Maybe it's time to serve the turkey cold

When I was in my early 20’s, I wanted to quit smoking.  Like many smokers with an idea to quit, I first tried quitting cold Turkey.  No preparation, no planning, I just decided to stop all of a sudden.  And as it is for many other smokers with an idea to quit, it didn’t work.  It lasted a couple hours or a couple days, and then I was back to smoking the same amount I had been smoking before.  For it to finally stick, I had to quit gradually, methodically.  I needed a plan.

I started by identifying all the events and activities I labeled as the right time to smoke.  These included such notable daily activities as: after a meal, while waiting for a bus, to break from work, when someone else was smoking, getting in a car, getting out of a car, leaving a store, meeting a friend, and drinking coffee.  The list went on.  So I nixxed those from my routine one by one over several months.

Once I had given up all the times I smoked just for the ritual of it, I was down to about 3 a day.  Those were the cigarettes I smoked purely for the addiction, so if I could ween myself off those final few I could kick the habit for good.  Each morning I put 3 cigarettes into the pack I took with me out of the house.  A couple weeks later I put only two in the pack.  A few weeks after that it was only one.

The final cigarette took the longest to let go.  I usually smoked it before work, and at the time it felt a little like armor.  I was working telephone customer service at the IRS under a manager that was sometimes great and sometimes the opposite (depending on unknown forces that changed without warning).  It was a stressful time.  But after one long weekend, I woke up Tuesday morning to get ready for work and realized I had forgotten to smoke the entire weekend.  “I guess I’m done” I said, and that was that.

Quitting cold-Turkey didn’t work for me, but it does work for some people.  More importantly, I had the option to quit gradually because I had time.  My life was not in imminent danger from the effects of smoking, cigarettes were still available for purchase at a price I could afford, and my social circle did not ostracize people for either smoking or not smoking.  Whether it took me a week, a month, or two years, as long as I stopped smoking entirely, my health would fully recover before my body began breaking down due to age.

The same is not true for climate change.  The incremental measures countries have agreed to do not seem like enough to actually solve the problem or prevent certain doom.  To me it seems like more of the same strategy that has not yet worked: making big promises at conventions and then going home to give industries who got rich (and continue getting richer) from harming the environment many years, and even decades, to adapt and come up with more sustainable ways to exploit the earth and its inhabitants.

The problem isn't that we haven't promised big enough promises.  The problem is that we haven't delivered big enough solutions.  Maybe instead of a gradual and measured approach, we need something just as drastic as the issue we're attempting to solve.  Maybe we need to take action commensurate with the urgency of the environmental issue at hand.  Maybe we need to make using any fossil fuel illegal.  Like right now, today.  Quit cold Turkey.

It would be insane.  But we would figure it out.  Just like we figured out how to adapt to Covid lockdown when that was imposed all of a sudden with little warning and nearly no time to prepare.  Because that is what humans are best at: adapting to circumstance.  Granted, many people suffered during and because of Covid lockdown when we implemented it thoughtlessly.  But we’re already doing regular society poorly right now.  Millions of people suffer every day because our societal systems and structures were not designed to actually take care of people.  Maybe a full stop to fossil fuels would be the un-ignorable crisis government needs to actually try and things.

We have given private industry plenty of time to innovate and adapt their practices.  Some have: I now get soap and cleaning product refills from a company that arrive in compostable packaging.  I broke a spray bottle nozzle and they sent me a new one in exchange for me returning the broken one so they could recycle it responsibly.  Our laundry detergent comes in sheets from another company that uses no plastics, perfumes, or dyes.  It also shows up in compostable packaging and creates no waste.

Other companies, however, have squandered their decades of figure-it-out time.  Take the entire oil/gas industry.  Apparently at least ExxonMobil knew what they were doing to the planet in 1981.  As I sat listening to those industry leader's recent testimony to Congress, I was infuriated.  I heard them say with a straight face that we need petroleum power products because it’s going to take time to convert to other renewable sources of power...

And why haven’t we built that infrastructure yet?  Why weren’t we building that infrastructure since day 2 of knowing what the industry knew in 1981 and the scientific community apparently knew in the 1968?  Because the companies who control the resources and the wealth (which controls political power in this country) haven’t needed to.

So, good for Greta Thunberg.  Call those assholes out.  They talk a good talk at the climate conference, but they are also the ones who have been in power the last 30 years when we could and should have been doing something.   They are also the ones who won’t let go of their power now, so no one else can step in and sort things out.

For changes as sweeping as we desperately need, it seems like The Public won’t get our collective act together to throw all our effort and creative juices into a solution until there are no other options.  So maybe it's time to take away all those other options and make what we need to do the only choice.  We just need to also plan to feed and house and educate and heal everyone in the meantime while they learn a new skill, develop a new trade, start a new company, or spend their time making art and going to therapy.

I have recently hit some kind of wall, or crossed some kind of threshold, where I no longer care what people do with their time if offered financial freedom; I just want everyone to have it.  There is so much trauma in the world, historical, generational, and on-going.  Absolutely everyone has something that needs processing and healing.  If this current generation does nothing but heal and create a stable base for the folks that follow us into in the future, that will be an epic success for humanity.

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Information and Inspiration

• Oregon Health Authority: Ready. Set. Quit.
• United Nations News: COP26 closes with ‘compromise’ deal on climate, but it’s not enough, says UN chief
• New York Times: Oil Executives Grilled Over Industry’s Role in Climate Disinformation
• The Guardian: Oil industry knew of 'serious' climate concerns more than 45 years ago
• BBC: Greta Thunberg says 'many loopholes' in COP26 pact
• MIT Technology Review: Universal basic income is here—it just looks different from what you expected