to signal Quinn to get out which she did. She looked at Bumblebee with narrowed eyes before she caught sight of that blue truck with red flames driving towards her. It stopped until it was just a few inches away from her then Quinn could see Optimus transforming into his Bot form. Gears, parts, lights, and tires rolling into place until Quinn could properly see the thirty foot tall bot. He kneeled down to be face to face with Quinn. Even then, she had to tilt her head up to look at him.

"Hello, Quinn Harlow." A deep voice rang out from in between his metallic lips, one she didn't expect but it fit. "I must commend you for all the things you've done for our race." Optimus hummed, blue optics taking in Quinn's form. Almost as if he was studying it.

It seemed all Autobots had blue optics, a detail Quinn would come to know very well.

Quinn was speechless. She'd seen Bee transform all the time but this… it was different. Optimus was a prime. The peak form of a Cybertronian. Perhaps that's why he was so goddamn big.

The human coughed slightly and shrugged. "I, um, it's nothing." Quinn quickly said as she felt something start to prickle at her forearm. She tried to ignore it best she could. Whatever it was, it wasn't as important as meeting Optimus.

"It's not nothing." Optimus huffed out a laugh, a noise Quinn wasn't sure Optimus was capable of but it seemed he was full of surprises. "Every time you walk into that white building, you risk being ridiculed and endangered. I'm glad to call you a friend." He nodded, holding up his hand to Quinn's.

Quinn's eyes flicked from Optimus' face to the hand in front of her. It was probably as big as her entire body and she was six feet tall, above average for girls. "Um, you too." She smiled, awkwardly taking one of his fingers in her hand and shaking it.

Optimus lowered his head a bit to be more level with Quinn and took his hand away. "I must also congratulate you on being admitted into college. As I understand these past few years have… as you say, thrown a wrench in your plans." He was certainly much more composed than his Autobot brothers. He spoke eloquently and clearly.

If only little Quinn could see her now. Conversing with that blue and red truck who led the Autobots.

"Th-Thanks." Quinn stammered slightly. Seeing Optimus close up was intimidating yet weirdly… attractive. She could see the little details of the metal plates that made up his face. "I mean, helping friends is more important than anything, right?" Quinn glanced back at Bumblebee who had transformed into his Bot form and sat at the stump of a tree.

"If only other humans could be as gracious as you." Optimus smiled lightly, a bit of a bitter tone in his voice. Not at Quinn. She could tell that already.

—------

As Bee dropped Quinn back off at her house, she immediately made her way up to her room. That prickling on her arm was starting to bother her to no end. Like an itch she couldn't scratch. Quinn threw off the jacket she wore and rolled up her sleeve to see if anything was stuck on her skin or anything.

There was nothing. No little bug that had managed to crawl its way into her sleeve, no raised red rash. Nothing. Well, except….

In the Cybertronian language, a deep blue mark appeared on the expanse of Quinn's forearm. While she couldn't read what it meant, she could tell what it was. Her soul mark appeared.

Right as she met the leader of the Autobots.

"Holy fuck." Quinn blinked, eyes wide as she slowly lowered herself onto her bed.

Of course she just had to be soulmates with Optimus fucking Prime. An alien robot. To be fair, she loved Bumblebee. But that was platonic. Like a brother and sister. But to be in love with a Cybertronian? As a human? It was hard to wrap her head around. Could they even… no, she didn't need to think about that.

Quinn ran her hands through her hair. It was bittersweet. After all this time of wanting any sort of soul mark and she finally had it. But her soulmate wasn't human. She didn't think it was possible. But perhaps Cybertronians were more human than she had originally thought. Quinn took a few deep breaths, shaking her head from her thoughts.

It's not like Optimus had a mark. He wouldn't have to know, especially if he didn't know about humans having soul marks to begin with. So it would be easy to hide.

"It's okay, Quinn. You have a mark now, you're alright." Quinn whispered, trying to calm herself.

Her thoughts about Optimus, being desperate to meet him, feeling almost betrayed when he crossed paths with her, it started to make sense. Quinn pursed her lips before she looked at her mark again. She'd saved a space for it among all the tattoos she got, still holding out hope. At least it looked at home among all the ink around it.

If Optimus didn't know already then Quinn certainly wouldn't tell him. Not right away. Maybe down the line, when they actually start to know each other. That night was only a meeting to finally see each other for the first time. The human fighting for Cybertronian rights and the leader of the Autobots would have to meet eventually.

Funny how their paths were so acutely intertwined.

Quinn let out a breath. College was just around the corner, that would give her time. Time to breathe, to get her thoughts together, to figure out what the hell she was gonna do.

#oc #bayverse optimus #bayverse optimus prime #optimus prime x human #optimus prime x oc #optimus prime #optimus prime x quinn harlow #quinn harlow #transformers bayverse #transformers #soulmarks #soulmate au #soulmates

6 notes · View notes

oldtvandcomics · 3 years

Text

So I finally watched the secret Sinterklaas intocht from last year to Arnhem (I KNOW IT’S MAY, SHUT UP!!), and wow, that was a wholly different level of existential angst.

I also watched the one for Krimpen aan den IJsel, and it was less depressing, but still. Morale of the story being, if you want to see something that is really wrong, watch 2020 Sinterklaas arrivals.

#I was just telling an American friend about what this celebration is #and discovered that it's on YouTube #SO ARE REALLY OLD ARRIVAL FROM THE THE 1990'S!!#anyways I remembered that I was actually curious about how they handled it #it was peak 2020 existential crisis #sinterklaas #2020 #COVID-19 #existential angst

0 notes

whywishesarehorses · 3 years

Text

A Mustang Crisis Looms in the West

With too many animals on public lands and too many on the public’s hands, the federal wild horse management program is short of money and palatable solutions.

By Dave Philipps Published March 22, 2020

CHALLIS, Idaho — Dawn broke over the peaks of the Lost River Range, revealing a chase in the wide open valley below. Seven wild horses crashed through the sage, dark manes billowing in the golden light, pursued by a government contractor in a glossy helicopter that dodged left and right like a mechanical Border collie, driving the band forward into a hidden corral.

Within hours, the captured mustangs had been sorted, loaded onto trucks to be stamped with an identification number and sent to the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse storage system. And the helicopter was back out hounding the hills for more.

All over the West, similar scenes have played out as the federal government fights to control the number of wild horses roaming public lands. Managers say they need to keep the herds down so they don’t destroy delicate native species habitat and threaten the livelihoods of ranchers.

But in recent years, the Bureau of Land Management has been losing that fight on two fronts: It hasn’t been able to round up nearly enough horses to limit the wild population. And it doesn’t know what to do with the ones it has managed to capture.

The roundup operation itself is strikingly efficient — a helicopter and a few workers in jean jackets can catch scores of mustangs in a day. The bureau rounded up 7,300 in 2019.

But once they are caught, they have to be fed and cared for. And the costs and frictions of having so many animals on the government’s hands — 49,000 at last count — have pushed the whole wild horse program toward collapse.

The rented pastures and feed lots where they are kept now devour more than two-thirds of the program’s budget, leaving little money for anything else, including looking for ways to get the bureau out of its current fix.

Low on cash, the bureau cut roundups drastically in recent years. But officials acknowledge that the move just made matters worse, by allowing the population on the range to grow rapidly. There are now about 100,000 wild horses and burros on public lands — more than at any time since the days of the Old West. The government reckons the land can sustain only about 27,000.

Bureau officials warn that the mustang herds are a looming catastrophe for the land, and there is no cheap or obvious solution. Capturing all the excess horses and caring for them in storage for the rest of their lives could cost up to $3 billion. Doing nothing may prove costly, too.

“If we don’t get this controlled, it’s just going to get worse,” said Alan Shepherd, the on-range branch chief for the wild horse program. Mustangs have already destroyed fragile desert springs in some places, and the birds, snakes and butterflies that depend on them, he said: “We are going to get to the point where the public lands are going to be almost unusable by anything.”

Mr. Shepherd started his career 30 years ago working on an emergency roundup on the Nellis Air Force Base missile test range in southern Nevada, where drought and overpopulation killed thousands of mustangs.

Now, near the end of his career, he worries that more herds are headed for a similar collapse.

Wild horse welfare groups argue that the crisis is largely invented. They say the government sets its population targets artificially low to justify mass removals that serve the interests of cattle ranchers and distract from other public land policies that are far more damaging.

“It’s a bait and switch,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, a group that has lobbied against roundups. “They say wild horses are an existential threat; meanwhile, they are loosening regulation on energy extraction. We do agree that roundups are creating a crisis in management, but the claims of overpopulation and horses starving are just not borne out by on-the-ground observations. Generally, the horses are doing pretty good.”

Crisis or no crisis, the number of horses on the range has risen into uncharted territory. Mr. Shepherd estimated that while 7,300 horses were captured in 2019, 17,000 foals were born. “We’re not even keeping at status quo,” he said.

In the early frontier days, wild horses in the West were too numerous to count. Explorers saw herds running on the Great Plains, likening the sight to the roll of waves in the ocean. On early maps, vast areas were labeled simply as “wild horse desert.” Later, as the region was settled, the herds were hunted down. Many were shipped east to pull city streetcars in places like Manhattan. Others were slaughtered for dog food and fertilizer. By the 1960s, only a few thousand mustangs were left.

Congress granted federal protection in 1971 to the remaining herds, which were nearly all on Bureau of Land Management land. With few predators and no hunters to cull them, the herds began to rebound, and land managers realized in the 1980s that they were quickly outgrowing the patchwork of public land allotted to them. That is when the helicopter roundups began.

At first, the program appeared sustainable. The bureau publicized an adoption program that found homes for captured horses, and the wild population stayed relatively constant. But news reports in the 1990s revealed that most of the “adopted” horses were actually going to slaughter, often while bureau employees profited. Regulations were tightened, and a backlog of unwanted horses began to build up on rented pastures in the Midwest.

Some conservative lawmakers from rural districts have pushed the bureau to euthanize excess horses or sell them for slaughter, but those steps remain widely unpopular and have not gained traction in Congress.

The bureau has told lawmakers repeatedly that it could create a sustainable program if Congress budgeted enough money to reduce the wild population to 27,000. Three times in the past 30 years, Congress has done so. Each time, though, the efforts were tripped up by dizzying costs and lawsuits from animal welfare groups.

Now the bureau is asking again. William Perry Pendley, its acting director, is a longtime conservative activist and lawyer who sued the bureau a number of times on behalf of ranchers before entering the administration. In an interview, he said he favors a proposal to remove more than 70,000 horses from the range over five years.

“Right now, it’s the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” he said. “We’re carrying water and not getting anywhere.”

The bureau is in talks to open two huge feedlots to hold thousands of horses. But it is unclear if Congress is willing to spend billions to store unwanted horses, especially if an economic downturn drains public funds. Bureau staff say privately that they expect the population on the range to continue to grow toward disaster.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. More than a decade ago, government auditors warned that the cost of storing captured horses would “overwhelm the program.” A 2013 report by the National Academy of Sciences urged the bureau to shift away from roundups and start using readily available and inexpensive fertility control drugs, which are typically administered by dart gun annually in the field.

Bureau leaders acknowledged the warnings and promised to embrace fertility control drugs, but their use actually declined in the years after the report. Less than 1 percent of the program’s current budget is spent on them.

Nearly all of the fertility control now happening on wild horse ranges is done by local volunteers, often retirees, who have learned to wield dart guns in the field.

That includes Andrea Macki, a visual artist who has been darting horses in the Challis herd for more than five years. She says the fertility control treatments have slowed reproduction rates by half, and could do more.

“It’s the obvious solution,” she said as she squinted through the dawn light to watch the helicopter rounding up horses she knew. “I wish the B.L.M. would invest in it, instead of all this.”

Bureau officials say that darting tens of thousands of horses in the field each year is not practical, and would take years to shrink the herds as much as a roundup can in a few days. Congress approved a $21 million increase in the wild horse program’s budget for this year, with the stipulation that the money would be released only when the bureau submitted a five-year plan that includes increases in both roundups and fertility control.

The bureau has also taken steps to dispose of captured horses, including deals that may be sending horses quietly to slaughter. It has ramped up sales of horses it deems unadoptable, charging $25 a head. In 2019 it sold 1,967 that way, often by the truckload in bulk sales; officials have refused to say who the buyers were.

Mr. Shepherd say the bureau tries to screen out slaughter buyers, but acknowledged that it does nothing to monitor the fate of horses after sale.

The bureau also created a program that offers $1,000 to anyone willing to adopt a horse.

Together, the sales and adoptions put about 7,000 horses into private hands last year, not enough even to keep pace with roundups, let alone draw down the number now warehoused.

On the edge of the wild horse range in Challis in central Idaho, Jackie Ingram, a rancher, has shared 168,700 acres of public land with the mustang herds for 46 years. Each spring her family drives hundreds of Black Angus cattle up a steep road through Spar Canyon to graze the high, windswept hills on Bureau of Land Management land.

In some years, she said, the wild horses left so little grass to eat that other wildlife disappeared, and her family had to cut back their cattle herd.

“We like the horses, but we also want to protect the land,” she said. “Every time they do a roundup, we’re happy. If the horses get to be too numerous, it affects the sage grouse, the elk, the antelope and us. All of us depend on the grass.”

#long post #blm mustang #mustang horse #horse news #equestrian #equine

371 notes · View notes

myepiphenies · 3 years

Text

What 2020 Made me Realize !!

The year 2020 has had quite an impact on our lives. The covid 19 pandemic at its peak, the whole world getting fixed in a knot and life coming to a standstill were the biggest highlights of my year.

Realization about random things and episodes of subtle existential crisis became the theme of my year.

First of, I realised that me fantasizing about staying at home doing absolutely nothing is not very glorious and fun as I had day-dreamt in my classes.

But the positive side, I did get to live atleast one of my dream of watching TV, with pizza in my old comfy pajymas and doing nothing. So not all of it was bad.

The year 2020 also made me think about all the possible things that I wanted to do when I was busy with work.

For example gardening, sky diving, and partying (which I could still not do due to lack of supplies and well.......Covid).Still I had fun cleaning the house, wadrobes and shelves. Yes, I respect my parents hobbies too(My mother raised me to be empathetic).

Other than cleaning, how can you forget cooking, when you have a professionally trained chef as a mother and a brother who demands you cook a dish every hour ? So after a couple of trials and shameful errors joined by the very "motivating" dissaproving glares from my ma. I finally nailed the Paneer curry!

Still I did say the best part of the year was reawakening the sleeping Picaso in me( reluctantly, but yes he did wake). To my fathers delight, I had finally put the expensive paint set to use.

But not all of 2020 has been about realizing things! It has also been about opportunities which I had only dreamed about. I had finally got the honour of representing the Shah family in the Weekly Online Family Housie contest.

After 9 whole weeks my granny was very happy and proud of me that her hard work and coaching throughout my life for this one moment of glory had finally paid off.

Another opportunity came my way that I had enough time to discover about my hidden talent of singing.

Never thought during my awesome shower concerts that I do have the potential to become an actual rockstar.

Surprisingly, that actually made me think about alternating careers in the deepest of my self analysing 3am thoughts.

The year 2020 wasn't a roller coaster ride for me only. It did well for my mother too(well..kinda).

To her utmost delight and horror me and my younger brother had finally made truce for the first time in history for 2 whole months. I guess we finally realized united we can make a bigger ruckus in the house. So 2020 was important to me for giving me life long bonding lessons too.

That makes me realize yet another thing, my relatives were right. My mother does deserve a noble prize for raising me and my brother(I think she might prefer the term monkeys).

Inspite of all this, I also got plenty of time to grow and develop my hobby of overthinking. Well I would like to thank my small to almost non existant career and studies hanging up despite my efforts of pressing shift + delete to my thoughts popping up every few minutew.

But as truely said "God always opens another door". I would really like to appreciate the almighty's timing here. He finally decided to answer my relatives prayers to get a free diet consultation from me.

Yes! God I got the hint. So I found a way for my will. Freelance diet consultations aren't bad at all it gave me more exposure to my field and who can say no to extra pocket money.

Yes there were bad times and there were good times. But above all what 2020 made me realize were my inner strengths and weakness. I discovered that precious little moments with friends and family have the power to vanquish the dark night.

I learnt how to mould in the given situation and give my best be whatever the situation.

Thus, delicious snacks, occasional existantial crisis, prayers for covid to go away, spending time with family and exhausting my Netflix account my 2020 was truely a roller coaster.carr

4 notes · View notes

elyreywrites · 4 years

Text

singing here’s to never growing up

more batkids shenanigans - this time inspired by a comment on a YouTube video of Avril Lavigne’s “My Happy Ending”. thank you so much to the Capes & Coffee Discord for brainstorming this fic with me, and helping me figure out ages! and an especially huge thank you to Bumpkin and Oceans on that server for being my betas for this fic!!

this fic is set in 2020. the character ages & years born are: Bruce: 37 - born 1983 Dick: 25 - born 1995 Jason: 20 - born 2000 Tim: 17 - born 2003 Damian: 11 - born 2009

title is from Avril Lavigne’s “Here’s to Never Growing Up”!

please REBLOG - DO NOT REPOST

AO3 Link

Teen 1,276 words Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Damian Wayne & Bruce Wayne part of my batkids shenanigans series

Summary:

Dick is just trying to get in touch with his inner angsty teenage girl. He didn’t ask for an existential crisis. Tim is making him have one anyway.

- - - - -

“…and it’s not like most plot-driven things – movies, books, shows, whatever – where the side stories might be briefly referenced but you don’t have to read them to understand what’s going on. The side games are absolutely crucial to understanding the plot.”

Jason snickered as Tim ranted about the Kingdom Hearts series. Sure, all Jason said was that he had only played the second game and was thinking about playing the first to understand the plot better, but that was ridiculous!

“If you play the first game and then go straight to the second, you’ll end up completely lost,” Tim huffed. “It starts with totally different characters and very little explanation of where they came from. That’s why you play ‘Days’ and ‘Re:Chain of Memories’—”

“Shhh,” Jason hissed, covering Tim’s mouth. “Do you hear Avril Lavigne?”

Tim paused just before he bit Jason’s hand and listened. Down the hall, he could faintly hear music.

“’All this time you were pretending. So much for my happy ending.’” Okay, that was definitely Avril Lavigne. With a tilt of his head, Tim gestured for them to investigate.

Down the hall, one of the lesser used sitting rooms had its door cracked open as the music spilled from inside. Tim slowly pushed the door open more and poked his head in. From the line of heat along his back, he knew Jason was leaning over him. That, and the chin that rested on his head because Jason was an asshole that took every opportunity to remind Tim that he’s shorter.

Tim blinked. Above him, Jason turned a near-silent snicker into a cough. Laying upside-down on the couch – feet dangling over the back and hair brushing the floor – was Dick, lip-syncing the words as dramatically as possible without changing position.

“Dick? What are you doing?” Tim asked, giving up the pretense of being sneaky and just walking in. The quiet curse behind him told him that Jason hadn’t been prepared to suddenly lose his support.

Either their older brother knew they were there or he was too good to visibly startle – each as equally likely – but it meant that Dick didn’t jump or even bother looking at them. “I’m getting in touch with my inner angsty teenage girl,” he explained.

Jason sprawled on the other end of the couch, leaving Tim to sit on the coffee table. “Any particular reason, Dickiebird?”

Dick spread his hands in an approximation of a shrug. “It be like that sometimes.”

Here’s the thing: Tim had gone through a bit of a phase years ago, and during that phase he was curious about when Avril Lavigne’s songs were released – he was a weird kid, okay? He never expected that information to come in handy, but it was his job as a little brother to torment his siblings. “Hey Dick,” Tim grinned, “guess how old I was when this song came out?”

“Why?” Dick asked, already sounding suspicious.

“I was about a year old, depending on the month,” Tim told him cheerfully.

“Nooo,” Dick whined, “Tim, why? Oh my god, you were a baby! And now you’re a teenager that’s nearly an adult and I’m old!”

“I was twenty-one,” Bruce scoffed, leaning against the doorway and drawing everyone’s attention. “I’m thirty-seven now. Please Dick, tell me about being old.”

“You don’t understand, B! At least you were already an adult, and now you’re just a more adult-adult. Tim was a tiny little baby and now he’s practically all grown up! I was a kid, and now I’m an actual adult! With a job! I’m having a crisis right now!”

Tim hummed. “Then I probably shouldn’t mention that her song ‘Sk8er Boi’ is older than I am.”

Dick wailed as Jason started howling with laughter so much that he grabbed his ribs.

“Tim! Why would you say that?!”

Damian walked in right then, scowling. “What idiotic nonsense is Drake spewing now that has you in a fit, Grayson?” Before anyone could answer, his brows furrowed and he added, “And why are all of you listening to such old music?”

That set Jason off again and Tim joined in. Their combined laughter wasn’t nearly enough to drown out Dick’s small, quiet sob as he slid off the couch to be a human puddle of existential crisis on the floor. “Babies,” he whispered. “I’m surrounded by babies. All of you are children. Oh my god.”

“Hey! I’m not a fuckin’ child, I’m twenty goddamn years old!” Jason argued.

Dick shrieked, “You can’t even legally drink!”

“Did you know you’re older than Google by three years, Dick?” Tim said. Dick whimpered.

Rolling his eyes, Bruce lightly cuffed Tim on the back of the head. “Give him a break, kiddo.”

“I have yet to have an answer as to why you all are listening to this infernal racket,” Damian demanded.

Within a couple seconds, Jason went from wheezing for air to completely solemn as he looked at Damian. “Sometime, kid, you just fuckin’ need to get in touch with your inner angsty teenage girl, and Avril Lavigne is the shit for that.” His faux-serious expression shattered with a smirk as he tacked on, “Also, I’m pretty sure Jon’s got this album.”

Damian scoffed and stormed out, muttering about being surrounded by idiots – Dick must have shown him Lion King then – and Tim snickered again. On the floor, Dick was still muttering and moaning about children and babies and “I’m so old, I’m like the Crypt Keeper”.

Tim bit his lip to stop himself from telling Dick that Freaky Friday – which was already apparently a remake – came out about a month after he was born. That could be saved for the next time Dick had a crisis about his age.

- - -

Two weeks later, Tim stopped halfway through ranting at Dick for only playing the main titles of Kingdom Hearts to stare down the hall. Much like the last time he was on a tangent about the game series, he could hear Avril Lavigne playing from somewhere. Except the only rooms down that hall were their bedrooms, and Jason and Dick stood on either side of him. The three glanced at each other, and Dick immediately grinned and bounced down the hall. Jason was smirking as he followed, and Tim trailed after hoping this wouldn’t end with Damian trying to stab him again.

Dick burst in as soon as he reached Damian’s room, where the music was definitely blaring from behind the door. “Dami, you’re listening to Avril Lavigne!”

When Tim peaked in, Damian was face-planted on his bed with his face towards the foot of the bed.

“I do not wish to talk about it,” he snapped, muffled as it was.

“Aw,” Dick pouted, “do you want a hug?”

Snarling, Damian lifted his head up enough to glare at all three of them. “I would prefer for you to leave my room at once!”

“Alright Dickie,” Jason said, grabbing and hauling Dick out, “leave the brat to fuckin’ wallow in his anti-social, pre-teen angst. Sometimes you just need to angst it out alone, as you damn well know.”

“Aren’t you the literature nerd? I mean, really, Little Wing, ‘angst it out’?” Dick snarked.

Tim pulled Damian’s door closed and followed after. “Hey, language is fluid and always changing,” he added.

Gesturing at him for emphasis, Jason declared, “Fuckin’ exactly! All words were made up at some point, and English is already a fucking mess of words from different languages smashed together! And at least a shit ton of the rules have exceptions!”

Tim nodded, “Like the ‘I before E except after C’ rule.”

“Here we go again,” Dick muttered.

“You fuckin’ started it!”

#batfam #batfamily shenanigans #batkids shenanigans series #fanfiction #crack fic #elyrey writes things #tim drake #dick grayson #jason todd #bruce wayne #damian wayne #dcu #batman #red robin #red hood #nightwing #robin #avril lavigne songs referenced #tim drake is a little shit

45 notes · View notes

raereview · 3 years

Text

A Writer in Her Early Twenties Writing About Smoking Cigarettes and Feeling Inferior? …Groundbreaking

an essay I wrote in November of 2020 as I was nearing graduation from Columbia College-Chicago

You know when a bug gets stuck on its back and its little legs start flailing and it frantically rocks back and forth trying to flip back over? That’s how I’ve been feeling recently.

I started smoking cigarettes again to calm me down because smoking weed always makes me have an unwanted existential crisis. In high school, I loved smoking cigarettes because it made me feel like an adult. I dreamed of being someone like Carrie Bradshaw; smoking cigarettes at parties and being so terribly interesting that I only had to write one column a week to pay for a lavish lifestyle. That dream was only amplified when an English teacher wrote on one of my assignments in red ink that she wanted to read my memoir one day. After that, I smoked cigarettes my friends would steal from their stepdads, while I waited impatiently to turn 18 so I could be an adult, leave my hometown, and become a real writer.

Now I’m 21 and can legally buy cigarettes in the city of Chicago. I bought a pack of American Spirits two days after the 2020 Presidential Election because my anxiety was getting high and I couldn’t. I tell myself they are better than regular cigarettes— even though it clearly says on the package they aren’t. Just holding a cigarette is sex to me (I never describe things as sex, but my first Creative Writing professor used to, and she sounded so fucking cool when she did). I always feel dizzy after the first couple hits. I can’t imagine that’s normal. I know that weed is probably better for my body, but I like that no one judges me for not inhaling correctly like they do with weed. I can let the smoke barely touch my lungs before I puff it out of my lips, and no one says a goddamn thing. And so maybe it’s just the action of smoking, but I always feel calmer by the time I put out the cigarette, leaving behind that black mark and bits of ash.

On the 13th of November, Phoebe Bridgers and Maggie Rogers released a cover of “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls because Bridgers tweeted that she would do so if Biden won the election. I didn’t recognize the song based off the title, but after a quick google search, I remembered hearing it on the radio growing up. It’s got one of those choruses that feels like it was written to be screamed at the top of your lungs in the car with the windows rolled down. I paid $1.50 for the song on Bandcamp (the proceeds went to Fair Fight), then I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, and went out to my back porch to listen to it. I’d barely been able to get out of bed all week, but I knew the cover needed my full attention because I recently became a “stan” of Phoebe Bridgers.

For a while I felt as if Phoebe was someone I knew through a friend of a friend; we ran in the same circles, but never really crossed paths. I adore Hayley Williams and Phoebe’s vocals were on my favorite song on her new album, most of the music I listen to is indie and makes you want to cry which is how you could describe her music, and her lowercase tweets always showed up on my timeline. I knew I’d become acquainted with her eventually, I just wanted to be ready; I had a premonition she’d change my life. I wanted us to fall into each other at the perfect moment.

Sometime in late June or early July, I was laying on the futon in my sister’s spare bedroom, staring at my phone in the darkness while everyone was asleep. The quiet nights of West Texas creep me out when I’ve gone months in Chicago without a moment of silence. I don’t remember what I was initially looking for on Spotify when her solo, sophomore album Punisher came up on the “recommended” section. I hit play because it felt like Spotify was a friend trying to set me up with her for the millionth time, telling me to just trust them and to meet her. It felt like the perfect moment, spilling our guts under the covers, “What if I told you I feel like I know you, but we never met?”

By “Moon Song” and “Chinese Satellite” I was silently weeping, trying not to wake up my nephews in the next room. Punisher made me feel introspective and existential, and the record almost gave me the same floating, panic feeling that weed gives me (but it’s cool when she does it). The strings from “Graceland Too” and “Savior Complex” swam inside my bloodstream and lifted me off the futon, off the part of Texas that I suspect she writes about hating. I was 16 when I had my first weed-induced existential crisis. My friends drove me around town in an attempt calm me down and I kept asking them if I was dead; Punisher feels like the soundtrack to that car ride. Receiving an impressive 8.7/10 on Pitchfork, the publication’s Sam Sodomsky describes her songwriting on the album as “candid, multi-dimensional, slyly psychedelic, and full of heart.” There are moments as a writer where a line makes me mad because of how well it described something I have yet to put words to, and Bridgers made me furious when she sang on the final track “I Know the End”: “When I get back I’ll lay around Then I’ll get up and lay back down Romanticize a quiet life There’s no place like my room.” It’s so simple, but it perfectly described the way I can get so anxious that I spend most of my days in bed, convincing myself I’ll never not feel this way.

That’s at least how I’d describe my recent state of constant anxiety. I know it started before the election, but constantly checking news sites seemed to amplify everything. I think the thing I have been most anxious about (personally, not politically) is the fact that I’m moving back home to my hometown after I graduate next month. I finally became an adult, but I will be graduating with my Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing, and I have no job prospects and no memoir in the making. I try to remain optimistic, but the catastrophic thinking my brain does is very convincing and tells me that if I can’t find a job in my field that I’m a bad writer, and if I’m a bad writer I’ll never be understood, and if I’ll never be understood I should just quit writing now, and if I quit writing then I should just lay in bed and not go to my zoom classes. It’s a long series of pointless, self-deprecating “and if’s”, but once they start it feels like telling yourself that you’re only going to smoke a couple cigarettes, and then you end up going through a whole pack in a few days and all you’re left with is regret and a headache. So, during that week of bed-ridden anxiety, I was thankful that my new love for Bridgers was stronger than my imposter syndrome. If I was doomed to be misunderstood, I wanted to listen to a writer who I feel like I understand.

When I went outside to listen the song, I quickly remembered that it was November in Chicago and my fingers shoved themselves deeper into my jacket sleeves. I managed to peak them out just enough to light a cigarette and hit play on the song. I was sure I looked very dramatic to the men doing construction on the apartment next door: a girl in her 20’s, smoking with her headphones in, staring off into the distance. The cover initially sounds more stripped and melancholic than the original, just Bridgers light vocals and an acoustic guitar. My legs were already shivering, but all the hairs on my body stood up higher when Rogers came in and their voices molded together. I don’t know her music, but the twang in Maggie’s voice that carries the second verse was comforting to my southern roots. I took a long drag when she sang “When everything feels like the movies, yeah you bleed just to know you're alive.” If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this cover was the original.

“Iris” is a song I’ve always known all the words to, but I had never really listened to the lyrics. The song was written by Goo Goo Doll’s John Rzeznik for the movie City of Angels (1998) staring Nicholas Cage. Rzeznik told Dan MacIntosh of Songfacts that when he wrote the song he was inspired by Cage’s situation in the film and thought “Wow! What an amazing thing it must be like to love someone so much that you give up everything to be with them.” Phoebe Bridgers’ songwriting feels like it comes from the same universe as “Iris”, specifically her song “ICU”. Both songs could technically be described as love songs, but I feel that a disservice to both.

They differ from traditional love songs because write about it in a realistic way, almost as if the thesis of both is “I know everything is awful and we could hate each other one day, but I want to be with you anyways.” A line from the chorus of “Iris” almost says this exactly, but far more eloquently, “When everything's made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am,” and then verses repeat this sentiment of knowing the love could end, but wanting the love anyways. Bridgers’ songwriting in “ICU” comes at a relationship with the same approach. The verses describe things she thinks could complicate or end the relationship (the other person’s family, someone falling out of love, self-sabotage). Regardless, the refrain keeps repeating, “But I feel something when I see you”. All this to say that when Bridgers sings Rzeznik’s lyrics, they feel as if they are her own.

The Goo Goo Dolls must have also thought Phoebe would do the song justice as their twitter account replied to Bridger’s original tweet a few days after Biden was announced the projected winner, saying “We’re waiting…” with the gif of Judge Judy motioning “hurry up”. When I read or hear really good writing, I selfishly question if writing is even actually what I’m meant to be doing… if it was something that should have stayed a hobby, or a poorly constructed daydream of becoming Carrie Bradshaw.

Recently, I wrote a paragraph about one of my favorite albums with the intention of writing a whole essay about it. However, after that I got stuck. Every time I tried starting the next sentence, I hit the backspace button until it was gone. I spent two whole days watching interviews with the artist, reading reviews of the album, listening to the whole record on repeat for hours, and I couldn’t get anything more than that paragraph. The words simply would not come to me. Moments like that, combined with rejection emails from literary magazines or hearing Bridgers sing lines that take my breath away, I wonder if I should keep fueling my love for something that will always love someone else more or if I should quit?

I listened to the cover of “Iris” on repeat until my cigarette was out. The big tree in my backyard is barren because of the new season, and so now more of my neighborhood is visible. It was around 4p.m. and the sun was already starting to set thanks to daylight savings (until I wrote that sentence, I didn’t think to consider my anxiousness and my need to stay in bed all day could also be attributed to seasonal depression). I’ve always been obsessed with sunrises and sunsets. I know I probably write about them too much: how they make the whole world “glow” orange, the transitions of the colors in the sky, how they always represent an end or a beginning. My hometown has the best sunsets and sunrises: the land is so flat you can see all the way to the horizon, there are no clunky buildings blocking your view. I thought maybe this sunset would spark inspiration in me, so turned to go toward the edge of my porch to see more of it, and for a second I looked at the windowsill I rested my lighter and cigarettes on.

Lying there was a fly stuck on its back. Before they fixed the insolation, our apartment was infested with so many flies that all summer the surfaces of my home were perpetually covered in fly guts. The fly’s little body twitched frantically as it tried to push itself over. I felt pity for the fly even though others of its kind spent the warmer months buzzing in my ear and making me want to move. As I watched the insect, I realized that my anxiety doesn’t feel like drowning or spiraling or falling. It feels like flailing— like a bug stuck on its back trying desperately to get right side up again. It’s kind of pathetic how much it feels like the end of the world. I might not be the first person to think of that, but the metaphor came to me so clearly that it took my breath away. Quickly, I used my lighter to flick the fly back onto its legs. We stared at each other for a moment. I know flies don’t have facial expressions, but I swear, it looked confused. I thought maybe it heard horror stories about me from its friends about the sweaty girl who kills them with rolled up newspaper and wondered why I helped it. Finally, it turned from me and crawled away in the opposite direction.

That fly made me like a god, but more importantly, it made me feel like a writer. I found the words again. Relating to an insect isn’t exactly Carrie Bradshaw or Phoebe Bridgers, but I was excited. I immediately ran inside and started this essay. My frozen fingers started to warm up as I typed everything out. It felt like writing and I were a married couple who had sex for the first time in months; we got our spark back. And I know writers aren’t supposed to wait for inspiration to start writing, and I know this doesn’t make me as good as Phoebe Bridgers, and I know I still don’t have any job offers, and I know I didn’t cure my anxiety but writing this felt really good.

When I wrote this essay, someone I showed it to said they “got my angst”, but not my love for writing. Maybe that’s because I don’t always love writing in the explosive, epic way I sometimes think I should? I love writing with the kind of love that I’m told is in good marriages; the love is a choice. There are days when I can’t stand a word I put on the page, but there are also the days where I find perfect metaphors for sunsets or anxiety or bugs or Phoebe Bridgers. There are days I lay in the warmth of someone else’s words as if they were the sun. There are days where I can’t stand go to class after turning an essay in because I don’t want people to associate the person on the page with the person sitting across the room from of them. However, even on days when I can’t stand writing or being a writer, I still wake up, put on my fake glasses that make me feel like an intellectual, I grab my New Yorker tote, I write silly lyrics I think of on the train, I read someone else’s work and remind myself they had 20 drafts of this I’ll never see, I reread my own work and see if any lines make me catch my breath, and I write.

I write because I still have the desire to be understood. I write to try and understand why I can’t stop loving it even when I hate it. I write because I fear one day the inferiority will be too much and I won’t wake up and choose to still love writing.

I still listen to Iris on repeat because the lyrics are as painfully relatable as they are catchy. At its core, the song is asking someone to understand. I think that’s what all I want, understanding. I want to know that someone else feels the same way I do about sunsets, or Carrie Bradshaw, or Punisher, or smoking cigarettes to look cool. If I write my truth, maybe someone will understand? Alexander Chee wrote in his How to Write an Autobiographical Novel that “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.” Maybe that’s why I don’t love being high because I feel like I am trying to escape the truth? Maybe that’s why I love Phoebe Bridgers’ songwriting and writing in general because it makes me feel like I am trying to escape into the truth? Maybe if I can make it to the truth, I’ll be understood?

Maybe I’ll understand?

Sources: Bridgers, Phoebe. Lyrics to “Punisher.” Genius, 2020, genius.com/albums/Phoebe-bridgers/Punisher. Sodomsky, Sam. “Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 22 June 2020, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoebe-bridgers-punisher/. Rzeznik, John. “Goo Goo Dolls – Iris.” Genius, 7 Apr. 1998, genius.com/Goo-goo-dolls-iris-lyrics. MacIntosh, Dan. “John Rzeznik of Goo Goo Dolls.” ShieldSquare Captcha, 12 June 2013, www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/john-rzeznik-of-goo-goo-dolls. Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Bloomsbury, 2019.

#personal essay #writing #phoebe bridgers #iris #writer #goo goo dolls #nonfiction #music #music writing

3 notes · View notes

purplesurveys · 3 years

Text

1060

(made by: tickle-my-pickle)

1. What do you think is the best way to start off the New Year? Everyone has their own way of ushering in the new year. Me personally, I just like to start everything with a little more optimism. I don’t have to be super excited, but it’s important that I at least have a healthy mindset.

2. What is something that you can do in order to make your house look/feel ready for the New Year? We turn on every single light in the house. My family and I also dress up since we usually go to NYE mass. To get into the mood, I will usually play music on the speakers. 3. Do you/your family put up any sorts of decorations for the New Year? Do you celebrate with any props such as hats, blowers, etc? We don’t really put up New Year’s decorations (do those exist?) and the only decor we have are items for Christmas, which we keep until the end of January. Sometimes my mom will buy horns and New Year-themed glasses and headbands.

4. What was your most memorable New Years, and why was it so memorable? 2013. It was our first New Year’s with my dad home, so we really went all out with the celebrations and offered to host dinner for both my dad’s and mom’s sides. For the first and only time so far, my parents also bought a shit-ton of fireworks that we ourselves could set off – we never buy our own since a single pack that will only last a few seconds is already quite expensive.

5. What was your worst New Years celebration, and what about it made it the worst? The New Year that ushered in 2019. I was alone and felt extremely alone that night. I remember taking a selfie at midnight to serve as a reminder to myself that better days are ahead, but until now I can’t even look back at the photo because all it does is remind me of how sad I was at the time.

Slight trigger warning below the cut.

6. What is something new that you did this year and hope to do again in future years to come? I’m really getting the hang of embroidery and am glad that the hobby stuck with me and didn’t die out within a week or so. I’ve also been taking myself out on more dates, and I feel very happy and at peace when I do so.

7. If you could be anywhere in the world on New Years Eve, where would it be, and why? I know New York is such an iconic New Year’s spot, so I’d love to be there one of these years. It’s one of the rare times I will allow myself to be like a basic tourist, hahaha.

8. What was something stressful about this past year? [trigger warning: self-harm] The breakup of a long-term relationship and the massive weight loss, tears, sleepless nights, nightmare-filled nights, despair, depression, and new self-harm scars it gave me. There was also powering through my thesis during the virus’ peak; the existential crisis that followed my college graduation; and the whole mess that was job-hunting. Our financial situation at home has also caused me to feel a bit stressed at times.

I was on autopilot for most of the year and I thought 2020 was pretty decent on my end overall, but as I typed all those out I just realized how fucking shitty this year was. Holy shit, it was really that bad?

9. Do you know of any other ways that the New Year is celebrated in other countries around the world? Is it on the same date or a different date? I know there’s something about a ball drop in New York that I want to see. Chinese New Year also happens at a later date in the new year and I just know there are dragons involved lol; my Filipino-Chinese friends also usually give me mooncakes.

10. What is something that you would change about this past year, if you could? I wish I got to enjoy my last year in university, that I was able to spend time with my friends, that no pandemic happened, that I remained in a happy relationship that I personally found fulfilling in every sense of the word. And that all my relatives were kept alive.

11. Has anything about you changed over the past year? If so, what? “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” am I right? I went through so much inconvenient bullshit that I pretty much feel indestructible now.

12. Did you make any new friends this year? What about losing any old friends? I made a handful of new friends. The biggest additions were the people I interned with - Angel, Justine, and Bianca. I’ve also been able to build a good rapport with some people in the team, like Pia, Jazz, and Redd. As for old friends, I lost Callo and Gabie this year.

13. Some of the best books you’ve read this year: I read some wrestling memoirs but tbh it would be a little unfair to call any of them the ‘best’ since all of them were just so-so in terms of writing, as great as some of their stories got. There’s a reason they’re wrestlers and not authors, hahaha.

14. Some of the best movies you’ve seen this year: I barely watched any movies this year.

15. The best television/Netflix/etc series that I’ve found to binge-watch this year: Descendants of the Sun, Start-Up, The Crown,

16. Some of the best new artists/groups I’ve listened to this year: Chase Atlantic, Benee, and Beach House have been my favorite discoveries.

17. Some of the best new songs that I’ve heard this year: Not a big music year for me. I do remember falling in love with no song without you by HONNE, at least back when it meant something. Hayley Williams’ entire solo debut album was great too.

18. Have you tried any new foods within this past year? If so, what are they? Baked sushi is my favorite food discovery this year. Didn’t get the chance to be too adventurous when it came to food because Covid.

19. Did you take up a new hobby this year? If so, what was it? Doing embroidery has been the biggest and my favorite new thing for me.

20. Have you played any new games this year? (board, card, video) If so, what were they, and did you enjoy them? I don’t think so. Most of the games I joined I had already played before, like Boggle, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, certain Jackbox games, etc.

#survey #surveys

4 notes · View notes

deniscollins · 3 years

Text

‘Is Exxon a Survivor?’ The Oil Giant Is at a Crossroads.

Exxon, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year. In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company. If you were an Exxon executive, would you spend (1) more, (2) the same, or (3) less on oil exploration and production? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Over the last 135 years, Exxon Mobil has survived hostile governments, ill-fated investments and the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill. Through it all, the oil company made bundles of money.

But suddenly Exxon is slipping badly, its long latent vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and technological shifts that promise to transform the energy world because of growing concerns about climate change.

The company, for decades one of the most profitable and valuable American businesses, lost $2.4 billion in the first nine months of the year, and its share price is down about 35 percent this year. In August, Exxon was tossed out of the Dow Jones industrial average, replaced by Salesforce, a software company. The change symbolized the passing of the baton from Big Oil to an increasingly dominant technology industry.

“Is Exxon a survivor?” asked Jennifer Rowland, an energy analyst at Edward Jones. “Of course they are, with great global assets, great people, great technical know-how. But the question really is, can they thrive? There is a lot of skepticism about that right now.”

Exxon is under growing pressure from investors. D.E. Shaw, a longtime shareholder that recently increased its stake in Exxon, is demanding that the company cut costs and improve its environmental record, according to a person briefed on the matter. Another activist investor, Engine No. 1, is pushing for similar changes in an effort backed by the California State Teachers Retirement System and the Church of England. And on Wednesday, the New York State comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said the state’s $226 billion pension fund would sell shares in oil and gas companies that did not move fast enough to reduce emissions.

Of course, every oil company is struggling with the collapse in energy demand this year and as world leaders, including President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., pledge to address climate change. In addition, many utilities, automakers and other businesses have pledged to greatly reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels, the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and have embraced wind and solar power and electric vehicles.

European companies like Royal Dutch Shell and BP have already begun to pivot away from fossil fuels. But Exxon, like most American oil companies, has doubled down on its commitment to oil and gas and is making relatively small investments in technologies that could help slow down climate change.

As recently as last month, Exxon reaffirmed it plans to increase fossil fuel production, though at a slower pace. The company is investing billions of dollars to produce oil and gas in the Permian Basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico, and in offshore fields in Guyana, Brazil and Mozambique.

Exxon committed to its strategy even as it acknowledged that one of its previous big bets did not go well. Exxon said it would write down the value of its natural gas assets, most of which it bought around 2010, by up to $20 billion. The company is also laying off about 14,000 workers, or 15 percent of its total, over the next year or so as it seeks to cut costs and protect a dividend that it had increased every year for nearly four decades until this year.

But if this crisis is an existential threat, there has been no acknowledgment from Exxon’s executive suite, still known in the company as the “God Pod.”

“Despite the current volatility and near-term uncertainty, the long-term fundamentals that drive our business remain strong and unchanged,” Darren W. Woods, the company’s chairman and chief executive since 2017, said at a recent shareholders meeting.

Exxon is known in the oil world as an insular company with a rigid culture that slows adoptive, pivotal change. It has been that way since John D. Rockefeller founded the company in the late 19th century as Standard Oil, a monopoly later broken up by the government.

An accountant by training, Rockefeller instilled a deep commitment to number crunching that remains in the company’s DNA. Exxon is primarily run by engineers who generally work their way up to senior roles. Its executives project determination in their ability to navigate every imaginable hurdle like OPEC oil embargoes, war and sanctions. Such confidence is perhaps necessary to run a company that does business in dangerous or inhospitable places.

As a trained electrical engineer and 28-year company veteran, Mr. Woods speaks with the same cool self-assurance as his more famous predecessors. But he has kept a lower profile than Lee R. Raymond, who dismissed concerns about climate change in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Rex W. Tillerson, whose international wheeling and dealing between 2006 and 2016 helped him become President Trump’s first secretary of state.

While Mr. Raymond and Mr. Tillerson were dominant figures in the industry, they left Mr. Woods with many problems that were at least partly obscured by higher oil and gas prices.

Mr. Raymond’s public skepticism of climate change damaged the company’s reputation. Mr. Tillerson was slow to take advantage of shale drilling, which lifted the American oil industry. His foray into the former Soviet Union and Iraq proved to be expensive failures. When he bought XTO a decade ago for over $30 billion to acquire fracking expertise and prized natural gas fields, gas prices were at their peak. As the commodity price declined in the years since, the company lost money and wrote off much of the investment last month.

“Darren Woods has inherited a company that has made huge bets in recent years that were not successful,” said Fadel Gheit, a retired Wall Street analyst who was an engineer in research and development at Mobil before its merger with Exxon in 1999.

“Exxon Mobil is like a big cruise ship,” he added. “You can’t change course overnight. They can weather the storm but not go far. They will have to transform to stay relevant.”

Mr. Raymond declined to comment. Mr. Tillerson did not respond to a request for comment. Exxon responded to questions mainly by referring to previous public statements by Mr. Woods and the company.

Casey Norton, a company spokesman, said the acquisition of XTO had “brought people and technology in addition to potential resources” that helped the company be successful in shale fields in the Permian Basin.

In the first few years on the job, Mr. Woods followed the broad strategy set by Mr. Tillerson by borrowing and investing heavily to expand production. The pandemic forced Mr. Woods to change direction. The company now plans to spend one-third less on exploration and production through 2025 than it had originally planned.

Yet the changes Exxon is making, while big in absolute terms, seem like tinkering compared with what European oil companies are doing. BP has announced that it will increase investments in low-emission businesses tenfold over the next decade, to $5 billion a year, while shrinking oil and gas production by 40 percent. Royal Dutch Shell, Total of France and other European companies are making similar moves at varying speeds.

The only major American oil company that comes close to setting European-style targets is Occidental Petroleum. It recently pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions from its operations by 2040 and from the use of its fuel by 2050. It is building a plant in Texas to capture carbon dioxide from the air and use it to push crude oil out of the ground while leaving the greenhouse gas underground for perpetuity.

“We’ve moved from the shale era to the energy transition era, so there is a greater divergence of strategies among the companies, the widest it’s ever been in modern times,” said Daniel Yergin, an energy historian and the author of “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.” “Now the big debate is will oil peak in the 2020s or the 2030s or the 2050s?”

Exxon executives have said they recognize an energy transition is underway and necessary. But they have also asserted that it wouldn’t make sense for the company to get into the solar or wind energy business. Instead, the company is investing in breakthrough technologies. One such project involves using algae to produce fuel for trucks and airplanes. Exxon has been talking about that project for years but has yet to begin commercial production.

Exxon refineries might also someday become major producers of hydrogen, which many experts believe could play an important role in reducing emissions. The company is betting on carbon capture and sequestration. One project involves directing carbon emitted from industrial operations into a fuel cell that can generate power, reducing emissions while producing more power.

“Breakthroughs in these areas are critical to reducing emissions and would make a meaningful contribution to achieving the goals of the Paris agreement, which we support,” Mr. Woods said in a message to employees in October, referring to the 2016 global climate accord.

Energy experts said it was possible that Exxon could come up with new uses for carbon dioxide like strengthening concrete or making carbon fiber, which could replace steel and other materials.

“If Exxon and other major oil industry players crack those nuts, the entire discussion about hydrocarbons changes,” said Kenneth B. Medlock III, a senior director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. “That kind of change is slow until it’s not. Think about wind and solar, which were slow until they weren’t.”

A big increase in oil and gas prices could also allay some of the concerns about the company, at least temporarily. In recent weeks, as oil prices have climbed on optimism about a coronavirus vaccine, so has Exxon’s stock.

Vijay Swarup, Exxon’s vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview that the company understood it needed to lower emissions and was developing better fuels, lubricants and plastics.

“As we are developing that pathway to get there, we can’t stop providing affordable, scalable energy,” Mr. Swarup said.

But John Browne, a former BP chief executive, said it was not clear that Exxon and the other big American companies would transform their businesses adequately for a low-carbon future.

“They may decide just to carry on and harvest and say, ‘Let’s see what happens in the long run,’” he said. “That’s quite a risky strategy nowadays.”

#Exxon #Climate Change

2 notes · View notes

popolitiko · 3 years

Link

A political scientist explains why the GOP is a threat to American democracy And why the November election is an opportunity to fix it. By Sean [email protected]@vox.com Oct 20, 2020

It sounds hyperbolic to say that American democracy is broken, but an honest glance at the country — at our institutions and the broader political culture — makes it hard to conclude otherwise.

As things stand, one of our two major political parties is committed to suppressing as many votes as possible, and the leader of that party, the president of the United States, has said outright that he won’t accept the legitimacy of the election process if he doesn’t win.

If, under those conditions, Trump either wins the election or loses and throws the country into a bitter, protracted fight over the results, it doesn’t seem all that alarmist to suggest the US will have descended into what political scientists sometimes call a “weak democracy” or even “competitive authoritarianism.”

But I really don’t want to be overly alarmist, so I reached out to Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard University and one of the leading authorities on global democracy. I wanted to know her honest assessment of the state of American democracy, why she thinks the upcoming election is a true turning point for the country, and what the US will have to do moving forward to undo the damage done in the past several years.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

If American democracy was a patient, how would you describe its condition?

Pippa Norris

I’d say the patient has not been well for a long time. The patient is obese and doesn’t exercise.

Sean Illing

You like to say that democracy is not an “all or nothing” process — it’s more like a continuum with peaks and valleys and lots of movement over time. Would you say that the biggest weakness in the American system right now is this combination of the intractability of our Constitution and the fact that one of our major parties, the Republican Party, is basically invested in an anti-democratic, countermajoritarian agenda?

Pippa Norris

It’s true that we’re facing an existential crisis in part because the Republican Party has put all of their appeals into a shrinking sector of the electorate — mostly white, mostly older. And they’re using their power to change the rules of the game to favor their own party. That’s all true

The point about the intractability of the Constitution is also true. There’s something called the Comparative Constitutions Project. They look at the longevity of constitutions and how much change is ideal and how much change is dysfunctional. So you don’t want a constitution that changes all the time because that leads to instability and you need to have rules of the game that everybody can agree upon. But you also can’t have a constitution that’s fundamentally unchangeable.

America is just off the charts in terms of the rarity of changes. It’s not just that we have so few changes; it’s the combination of institutional arrangements that make change almost impossible. America’s Constitution really doesn’t change, and we don’t look abroad for constitutional innovations.

Sean Illing

Can you give me an example of a good constitutional innovation from around the world?

https://www.vox.com/21496907/2020-election-republicans-american-democracy

#political scientist #GOP is a threat to American democracy

1 note · View note

firewolffinance · 3 years

Text

The search for a congruent euro area policy mix

During the past 13 years, the EU has undergone two major ‘existential’ crises: the Great Recession that reached the peak after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and culminated with the sovereign debt crisis of 2011-2012 (Reinhart and Felton 2008a, 2008b, Baldwin and Giavazzi 2015), and the COVID-19 crisis which erupted in spring 2020 (Baldwin and Weder di Mauro 2020a, 2020b). It…

View On WordPress

#area #congruent #Euro #mix #Policy #Search

0 notes

docmary · 3 years

Text

Mea Culpa

It’s been about 50 years since I went to confession. I am not looking for absolution. I just want to get this off my chest. When SARS CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, reached our shores (literally, as I live not far from Kirkland, Washington), and anti-masking became political theatre, I had two thoughts almost simultaneously about these anti-maskers:

Gee, if there were only more people in the world like you, there would be fewer people in the world like you.

And

Nature’s way of thinning the radishes.

I was too polite to ever say such things out loud.

Of course, the vast majority of people who have endured intubation, COVID-19 long-haul, the death of a loved one, or any of the many complications of the virus, did not earn my impure thoughts. Whether becoming ill was because of living or working in a congregate living facility such as a nursing home, or a consequence being a frontline worker, or just because of bad luck, I apologize to these individuals and their loved ones.

Yes, in fact, I was the person who was quoting John Donne just a couple of months ago: “Any man’s death diminishes me…”. (from my post "The politics of a pandemic, how not to manage coronavirus") But that was when it seemed like we were turning the corner in the United States in terms of morbidity and mortality and the economic disaster that resulted from the pandemic. We needed to set our sights on other hot spots like India and Brazil. We still do. With a fast-moving pandemic, nobody is safe unless everyone is safe.

Now we are in our fourth wave of the virus and since July 1, 2021:

Cases and hospitalizations have soared: both hit six-month peaks last week.

The stock market has dropped from record highs.

Consumer confidence had the sharpest 3-week decline since November 2020 when the third wave of the coronavirus was roaring through much of the US.[1]

Delta Blues:

The COVID-19 Delta variant is now the dominant strain of coronavirus in the US. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the week ending 8/7/2021, we have, on average, 210 new cases per 100,000 population.[2] The CDC also reports that each person with the Delta variant will transmit the virus to an average of five unvaccinated people-more than twice the rate of infections caused by the original strain. In Washington state, the Department of Health reports that 94% of recent cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 are among those that are not fully vaccinated.[3]

In other news, the Biden administration hit it’s target of getting 70% of adults in the US having received at least one vaccine shot on August 2, almost a month past the original target date of July 4.[4] In a surprise to no one, states with the lowest vaccination rates are experiencing the biggest surge in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This has, no doubt, led to an increase in the number of people who have gotten the jab in the last month or so.

Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C)

While children continue to have low rates of severe illness, hospitalization, and death associated with COVID-19, those numbers are increasing. MIS-C is a rare but serious complication associated with SARS CoV-2 infection in children. As of October, 2020, there had been 1,000 cases of MIS-C reported to the CDC. As of 8/13/2021, that number is 4,404, with 37 deaths reported. The median age is nine years old. Sixty-three percent of cases in which race and ethnicity are reported occur in Hispanic/Latino or Black/non-Hispanic children. These demographics are associated with more severe illness in adults as well. Ninety-nine percent of children with MIS-C test positive for SARS CoV-2, the other 1% have had exposure to COVID-19.

Reported MIS-C Case Ranges by Jurisdiction, on or before July 30, 2021

retrieved from: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surveillance

Carrots and Sticks

At present there are approximately 90 million people in the US who have held off on getting vaccinated. There are probably three main reasons for this:

1. People who lead a very healthy lifestyle. Let’s be honest. That is not most of us. But as long as they follow other public health guidelines like wearing masks, staying away from vulnerable people and children that are not eligible for the vaccine, they might be able to do that for as long as it takes. Let’s face it, social isolation is not a hardship for some of us.

2. People who just haven’t made it a priority to get vaccinated but don’t have strong beliefs one way or the other on the relative risks of getting COVID vs. the COVID vaccines.

3. Freedom. I don’t understand this one, but I am told it’s a thing. They are certainly the most vocal and probably the least likely to have the “we are all in this together” attitude. My parents, who went through the rationing of World War II as well as my father's service in the army to defeat Hitler, would no doubt laugh at these folks if their ideas didn’t result in such tragic consequences. These “freedom fighters” are putting a tremendous strain on a healthcare system that wasn’t all that great, especially in terms of equity, to begin with. It gives me no joy to know that these are the radishes that nature will thin most aggressively.

If not being intubated or putting your loved ones at risk is not incentive enough to get vaccinated, some states have tried other incentives like a million dollar lottery and marijuana (joints for jabs) as "carrots" to encourage the unvaccinated to close the vaccination gap.

The stick approach involves mandates. Federal, state, and local government does not like to use the M-word, and corporations are even less inclined to make people either get vaccinated or submit to nasal exploration 1-2 times per week as a requirement for employment, but they are warming up to the idea. Many school districts will no doubt follow suit. This may also give some people cover if they were initially anti-vaxxers or vaccine hesitant but have since become more open to the idea of the COVID vaccine.

There is no shame in admitting that you were previously speaking from a less informed place.

- Kelly Hayes, author from the Menominee nation

My Take:

It is beginning to dawn on me that I may not live to see a post-pandemic world. I hope I'm wrong but in case I'm not, how do I manage this new reality?

The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher. – Chinese Proverb

There will be those that won’t get vaccinated no matter what. Their choice. Despite our differences, we are going to have to find a way to live with each other and coronavirus. I would like to believe that we could unite against this existential crisis but we are not there-yet. In the meantime, we have to find a way of communicating our own needs and boundaries while accepting the needs and boundaries of others in a respectful way.

We also have to look at the wider picture. Wealthier nations should send the extra vaccines that we have scarfed up to COVAX, an initiative dedicated to equitable access to vaccines, particularly to healthcare workers and those most at risk who live live in less affluent countries. For more information on COVAX, see my previous post; "The politics of a pandemic" This organization is ready to get more vaccines and the ability to administer them to countries that would love to get the jabs that our citizens have decided, for whatever reason, to refuse. This is not just white savior complex, it is enlightened self-interest.

Less affluent nations are huge reservoirs of virus that continue to produce more variants. Not only does COVID cause a tremendous disease burden, it also takes a bite out of limited resources that are used to combat other deadly diseases like tuberculosis (TB). I heard a story out of Africa that when local clinics send people with respiratory symptoms to get tested for COVID, if those tests come back negative, the patient doesn’t necessarily get sent back to get screened for TB. That is not good.

As John Donne recommended 500 years ago, “do not send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

[1] Keckley, P. 2021. Delta variant exposes two flaws that could undermine recovery, The Keckley Report, 8/2/2021.

[2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days

[3] Olympia, WA (AP). Report: 94% of COVID-19 deaths among not fully vaccinated, 7/30/2021. Retrieved from: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/955761?src=WNL_mdpls_210806_mscpedit_wir&uac=81725MZ&spon=17&impID=3551586&faf=1

[4]Kalter, L. 2021. US hits 70% of adults with at least one vaccine dose, Web MD Health News, 8/2/2021. Retrieved from: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/955884?src=WNL_mdpls_210806_mscpedit_wir&uac=81725MZ&spon=17&impID=3551586&faf=1,

#COVID-19 #covax initiative #pandemic fatigue #vaccination

0 notes

orbemnews · 3 years

Link

In Colombia's protests, pandemic pressures collide with an existential reckoning for police According to Temblores, a Colombian NGO tracking alleged police abuses, there have been over 1,800 cases of police violence since the marches began on April 28, along with numerous incidents of policemen firing tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters that have gone viral on social media. The data is based on a compilation of media reports. The US-based Open Society Foundations are among Temblores’ financial supporters. Officers of the Colombian National Police were involved in the death of at least 11 protesters in the last seven days, according to the country’s interior minister Daniel Palacios, who told CNN that at least three arrest warrants have been issued for officers involved in the deaths. At the same time, the police have been targeted by groups of violent rioters, with 25 police stations attacked since the protests began, according to the Colombian ombudsman’s office. In one case, protesters set fire to a police station in Bogota with at least 10 officers trapped inside. The images captured then went viral and triggered another debate between those defending the police and those asking for deep reforms within the body. Violent confrontations between the Colombian police and protesters have erupted before: Just last year, dozens of police stations in Bogota were vandalized in September in another wave of protests against police violence, a tragic episode in which at least 13 people died. The roots of this conflict run into Colombia’s past, tapping into both the strain of the recent Covid-19 pressures, and the country’s long history of conflict. Zealous lockdown enforcers In Colombia, the pandemic has impacted everyone’s finances: from informal workers who were not allowed to work, to those who lost their job to the finances of the state itself. Colombia’s debt shot up 20 billion USD in five months under the lockdown, putting pressure on the government to increase revenues through taxes. Meanwhile, unemployment almost doubled between March and June last year as a result of the lockdowns. While the loss of jobs eased after the peak of the crisis, as of March this year, some 16.8% of workers in the 13 largest cities and metro areas were without a job: 3.4 percent points more than in March 2020. That’s about half-a-million more people unemployed year-over-year, according to DANE, the government’s statistics agency. Colombia’s months-long lockdown last year hit lower income classes and informal workers particularly hard. And the unpopular role of enforcing the lockdown largely fell onto the police, who were often the only state institution present in the small villages of rural Colombia and the vast slums surrounding the main metropolitan areas. While social services and civic institutions had to close and work remotely, the police became the visible face of irksome restrictions imposed, including curfews, bans on alcohol sales and fines to the transgressors. Heavy fines have exacerbated antipathy toward the police, especially among citizens with less means. Between March 2020 and April 2021, the Colombian police issued 2.5 million fines for breaking quarantine orders (about 6,400 per day) — roughly equivalent to the number of Covid-19 cases reported in Colombia over that period. A legacy of war The bitter tensions of the pandemic have also collided with a broader existential reckoning for Colombia’s police. The South American nation was at war for most of the last half of the 20th century, as the government squared off against left-wing insurgents in cities and rural areas, right-wing paramilitary, and some of the most powerful drug cartels in the world, which in turn made competing alliances with either the guerrillas or the paramilitary. Progress toward peace in urban areas began around the turn of the century, culminating in 2016 when, following a landmark peace agreement with the government, the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) demilitarized and mostly entered civil life, mostly ending five long decades of continuous armed insurrection in the Colombian countryside. The Liberation National Army (ELN) guerrilla is still disrupting life in parts of the countryside, but the demobilization of FARC’s core elements has changed the dynamic of the insurgency. That era shaped the police’s role in the country, as the government prioritized bringing narco kingpins to justice and enforcing the rule of law in conflict zones. The Colombian police, for example, were pulled into the Ministry of Defense during this period, rather than the Interior or Justice, as is typical in most other countries. In Colombia, the police are not part of the Armed Forces like the Army, Navy and Air Force, though they do work closely together and are termed fuerza publica, security forces. But if this arrangement made sense for a country at war, it is less relevant now. “What we’re seeing now is a reflection of the fact that we haven’t had this moment of reckoning about what does it look like to have security forces in a country that is no longer at war?” says Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombian analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think-tank that specializes on the legacy of the peace agreements. During the civil war, Colombia’s security forces were considered a unifying element for the country, which helped to shield them from greater accountability to civil society. But that’s no longer the case. According to the Special Peace Court charged with investigating the crimes committed during the war — part of the terms of the 2016 peace agreements — 6,402 Colombians were murdered by security forces in order to boost war killing tallies between 2002 and 2008, a scandal collectively known as “false positives” which has become a rallying cry for the disaffected. The transition to peace has meant such crimes can now be investigated — and that the security forces are facing unprecedented scrutiny. As Dickson put it, “Something that the street is really calling for is a signal that civilian authorities are able to hold accountable the police and the military for misconduct.” Source link Orbem News #collide #Colombias #Existential #Pandemic #Police #Pressures #protests #Reckoning

0 notes

aseriesofthrills · 3 years

Text

Suzie Is Back

Suzie is back, and so are long, overly emotional, rambling posts.

I matched with Suzie mid-October 2020. Caileigh and I had broken up earlier that summer after 3.5 years together, and my plan was to take some time off dating to “figure myself out.” Caileigh was the first person I ever dated, so I thought being single and out at the same time - for the first time - was a necessary step in figuring out my identity as an individual. Well, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there’s this big thing called a Global Pandemic going on that’s forcing us all to choose between our physical health and a social life. Put simply, I was lonelier than America’s Dad Tom Hanks on a deserted island before he found Wilson. Or maybe even lonelier than America’s Dad Tom Hanks after he struck up a friendship with Wilson, because after all, Wilson was a volleyball. I wanted to find my Wilson.

And boy did I find a lot of Wilsons. Unfortunately for me, I found a lot of off-brand Wilsons that were the wrong color, didn’t hold air well, or came out of the box with fabric missing. This is not to say these Wilsons are undesirable. I’m sure any of them would provide solid companionship to the next unfortunate soul whose fallen plane renders them a castaway. They were just not for me.

There was Emily, someone who I had strong feelings for and made me realize I’d really like to date someone who’s also Jewish. I was wowed by her philanthropic agenda of making candles and donating half the proceeds, until she did a very gay thing™ and got back with her ex, which was when I began to wish I instead had simply donated that $100 directly to charity and didn’t have to stare at her Tender Flame (more like Tinder Flame, amirite) candles sprinkled around my house. Looking back, we really were not compatible. Emily taught me that just because you have good banter with someone and a shared belief system, it doesn’t mean you wont clink teeth when you make out for the first time. It might even mean she will be extremely silent while you go down on her for what feels like hours, then not reciprocate because she is… probably thinking about getting back with her ex.

Then there was MK, someone who I’d actually met once before at a Hollywood Ladies Drinks Night Before The World Shut Down We Used To Have It So Good Oh My God. I remember wondering that night if she might be queer, but my gaydar couldn’t figure her out and I was in a relationship so it was a moot point anyway. I was hesitant to send her a “like” on Hinge because what if she didn’t feel the same way and then I ran into her at a work thing in 2023 and she KNOWS I liked HER but we BOTH know SHE didn’t like me BACK and -

It took me 3 seconds to get over that existential crisis because I remembered that thousands of people were dying every day and nothing actually mattered. So I liked one of her photos, and she matched with me in literally 4 minutes. I normally like to talk to someone for at least a few weeks - pandemic or not - before meeting in person, but she almost immediately suggested getting together the following weekend. Maybe that’s just her, or maybe she felt confident that I’m most likely not a serial killer since we have mutual friends, but she went for it and I agreed because I hadn’t yet figured out how to assert my own boundaries. But also, why not. It was just a picnic.

It was not just a picnic. It was a picnic conveniently a few blocks from her apartment. It was a picnic and then it was dinner and sex. I enjoyed spending time together at first, but the more we talked and hung out the more my feelings dissipated. In the middle stretch I thought for a second that I had perhaps cracked the mythical Friends With Benefits code, but after a few more dates I realized the code was far more complicated than I’d originally anticipated and what I thought was the treasure map key was actually just meaningless hieroglyphics and OK I will stop this metaphor now. It was time to take the high road and be honest, which for me manifested in telling her I was going to quarantine the next 2 weeks before flying home so this would be the last time I saw her before 2021 and we should check in when we’re back in LA in January - and then I texted her once I got to Florida to say lets just be friends. Not my proudest moment, but we’re learning.

There were a few other short-lived dalliances, but we all have places to go and people to see (from a distance). Just know I somehow managed to make the Pandemic Year my own personal Slut Year. And we’re using the term slut lovingly, simply to describe that 2020 was the year I managed to sleep with more people than any year prior. Tell me I can’t do something, then watch me work.

If you pay attention to detail, as I’m sure my 2 consistent followers do, you’ll remember Suzie and I matched mid-October which was in the midst of my MK chronicles. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was lovestruck by Suzie just from her Hinge profile and pictures. I don’t mean like, “Oh, she’s pretty, I hope she likes me back.” I mean like, something happened to my brain immediately that can only be described as some version of virtual pheromones invading my bloodstream. It felt uncontrollable and biological. And if we learned anything from Dr. Fauci this year, it’s that science knows best. The first real conversation we had - meaning that sweet sweet moment someone on a dating app finally admits that they, too, were looking at the app at the very same moment you messaged them - felt engaging and electric and right. At the end of the conversation I gave her my number and she immediately texted me “Talk to you tomorrow *kissy emoji*,” which probably made me precum.

What ensued was months of talking every day. I’ll drone on for paragraphs if I let myself, so I’m not going to let myself. I’ll just say for a while it felt amazing. I liked her so deeply. It took us a good stretch of time before we broached the subject of seeing each other in person, but then a combination of her horrific time management skills (her words), a potential Covid exposure, and a highly contentious presidential election got in the way and lead us down a windy path ultimately culminating in a Zoom first date… a week and a half before I was supposed to fly home for 2 months. The Zoom date was everything I hoped it would be and more. I’d never felt more sad to click “End Meeting For All” but was too giddy to notice. She asked me about my holiday plans, so I told her about my impending travel, and then she more or less said we should have sex before I go. So we did. And it was the best sex of my life. And then I left the state of California, our mutual residence, for 2 months.

Things were somewhat fine at first - we were still talking every day, with a few more Zooms sprinkled in - but then she went home to New Jersey, and suddenly we weren’t talking every day. It was more like every 3-4 days and rarely in actual conversational form. It was more like me waiting for her to reply, then waiting to respond since she’d waited so long, then we’d do it all over again. I felt anxious and tortured and dejected and had no appetite and my mom asked me on more than one occasion if I was ok. I was not ok. But I told myself to bE cHiLL, something that is often diametrically opposed to my natural state of being. I reminded myself that, despite the fact that we had spoken every day for 2 months - which is practically one step away from engagement in LesbianLand - we had only had one in-person date. I was careful to not make It seem more serious than It was, so instead I workshopped a lot of dramatic WHAT ARE WE? texts that I sent to all of my friends and never to Suzie.

We had mutually agreed upon “See you in January,” so I told myself I’d just ask her to hang out when we got back. Then she postponed her flight to LA for 2 more weeks because our Covid numbers were at a scary peak, the worst it had been since the beginning of the Pandemi Lovato. Finally she told me she’d rebooked her flight for the 15th, and I optimistically thought to myself, “You simply don’t tell someone the exact day you’re getting back into town if you don’t plan on seeing them! Right?” Wrong. I shot my shot, and she shot me down. She replied with a long series of texts explaining that her mental health wasn’t in a good place, and she couldn’t be accountable for communicating effectively. She sprinkled in some compliments for good measure, making sure to take a pit stop in “I think you are so wonderful so please don’t think this has anything to do with you” Town, which was reassuring but did not override my brain’s instinct to rethink everything I’d done and said the past few months. But I felt connected to her on a human level, and I didn’t want to lose that simply because she didn’t want to bump butts anymore, so I suggested we be friends and she enthusiastically agreed. End of conversation.

Until later that night, when she texted me Greetings after landing at LAX. I was confused, but I assumed that just meant she was taking me at my word, and this friendship started n.o.w. What followed was some of the most perplexing behavior I’ve witnessed as a living person and hands down the most confounding I’ve ever experienced in my dating career. She’d text me about a new vibrator she bought, or send me a song link then simply “heart” my response and be done with the exchange. It felt like she was just reminding me she existed, as if my small brain could forget. Sometimes she’d ask me how I was doing and we’d have semblances of a real friendship, but other times she’d tell me that I’m SO HOT or send me DMs of a sexy Phoebe Bridgers photo or a Normal People instagram post of Connell telling Marianne she’s pretty. Somewhere in the middle of all that my patient friend Caroline finally hit me with some tough love and told me I needed to block Suzie’s number and hide her on social media. For all intents and purposes, Suzie couldn’t exist anymore. Caroline was right, but I couldn’t do it, so I compromised that for the next week I wouldn’t reach out to Suzie first. Caroline told me “Alcoholics have to quit cold turkey, they don’t get to say well I drink on the weekends” but I decided I was simply not able to do anything more drastic than not text this freshly 25 year old girl who was slowly unraveling my emotional stability first for a week.

You will not believe this but I survived the week and actually felt better, so I did it again the next week. And the next. And the next. Until it had been a month and I hadn’t reached out to Suzie first. She was still texting and DMing me, but I felt my feelings finally waning! Gone were the days of finding her high school ex-boyfriend’s blog in the depths of the internet or looking her up on Venmo to see who she’d gotten Chipotle with the night before. I absolutely still liked her - those fucking pheromones are relentless - but it felt less fresh, so I started to formulate a plan. Once I felt FULLY (lol) over her, I’d text her the next time I was horny. Best case scenario she’d come over, worst case scenario she’d be so disgusted or insulted that she’d never want to talk to me again and I’d actually get over her, not pretend-get-over-her-so-I-could-trick-myself-into-safely-bootycalling-her. But then she sent me potentially the most flirtatious message yet, and I took my opening at 12:53p on a Wednesday and simply said “when are you going to fuck me.” She fucked me that Saturday night.

So. Suzie is back, and Saturday night (and Sunday morning, *wink* she slept over) was great. But now it’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad again, to borrow some words from Judith Viorst.

How we left things this time is that she does want to see me again, but it can’t be a talk-everyday-thing because she’s ~bUsY* and moving to NYC this summer anyway for grad school (did I forget to mention that? Oops!) and for whatever other reasons that exist that are preventing her from being obsessed with me. She asked what my boundaries and needs are too, and both her actions and words that night really felt clear that she still liked me. I asked if she thought she’d ever see me again. There are some things you really can only ask while cuddling post-sex, and that’s one of them. She paused and said yes. She explained the context around her poor communication and that she never wanted to stop talking to or seeing me, and the way she was holding me felt like she was feeling just as connected to me as I was to her. You can tell when someone just isn’t there with you, and this was not that. We were both right there.

But we were also right back to there being a power imbalance between us. There’s no escaping the fact that this is really on her terms in its present configuration. Our best plan was to promise to be honest moving forward, which felt like it had a lot of potential at the time, but it turns out being honest is hard. Things sort of reverted back to how they were, except with all of my feelings and expectations that I’d worked hard to push down rushing back to take their place on the frontlines of my brain.

It’s been almost 2 weeks, and we’ve talked a few times every 2-4 days. I’m fighting the urge to memorialize exactly what’s transpired, but there’s simply no use in holding onto the details. What finally made all of these not-at-all latent emotions bubble up to the surface and inspired this Intense Feelings Word Vomit is two pronged. First, because I love to torture myself, sometimes I look at Suzie’s Hinge profile to see if she’s changed anything. For some reason, if it stays the same, I feel safe that she’s not seeking out anyone else but me. Which is somewhat logical but also farcical in this particular situation, and I fully understand that. I guess I was really wanting to invite some pain into my life tonight, because even after she texted me yesterday and then proceeded to stretch a very short conversation into something that still is in limbo, I decided it would be fruitful to check her Hinge profile. I’m here to report that all 3 of her prompt questions & answers were different. And readers, I had previously checked it recently enough to know this was a very fresh edit.

The second thing that pushed my feelings over the top, out of my mouth, and directly onto my keyboard is that when she finally texted me back at like 11:30pm, she seemed to entirely brush over two clear attempts, in my opinion, at relaying that I’d like to see her again. And that feels not good. My instinct is to tell myself that maybe my comments weren’t as overt as I first believed them to be, but I think that’s a thinly veiled excuse and a defense mechanism. If someone wants to see you, they will.

I’m almost certain (I am certain) all of my friends - ALL of them! I have A LOT! - are up to their eyeballs in Suzie-flavored-shit, so before writing this I must admit I did the loneliest thing of all: instead of being honest and sharing my feelings directly with her, I texted them… to myself. Raw, unedited emotions that I hope to never re-read one day but probably will and when I do I sure hope I’m in a healthier place and can laugh about it and think about How Far I’ve Come.

The truth is, I’m sitting here all over again picturing the dates I could take her on (the Carlsbad Flower Fields), what restaurants she should experience before leaving LA (Pace), and what fun at-home activities I could plan for us before the world fully returns to a post-Covid society (the DIY pottery kit I bought for myself, fully aware she loves to make clay art). Dare I admit I even daydream about the cross-country road trip that I’ll offer to accompany her on when she moves back East. I look at the contents in my fridge and think, “Maybe I wont use that ingredient tonight in case I need it to make us dinner next time she comes over.” I was ready to plan trying to get vaccinated this weekend around her availability, which is actually insane. You look up simp in the dictionary, and there I am. I took the crumb she gave me and turned it into a huge fucking Mrs. Fields birthday cookie cake that serves 20. No wonder I feel sick.

Unless I’m entirely miscalculating, which I can safely say I am not, Suzie is not sitting in her home thinking the same about me. I think she does like me - I have to allow myself to believe she does, because she said she does, and if I don’t believe it now I never will - but I also have to admit that 6 months into this game of Suzie Mental Gymnastics, I can recognize that all signs are pointing directly to the fact that I like her far more than she likes me. I don’t say that as a form of self-flagellation; it’s just a fact that I need to finally accept. Not just accept, but also let go of the possibility that it’s going to change. That’s the hardest part. I naively thought we were getting back on the ride again, and I buckled up for what turned out to be just a detour.

It can feel nearly impossible to pull yourself away from someone, especially when it feels like their claws are deeply embedded in your brain and your heart. That sounds wildly dramatic, but it is genuinely how I feel. What’s doubly hard is being able to trust my own instincts. I can get attached very quickly, and then it’s almost indecipherable whether someone is actually mistreating me or if my unrealistic expectations don’t allow the other person a chance to actually meet them. This whole essay could potentially be described as an overreaction, but the more I think about it, the more confident I feel in the validity of my feelings. Even if part of the issue is setting my expectations too high, the bigger issue is how I’m being treated. Suzie and I did agree on a low-pressure situation, but it doesn’t take much more than the bare minimum effort to consider another person’s feelings. And I don’t think my feelings are being considered all too much.

Not that Suzie ever really left my life in a real way, but I’m starting to think she came “back” for me to get a second chance at prioritizing my boundaries, my feelings, myself. I don’t want to overreact and call a party foul too soon, but perhaps I need to readjust my idea of what constitutes too soon. After all, maybe it was a mistake to not have asked for clarity sooner the first time. It would have probably allowed me to enjoy my time at home with family more and saved my brain a heck of a lot of overtime I am still saving up to pay. A not-no doesn’t mean a yes, and waiting does not change the outcome. It’s a natural reaction to hold on tighter to someone while loosening your grip on your own needs when you feel them pulling away, but it’s often something you can’t stop from happening. And that’s a tough pill to swallow. Sometimes you have to assert your needs when they’re not being met and watch things fall apart, not because you have those needs but in spite of them. You start again. I will start again.

0 notes

dipulb3 · 3 years

Text

Opinion: This town powered America for decades. What do we owe them?

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/opinion-this-town-powered-america-for-decades-what-do-we-owe-them/

Opinion: This town powered America for decades. What do we owe them?

Moving away from coal is essential to fighting back against worsening droughts, storms and sea-level rise around the world. That fight will only get harder if America keeps burning coal.

I drove here in January after Steve Gray, a 56-year-old resident who’s been laid off from both the coal and oil industries in northeastern Wyoming, left Appradab a voicemail after the 2020 presidential election. I’ve been exploring your questions about the climate crisis as part of an ongoing series for Appradab Opinion, and Gray’s message seemed to bring up some of the toughest questions concerning what must be a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.

“Everybody in this town is afraid that it is going to become a ghost town,” he said.

Implicitly, Gray seemed to be asking: What will happen to Gillette — and other fossil fuel towns — as the coal industry recedes and clean-energy goals are realized? And what difference could the Biden administration or Congress make for a dying town built on coal?

Climate advocates tend to lump solutions to all of these issues under an umbrella term: “just transition.” Not like, “just get on with this transition already.” “Just” as in fair.

Gray, the man who called Appradab, doesn’t see anything fair about it.

“People are getting left behind,” he told me.

He and others I met in Gillette want the rest of the country to realize that they’ve worked hard, for decades, to supply the United States with electricity. They didn’t own the companies that got rich off the boom in coal and other fossil fuels — companies that hid research showing the disastrous effects of climate change, or that funded disinformation campaigns.

They were just working.

Working in an industry created by federal policies that failed to price carbon pollution — that encouraged the mining of coal on land owned by the US government.

And now they’re being asked to stop.

Both by markets, which value cheaper energy sources.

And, importantly, by climate advocates like myself, who understand, based on science that’s been amassing for decades, that global warming poses an existential threat to humanity.

What do we owe Gillette and its workers?

Boomtown

There’s an important irony hidden in the story of Gillette.

The US government willed much of this place into existence.

This nudge came in a few forms. One was federal support for domestic energy production in the early 1970s — a time when overseas markets were seen as volatile and problematic.

Another was environmental regulation.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 and its 1990 amendments targeted, among other pollutants, sulfur dioxide, which is a component of smog and acid rain. Powder River Basin coal just so happens to be naturally lower in sulfur than coal found in Appalachia and elsewhere.

Before 1970, there were a few coal mines and oil rigs in the Gillette area, Robert Henning, director of a local history museum, the Campbell County Rockpile Museum, told me. We were standing in front of a wall-sized image of 1920s Gillette, which had the look of a sepia-tone Western outpost — a dusty landscape with wooden fences and magnificent rolling hills on the horizon. Gillette was founded in the late 1800s as a railroad town — named for a surveyor. But after 1970 and the Clean Air Act, Henning told me, the then-localized mining industry exploded.

In 1960, the population of Campbell County, which includes Gillette, was about 5,800.

By 1970, it had more than doubled — to nearly 13,000.

During the boom, the town was so crowded and chaotic that some families lived in tents, said Jim Ford, a Gillette resident who advises local government agencies and non-profits on economic and energy issues. Ford told me that when he was a child, his elementary school adopted a two-shift schedule to accommodate all the students. One group started at 6:00 AM and went until noon. Then the other started, ending at 6:00 p.m.

Steve Gray told me that his family was one of the ones that came to the region to work in the fossil fuel industry in the early 1970s. His dad worked in the oil fields, and so did Gray, at least for a time.

That was when life was good. Work was free-flowing. Wages were high.

The coal in the Powder River Basin sits near the surface and is mined with giant trucks carrying shovels so big you can fit a large family inside. The scale of the operation is difficult to comprehend. “Our largest mine is roughly 90 square miles,” said Shannon Anderson, staff attorney at the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental group.

These mines grew and grew.

But any boomtown worker knows that kind of growth can’t last forever.

‘The economy just collapsed’

The year 2016 — that was the worst of it, according to the mayor.

That was when the “economy just collapsed.”

“The energy industries always have been boom-and-bust, but this was a big one,” said Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King, who keeps an image of her father, who also was mayor of Gillette, hanging behind her desk. Her roots in the community are deep, and her husband works in coal. From her office window, you can see one of two coal-fired power-plants puffing smoke into the sky. “It was like a perfect storm because oil went down, coal went down, natural gas — everything.” The bust was caused primarily by lower natural gas and renewable energy prices, less demand from coal-fired power plants, which continue to close, and concerns about climate-change regulations, according to economists.

Most of the coal mined near Gillette sits on public land, meaning that the state government collects royalty payments and other taxes on its production. Wyoming doesn’t have a state income tax and its property and sales taxes are notoriously low. Many years, well over half of the state’s tax revenue comes from the coal, oil and gas industries.

After the bust, Carter-King said she knew Gillette would have rethink everything.

Gray told me that his call to Appradab was influenced by how things fell apart with the oil and coal industries shortly before and after 2016, the year US voters elected President Donald Trump — who’d promised to bring back “beautiful, clean coal.” Nearly 90% of Campbell County residents voted for Trump again in 2020. But you won’t find too many people in Gillette who believe Trump kept his promises to coal workers — or that it was even possible to keep them.

Wyoming coal production peaked in 2008 at 468 million short tons, according to the US Energy Information Administration. By 2016, it was 297 million tons, creeping down to 277 million in 2019, nearing the end of Trump’s term. Last year’s figures are not yet available, but the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on demand for energy is known to have contributed to widespread collapse in the energy industry.

Gray says he was laid off from an oil field job in 2015, then subsequently from another job in oil and then one in coal last year. His wife left him shortly after the first layoff, he said.

These days, Gray is working again, driving railroad workers to and from job sites — part of a broader industry that supports the mines and fossil fuels. (Mayor Carter-King estimates most people’s jobs in Gillette are linked to coal and other fossil fuel industries — whether directly or indirectly). But Gray said that he’s eaten through his savings.

My “bank accounts were drained — lost my house, all the repossessions,” he said.

“It was tough.”

He’s living on the razor-thin margins of a bust economy.

‘The coal industry’s on its last leg’

Here’s an inconvenient truth: Towns like Gillette tend to fail.

I asked economists, environmentalists and policy experts. None could provide a sunny case study — the story of a town whose main industry didn’t take the initiative to remake itself.

“There’s not a sterling example,” said Jake Higdon, a senior US climate policy analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund who has contributed to several reports on fossil fuel communities.

Timber towns, auto towns, military town, mining towns — the logical progression is toward “ghost town” status if the town isn’t big enough, or industries aren’t diverse enough.

In even trying to rebuild, then, Gillette aims to do something unprecedented.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. “Maybe our chances of remaking our community in a generation — so my kids have something to come back to — are 10%,” said Ford, the county consultant. “But I know if we don’t try, the chances are zero.”

On a recent snowy morning, I dropped by Lula Belle’s Café — “non-smoking as of 4/1/2020” — near the railyard in Gillette. It’s a welcoming, chatty kind of place — fruit pies on display behind the diner counter. I wanted to learn whether people here were in denial about coal’s demise.

“Will the mines bounce back? No,” said Doug Wood, a retired coal miner with a mustache that’s twirls at the tips. “The coal industry’s kind of on its last leg.”

What’s next then?

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with a TV show called ‘The Jetsons?'”

I found that sentiment — the coal part, not the Jetsons — to be a common refrain in Gillette. Frankly, I was stunned by the degree to which the mayor, county development officials and people like Gray accept the unsettling facts of coal’s decline.

Phil Christopherson, CEO of Energy Capital Economic Development, a local non-profit that’s funded by industry as well as city and county government, told me that he hopes children who are growing up in Gillette 50 years from now won’t even know that this was a coal town.

“It’s going to be a tough transition for this community,” Christopherson said, “and we’re doing our best to prepare for that, so we still have a community here in five, 10 or 50 years.”

Carbon Valley

Yet, Gillette remains conflicted.

While claiming it wants something new, local and state leadership continues to push coal products and technologies — many of them expensive and unproven — as the future.

You’ll hear some people calling Gillette “Carbon Valley” — as in the Silicon Valley of coal. Coal research, they say, is what’s next. As are new and supposedly cleaner uses for coal.

One such project, called the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, or ITC, sits at the base of a coal-fired power plant — painted blue and white as if it might blend into the sky.

Jason Begger, the project’s managing director, told me to think of the site as an “RV park” for researchers interested in capturing carbon-dioxide pollution from the power plant and doing something else with it — potentially “sequestering” the gas deep in the rock underfoot.

The idea is that if most of that CO2 pollution is captured and stored away somewhere, coal can keep burning, because it wouldn’t contribute heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. It’s reasonable to place some hope in the technology given the fact that carbon pollution needs to reach “net zero” by about 2050 in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. But carbon-capture and storage has proven to be costly and troublesome compared to alternatives.

Begger told me the world needs to recalibrate its expectations.

“I have a 2-year-old daughter, and it’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, in 20 years, she’ll be in the Olympics,” he said. “We [would] have to see if she can crawl and walk” before signing her up for the Olympics.

The state has been trying coal-spending technology for years, said Anderson, the environmentalist, with little to no results. She says she remains “very skeptical” of it — as do I.

Wyoming, meanwhile, also has some of the nation’s greatest potential for wind energy, according to the American Clean Power Association, an industry group. PacifiCorp, the massive power company that is retiring some of its coal power plants in Wyoming, recently opened a large wind farm — 520 megawatts, enough to power about 150,000 homes, according to Laine Anderson, the company’s director of wind operations — about an hour-and-a-half drive south of Gillette.

Yet, Wyoming is a rare state that also taxes wind power — rather than incentivizing its production as a much-needed clean energy source.

“Wyoming’s leaders have done little to pivot our state’s economy away from this volatile industry,” the Casper Star-Tribune’s editorial board wrote of coal in 2019.

Just transition

Perhaps Gillette is less a place of contradictions than one of surprises.

Steve Gray lives in a small apartment complex near the highway. He answered the door on a recent blizzardy morning wearing a denim, pearl-snap shirt and fuzzy red slippers.

After his layoffs from the oil and coal industries, he lost the house he shared with his ex-wife and son, who is now 25. For a while, he moved back in with his father. But now here’s here, and when he welcomes you in you can feel the pride he takes in the place.

On the living room walls are the portraits he’s taken with his son, an oil field worker in a community south of Gillette, and Steve’s grandchildren. In these photos, Steve wears his trademark cowboy hat, a broomstick mustache and a contented grandfather’s grin.

Nearby, you’ll find the military honors — a Purple Heart and Bronze Star — bestowed on his elder relatives. Gray says he, too, served in the Navy and he values service to country.

It’s hard to talk here about a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers — as if any transition for workers in dying US industries ever has been “just.” Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which aims to unite labor and environmental interests around the issue of a transition for dislocated fossil fuel workers, told me there’s no justice in what happened to auto workers or timber workers — or in what’s happening to fossil fuel workers now.

“We are insisting that policy makers pay attention,” Walsh said. “It is not acceptable to leave any workers or any communities behind. We have an obligation to fulfill to workers and communities that have powered this country for generations and have often paid a very stiff price in terms of the health of their environments and their people and their workers.”

I agree with that sentiment. In seeking a transition away from fossil fuels — which, again, is required by science if we want to continue living on a habitable planet — we must learn from the mistakes of the past. That’s the only way America can inch closer toward justice.

Among history’s lessons, according to Walsh: The investments must be bigger than before.

Walsh advised the Obama administration on a grants program — called the POWER+ Plan — that aimed to help diversify the economies of coal towns in the Appalachian Mountains.

That program and others failed to fully address the full needs of these communities, according to policy experts I interviewed. But there’s a consensus emerging on what’s needed now, including: job retraining, community college investments, wage replacement, healthcare extensions, pension extensions — and jobs that help repair land scarred from decades of intensive mining. Advocates are, smartly, in my view, pushing the White House to create an office focused on this economic transition — assisting fossil fuel communities and creating new jobs, according to advocates involved in these efforts.

Colorado recently took a step in this direction by creating an Office of Just Transition. Wyoming and other fossil-fuel states should do the same. And, importantly, it would be wise of the Biden administration to make good on its campaign promises to fight climate change aggressively — getting to “net zero” emissions as soon as possible — while also creating jobs.

Their focus should be on struggling towns like Gillette.

Listening to them — and helping — could be both a political and moral victory.

Wyoming is a state as red as they come.

President Joe Biden and the Democrats who now control Congress could earn respect, if not votes, for telling coal country the truth — that coal must be phased out of the national energy mix, but that workers will not be left behind. That means they should get job training, health care, wage replacement and, when possible, jobs in the new industries that are popping up to replace fossil fuels. This suite of policy solutions is complex, but they must be taken seriously, and the discussion must forward the voices of fossil-fuel workers. Workers need to know that climate advocates respect and support them before we can move forward.

This requires risk.

It requires trust.

That’s something Gray showed when he reached across cultural lines to call Appradab.

“I figured, well, yeah, I’m going to call. I’ll never get any return, but it’ll make me feel better, you know?” Gray said. “I just — I’m kind of glad that you guys did contact me.”

The Biden administration should answer the call, too.

0 notes