Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet. Thank you to Sam Liptak for editing this morning’s post.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.
🍺 I wrote this on Sunday morning, a little worse for wear thanks to a couple late-night drinks — which I promise you is relevant for this post.
What if you could drink something to gain confidence, reduce anxiety, and feel happier? Well, lucky for you, that exists in the form of alcohol.
The catch, of course, is that those feelings are temporary. And tomorrow, you’ll not only lose these effects, but you’ll feel the exact opposite. Oh, and it may kill you.
Our relationship with alcohol says a lot about our tendency to favor short-term gains over long-term consequences. It also reminds me of our relationship with fossil fuels, which is essentially a century-long quest of prioritizing immediate rewards over the long-term health of our Planet.
Like alcohol, fossil fuels provide short-term gains by making our life better: Electricity and A/C; planes, trains, and automobiles; and even plastic, a fossil fuel-derived material found in everything from the MacBook I’m typing on to a pacemaker keeping someone alive.
But fossil fuels also have disastrous downsides: By burning oil and gas, we release greenhouse gasses that trap heat and warm the Planet. A warmer Planet means all sorts of bad things, like more drought, heat waves, and hurricanes. Plus, burning fossil fuels dirties the air, contributing to an estimated seven million deaths a year.
Despite this trade-off, we have historically accepted fossil fuels as essential, not protesting their use but instead questioning those who actively avoid them.
In the U.S., when we avoid cars or meat, we are seen as making a political statement rather than a rational decision. And this is despite us knowing that gas-powered cars and factory farms fuel climate change, which makes large swaths of our country unlivable.
Avoiding alcohol is a similarly intentional decision, maybe not as engrained these days as everything powered by oil and gas but still enough to be noticeable. Yet in both cases, the healthier decision — whether on the individual or planetary scale — is the unpopular one.
Still, we hold onto these habits partially because they make us feel good. It’s an insane instance of stubbornness, but one that is so pervasive that to change it would be to transform society. Jonathan Safron Foer summarizes this nature perfectly in his book We Are The Weather:
“We are killing ourselves because choosing death is more convenient than choosing life… Because short-term pleasure is more seductive than long-term survival… We know we are choosing our own end; we just can't believe it.”
I’m not trying to be a buzzkill — there’s nothing like a couple of IPAs on a hot summer day like today. But there are lessons to be learned here. For example, as multiple head injuries this year have curtailed my drinking, it feels easier to voluntarily agree to avoid drinking than to be told to do so.
So rather than yell at people for driving a car or eating meat, we should create situations or environments where it is easier, safer, or more affordable to choose the low-carbon option. Recent federal laws do just that:
The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, offers incentives for homeowners to install heat pumps or drivers to buy electric vehicles.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021, invests billions in a lower-carbon transportation network that includes more EV chargers and rail lines.
On top of this, we’re fortunate to have a younger generation that demands change from this status quo. To keep this metaphor going (are you still with me?), Gen-Zers drink about 20% less than Millennials, who drink less than previous generations. Middle-aged adults, meanwhile, are binge drinking at record levels.
Maybe that tendency to avoid unhealthy habits helps explain why young people also care more about the Planet than older people.
Either way, there are plenty of signs that we can kick our bad habits, even if it’s an uphill battle. And unlike alcohol (sorry mocktails and N/A beers), viable alternatives to fossil fuels like solar and wind are right there.
In the meantime, let’s keep talking about climate change and solutions. Hell, we can even do it over a beer.
As a fellow sober youngish person who is constantly being hounded about it, I hadn't noticed the anaology myself but now you've pointed it out I love it!
I admit this analogy was hard hitting, but it did hit home. Giving things up is really hard. The core difference I guess is that giving up alcohol or any drug is mostly an individual choice (albeit in cases of addiction one with implications for others) whereas giving up our fossil fuel addiction has to be collective and mass to work. But an interesting r