A Gas Story

The Eighth Cardinal Sin Must Be the Pursuit of Happiness
Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24"

For the past two weeks I have been losing sleep and ramping up my anxiety because our furnace is malfunctioning. They call it “short cycling” in the business. Which means it goes through the motions of starting up, makes all the right sounds, even turns the blower on to circulate air throughout the house. But it’s cold air, because the gas failed to ignite. After a couple minutes, a safety sensor shuts down the furnace and starts it up again five minutes later. It will repeat the process a few more times, and if ignition continues to fail, the furnace will shut down completely until it is manually manipulated.

Which is what I do in the middle of the night, when I wake up with a chill. I have the flashlight and screwdriver set by the bed. The first time this happened I took off the hose that drains the condensate and flushed out the wet dust bunnies and cat-human hair that tends to clump and block the flow. This seemed to be the fix, for the rest of the day anyway, until 3:00 a.m. the next morning when I woke up with the chills again. This time I turned the thermostat way down low, switched off the power, unscrewed the cover doors, and stood by the furnace for five minutes praying to the god of houses and heat to wake up and stoke the fire. Then I replaced the doors, switched on the electricity, and upped the dial on the thermostat. Wonderful warm air blowing out the vents. Then back to restless sleep to wait for it to happen again.

It will work fine throughout the day, with or without my anxiety, until bedtime. This is the routine. It’s a long story, but there’s a reason I won’t call the technicians. They gave me the runaround this same month two years ago, trouble-shooting, changing switches, cleaning sensors, charging a couple hundred bucks, and saying all looked fine. Until the middle of the night when it shut down again. And again. I don’t call them anymore, especially with coronavirus on the prowl. Don’t need professionals to tell me I have a fickle furnace. Don’t need COVID and a loss of a couple hundred bucks to not fix a problem.

I don’t think we need gas either, but that’s just because I’m crazy to think so. All this anxiety over a gas furnace. My ancestors survived without one. Some were quite able to maintain a sense of humor while chattering enamel off teeth on cold December mornings. The successful ones managed to eat and make babies because here I am. In 1851, my 3X Great Grandpa, William the Farmer, had a house with five people, and a woodburning stove and fireplace to heat it. And they all lived! Several hundred years before William, Throops of England and Rizzos of Italy (lines of patronym) had stone fireplaces. Five thousand years ago, a community fire in the clan circle kept the stories coming, even if the heat wasn’t so efficient. Forty thousand years before that, a fire got lit in the forest any night folks had to cook their kill and/or not freeze to death.

Of course we don’t have the wood to heat our enormous indoor spaces, cars, airplanes, space rockets, and favorite Chinese take-out franchises. Even if wood was rapidly renewable, it is so much less efficient than burning coal, gas, and oil. And the efficient methods (wind, solar, geothermal) burn countless tons of fossil fuels in their creation, and re-creation (not to mention disasters in mining and disposal of waste). Our problem is how we live, why we live this way, and who says it must be so. All popular methods and measures for living in the modern age are raising global temperatures. So much chatter about sustainability, so many important people paying lip service to the doom of global warming, yet all are mute on what needs to be said.

And that is this:

We must be forced, not persuaded, to cut off nine parts of our carbon footprint. Within a year, not twenty. Yes the economy must be crippled. Yes, nation-states with their enormous democracies must die. Majority rule will never vote to reduce fossil fuel use to pre-industrial levels, which needs to happen now to retard the effects of the sixth extinction. Who do you know who would voluntarily load up his or her Corolla® with nearly everything and drive it into a pit, just to save a million-billion species (and perhaps its own) from extinction? We can’t even stop shopping at dollar stores run by the Sino-American plastic nonsense cartel. Having a birthday party? Dollar General® has an all year sale on streamer rolls made in a China factory village, loaded onto trucks, then trains, then ships and sent round the world to be unloaded onto trains, then trucks and then shelves at Dollar General®. All for one dollar! The streamers could have been made with old paper, some crayons, love and a wee bit of talent, but Bill Gates needs to thrive for our great grandchildren to afford real estate at the north pole and gobble up any parrot or porcupine who felt the need to move there too.

Gaia is begging us for our own sake (and she never begs), to get with the program (followed by the rest of life), and act immediately. She gave us coronavirus to kick-start the effort. It is estimated that last year global CO2 emissions were reduced by 7%. Wow! We survived! And with our smartphones in tact. And also our cars, bowling alleys, jet airplanes, pork spareribs, satellite launches, Seattle brunches… All we had to do was let a virus turn down our knobs just a little bit. Nothing really changed. An extra valve opened for the boredom to flow in, that’s all. No longer could we eat out every night just because we felt like it (and were overpaid enough to afford to). Can you imagine the reduction in CO2 if plane travel was ended? There weren’t any planes in 1902, but there was Mark Twain, and trains (say that three times fast). How about eradicating the factory manufacture of place mats, decorative sconces, coffee mugs, ChapStick®? What if we outlawed everything we don’t need? I’ve read that food-related CO2 emissions would be reduced by 60% if the world became vegetarian by 2050. Also 68% of the world’s arable land would be freed up for agriculture. Divorce that animal husbandry! Vegetarian means you still get to eat cheese, which is awesome. Eggs too! What if the meaning of “to be human” metamorphosed from being “insatiable feeder of earth” to “conservator of life”. What if we didn’t have a choice, and either obliged or had our arms cut off and composted in fields?

Enter the Philosopher/Warrior King and Queen in possession of great climate wisdom. (Listen to Lou Reed to imagine the arms spread over lentil fields).

Nation-state politics must be abandoned. All the bipartisan political short-sightedness over coronavirus ensures that, as it pertains to the environment, the planet is doomed by democracy implementing status quo bureaucracy. I think we understand the problem, and cognitive dissonance forces us to push it out the door. If we can’t (won’t) collectively adjust to save our neighbor’s skin, then forget about preserving the continuity of oak trees and grandchildren. Powerful politicians and world leaders aren’t basing decisions on how they will effect junior’s asthma, let alone the next seven generations. They set the platforms and parameters of systems that the masses follow blindly, impotent to implement drastic change collectively. People are allowed to pick a side, although no side plans to upset dysfunctional homeostasis wrought by infectious greed. The banality of evil is not reserved solely to enormously influential ideaologue/demagogues controlling bureaucracies of the past. Modern democracy shall continue to ignore the dire warnings of science to satiate the wants of the very few while maintaining the normalities for everyone else. Even these dysfunctional, dystopic normalities we suffer day after day.

No one is innocent. No saints of the environment will be anointed. No Green New Deal can be successful wherever dried cereals are shipped over state lines to populations who have never experienced a world without General Mills, Inc®. There might be a Green New Deal for more jobs, but more jobs means more carbon, and leftover inhabitants of Miami floating in Hard Rock Stadium, post game. We need less jobs, not more. Less pets, less cheese, less wine, less status to dine. And we’re not gonna get that good news under the present political and economic systems. We need an Octavian or Octavia philosopher emperor to strip us of all rights while doing his or her best to preserve the dignities.

Last year, without our permission, a pesky, deadly virus dropped carbon emissions by 7%. You see, earth is giving back to earth by forcing human beings to slow down, scale back, and live with it. I cannot fix my furnace. There are moments during its malfunctioning that I don’t care if it ever gets fixed. I just want to acquire a little land and build an insulated hut, heat it with wood or jog in place, and gather some books to read. My wife and I live in too much house for two people. Last year we worked from home, and nine-tenths of the heated space remained unused 24/7. Big furnace heating most of a house for no one. Complication churns the ridiculous. We know we must cut back tremendously. But look left and right, look ahead and behind. Nobody else seems to sense the inevitable. The world tribe isn’t ready to give up the trinkets. There’s got to be a chief among us to take them from us. But how? And when? Next year is not soon enough.

I’m ready to relinquish false liberties to stabilize a climate. I’ll shut my mouth and turn the compost. I’ll sleep in the corner on a hot stone, and boil lake water before drinking. Maybe next round, Gaia will send us an emperor of climate wisdom, rather than a more deadly pathogen. Probably not. After coronavirus no longer posed a shutdown threat, everyone turned up the heat to party like it’s the end of the world.

I know it’s not much, but it is all I intend to do. I will keep a 100 mile radius awareness often but not always, avoiding purchase of any non-food product manufactured more than 100 miles away (I’ll try the same with food too when just mildly inconvenient). While waiting for the emperor, I’ll continue to hang my laundry out to dry when the temperature outside is above 50°F, drop my meat consumption by 75% and work toward a permanent vegetarianism (I don’t even know what that means).

This is more effort made than anyone else in my family has promised, and I’m sure many friends and acquaintances too. And I’ve thought enough about the problem to write about it, which means I probably worry about environmental catastrophe more often than my neighbors. And yet this is all I got to sacrifice, which is practically nothing plus a malfunctioning furnace I don’t need because I never had to live so large in a brief lifetime.

That’s my reality as an individual confronting the carbon crisis. And we should just forget about the collective power of democracy stepping up to solve big problems. There are three Dunkin’ Donuts drive-throughs in my little town, and some of the best people I know would make a secret deal with the devil to poison my groats if he would keep the wheels of Coolatta® machinery turning. If Gaia declares I’m not worthy to walk her back skin, as pitiful as my carbon footprint reduction is, one can imagine the dreadful plan she has for the rest of us put together.

In the meantime, while we wait for her next move, I’ll keep a record to leave to my descendants proving that fools never stop fooling themselves. Good clown stories will help fuel the clan fires of the future.

Damn! The furnace shut off again.