When the Billboard Says The End is Near

 “Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

When it comes to climate change I have borrowed a phrase in my own writing from my good friend and climate change pragmatist Chris Powers that goes something like “Things might get bad, but I won’t be pushing my children around in a shopping cart in some Cormac McCarthy-style apocalyptic wasteland anytime soon”.

One of the things that always seemed to make the climate crisis somewhat easier to reconcile with is how far away all of the consequences seem to be from me and, since having them, from my children.

Things might get bad, I may witness some nascent systemic failures and even some far-away climate-driven atrocities, but I won’t be inflicted with the worst of it. The world will not become uninhabitable. That is until I read David Wallace-Wells book The Uninhabitable Earth where he explores the very real shopping-cart-in-wasteland-possibilities.

Wallace-Wells opens the Uninhabitable Earth explicitly and aggressively challenging the concept that the climate crisis is a distant crisis. Part one, titled only “Cascades” lays out two arguments to consider. The first is the possibility that the climate model’s predictive power is only so good and we could be in for more devastation, and sooner, than the scientific community previously thought. The second is that it is inaccurate to expect a singular, apocalyptic event to deal a final blow-style devastation, but rather cascading increments that will start to shape and change our lives, the pace of that change determined only by our efforts to mitigate damage to the planet.

In “Cascades”, Wallace-Wells contextualizes the crises in a way that feels very personal to my generation, explaining how the historic fossil-fuel burning in the Industrial Revolution “is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today”, and that “the majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld”, which was exactly one month before I was born. If the purpose of reading texts like these is to reconcile the climate crises with my decision to have children, the Uninhabitable Earth is essential reading; this framing brings with it an awareness that there is a cost to my life’s comfort and that is the comfort of my children.

But only possibly. Throughout the Uninhabitable Earth, we are reminded that “some climate research is speculative, projecting our best insights into the physical processes and human dynamics onto planetary conditions no human being of any age or era has ever experienced”, particularly as it pertains not to the reality of climate change but rather to the devastation it will wreak. It is inevitable that “some of these predictions will surely be falsified; that is how science proceeds. But all of our science arises from precedent, and the next era for climate change has none.”

So while we cannot know what the horizon will bring to our children or even ourselves, Wallace-Wells expects the changes to come in small cascading and interconnected phenomena that in many ways we are experiencing the very early stages of right now. He titles these the “Elements of Chaos” and each is devoted its own section in part two: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters no longer natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse, climate conflict, and systems [collapse].

Each “element” is expressed both as a singular possibility and as a compound with other elements. The singular possibilities are themselves compounding, sometimes taking the form of an unlikely and unconsidered phenomenon, such as the “hunger” element featuring something called “the great nutrient collapse where every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising” thereby making food itself less filling. But hunger also ties into economic collapse, or supply chain systems collapsing, or water scarcity; themselves all their own elements as well.

This is how the climate crisis will impact us. Not through one giant disaster (although jury is not out there either), but rather death by a thousand cuts. The idea that climate change will mount some singular horrific act that will affect tragedy onto one’s personal life is rooted in individualism; it centers the person imagining the horror. In reality, climate change is a systematic change that will impact us exactly because of the interconnectedness of everything.

And in many ways, we’re seeing it already. We’ve seen fires increase their scale and damage, same with different varieties of storms. Even in my home state Michigan, sometimes marketed as some sort of climate change oasis, the winter wonderland can be made all the more deadly; “the warmer the Arctic, the more intense the blizzards in the northern latitudes - that’s what’s given the American Northeast 2010’s Snowpocalypse, 2014’s Snowmageddon” and 2016’s Snowzilla”. Just last year I watched my kids choke on wildfire smoke from Canada (wild fires and air pollution are elements of chaos explored in the book). Nowhere is safe even if they are safer than others.

Systems we have come to rely on will be pushed to the max, some already seem to be bending. And this is not some distant world of 5 degrees of warming, this is the very real, very present possibility given our trajectory; “at just two degrees, cities now home to millions would become so hot that stepping outside in summer would be a lethal risk…wildfires would burn at least four times as much land. The sea level rise would flood or down hundreds of major cities sooner, with as little as two degrees of warming.”

The Uninhabitable Earth also has very little room for optimism or any insistence that we will avoid this future, the only question is when we will endure it. Wallace-Wells beefs with everyone here; major infrastructure investment arguments of the left receive jabs about the improbability, pointing out that to avoid two or three degrees of warming we’ll need “a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture, and perhaps even a meatless planet” when in reality “it took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line.”

Techno optimists and market pragmatists receive their fair share of doubt. Wallace-Wells points out the complete failure of market forces to deliver a “green energy ‘revolution’” despite “yielded productivity gains in energy and cost reductions far beyond the predictions of even the most wide-eyed optimists”. Pointing out that it “has not even bent the curve of carbon emissions downward. We are billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started…that is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system”. The market is not designed to scale down engines of profit, only to build on them.

Christopher Suarez, “The Download,” 2023

So if we are to watch the world become uninhabitable and the only question is how fast we will watch it become so, how do you reconcile having children? I’m now cursed with the knowledge that I have brought them into a world rapidly in decline. Wallace-Wells seems to feel similarly to this as a father himself:

“I know there are horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children…She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future of themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it - quite literally the greatest story ever told.”

It doesn’t feel particularly great starting this piece on a 70 degree day in February, after what many are deeming “the winter that wasn’t”. Yes, many of the explanations for the anomalous weather center around the El Ninio hurricane, but I just finished a book about how all the climate models could be incorrectly skewing optimistic and we could be facing an apocalyptic-level crisis in the next week or month or 12 years. The hurricane explainer might have helped me breathe easily before reading the Uninhabitable Earth, but I’m sure I will never feel that way again. It’s one of those books that curses you with a knowledge that is not forbidden, just foreboding.

There is no happy ending or optimistic lift to this piece. There was nothing like that in the Uninhabitable Earth either. Just the reality of how we will “deal” with what is to come:

”People will likely fall into spasms of panic - some of us, sometimes - considering that a future of so many more of them seems so unlivable, unconscionable, even uncontemplable today. In between, we will go about our daily business as though the crisis were not so present, enduring in a world increasingly defined by the brutality of climate change through compartmentalization and denial, by lamenting our burned-over politics and our incinerated sense of the future but only rarely connecting them to the baking of the planet, and now and again by making some progress, then patting ourselves on the back for it, though it was never enough progress, and never in time”

Andy Abeyta photographing billboard by Thomas Broening for The Desert Sun...

No One Brings Their W2 to the Grocery Store

Being someone who works in talent acquisition and recruiting means I'm very close to the labor market and work within its confines daily. Lately, I have been really interested in the discourse around whether or not the economy is "good". The debate seems to be taking place between the larger American public who express pessimism for the state of the economy in various high-profile surveys, on TikTok, Twitter (I will never call it X), and other social media opposite a whole lot of policy wonks and economists who...frequent all the same social media spaces. 

In this economists vs the mob discourse, the economists - unsurprisingly - have data on their side. People in surveys and across social media seem to be largely discussing how the **vibes** of the economy are bad; fears about being laid off, not having enough money to keep up with inflation (inflated prices), having to work multiple jobs, etc. Yet as economist Matt Darling often points out the rate of layoffs are low, historically low, and economists like Claudia Sahm have argued that the rate of inflation has fallen and that wages have risen to keep pace with the still somewhat inflated prices. 

So then why are the vibes bad? The consensus from people like policy wonk Will Stancil - who has taken up the mantle as one of the more infamous commentators in this debate - is that social media, TikTok and the information feedback loop is poisoning people's mind and misinforming their supposed lived experiences. 

There is certainly a media - both traditional and social - frenzy about the state of prices despite some of the larger myths being untrue or misleading; Jeff Stein had a great write-up on this whole debate that dismantled the $16 Big Mac meme that was going around. People are under the impression there are massive layoffs when there aren't. With all of this misinformation floating around and needing constant dismantling, there may be a point to be had about feedback loops. 

However, I find the whole argument is missing a lot of key components that the economists and wonks, at least so far as I have seen, refuse to contend with. 

Recently I sat on a Zoom call with Nick Bunker, one of Indeed's (the largest job board in the country) economists. I was able to ask him directly why he thinks there is a distinction between the objectively good economy that he and others are touting with what the American public seems to think of it. 

To his credit, he gave a pretty fairminded answer; that Americans are still seeing the inflated prices, and while their wages should be making up for this fact it may not be computing enough to snap them out of the price delirium. Which is sort of a nice way of still saying Americans are out of touch with the facts of the situation. Stancil-lite. 

But what I found interesting and what really got me thinking was his data on wages. There was a huge jump in wages in 21/22 and these have seem to come down. When pressed on this people like Stancil or Sahm will say that the wage rates have come back down to 2019 levels, which are still quite high, and more importantly, no one in 2019 thought the economy was in shambles. 

Yet as Matt Bruenig and others have pointed out, there were a lot of gains made in 2021 and 2022 in the welfare state; things like child credits, free school lunches, etc in addition to large jumps in wages that were mostly the result of pressure from the great resignation and a high demand for labor (this can also be seen in the Indeed data). For my part, I would add that workers also saw an explosion of remote work and flexibility. There were a lot of gains for workers in the economy, wages and otherwise.

Bruenig argues, and I have to echo here, that the dismantling of those programs and the decrease in wage increases is frustrating people and leading to a lot of wariness over this economy. Adding the decrease of remote work, a slowdown in hiring, and article after article about burnout among workers (this was also echoed in some of the Indeed quits data about hospitality workers), even if it's just a RETVRN to 2019, I can't understand why it isn't easy for people to see how this would be frustrating and lead many to doubt the health of an economy that so giveth and taketh away.

Let's break it down like it's an equation in a child's math book: you have one candy bar, I give you three more, but before you can eat them I take two of them away. When polled about your candy bar experience, you state that the economy for candy seems unstable and you're feeling pessimistic toward the overall state of that economy. It would seem weird to say "but why? you have more candy than you did before!". 

A more realistic, relatable situation: I was fully remote in 2021, and I only came in one day a week in 2022. After some high-profile layoffs and a cooling of the demand for remote workers, my company took advantage of the situation to increase the number of days we're all expected to work in the office. It's not five days, and it's true in 2019 I was happy with five days in the office, but I got a taste of zero to one day, so it shouldn't be surprising that my disposition has changed. Now apply that logic to wages or the various COVID programs. 

The other side of the argument is unemployment and layoffs being low, so theoretically there is still nothing to fear. But similarly, the slowdown in hiring and demand for workers has chilled the Great Resignation that gave workers empowerment over their compensation and flexibility. So maybe people shouldn't be afraid of being laid off, they might feel the slowdown in hiring as being a comparatively bad thing in the economy. 

I'm more interested in exploring these sentiments rather than just deeming them wrongheaded or misguided. When I talk to a candidate and they're concerned about leaving their current job because the economy doesn't seem as strong as it once was, showing them a graph just doesn't cut it. 

"They're All Good Stories"

 

In memory of my grandfather Donald Zimmerman

I can only imagine the waves of nervous wreckage that crashed through my dad as he watched my truck pull up to Black Lake. Your and Nonnie's cabin has been the center of something of an annual family gathering for decades and decades and here I was making a maiden surprise voyage. Uncle Doug, having just found out that I would coincidentally be staying at my girlfriend's cabin just 20 minutes away that same weekend, invited me out to surprise my dad and everyone there. To this day I wonder if he knew the weight of that invite, played mostly as a joke on my dad. A joke of philosophical merit, that's classic Doug. 

I had never been there. In fact, I had only met you and Nonnie once as an adult just a year or so prior. It hit me much later, only recently if I'm being honest, that all of the times I had seen my dad when he was in town, he was likely in town for this exact annual gathering. Oblivious as to what that meant at the time, I drove to the cabin at Black Lake not realizing I was going to meet more people I didn't know existed, some of which like my cousins, who did not know that I existed either. 

The cabin on Black Lake is your kingdom. You cleared 6'6 in your full height and you sat like a king of the giants in your massive chairs. Giant living room chair, giant dinner chair, giant camping chair, all poised in various positions around the cabin that allowed you best vantage point for observing all the fun around you. When I arrived at the cabin, I'll never forget the way you said "oh, Kyle's here" as though my arrival was casually due any minute for the last 25 years. 

The initial visit had me reeling. Meeting all of my dad's brothers and cousins and nieces and aunts and uncles, a welcoming and loving precession of faces who were also confused, surprised, or unreadable was more than I had expected (my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, said she could not tell I was meeting these people for the first time, so it's at least good to know I wasn't exuding any weirdness). It's clear my dad struggled with bringing me up there; he had no idea what my arrival would entail, what people would think of me, how to broach the subject of me to some, how I would understand it, what I would think of everyone - the list is endless. He had no idea what to do or how to start.

You knew exactly what to do. You had to catch me up. One thing I've come to know about you is that you're a - in the most literal sense of the word - gigantic vessel for stories. You collect them and share them and love them. You lived an insanely interesting life from which you can pull stories up like a deep well with a greased-up pully, but you also gather stories from everyone around you and in your commanding, retired police chief voice can get them to retell it while you watch intently for the impact. And I had consequently missed out on a lot of these. 

I was only there for about a weekend, but almost every minute I was there you parked me next to you and regaled me with story after story, sometimes telling me yourself and sometimes inviting someone over to tell one. You told me stories of your days as police chief of Bloomfield Hills, about your  Military Police deployment in the 50s, about your time as a beat officer. You told me stories about raising 4 boys, about my dad, about my mom, about your wife, my cousins. They ranged from the comical - visits my Uncle Doug had to make to the principal's office in school - to the meaningful, like my dad's speech at my Uncle Dan's wedding. And as they oscillated between the range your eyes were alight with tears of laughter or beaming with pride, the stories and their impact had a real power. You couldn't share them fast enough. 

While I wish I could say I remember every story to the T from that day, I of course don't (cut me some slack Chief, there were a lot of them). But what I do remember is how you would punctuate each story with the phrase "they're all good stories". Usually, you would say it jostling my knee or clapping one of your gigantic hands on my shoulder, your voice trailing laughter. "They're all good stories". You probably said it 45, 50 times that weekend. The phrase has stuck with me as a testament to who you are. 

Stories are often analogized as woven fabric; the idea comes from when human civilization used to weave enormous tapestries telling stories of war or family or daily life. The tapestries were woven using millions of threads and the weaving process means the stories can always be added to, changed or continually constructed to portray the passage of time. These are stand-ins for the notion that we are all contributing to a singular, larger story and that stories never die. 

It's in this context that I have come to understand what you meant by the words "they're all good stories". I am a thread in the tapestry of your life and subsequently your family. The phrase is not just a reflection of your own positive feelings toward the stories, but an assurance to me, as a newly woven piece, that my story is also "good". That whatever pain or confusion or mystery that might have been has passed and the story is now just one of unequivocal good because I am here, now, in your presence, being told exactly that. 

So as I say goodbye to you, and I watch the sadness your passing brings to everyone around you, as the weight of your greatness and presence lifts, I am reminded again that they're all good stories exactly because stories never end. And neither, truly, will you. 

Love you Grandpa.