Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Cyn remains behind the rock of the massive cut-through, the rock that blocks her view of the road farther up and the vehicles off the shoulder.

She keeps getting lost in the echoes of what she’s seen, and she’s trying to fight against the ever-rising static in her mind.

She forces herself to understand she isn’t eight years old, she isn’t slumped against the far wall of that childhood living room, but she keeps finding herself thinking of the odd shape of her father bleeding, her father slipped down on the hall floor, and of the police lights and the ambulance lights strobing through the windows and the still-open front door—of the cops crowding the living room, stepping in and out of the front door, her mother keening.

She can’t remember what came next. She has never had a memory of this, but someone had surely come and taken her away.

She’s trying to stir herself. She thinks about creeping back to her car down the county highway beyond the curve, but the idea that the man—policeman, or sheriff, or deputy—might see her freezes that idea with panic.

The man who killed Joe.

She knows the occupant in the car isn’t Joe anymore but something else now. The blood and other matter sprayed against the rear windshield makes that clear enough. Sweat creeps over her, and she’s having trouble breathing.

She’s wishing with a growing roar that she never saw Joe’s car, or the other one, the white one with flashing lights, or the uniformed man, stark images along with what seems a thousand other high-contrast concurrent impressions, including her sense of the man’s surprise and anger at the blood.

Cyn sits up, her back now no longer pressed against the massive and looming rock, her eyes no longer shut against the morning sun. The rock behind her is already warming, the sun already hot, and in the next moment she closes her eyes again and almost surrenders to sleep, but she fights this feeling because she knows on the other side of the massive rock is the shoulder of Route 247, the small county highway in the middle of the desert where Joe is dead.

She’s getting lost in furtive waves of half-thought notions and cascading grasps for explanations that pulse in and out of her feelings, and then she knows with a wave of certainty that if she hadn’t taken her own rental and had instead gone with Joe, she would be dead too.

Her body feels cold, even against the growing hot face of the sun-bright rock.

She pulls in the dry air of the scrub desert in a long stuttering breath, and it’s as if she’s in an odd well of gravity, a mix of bright light and shadow of past and present, and she’s trying to bring herself back.

She’s trying to form an idea about what to do.

She’s trying not to think of Joe alone in the car, or of the blood on the back glass, part bright and part dark in early morning sun and shadow. Her eyes are squeezed shut but she sees it all, the bright flashing cop lights ghost coloring the rock cut on the opposing side of the curve of the road, the cop lights coloring the man as he leaned into Joe’s car, and the moment too that burst red against the car’s rear glass.

But now she finds herself getting up, and with animal caution she peers back around toward the two vehicles, peeking past the huge cut rock, looking up at Joe’s rental and the policeman standing, except the man isn’t a policeman, the uniform is nothing like a city cop, but a sheriff, or a deputy, and the man is walking back to the white patrol SUV that has a circle of gold on the door and lettering and a central image she can’t make out, but the lettering reads San Bernardino County. She slides back around, back down, sitting on the ground, certain of her danger and her need to remain unseen, quiet.

Her eyes shut.

She sees her father smile at her above his blooming blood.

Dad, she thinks.

Her eyes fly open and she looks around, sees the scrub extending forever, without end, the scruff of dusty brown plants and the dirt, sand, the curved-back giant rocks and every small pebble, a bird, tiny, high up, a lone cloud, a contrail even higher.

Get a fucking grip, she tells herself.

And she whispers, “Okay, okay, okay,” over and over. She’s fighting for control of her panicked and jumping thoughts.

In her linen jacket pocket is her phone. It’s vibrating, muffled.

Fuck! she silently screams and even that feels out loud, and her heart leaps up into her throat. Even this seems too loud, her blood beating noisier than the vibrating phone she tries to bury with her body.

Her phone goes silent.

Her phone chirps of text notification.

She listens, new panic rising, but she hears nothing but the hint of the man speaking into his phone, those several dozens of feet up beyond the rock, and she rises shakily and chances another glance.

Deputy, sheriff? she wonders, seeing him back to his vehicle, his lower torso hidden behind that vehicle’s front end, his phone up to his ear. He’s half turned away from her.

Cyn slips back.

She pulls the phone out and sees she’s just received a text from Joe.

Hey, where r u? Imwaiting

She wonders at it vacantly, and then she hears the man say something, but she can’t make it out exactly, but she catches some of what he’s saying, he seems to be talking loudly enough on his phone, but her hearing is off, her ears still overflowing with surging runs of pounding blood.

And then she knows with a moment of clarity those earlier texts this morning weren’t from Joe but somehow from the man.

She knows what she must do.

She texts, thumbs moving with strange calm, At meeting.

She adds, Thought you were going early. Where R U?

She hears a distant ringtone play and peeks around the rock edge in time to see the man pulling out a different phone. The first phone is still held up to his ear, he’s still talking, and then the man goes still as he looks at this second phone.

Cyn pulls back and sits against the hard rock, concentrating on what she can hear. Her eyes pop open when the man starts cursing, his fury carrying past the massive rock still between them. Then a car door slams shut and the vehicle starts off away, kicking up enough gravel for Cyn to hear it ping off Joe’s car.

Cyn remains sitting, a brief staticky relief rushing over her.

And then she’s back, brought back by her body needing something.

I need to shit, she tells herself, surprised.

She’s up, she feels the pressure, but her whole body is also about as clamped up as possible. She’s moving with quick clumsy steps, stumbling on the tiny rocks underfoot, her steps giddy with reprieve.

She’s trying to quiet herself.

She’s suddenly powerfully thirsty.

She realizes the sun is hot.

She can feel the sweat blossoming beneath her arms already going dry. She thinks about the bottles of water back in her car, back down the road a bit, around the curve, and this makes her think about Joe’s car on the other side of the rock, half-leaning off the shoulder.

Joe is dead, she tells herself, one part of her, but this is met with a silence from a hot and fearful depth that’s swallowing what she’s just again admitted.

Her body, her abdomen seems to be twisting, a pulsing twist back and forth. Her body feels like it’s loosening gravity, she’s starting to float, a wail rising up inside her in preverbal sounds.

A quieter part of her tries to take stock.

She knows her car is parked, pulled over on the shoulder some way behind her, and still half-crouched she can see through some scrub just a glimpse of the car, back at the start of the slow long curve that’s kept the car out of sight from the roadside ahead.

Weeds, but dry, crinkly—she thinks, fixating on the scrub and landscape she doesn’t know. Not in Kansas anymore, she tells herself. Fuck you, she tells herself.

Her bowels cramp. She moves to hold herself against a midsized rock, clumsily pulls down her panties, her left hand now holding up her skirt, her right hand steadying against the slope of the rock she’s squatting next to.

Her right hand, her left hand, arms trembling. Cyn is trembling.

Breathe, she tells herself, trying for a calm voice within, and then she tries this voice out loud.

“Breathe,” she says, but this isn’t a calm voice, it’s shaky and hoarse and a whisper.

And then she’s throwing herself forward, both arms out, her hands planting as widely as possible, but some drops of vomit splash on them. She can feel it even as she heaves, spitting, but when she looks, she sees only one or two drops on one sleeve of the dress jacket, the off-white one, the fashion brand she cares less than nothing about except that Joe bought it for her, a welcome gift when she’d started the new job.

Before we started fucking.

“Shit,” she says. So that I look right for the meetings, she tells herself. She’s standing up.

I guess I had to puke, she tells herself, some strange calmness in this thought.

She stands up, tugging at her underwear as her skirt flops down.

She glances down her front, smoothing the fabric.

Who wears a dress jacket to the desert? she finds herself asking, or maybe it’s just another random thought, these seem to be coming and going—all sorts of things.

So that’s what a continental breakfast looks like, she thinks, looking at the ground darkening brown with the wet vomit.

She’s feeling calmer.

She stands up and concentrates on pulling the skirt straight.

She looks around, glances back down at her throw up, and she pictures the impressive breakfast spread put out by the out-of-the-way desert resort, coming in the afternoon before the meeting this morning.

This image makes her laugh, but it’s a strangled sob that comes out.

She’s having furious on-and-off conversations with herself for what seems like hours, days.

Her dress jacket’s pockets are tight, and it’s a struggle to get the phone back out. She feels like she can’t do it, her arm an independent clumsy creature, and then the phone is in front of her, a surprise.

It hasn’t been very long at all.

She sees she’s been here only a few minutes.

I thought I had to shit but I really had to puke, she finds herself repeating as she moves away from her vomit and sets herself back down gingerly, settling down like an ancient woman, like a dying person might. She slowly leans back, but her eyes fly open.

She doesn’t like what she sees when she shuts her eyes. The blood, the man with Joe, the pop that keeps repeating in her mind like a bad spot on a scratched-up CD, the clipped pinging sound of it all, a loud and running rip.

She’s got to go.

She’s trying to piece together everything, and the pieces are trying to fit. After a moment, she says out loud, “Number one, my phone.” She picks it up from where she’d laid it on the dirt beside her.

She’d gotten those messages on her phone, those messages.

That’s important, she thinks.

She reads the most recent message.

“Number two,” Cyn says in a whisper. “Dead.”

She knows this. She sure as hell isn’t going to go out to the road, to Joe’s car, to check.

Because he is dead, she thinks. And dead men can’t send texts.

She picks up her phone again and scrolls through the texts.

Com on don’t be mad, is the first one, supposedly from this morning, less than thirty minutes back.

My life is done U ruined it, she had replied, although she hadn’t texted this, except this was now on her phone as Sent. But she had been too puzzled by the Mile 27 meet-up text, the only one she’d really seen while driving.

She hadn’t replied to any of the texts.

She had not really read them until now, not really. She’d been in a rush, the new printouts done, and she was in her rental heading out to meet Joe and the investor executive.

She knows Joe was excited for the big meeting, had left earlier. Up and at ’em, he’d actually said through the door of her room, his knock knocking her awake.

He’d sounded excited through the adjoining door. He was already yelling through the door about some changes they’d have to make with the contracts.

She’d known he was excited, the meeting likely to be a big win for them, a first for getting this kind of investment group to pledge fossil fuel divestment, turning away a big pipeline project for one thing. The changes to the contracts she saw as she’d made the changes, were more specific language about the pipeline.

She’d been glad for the trip, a chance to be with Joe without the eyes that might be watching, without worry his wife might drop by the office with the kids, and she’d been giddy with the idea of relaxing away from the signs and hints she always had to watch. But she also had been excited about the trip because she was going to Joshua Tree after she was done at the meeting.

On her own. It had been too long since she’d done that sort of thing.

Cyn sees all her plans, the time with Joe, the camping, the time alone, the hiking, all emerging and fading, just parts of her distractions and drifting thoughts.

But she’s trying to settle herself, gather herself.

Joe had texted about Mile Marker 27. He certainly wasn’t likely to pull over and text her weird messages. Maybe an On your way? query, possibly. Maybe Don’t forget the new printouts, although that too was unlike him. He knew she was competent.

It certainly wasn’t like him to text to ask if she’d taken his pistol, which she sees as she scrolls the text thread upward.

Why did u take gun?

Which he doesn’t even have one, she tells herself, but a wave of what’s happened washes over her again, her underarms prickling a new wave of sweat, and she swallows hard against the hint of nausea.

Which he didn’t have, she corrects herself.

Never had had, as far as she knows, not when he was alive, not when dead. She tries to push the new wave of panic back down.

She knows she hadn’t written the next text either. Need to tell you something, a reply from her phone that she reads as part of the text thread, the time of the text recorded as two hours ago, but she’d had her phone with her as she finished up with the contracts.

And Joe’s reply, coming much more recently, wasn’t Joe, not like him, not the way he talked, or texted.

Meet me at mile marker 27. I’ll wait hurry.

She had already been underway, had stopped as soon as she came to the mile marker, puzzled Joe wasn’t yet there. She had pulled over and gotten out to stretch her legs and look at the view.

She looks at the phone’s time and sees the message was sent less than twenty minutes ago. Not even.

Joe was alive, she realizes.

She holds her phone loose in her hand and a flushing panic rises up again, sweeping over her entire body. Despite her efforts not to, she wonders about Joe’s last minutes. What had he thought, what had he been feeling?

She’s got to go.

Cyn gets up and begins moving back toward her car. She stays off the road to keep behind the rock mass that had hidden her original approach. She starts retracing her shortcut that cuts the curve of the road.

She won’t look back.

In her mind she fiercely keeps the mass of rock as the only thing behind her.

The post Chapter 3: Mile Marker 27 first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Davin has long joked about the invitation to others—friends, family, even sometimes, nearly complete strangers, depending on his mood or stage of mania—to move into the rather-too-large house on the hill he and Gwen had bought in the Berkshires, in Housatonic.

Davin stands before the 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden in the back of his property, seeing the first sprouting of weeds in this spring light. He knows he’ll somehow have to keep up or risk having the garden overrun. So far Chaplin has been pitching in with the garden work, liking the rent-reduction-for- labor offer Davin made to him.

Well, the joke has become the master, Davin tells himself with a mix of feelings he decides not to look at too closely.

But the feelings are there, insistent.

I’m feeling pretty fucking bummed, Davin admits, and then he pushes this away.

The joke he had been thinking about was almost always unvaried, as unvaried as it was frequent back when Gwen was still around. “We’re accepting applications for serfs…ur, associates,” Davin would intone, pretty much always to the same nonreaction. He had been willing to entertain the notion that performing the same bit too often might seem an oddity to many but he didn’t see much point in trying to change something so inconsequential. This joke, and too many others, was more symptom than cause of the growing discomfort between him and Gwen, their conversations increasingly scripted, removed, desperate.

With his time spent in his studio, money was tight and he had suggested they take in people, for rent, sharing the big house with them.

Whether a straightforward proposal or a repeating joke, Gwen was not amused. It hadn’t helped that the pandemic hit and a big chunk of that year and more kept the two of them in the same house.

Just another Covid divorcee, he thinks, a punchline he doesn’t find funny at all.

Just like Trump getting reelected wasn’t funny, not after that one Biden term and the progress made then, and then all the shit of Trump’s chaos.

Trump Redux, that’s his shorthand for the ongoing clusterfuck.

At the start of Biden’s term, the world had already seemed upside down, what with Gwen and he were doing. They were considerate of each other with the exceptions of occasional blowups until, of course, there were no more conversations at all, Gwen going off to claim a new life as soon as the pandemic was declared dead, or dead enough, a declaration that took surprisingly longer than expected. After that, the only discussions and communication between them were practical matters of the proceedings and property. Davin still thinks he’s never heard her reasons for the divorce, not any real ones.

Like depression, he tells himself. He has long struggled with depression, although he’s done well in the fight according to his several therapists over the years. He’s certainly never far from thinking about it or feeling some tendril or twist of it snaking through his mind. For the most part he knows he does okay and he sees this reflected in his general effectiveness in the world and in his ability to usually avoid the most crushing aspects of depression. He long ago came to accept that the antidepressants would take care of the darkest turns, staying the too-far-down drop to where self-annihilation seemed a reasonable option.

Better life through chemistry, he tells himself as he looks around the property. He suspects he’s managed to remain good at his work over the years largely because the edges of the depression were blunted by the pills, and the rest, well, because he’s a stubborn son of a bitch.

It certainly is a beautiful day today, although yet another oddly warm one for the late-May date. Still, what passes for normal weather has been shifting rather wildly over the last decade or so as the consequences of climate change have begun to hit closer to home.

His son, Jimmy, lives in Chicago and the upper Midwest is socked in some super-inversion system and it’s actually hot there, August hot, worse than August hot. Hotter than hot and something to do with the extended La Niña, he’s read, although he is always getting La Niña and El Niño mixed up.

Climate change, Davin muses, and yet there are still deniers.

And this thought gets him thinking about something he’s been trying to better understand, something Davin has come to call “magical thinking,” an exercised belief in actions that are not, on further consideration and rational analysis, warranted. He has come to understand the error of magical thinking in his and Gwen’s move out of the city and his expenditure of considerable time and too much currency to turn the old Greek Revival duplex into a reasonably weather-tight and energy- efficient country retreat. A country retreat that wasn’t really a retreat, of course, but their primary residence with no secondary abode anywhere in view.

And this thought gets Davin back to his serf gibe, which he thinks is a funny joke, if a bit hyper-ironic. He knows this joke—like many of his other favorites—resides on the “whiteboard” side of the humor ledger where, in this instance, the only way the joke could be seen as humorous by anyone is to follow the line of thinking. His serf joke depends on an understanding that the current state of western culture is one of income inequality, the drop of the middle class, and with political polarization pointing the way to feudalism, and thus the rejection of the Myth of Progress once so dear to him.

Now that’s funny, right? he tells himself.

On some sort of molecular level Davin still believes in the Myth of Progress despite the resurgent power of moneyed interests with big corporations growing bigger. He remains hard-pressed to reframe the world to account for banks and other financial institutions taking on an ever enlarging part of the economy even while producing little more than paper and digital money mostly for themselves along with a bewildering number of bubbles and collapse cycles for everyone else. He knows that the Myth of Progress is shared by so many others born after the World War and well before Reagan, the Antichrist, when the American Dream’s overthrow seemed inexorable, and it proves harder and harder day by day to maintain the Myth of Progress.

Neo-liberalism at its finest, he thinks. He had been increasingly finding himself thinking this even when he still lived in Cambridge.

Costs go up, wages go down. Options disappear.

There have been some positive steps in his personal economics lately, he considers, but still, the concept of serf seems evermore relevant. There is the danger in the ever-growing income inequality where the rich keep staving off taxes, despite the obvious and crushing needs of the country and the world. He sees the extreme rich playing with politics and paying for politics. He sees the ongoing fall in real wages despite the occasional efforts to address minimum wages. He knows inflation and cost increases means that such would-be corrective measures will play the fool.

Davin is relieved his kids seem to be doing all right. His daughter is in Spain working on a PhD, and his son is only recently out of college but has found a paying gig in his field, or had, until the recession, or whatever the economics professors de jour call things these days, but whatever describes the economy, his son has recently told him he’d been laid off.

He doesn’t appreciate the lastest election, one that turned out about as opposite from his hope for an uptick in progressive voting trends. With the White House and Congress back in Trump’s hands, the extreme rich remain largely untouched and in control. And the bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court makes it all worse.

Plus ça fucking change.

Davin is well aware he and Gwen, with their two-income work in high tech and medicine in the city, had brushed up against the ten percenters, at least in several of their best years of work, even though such unseem income exuberance had been all too easily offset by the cost of living with which they struggled, including all they could do with college costs, socking away whatever possible in 529 plans. Jimmy couldn’t escape some student loans even with all their planning.

He steps toward the garden fence to check on the three blueberry bushes inside, near the front gate. The signs of budding are there, he’s relieved to see.

He turns back toward the house, knowing he needs to get to work on a report for his client at South County Interactive, but he lets himself dawdle, again looking around his backyard, enjoying the light and warmth of the morning.

He closes his eyes, letting the sun cresting over the rise of Monument Mountain warm his face, but his hoped-for moment of stillness washes away in his torrent of thoughts. These days, he’s fixated on costs and how anxious he too often feels about his own economic situation.

It had been in part the rising cost of living he had tried to remove himself not so long ago along with Gwen and their youngest, Jimmy, who had been halfway through high school at the time. They had moved to Housatonic from their small Cambridge Greek Revival where they’d raised their two kids. A Greek Revivallette as Davin had long joked about this former worker’s cottage he’d fully renovated. One or another Mideast oil conflict flare-ups and fuel cost spikes in the last two years they’d lived there had become a problem, even when he and Gwen had kept the average thermostat setting low. Energy price jumps were nothing new, but the credit line balance built up, and cost-cutting was a top priority.

Just like today, Davin thinks.

And mulling this over has him thinking about how the current political whores have long been hard at work killing the sort of public budgets Davin and Gwen and most other middle- class liberal Cantabridgians had always reflexively supported— education, infrastructure, basic research, clean energy, and the other long-term investments that seemed so obviously merited, and ever increasingly so.

And what do I do about it? I cash out of Cambridge and move to the Berkshires to be an artist.

Magical thinking.

He and Gwen had found out the hard way that living in the country wasn’t really any cheaper, especially with the profits from the hot-market Cambridge house sale getting eaten by the country house rehab project, which turned out to be more expensive than he’d assumed it would be and made worse by their buying a house sized to overcompensate for their first tiny place. And then too, for Gwen especially, there were the much lower salaries the hill country offered compared to what city jobs had paid. It hadn’t helped, he knows, that he’d spent too much time on the homestead effort and then in the studio with only modest breaks for the income-generating work from which he had been trying to move away.

Literally, he reminds himself. Changing his work was the other main reason for his wanting out of the city. He had worked in book publishing and then electronic publishing from its early days. He had been an editor and later an analyst and consultant to digital publishing vendors and their publishing customers.

Davin wants to think of himself as an artist these days, a sculptor. He’s got three unfinished pieces in the studio, but the studio is still cluttered by the tools and materials he uses for working on the house and yard and garden. He cannot help but think of O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi, and the money spent building his studio into the side of his sloping property, and how that had guaranteed his continuing to work as a content management consultant more than working in his studio, bills needing paying.

The divorce, now well over a year done, had made for one hell of a financial hit too, with the shift to two one-income households away from one two-incomes household. And Covid was still being felt economically, almost six years from its start.

Davin finds himself thinking about income and costs all the time, and he still tries to make sense of Gwen’s decision that she simply didn’t want to remain married to him. There had been no affairs, he wasn’t a drunk or drug abuser, nor wife-beater, nor gambler, or the perpetrator of mental cruelty.

Well, as best I can figure, he tells himself.

It had seemed, from all angles, that Gwen was somehow, for some reason, just done. Period. Full stop. That’s all she wrote, he thinks for the millionth time, right along with his suspicion that perhaps his own struggles simply exhausted her.

At sixty-four he is a good-enough-looking man, although he’s always happy to find fault, and as he gets older he’s well aware there are more faults to be found. Faults such as carrying around an extra fifteen to twenty pounds, which he thinks really doesn’t look so bad, although clearly there’s more than enough fat building up in belly and kidney pads.

Bend and stretch, reach for the stars, he half sings to himself, looking again at the neat rows of dark earth, trying to make out which tiny sprouts are good and which are weeds. He knows he’ll be doing a lot of bending down with close work. Bend down and reach for the Tums, he adds, remembering all too well his recent seed planting and the acid reflux his extra weight causes in that stooped-over posture.

Fuck me, he tells himself, brushing hair back over his forehead, the thinning wisps wind mussed and annoying. His hair is receding, especially along the front and top, a common enough pattern among men his age. The hair at the top of his head has grown thin, but there’s still more than enough up front to continue to comb his hair back, although he now has to instruct his barber to reduce the volume of hair that still grows thick on the sides and back to offset what he thinks of as the Larry-look, the Larry of The Three Stooges with hair sprouting from the sides, not unlike, too, the style of Bozo the Clown.

Vanity, vanity, sayeth the preacher.

He shakes those thoughts away and turns back toward the house.

He knows his joke about accepting serf applications is at heart a reflection of his ever-growing anxiety about the ongoing rise in costs, apparently without limits, including for food, especially the sort of food—organic, fresh, whole—Gwen had long ago deemed the only acceptable type. He keeps finding higher and higher food costs, even now with Gwen no longer here. Food is just expensive. The ongoing droughts in the West don’t help, nor do the high transport costs to get the food products to market.

He hasn’t seen his daughter for almost four years, although her being in Spain might be a good excuse, airline tickets being high. His daughter is an ocean away and Jimmy in his post-college life in the City of Broad Shoulders, only comes home for Christmas, if that.

Energy prices are always in flux, but always, it seems, ending up ever higher after any momentary price dip. He has to pay a lot for the oil heating his big house through cold winter days and nights, and while the much- tightened house needs fewer gallons per year, the reduction in volume hasn’t offset the ever-higher prices. And then there are automobile fuel, insurance, and maintenance costs, and while he drives as little as possible, it’s impossible not to drive in the country. Electric cars are becoming ubiquitous, but replacing his old Kia is currently a cost beyond consideration. And even then, electricity bills have jumped rather vigorously, despite his and Gwen’s religious use of CFL and LED bulbs and their increasingly regular energy efficient behavior. Behavior, to his surprise, that had included Gwen’s decision to turn off the hot tub they’d inherited when they bought the house.

Of course, you were on your way out, right? he once again wonders.

Don’t be bitter, be better, he chides himself with an out loud snort that has him looking around to see if there are any witnesses.

He steps toward the apple and peach trees near the garden and looks closely. He lost the whole peach crop last year to a ground fungus that was a new arrival from the South. He’ll have to get the antifungal supplies soon and spray the solution around the root area beneath the peach tree or face another lost crop.

The micro orchard is another task and another expense, and throw in high property taxes, surprisingly expensive telecommunication costs for cell phones and the Internet, and, of course, the many thousands of dollars paid for the health insurance policy he’d taken after the divorce decree was official, and the driving dream of reducing costs by moving to the country has been proven a fool’s illusion. Not that it would have been cheaper to stay in town, he knows, but in Housatonic, his costs keep going up even while his income drops.

He’s considered doing more of his professional work, although he’s old enough to be suspect to the young CTOs and CEOs and COOs and directors and managers, most of whom now seem uncomfortable with older colleagues. But he suspects it isn’t ageism that’s the main problem, even though that’s not to be dismissed. His main problem is his lack of motivation to beat the bushes for the kind of work upon which he’d built his career, now seemingly so long ago. His antipathy to the work could well be palpable to others.

The South County Interactive contract might prove the exception, but little money has yet been produced from those efforts. He likes working with Alicia Soares, the owner and publisher of the recently established local online newspaper, and while he isn’t getting big billings, he’s finding the work more satisfying. A step or two closer to offering actual societal value is his theory.

Still, the middle-class status he had so easily dismissed as bourgeois in his younger days is slipping, and badly, and not without concern and discomfort on his part.

And this is despite the Airbnb apartment they—now he— rents out, a small two-bedroom that takes up the north half of the first floor, its front entrance mirroring the one for the rest of the house at the other end of the sunny, many-windowed front porch. The short-term rental income adds up and is a big help. He had bought out Gwen’s interest in the house during the process of the divorce. He is still leaking debt.

And the apartment is currently offline because of an actual leak, some water damage from a very heavy rainstorm the past November that managed, with the house built into the slope, to have water seep into the apartment’s below-grade back wall. He still has the to-do item of hiring out a carpenter to replace part of the lower wall in the smaller bedroom, but he hasn’t yet sorted that out and is still considering doing the repair work himself. He is afraid that putting in a claim will raise his house insurance even higher.

I really do want some serfs to help out, Davin thinks, looking back at the 2,000-square-foot vegetable garden where good sun exposure and good compost made for good yields, assuming Mother Nature behaves.

He looks to the edge of the back property where lawn gives way to woods past a low stone wall, and farther on, hidden by branches just starting to leaf, are powerlines, and then beyond that the western slope of the small mountain named Monument. And then, standing there, back to looking over the just-planted rows of kale and the rows prepped for tomatoes, corn, and other crops, through his mind comes unbidden and almost unnoticed a nearly automatic mantra: Will work for food.

The post Chapter 2: He Never Meta-Joke He Didn’t Like first appeared on David Guenette.

Learn more about Kill Well here

Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

Chapter 1: Of Cops and Rocks

Cynthia Wainwright is loving the view.

She’s looking out at a landscape foreign to her since she’s not been in the Mojave before, although now that she thinks on this for a moment, she knows she’s seen desert, but about a decade back, on one of those interminable driving vacations her mom and stepdad had shanghaied her and the twins into, destination Grand Canyon.

This is a different landscape she’s admiring, standing outside her rental car, parked right at Mile Marker 27, just as Joe, her boss, asked her to do in the text, a text that strikes her as odd, and odder still are the two others he sent this morning, which she just now reads, but they’re weird.

Maybe a joke?

She’s not going to worry about it. She’s just too excited. She loves her job, her first fully-grown-up job, and she can’t think of a better place to help solve the climate crisis, and today’s upcoming meeting is the biggest such deal, at least that she has something to do with.

Joe has gone on ahead, not wanting to give anyone any excuse, even, as he had told her before getting into his car and heading out an hour ago, if it means he’ll end up drinking far too many cups of coffee with the Chairman of the investment group. This is big, he’s kept on saying.

She’s excited.

She was disappointed she wasn’t riding with him. She likes it when they have time alone.

But even if she hadn’t needed to make the changes they and the team at Carbon’s End discussed this morning, she still would have taken her own rental, because Joe was heading back to the airport in Bastow and she was heading for a few days of hiking about Joshua Tree. She did run late, with all the final touches and changes and it wasn’t a big business center, nor the printer all the fast. Faster enough, though, and she’s on her way, the amended sheafs of contracts in hand, until she’d received the text.

It’s strange to her that he would stop to text on his way to their meeting this morning.

Meet me at mile marker 27.

Had his car broken down? she’d wondered. But now, as she glances again at the two messages that arrived before this text, she wonders, just curious, if Joe might be role-playing.

Maybe a quick fuck? it occurs to her, but his excitement this morning was for the meeting and their shared expectation this would be a big win for them. And no time for sex either, anyway. He should be mostly there.

She looks at her phone, confirming her estimation.

And that isn’t like him, anyway, she thinks. He’s forty years of age, almost a decade-and-a-half her senior, and he’s married with another kid on the way, and the relationship between them is a simple thing, just sexual, really, just fun and comforting company. Although the thought crosses her mind there’s something else at play in her relationship, but she stops herself thinking anything about her old history with older men.

She simply wants to appreciate the vista before her.

She simply wants to let herself acknowledge that she’s feeling good, excited, even proud of herself.

And besides, she enjoys his company, their work at Carbon’s End putting them together all the time, including on trips like the one they’re on now, pushing fossil fuel divestiture, but she’s more interested in reveling in the view of the large rock formations scattered across the open land, the formations and scrub lit by the low rising sun that casts long shadows this early in the morning.

She can’t entirely dismiss thinking about the meeting she’s heading to, and how the meeting with the investor group this morning was scheduled for an early hour. The resort where she and Joe are staying is an hour away, and she hadn’t pushed back against the early meeting time, seeing in this an opportunity for her and Joe to fly out the day before and spend some time together. That had been her thinking, and Joe, of course, had very much liked the thought.

She smiles, thinking of Joe, his grin, looking at her undress.

She takes pleasure in his wanting her, in his chatter about how he loves her look, her shoulder-length hair, her green-gray eyes, her modest breasts, her hips, her toes, her height, and the way their two bodies fit together.

For an older man, he’s boyish in some ways, even a bit goofy, really.

But the relationship is simple, and Cyn likes simple. She knows she has a hunger, a drive, for being wanted, but she’s never cared for the stress of a relationship and has never been drawn to the working of being one within a couple, to build a life together.

She just wants to be wanted, needs to have this type of attention, needs that deep comfort she can feel even if, maybe, there’s something off, but she is practiced at ignoring that.

But if he’s trying to role play, that seems like a bad sign to her, a troubling complication.

She’s been driving her own rental to the meeting, so the text she got from Joe not more than ten minutes earlier is puzzling.

Her text notification had read Meet me at mile marker 27, and then her eyes went back to the road in time to catch the glimpse of Mile Marker 24 passing behind her.

Well, here she is, wondering about Joe not being here and about the stranger texts she’s just read scrolling up from Joe’s last text, texts she hadn’t seen. She hadn’t heard any notification alerts for these as she’d been driving.

She shrugs, unsettled a bit by these texts. Her best guess is these texts are some sort of joke, but still, these texts don’t seem at all like Joe.

But mostly she’s enjoying the early morning light and how the long rock formations across this flat landscape seem to her as schools of half-submerged serpents, the backs frozen mid- swim through the scrubland and sand. She’s also thinking about how much she’s looking forward to her time alone, taking a few days after business is concluded.

But then her peripheral vision catches ghost-pale strobing colors up toward the curve of the road a hundred feet or so, off the cut rock face on the opposite side of the road. The blinks of light are almost lost amid the low, bright morning sun, and it takes her a moment to resolve the washed-out reflecting light is a police or ambulance. Her heart spikes with concern, and she begins to fast-walk a short cut to where the road ahead curves and disappears behind the cut-through long rock formation. She fears there’s been an accident and hurries from where she parked, moving toward the source of light.

She walks and then runs over the sand and pebbles and the colonizing scrub weeds. Her dress shoes serve poorly for moving over the sand and stone, but her building anxiety that Joe has been in an accident is overwhelming other thoughts, and this blooms as an aching certainty.

She rounds the rock face cut and sees two vehicles sixty or eighty feet farther up the road with Joe’s rental closest to her, and she sees a cop or deputy who’s leaning into Joe’s car, she sees a shadowed flash and hears the sound of a gun firing, and the flash is blossoming red on the rear windshield.

Panic crashes and she’s trying to place herself, trying to roll the tang of danger flooding her from past the rock face she’s ducked behind. In her eyes’ after-image she still sees the big white SUV with a harsh flashing light bar pulled in front of Joe’s rental, each vehicle half off the shoulder of the county road, she sees the man jumping back, wiping at the blood splatter on his face and on the blouse of his uniform, and she at this moment knows Joe is dead.

Her mind is a roaring blank but for a single loudest voice within shouting, Joe!

That’s the loudest voice, but another part of Cyn’s mind is now trying to understand there will now be no meeting, even as another part is trying to grasp that something has happened, but the world is slanting off axis, and she is falling into a pressing darkness of overwhelming dread and animal panic.

She tells herself she’s gone unseen, that the man—the policeman!—hasn’t seen her, she’s pulled herself back unnoticed.

Joe is dead, a voice keeps telling her.

His blood scattered on the rear windscreen.

Joe is dead.

She hasn’t screamed.

Cyn pushes her back against the solidity of the rock, and then she slumps down. She can hear the man in uniform cursing, the sound of the shot still echoing off the cut rock formation on the other side of the road, drifting into the empty flat desert.

Just moments ago, she’d relished the landscape as she waited for Joe at Mile Marker 27.

Joe would like that, she thinks. But Joe is dead up ahead around the rock face cut. With a hiccup of surprise, she won’t get to tell him her sense of delight in the landscape.

And then she is again seeing the man lean in and with the echoing sound of a gun firing, and then she locks back to her eight-year-old self on that day the police came to the house.

Eight-year-old Cynthia sees her father slumped against the wall in the hall by the front door, her father looking at her, that strange half smile above the blooming blood starting to sag his t-shirt. Out here in this desert she is slumped against this wall, and eight-year-old Cynthia is seeing again that her dying father is embarrassed. And she is slumped against rock and her mind again rolls, and she’s aware Joe is dead, that she’s twenty-six years old.

She didn’t scream then either, back in her childhood home.

Her mind went off and on then too.

Joe is dead.

She knows all this, and some part of her knows just a moment has passed, and the gun fired on the other side of the massive cut face of rock still echoes here and in the ghost of her past.

The post Kill Well, Chapter 1 first appeared on David Guenette.

These costs are not paid by the fossil fuel industry.

Sure, if the fossil fuel industry had to cover the liability of their products negative consequences, the price of fossil fuel would be higher. Instead, the costs are hidden, even excused by regulatory agencies so that the industry does not have to account for social, environmental, or systemic costs otherwise offloaded onto the public.

Do you know how expensive climate change is today? Do you know how much more expensive climate change will get in a decade, a half-century, a century? Best start that special savings account!

Many Industries Account for the Externalized Costs

Despite the fossil fuel industry having started a century and a half ago, Big Oil is still getting a lot of sweetheart deals. What’s interesting is how few other industries manage to get their own sweetheart deals. The chart below breaks out several major industries where the external costs are part of the cost of business.

The awful part of the story is that other industries have their lobbyists and champions (vassals?) in Congress and the White House, and that with the rise of dark money schemes (well before Citizens United, by the way—read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, from 2016 if you’re sleeping at night), the trend has been to loosen regulations for many industries. The net effect is to increase these industries’ profits, but the costs associated with the industries don’t go away. These costs simply get passed on, typically indirectly and therefore under the radar, but the costs are still there. The fossil fuel industry remains the reigning queen of significant cost passed on—Shhh!—to everyone else.

Still, the trend in Washington these days would have more and more industries join that club. Reducing regulations is one main tool. Cancelling laws, another; think about the consequence of dropping the Glass-Steagall Act in relation to the 2008 crash.

We’re Paying for Carbon… Unless You’re a Shareholder

How much will fossil fuel pollution and the consequences of climate change cost the world in 2025, 2050, and 2100? You’ll find all sorts and ranges of numbers answering this question, but the thing these numbers have in common is that they’re huge. Here’s an AI Overview for this question:

The global economic cost of climate change and fossil fuel pollution is projected to reach tens of trillions of dollars annually, rapidly compounding over the coming decades. According to major macroeconomic climate studies (such as those by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Network for Greening the Financial System), the estimated damages are broken down as follows:

• • 2025: $2 trillion to $4 trillion in annual damages. By 2025, the world is already experiencing a permanent GDP reduction of roughly 1% to 3% compared to a baseline economy without climate change, driven by intensified extreme weather and health costs from fossil fuel emissions.
  • 2050: $38 trillion in annual damages. Experts project a 19% to 20% reduction in global GDP by mid-century regardless of aggressive future emission cuts, as past emissions have already locked in these near-term economic shocks.
  • 2100: $100 trillion to $150+ trillion in annual damages. If global temperatures rise by 3°C or more, the world faces a staggering 50% or greater permanent drop in global GDP, with certain regions experiencing near-total economic collapse.

Key Economic Impact Drivers

The total cost is a combination of direct climate impacts and the hidden social costs of burning fossil fuels:

• • Agricultural Collapse: Drastic declines in crop yields due to shifting weather patterns, severe droughts, and desertification.
  • Infrastructure Destruction: Trillions required to rebuild or relocate coastal cities due to rising sea levels, alongside damage to roads, grids, and bridges from extreme storms.
  • Health and Pollution Costs: Millions of premature deaths annually from air pollution and heatwaves, leading to lost labor productivity and overwhelmed healthcare systems.
  • Labor Productivity Loss: Extreme heat limits safe working hours, particularly in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing.

When you don’t have to cover all the costs of your product, you increase profit. When you don’t have to cover all the costs of your product, you can sell your product for less. Fossil fuels seem economically competitive with clean energy, but Big Oil is running a cheat. For all the complaining about subsidies for clean energy (much of which has also been crushed by President Big Oil Stooge), that money is a tiny fraction relative to the avoided costs the fossil fuel industry enjoys. You know who doesn’t get to enjoy these avoided costs? The rest of us—indeed, the world—because the costs of pollution sickening and killing people and the costs of high carbon emissions changing our world’s climate for the worse can’t be avoided.

It isn’t a matter of whether we should have a price on carbon. We’re already paying it.

The post The Truth About Carbon Pricing first appeared on David Guenette.

This will be my first book signing event and I’d love to see my local readers—and would-be readers!—come on by for a chat. And a scribble. A scribble, because that ‘s what my signature looks like, but, hey, don’t judge.

There’s the signing event at Lakeville Books and Stationery, which happens to be my local(est) bookstore. Lakeville Books is at 63 State Street (also known as Route 7 next to the fire station) in Great Barrington, MA.

Saturday, September 12, 2026, from 1:00 pm -3 pm.

I’ve signed books before, but previously this might occur after one of my talks out of the dozen or so talks I’ve given. The topic of the talks? Well, this has evolved over time, but the catch is in the title: “The Future of Climate Change in the Berkshires.” The Steep Climes Quartet, the series I position as literary climate fiction, now has three out of the four books published, with Over Brooklyn Hills published this past June.

Kill Well takes place in 2026, Dear Josephine in 2029, and Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035. The final book, Farm to Me, takes place in 2047 and is on track to publish Spring 2027. The first three books will be available at Lakeville Books and, of course, at the signing.

The series is a near-future look at how regular people deal with climate change, with some nefarious plots on the national scene thrown in to reflect larger themes. When I say “regular people” I also mean Berkshire local, since the through characters of the series live and work in the Berkshires. If you’d like more information about The Steep Climes Quartet, you’ll find plenty on my website. Here’s a teaser description of Over Brooklyn Hills:

In 2035, a NYC heatwave drives some residents into the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires, but the resulting overcrowding brings climate migration to Great Barrington writ small, while events at the Mexican border paint the larger scale problem.

The post I’ll be at Lakeville Books, Signing Away first appeared on David Guenette.

The start of the review nails it: “Over Brooklyn Hills is a story of people and climate.”

I mean, this sounds simple, but the reason I love seeing this sentence start the review is that my literary climate fiction series isn’t about some post-climate apocalypse but about how people today and in the near future live with climate change, with the emphasis on how people live. Too often climate fiction turns fantastic, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Our very real struggle with climate change is hard enough for people to identify with, which in turn makes taking meaningful action in our troubled Anthropocene that much harder for many of us to pursue. We must pursue effective change that will help moderate the severity of climate change consequences; this is essential if there’s much chance to keep our world safe… or safer, anyway.

The review continues this way:

It’s the third book in David Guenette’s future-based The Steep Climes Quartet. This installment centers around two different plot lines: the lives of some of the notable citizens of Great Barrington, a small town in the Berkshires; and the missions of an ecoterrorist. The overarching theme is the politics of climate change, and that theme receives detailed discussion. The weather is a character by itself, with a severe heat wave and a tornado driving some of the main action in Great Barrington.

In terms of the political overtones, Guenette has taken the events and legislation of the last half-decade and extrapolated them through to their plausible outcome by 2035. Likewise, current technological hardware and software have been advanced ten years. Political and tech nerds will be at home with all the plentiful details in those areas.

The post Reader Views says “Five Stars”! first appeared on David Guenette.

The Climate Historian Substack, in a post titled, “On Billionaires, Numbness, and the Futures We’re Allowed to Imagine,” with the subtitle “The problem is not only that billionaires have too much money. It is that we have started believing they have the right to decide what comes next.” It’s a good Substack, with good writing and thinking. Although, notwithstanding its qualities, I often end up skipping it, what with everything else on my feed list.

The Climate Historian is written by Athena Drakou, and she is “an independent researcher and  environmental scientist working at the intersection of environmental science, political history, and geopolitics.” She is “particularly interested in the history of climate change politics and how ideology and competing perspectives influence climate change policies.” On her About page, she answers the question of why she writes about climate change:

One day someone said to me that I write as if I am running out of time. He was right. I carry that sense of urgency with me every single day — a constant feeling that I am running out of time. I write because no matter how hard I try, it never feels like enough to make people truly care about this fragile planet we call home.

Her recent post’s title caught my attention. I’m a would-be professional imaginer, although this is also known as a writer. I am a fellow traveler with her on the issue of our current dilemma with billionaires. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, no doubt: the category of “billionaire” should not exist and the fact that there are billionaires is a pathology that illuminates our society’s ill health. As for “numbness,” this seems an accurate descriptor for how most of us feel in this time of polycrisis, at least those of us fortunate enough not to be desperately scrambling for basic  necessities of food and shelter. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people scrambling, and even here in the United States, although there are billions of others across the world caught up in a daily existential crisis. This makes the existence of billionaires look sick under such circumstances.

There are structural economic problems with billionaires, too. If you want a succinct definition of the main structural problem, I suggest you check out GarysEconomics on YouTube, Instagram, and other such platforms; there’s a memoir and a documentary, too. Gary Stevenson emerged from Britain’s working class to become a wildly successful financial trader at Citibank, then went to Oxford. He now has an significant online footprint that he uses to draw attention to how today’s economic situation advantages the wealthy over everyone else. His core concepts are straightforward, and summarized by Google Overview thusly:

• Passive Income: Billionaires make massive amounts of passive income from large portfolios of assets.
• Buying Assets: Because they cannot spend all this cash on daily consumption, they buy up property and investments.
• Falling Standards: This pushes up prices and locks ordinary people out of owning homes or building wealth, lowering living standards.

We are all aware these days that billionaires (and more modest multi-millionaires, too) consider politicians and the institution of The Supreme Court of the United States asset classes.

Radical Solutions?

There are many definitions of polycrisis, but The Climate Historian provides one as good as many other such efforts:

We are living in a world defined by climate change, nuclear risk that most of us have simply stopped thinking about, the arrival of AI, rising misogyny, expanding inequality, and above all this, a tiny club of ultra-wealthy individuals who are convinced that this planet and maybe a few nearby ones is their private VIP lounge. Given all of that, it seems to me that it’s only logical to fight for the future we actually want, rather than the one being sold to us.

Amen, I say. Where I disagree is when Drakou says the following:

There are no easy solutions, but I believe that we can solve our problems. They require systemic changes, and some of them may seem radical at first. But we are at a point that only radical changes can save us. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of denial.

Yes, required solutions are hard. But are the solutions radical?

Oh my gosh, it turns out that I’m the conservative. I want to conserve the Constitution. I want to conserve common sense and long-term beneficial projects for the country and the world. I want to conserve the planet as habitable for mankind. There’s nothing radical about it.

Of course, “radical” is one of those Swiss Army Knife definitions, including in mathematics, chemistry, and linguistics, but I’m sure “radical” as used in The Climate Historian post mentioned at the start is standing in for political/social reform that is rapid, sweeping, or extreme fundamental changes in laws, governments, or social structures. Some of the radical proposals for moving forward on addressing climate change include de-growth or ending capitalism. These are indeed radical choices. But a lot of what needs doing to address climate change, which in turn helps address other aspects of the polycrisis, are things we’ve done before.

Been There, Done That, Let’s Do It Again

The thing we should keep in mind and try to promote within the public discussion of the polycrisis is that we have the means to make changes and that many of these solutions are not radical, but rather part of our recent history. Heather Cox Richardson points to this when she notes that during the Eisenhower Administration (1953-1961) the upper income tax bracket was 91 percent, corporate taxes were much higher, the federal estate tax for estates over $10 million was 77 percent and in many of the states there were state estate taxes, too. Back then, working people could be a one-income family, buy a home, a car (or two), go on vacations, and send the kids to college. The post-war period that extended well into the 1970s is rightly described as an American economic golden age where most people shared in fast rising productivity gains.

Back then, the Republican administration was directed to maintain New Deal social programs, with a duty to provide a social safety net, regulate the economy, and invest in and protect infrastructure. Hell, there were proposals from the Republicans back then for health care programs, too. Most adults born before and during the Eisenhower administration have some idea of Eisenhower’s view about military spending; in his “Chance for Peace” speech, when he talked about the dangers of the Military/Industrial Complex, he warned that heavy spending on weapons and war was literally a theft from citizens who needed food, clothing, education, and health.

No, I’m not forgetting Jim Crow and other deep problems of the time. Still, the argument holds: What is a radical change is that most of what’s mentioned in the above paragraph is now out of reach for the vast majority of Americans.

It’s Even Good Business

If you want to dive in deeper as to why clean energy is good for business—and, of course, a good tool in the battle against climate change—check out a report I ran on Gemini, “Economic Imperatives of Clean Energy Transitions: Microeconomic Advantages, Fossil Fuel Stranding Risks, and Externalities Abatement.” Here’s the opening paragraph to the analysis:

The global energy economy is undergoing a structural reallocation of capital from fossil fuel extraction and thermal generation to clean energy technologies. This transition is propelled by fundamental market dynamics, capital efficiency, risk management, and microeconomic competitiveness¹. Clean energy technologies offer superior long-term economic structures characterized by zero-marginal-cost generation, rapidly declining levelized costs, and insulation from volatile global commodity markets¹. Conversely, continued investment in fossil fuel infrastructure introduces mounting financial liabilities, including asset stranding, regulatory cost escalation, elevated capital costs, and exposure to severe external health and environmental damage costs².

Obviously, things can remain “business of usual,” although we need to understand that today’s “business as usual” is highly unusual to most of us living in America. The intense threat to America’s democracy itself is highly unusual. There have been plenty of periods in America’s history when business interests got too close to the halls of government (Heather Cox Richardson offers great perspective on this history) and like any human institution, our government of the people, by the people, for the people has varying degrees of corruption. Today’s corruption, unfortunately, seems the clear winner is that particular sweepstakes, and what’s more, the corruption rampant in the Trump Administration today is actively bad for business. Unless, that is, your business is to stuff as much money into your pockets in order to score high on the power scale even as your world grows more and more unlivable. I’m pretty sure the world growing more and more unlivable is generally bad for business.

Of course, there’s the failure by the government to capture the resources needed to undertake the sorts of programs, policies, and projects needed to speed up the transition to clean energy to more quickly reduce carbon and greenhouse gases, thus slowing down worsening climate change. That government failure comes about through a many decades-long crusade (cf. Louis Powell Memo) by money interests to alter tax law and related policies that in turn further enrich the wealthy, thus providing yet more influence upon the government. The ultra rich, by accumulating absurd levels of wealth, are starving much needed systemic changes such as the clean energy transition, along with many other programs (e.g., child care, housing, healthcare) that would make regular people more productive, never mind happier!

The fossil fuel industry is a strong governmental influence force, and, yes, there are plenty of other money interest groups, too. Even though the business model for fossil fuels is becoming more clearly understood as downright lousy, the influence of the fossil fuel industry keeps profits up by cheating. How does the industry cheat? Well, for instance, costs directly associated with the exploration, extraction, transportation, refinement, transportation, and use of their products are indirectly passed to the public, making the use of fossil fuels seem more economically competitive. Fortunately, there is a growing sense of the trickery underway. Unfortunately, the deceit of the fossil fuel industry—I’m looking at you, C-Suiters!—is pushing the world’s climate into a worsening crisis. Someday soon, we’ll find ourselves puzzled as to why these enemies of humanity haven’t already been arrested and imprisoned, their ill-gotten gains confiscated to settle a tsunami of lawsuits and criminal liability.

Don’t be confused: President Big Oil Stooge has been bought by Big Oil and is delivering to his masters. He’s suppressing wind farms. His executive orders disadvantaging clean energy generation interconnects puts fossil fuel generation well ahead in the interconnect queues. There’s an astoundingly large supply of clean energy—in various stages from planning through completion—that is made artificially unavailable to the grid, even while old and extremely expensive coal plants are ordered to stay online. In the United States, nearly 1,800 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy generation and battery storage projects sit in regional grid interconnection queues, representing roughly 85% of the 2,060 GW in total proposed capacity. This isn’t just a thumb being pressed to the scale; this is the whole Republicans’ elephant sitting on Big Oil’s side in the marketplace, without any sense of true balance.

Here are some highlights of the Trump Administration’s specifically anti-clean energy policies and orders:

• Offshore Wind Leasing Freezes and Lease Terminations
• Energy Emergency Directives and Fast-Tracking Thermal Power
• Asymmetric NEPA Reviews and Federal Siting Priorities
• Supply Chain Tariffs Triggering Restudies
• Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act and Market Rule Interventions

The fact of the matter is that Trump and Big Oil are the radical actors. Clean energy is sensible and fits quite soundly into rational processes of markets by replacing less efficient and costly products or processes with cheaper and better ones.

Oh my gosh, it turns out that I’m the conservative. I want to conserve the Constitution. I want to conserve common sense and long-term beneficial projects for the country and the world. I want to conserve the planet as habitable for mankind. There’s nothing radical about it.

The post Solving the Polycrisis Isn’t Radical first appeared on David Guenette.

The Microeconomic and Financial Business Case for Clean Energy

The financial mechanics of clean energy deployment differ fundamentally from traditional fossil fuel generation. Thermal power infrastructure depends on continuous, lifetime operational expenditure (OPEX) exposed to fuel price volatility². Clean energy assets—such as utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV), onshore wind, and battery storage—are predominantly capital-intensive upfront (CAPEX) with near-zero marginal operational fuel costs once commissioned¹. This structural distinction transforms clean energy into a predictable, risk-adjusted yield generator that stabilizes corporate cost structures over decadal time horizons¹.

Levelized Cost of Electricity Competitiveness

Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) benchmarking demonstrates that renewable generation maintains a decisive cost advantage over new-build thermal alternatives on an unsubsidized basis². Unsubsidized utility-scale solar PV achieves an average LCOE of $58 per megawatt-hour (MWh), with operational ranges spanning $38 to $78/MWh⁷. When combined with federal production or investment tax incentives, post-credit solar generation costs fall to $20–$45/MWh¹⁰. Onshore wind demonstrates similar competitiveness, with unsubsidized LCOE ranges of $37 to $86/MWh¹⁰.

By contrast, new-build natural gas combined-cycle power plants face elevated financial hurdles, with unsubsidized LCOE ranges spanning $39 to $109/MWh¹⁰, rising higher in volatile fuel environments⁴. Gas peaking units are substantially more expensive, ranging from $144 to $276/MWh⁴. Advanced nuclear and traditional coal generation remain economically uncompetitive for new capacity additions, exhibiting unsubsidized LCOE ranges of $141–$220/MWh and $71–$173/MWh, respectively⁴. Furthermore, gas technology supply chains face critical bottlenecks; gas turbine backlogs and supply shortages are projected to push turbine costs to $600 per kilowatt by 2027, representing a 195% cost expansion that further undermines thermal asset economics⁴.

Debt Cost Disparities and Capital Stack Optimization

Capital markets increasingly price climate transition risk directly into the cost of debt and equity¹. Because clean energy assets deliver stable, long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) and predictably structured cash flows, institutional lenders offer preferential financing terms¹. Specialized capital mechanisms—including Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE), green bonds, and sustainability-linked credit facilities—lower debt service costs and optimize corporate balance sheets¹³. C-PACE financing provides long amortization schedules aligned with operational equipment lifespans, non-recourse structures, and transferability upon property sale, allowing commercial real estate owners to execute deep retrofits without eroding liquid working capital¹³. Globally, green financial markets are expanding rapidly to absorb clean energy demand; green credit issuances in major financial markets reached CNY 30.08 trillion in 2023, growing 36.5% year-over-year¹⁴.

Brand Valuation and Commercial Performance

Corporate adoption of renewable energy directly drives brand equity, institutional investment allocation, and customer retention¹³. Approximately 68% of commercial consumers actively express purchase preferences for environmentally responsible enterprises, while 59% of major business organizations have integrated renewable energy procurement directly into core operational strategies¹⁶. Corporations participating in clean power coalitions such as RE100 achieve documented operational cost reductions of 20% to 50% while mitigating reputational, regulatory, and supply chain carbon exposure¹⁶.

Systemic Liabilities and Transition Risks of Fossil Fuel Dependency

Retaining structural exposure to fossil fuel value chains creates compounding macro-financial liabilities³. Companies reliant on coal, petroleum, and natural gas face severe transition risks driven by regulatory decarbonization mandates, technology substitution, shifting consumer demand, and physical climate disruption³.

The Mechanics of Asset Stranding

Assets become stranded when they experience premature write-downs, devaluations, or conversion to liabilities prior to the end of their anticipated economic design life³. To maintain a 50% statistical probability of limiting global average temperature increases to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, empirical climate modeling demonstrates that approximately 60% of existing global oil and natural gas reserves and 90% of proven coal reserves must remain unburned in the ground³.

The financial exposure associated with unextractable reserves and early decommissioning of industrial infrastructure is immense³. Global net present value losses attributable to untapped fossil fuel output are projected to reach between $1.0 trillion and $1.4 trillion in direct asset stranding³, with long-term unmined reserve asset losses estimated up to $21.5 trillion under comprehensive net-zero compliance scenarios⁶. Coal-fired power generation assets face the highest stranding vulnerability, requiring structural retirement 10 to 30 years earlier than historical operating baselines³. These asset write-downs pose systemic risks to financial institutions⁵. Commercial bank balance sheets hold an estimated $681 billion in direct exposure to stranded thermal assets, creating systemic financial instability akin to historical credit adjustments if write-downs occur abruptly rather than through managed phase-outs⁵.

Regulatory Headwinds and Trade Barriers

Fossil-fuel-dependent enterprises face escalating carbon pricing mechanisms and strict emissions performance mandates³. The implementation of international trade policy adjustments—such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)—imposes import tariffs on carbon-intensive industrial commodities including steel, aluminum, cement, and electricity²⁰. Exporters operating in jurisdictions without equivalent domestic carbon pricing face severe trade margin compression and loss of global market access if they fail to decarbonize industrial process heat and power inputs²⁰.

Primary Sectoral Transition Pathways

Transitioning to a decarbonized operational model varies in complexity across economic sectors. The three most immediate, cost-effective, and technically mature transition vectors are electrical generation, built environment heating and cooling, and light-duty fleet transportation⁸.

Electrical Generation Decarbonization

The power sector represents the fastest and most cost-effective primary transition vector due to mature technology, modular construction, and favorable levelized economics⁷. Utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind installations require deployment timelines of only 1 to 3 years, compared to 6 to 10 years for thermal gas facilities and 10 to 15 years for nuclear power plants⁸. Intermittency challenges are directly mitigated by the rapid deployment of standalone or co-located Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)⁷. The levelized cost of storage (LCOS) for utility-scale 2-hour BESS ranges from $0.081 to $0.174/kWh, while 4-hour BESS ranges from $0.145 to $0.319/kWh¹². Transitioning baseline power procurement to renewable PPAs provides immediate direct carbon reductions of 80% to 100% per MWh displaced, insulating businesses from fossil fuel price swings²⁵.

Built Environment Heating and Cooling Electrification

Space and water heating in commercial and residential structures historically rely on direct combustion of natural gas, fuel oil, or propane²⁷. Replacing combustion boilers and furnaces with high-efficiency electric heat pumps represents an immediately accessible decarbonization route²². Heat pumps achieve coefficient of performance (COP) ratings between 3.0 and 4.5, delivering three to four units of thermal energy for every unit of electrical energy consumed²⁸.

In key domestic markets, market adoption has crossed a major threshold; heat pumps outsold fossil fuel furnaces by 26% in 2025 (2.4 million units versus 1.9 million units), maintaining sales dominance since first surpassing furnace volume in 2022²². Total annual US heat pump shipments reached 4.1 million units, outperforming total deployment in Europe (2.3 million) and China (2.2 million)²². Financial payback periods for air-source heat pumps range from 3 to 12 years depending on regional climate, grid power pricing, natural gas tariffs, and available efficiency rebates³⁰. Given that space heating equipment exhibits an operational lifecycle of approximately 15 years, achieving 100% electric heat pump sales share by 2035 is required to ensure complete stock decarbonization by 2050²⁸. Water heaters operate on a 10-year replacement cycle, requiring a 100% heat pump sales share target by 2040²⁸.

On current average electrical grid mixes, heat pumps reduce direct operational greenhouse gas emissions by 60% to 70% compared to high-efficiency gas boilers²⁷. Even when operating on emissions-intensive, fossil-dominated grids, heat pumps deliver a minimum 20% net greenhouse gas reduction due to thermodynamic efficiency advantages³³. In parallel, compliance mandates under the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act enforce a 70% reduction in hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) supply by 2029 and an 85% phase-down by 2036²². The HVAC industry is rapidly transitioning toward lower Global Warming Potential (lower-GWP) A2L refrigerants (GWP < 700), with lower-GWP heat pump shipments expanding by 69% to achieve full market coverage²².

Light-Duty Transportation and Fleet Electrification

Commercial light-duty vehicle fleets (delivery vans, municipal service vehicles, passenger cars) represent an accessible sector for corporate clean energy transformation due to rapid payback under total cost of ownership (TCO) metrics²³. For commercial fleet applications featuring daily operational routes under 200 miles, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) achieve total cost of ownership parity with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles within 3 to 4 years of operation²⁴.

Fuel expenditure drops by approximately 90% when substituting electricity for gasoline or diesel; for example, municipal fleet evaluations demonstrate operational fuel cost reductions from $0.29 per mile for ICE models down to $0.03 per mile for BEVs²³. Additionally, BEV drivetrains eliminate complex mechanical subsystems—such as multi-speed transmissions, exhaust treatment systems, spark ignition setups, and internal engine oil circulation—yielding a direct 40% reduction in long-term maintenance costs and significantly reducing vehicle downtime²³. Electrifying corporate fleets eliminates 100% of direct tailpipe carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter emissions, generating substantial localized health co-benefits³⁶.

Sectoral Clean Energy Transition Timeline Matrix

The following matrix outlines the implementation timeline ranges, financial payback windows, emissions reduction potentials, and strategic deployment drivers across key commercial and industrial sectors⁸.

Broader Externalities Abatement: Health, Social, and Economic Co-Benefits

The persistent combustion of fossil fuels incurs severe societal external costs—primarily through atmospheric emissions of fine particulate matter (pm 2.5), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and ground-level ozone (O3)³⁶. These pollutants directly cause respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, premature mortality, and lost economic productivity⁴⁰. Transitioning away from fossil combustion yields immediate, highly localized public health and economic co-benefits that complement climate change mitigation goals³⁶.

Public Health Improvement and Reduced Premature Mortality

Fossil fuel combustion from thermal power plants, industrial boilers, build heating systems, and internal combustion vehicles is the primary driver of anthropogenic air pollution deaths³⁶. National scale atmospheric modeling indicates that executing coordinated federal and subnational clean energy actions in the United States will prevent 6,600 premature deaths annually by 2030, delivering air quality improvements across all regions³⁶.

As energy transition scenarios reach advanced stages toward mid-century, public health co-benefits scale dramatically⁴⁴. By 2050, the structural phase-out of fossil fuel combustion in power generation, transportation, and building systems is projected to prevent between 67,011 and 81,003 premature deaths per year in the United States alone⁴⁴. On a global scale, transitioning from fossil energy sources to clean wind, solar, and modern zero-emission alternatives is estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to prevent between 4 million and 7 million premature deaths annually¹⁶.

Quantified Healthcare Cost Savings

Reductions in airborne pollutants directly reduce emergency room visits, hospital admissions for acute respiratory conditions, heart attacks, and lost workdays³⁷. In the United States, the monetized economic value of health co-benefits derived from avoided mortalities, hospitalizations, and lost workdays ranges from $785.8 billion to $949.9 billion per year by 2050⁴⁴. Public health evaluation framework models, such as the EPA’s COBRA tool, establish that for every $1 spent on reducing fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), society gains up to $77 in direct monetized health benefits⁴².

At the residential and municipal scale, fully electrifying household heating, water heating, and cooking appliances eliminates internal and localized ambient fossil fuel combustion, reducing outdoor PM 2.5 pollution by over 300,000 tons annually³⁷. Nationwide residential electrification alone prevents 3,400 premature deaths, 1,300 emergency room admissions, and 220,000 acute childhood asthma attacks annually, generating $40 billion per year in direct healthcare savings³⁷.

Social Equity and Environmental Justice

The health burdens of fossil fuel infrastructure are historically distributed unequally, impacting low-income communities, Black populations, and urban corridors situated adjacent to highway networks, industrial ports, and fossil-fired generating stations³⁶. Empirical health transition modeling shows that decarbonization policies deliver proportional health co-benefits to historically overburdened populations³⁶. Black, suburban, and lower-income demographic groups experience higher percentage reductions in baseline mortality under clean energy transition scenarios, demonstrating that clean technology deployment serves as a powerful mechanism for narrowing systemic environmental health disparities³⁶.

Strategic Synthesis and Corporate Policy Recommendations

The economic and operational evidence establishes that clean energy adoption is a core imperative for corporate capital allocation, risk management, and long-term value creation². Businesses that aggressively transition capital deployment toward renewable power, building electrification, and fleet transport capture tangible operational efficiencies while insulating balance sheets from catastrophic asset stranding and carbon border tax liabilities³.

To maximize competitive advantage during the energy transition, business executives and capital allocators should execute a phased strategy across four key operational areas:

1. Capital Stack Reallocation via Sustainable Finance: Leverage C-PACE, green bonds, and sustainability-linked credit facilities to fund upfront equipment CAPEX, preserving working capital while capturing 20% to 50% net utility operational savings¹³.
2. Accelerated Sectoral Transition Execution: Focus capital expenditure on high-return, short-payback transition vectors—specifically off-site and rooftop solar PPAs (immediate return), light-duty fleet electrification (3–4 year TCO parity), and space/water heat pump retrofits (3–12 year payback)⁸.
3. Fossil Liability De-Risking: Audit corporate real estate portfolios, supply chains, and industrial assets to identify stranded asset exposure, phasing out direct natural gas combustion and fossil-fueled equipment ahead of tightening AIM Act and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) regulatory thresholds³.
4. Quantification of Externalities Co-Benefits: Integrate public health savings, air quality co-benefits, and environmental justice indicators directly into corporate ESG underwriting and corporate governance frameworks to build durable equity value and stakeholder support¹³.

Works cited

1. The Cost of Capital in Clean Energy Transitions – Analysis – IEA, https://www.iea.org/articles/the-cost-of-capital-in-clean-energy-transitions
2. Bridging the clean energy investment gap: Cost of capital in … – OECD, https://one.oecd.org/document/ENV/WKP(2024)15/REV1/en/pdf
3. What are stranded assets? – Grantham Research Institute on climate, https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-stranded-assets/
4. Renewables remain cheapest, but their LCOE is rising: Lazard, https://www.utilitydive.com/news/renewables-remain-cheapest-lcoe-rising-lazard/825443/
5. The research is clear on stranded assets, but how will the finance, https://www.camecon.com/insights/the-research-is-clear-on-stranded-assets-but-how-will-the-finance-sector-respond
6. Stranded assets could exact steep costs on fossil energy producers, https://news.mit.edu/2022/stranded-assets-could-exact-steep-costs-fossil-energy-producers-investors-0819
7. LEVELIZED COST OF ENERGY+ – Lazard, https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025.pdf
8. Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+) – Lazard, https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/
9. LEVELIZED COST OF ENERGY+ – Lazard, https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pdf
10. Solar LCOE USA 2024: $60/MWh Empirical, $38–78 Lazard Range, https://www.solardataatlas.com/en/data-solar-lcoe-usa
11. Why Solar + Storage Beat Nuclear And Gas For U.S. Grid Growth In, https://www.solarpermitsolutions.com/blog/why-solar-storage-beat-nuclear-and-gas-for-us-grid-growth-in-2025
12. Despite low gas prices, solar, wind remain cheapest sources of, https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/17/despite-low-gas-prices-solar-wind-remain-cheapest-sources-of-power-in-us/
13. Sustainable finance incentives reshaping project economics, https://salasobrien.com/news/sustainable-finance-incentives-reshaping-project-economics/
14. The Impact of Green Finance on Energy Transition Under Climate, https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/15/7112
15. Green finance, renewable energy and capital formation in the global, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1745134/full
16. The business case for renewable energy, https://instituteofsustainabilitystudies.com/insights/guides/the-business-case-for-renewable-energy/
17. Climate change and the financial risk of stranded assets, https://www.pembina.org/blog/climate-change-financial-risk-stranded-assets
18. Stranded assets and Transition risks – UNITesi, https://unitesi.unive.it/retrieve/9d8379d5-f400-4c64-b83d-154088b24aa0/896957-1294488.pdf
19. Stranded Assets: Assessing the Impact on US and European Utilities, https://info.loomissayles.com/stranded-assets-assessing-the-impact-on-us-and-european-utilities
20. EU Issues 10 Guides for CBAM Compliance in 2026 – ESG News, https://esgnews.com/eu-issues-10-guides-for-cbam-compliance-in-2026/
21. Building Electrification Explained: Costs, Mandates, and the 2026, https://www.environmentenergyleader.com/stories/explainers-building-electrification,131973
22. Momentum Q3 | 2025 – Building Decarbonization Coalition, https://buildingdecarb.org/momentum-q3-2025
23. Total Cost of Ownership for Public Fleets: How Cities are Saving, https://electrificationcoalition.org/resource/total-cost-of-ownership-for-public-fleets-how-cities-are-saving-money-by-going-electric/
24. EV Fleet Total Cost of Ownership: A TCO Guide for US Fleet Operators, https://pulseenergy.io/blog/ev-fleet-total-cost-of-ownership-a-tco-guide-for-us-fleet-operators
25. Executive summary – Net Zero Roadmap: A Global Pathway to … – IEA, https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-roadmap-a-global-pathway-to-keep-the-15-c-goal-in-reach/executive-summary
26. Lazard: renewables consistently lowest cost of new electric generation, https://thequadreport.com/lazard-renewables-consistently-lowest-cost-of-new-electric-generation/
27. Are the ambitious Heat Pump Goals achievable?, https://heatpumpswatch.org/are-the-ambitious-heat-pump-targets-achievable/
28. Pace of Progress | Rewiring America, https://www.rewiringamerica.org/research/pace-of-progress-home-electrification-transition
29. A Roadmap of Building Decarbonization Strategies to Reduce, https://restservice.epri.com/publicdownload/000000003002022156/0/Product
30. What Is the Payback Period for a Heat Pump?, https://www.greentechrenewables.co.uk/ashp/what-is-the-payback-period-for-a-heat-pump
31. The true pay back time for heat pumps – Custom Renewables, https://custom-renewables.com/the-true-pay-back-time-for-heat-pumps/
32. Study shows payback times for heat pumps could plunge by 2030, https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/03/03/study-shows-payback-time-for-heat-pumps-could-plunge-by-2030/
33. Executive Summary – The Future of Heat Pumps – Analysis – IEA, https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-heat-pumps/executive-summary
34. EV vs ICE Cost Comparison – Elinta Charge, https://elintacharge.com/glossary/ev-vs-ice-cost-comparison/
35. EV Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): What Savings Should You Expect?, https://smartrak.com/total-cost-of-ownership-tco-savings-with-evs-what-should-you-expect/
36. Princeton-led study highlights widespread health co-benefits from all, https://cpree.princeton.edu/news/2025/princeton-led-study-highlights-widespread-health-co-benefits-all-society-clean-energy
37. Breathe easy – Rewiring America, https://www.rewiringamerica.org/research/home-electrification-health-benefits
38. Special Report: Stranded Fossil Fuel Asset Risk – UKSIF, https://uksif.org/policy/stranding-report/
39. The Industrial Heat Pump Opportunity Goes Beyond Energy Savings, https://www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/the_industrial_heat_pump_opportunity_goes_beyond_energy_savings_0.pdf
40. EPA will no longer consider health-related monetary benefits of, https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/epa-will-no-longer-consider-health-related-monetary-benefits-of-reducing-air-pollution/
41. Chapter: 3 Public Health Co-Benefits and Impacts of Decarbonization, https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/25931/chapter/6
42. EPA will stop calculating the money saved to health in air pollution, https://apnews.com/article/epa-air-pollution-health-benefits-trump-771218fb0059f4c1b07981755d3453a1
43. Health and air pollution co-benefits of climate change mitigation, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/B09460
44. Human Health Impacts of Energy Transitions across the United, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12288885/

The post Economic Imperatives of Clean Energy Transitions: Microeconomic Advantages, Fossil Fuel Stranding Risks, and Externalities Abatement first appeared on David Guenette.

“Climate Action Policies & Pragmatism’s Two Goals: Pricing Carbon Was Our Political Potemkin Village,” is a recent post by Jim Ball and his Substack Climate Hope Together. It is an interesting post recapping Ball’s years in the “DC climate/environment/clean energy scene.” In the post he argues that the price on carbon, which was the leading policy choice of the wayback time, was heralded by neoclassical economists and that the various carbon pricing policy proposals suffered from a lack of pragmatism.

Maybe so. Of course, no one having a time machine makes such second-guessing academic. Nonetheless, acknowledging the price of carbon—and it is high!—is an essential element of the clean energy transition, if for no other reason than the issue of affordability has become linked to energy policy.

Ball’s mea culpa over his own involvement in this early thinking on carbon pricing is sincere and based on his newer understanding that driving down the costs of clean energy would have been the far better choice. Of course, to some degree, this is what Biden’s IIJA and IRA were doing, but that came along about two decades later.

He puts it this way (emphasis his):

Well, I was wrong.

But there were a few folks who got it right back then who were part of a small, new DC think tank that wasn’t completely caught up in groupthink: ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

They were focused on the price part, but they flipped the script. Instead of making the bad stuff cost more, let’s make the good stuff cost less.

But of course. The weird thing is that the fossil fuel—“bad stuff”—does cost more and has been exacting a terrible price on the world. Don’t get me wrong—coal and oil and natural gas (a.k.a., methane) are great improvements over wood and the explosion of human population would not have been possible without the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels. You can argue that the Earth would have been better off without an explosion in human population, considering that biodiversity loss and climate change have taken big hits from human population growth. I, for one, have no interest in figuring out which individuals made possible with the vastly expanded energy wealth that fossil fuels brought to the human race should be asked to leave the stage of human existence. That’s one of the problems with de-growth thinking, where humans are intrinsically thought of as some sort of planetary virus, whereas figuring out how humans can better steward the world in which they live seems the more interesting approach.

The fact is that until fairly recently fossil fuel has been a requirement to keep people alive, whether through expanded agricultural land use or energy to support science, medicine, shelter, and employment, along with so many other things. But it is now irrefutable that mankind’s use of fossil fuel has come at a cost. That cost is that we’ve managed to screw up the planetary systems through the burning of fossil fuels on a massive scale for now hundreds of years, and we’ve just started realizing there’s the bill coming due.

I’m arguing that realizing the real cost of fossil fuels isn’t us “making the bad stuff cost more.” The bad stuff has always cost more—much more—than we’ve been pretending and it’s time to stop pretending.

Pragmatism is a Two-Way Street

As an economy, not only have we ignored the real cost of fossil fuels, but we’ve also been pretending that fossil fuel is cheap, even while direct government subsidies and policies have artificially lowered the price of fossil fuel. We’re happy enough to celebrate every penny drop in the price at the gas pump, albeit with some of us feeling guilt. I recently posted on my website “Over-Complicating Climate Change Progress,” [ https://davidguenette.com/over-complicating-climate-change-progress/ ] and there’s a header in this post titled “Understanding the Progress Underway and that Doing Nothing Is the Far More Expensive Choice,” and here’s part of that section that addresses the real costs of gasoline at the fuel pump:

One thing I’d love to see is the correction of the biggest failure for climate progress, which is ignoring our bullshit pricing of oil. Fossil fuels should carry the costs and consequences of their production, protection, and use, or what are referred to as “externalities.” Thanks to sneaky indirect subsidies, fossil fuels escape accounting and paying for the damages their product causes, an exceptional condition among businesses that usually include the cost of their product in the market price.

So, let’s learn to talk about the real costs of fossil fuels. Let’s try to get this talk into the political discussion, especially at this time of affordability as an election issue.

Fossil fuels are actually very expensive. The price at the pump doesn’t cover the actual costs. Here is an AI Summary table that addresses actual cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. Before you jump on me for providing something generated from AI, please understand that I know the sources and the arguments and that the exact and precise numbers are too complex to pin down to anything other than a range. Still, the table is convincing:

Pricing Scenarios: Current vs. True Cost

The table below highlights how different economic frameworks alter what you would actually pay at the pump to clear these hidden debts.

First, please note that this analysis was run before the Iran war further spiked pump prices. Second, before someone accuses me of sloppy math, I’m happy to admit fixing the exact cost on any particular application of fossil fuels is herculean. Fortunately, there’s no need for exactitude, which is why the above table has ranges. Want to argue the cost ranges? Fine. Make your case or leave it up to bureaucrats and technicians to assess for better specificity. But what is beyond question is that the cost of fossil fuel production and use is high and getting more expensive by the hour.

Moral Power : People Power : Staying Power

Ball’s post ends up a call for the Climate Movement (capitalization his) to heed the “magic word: pragmatism… and when it comes to legislation, our value of pragmatism has two goals: what works, and what can pass.”

I suspect a carbon fee and dividend approach is one workable way to start pricing real costs into fossil fuels while alleviating the poor of the additional cost burden, but there are other options. For instance, the federal government has built big things: There’s the TVA, and rural electrification, the moonwalk, the Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and any number of big wars (well, two!). We have a history of undertaking big projects in America and admittedly figuring out how to assess and price carbon sounds like a big project. Other examples of big projects are Biden’s IIJA and IRA, which were good starts and which should be revived, although there’s lots more than just carrots to consider.

Let’s also keep in mind that while Big Oil is powerful, its access to money (while impressive, as we all know) pales compared to what the United States can bring to bear. When it comes to carbon pricing, a good start would be eliminating direct subsidies and accounting for externalities. If Big Oil isn’t up to it, they can face lawsuits that likely will (unless sandbagged by the current SCOTUS) cost them a whole lot more of their obscene profits than a rational and ordered program for accounting for fossil fuel costs. We’re paying a high price in numbers of deaths and an increasingly threatened world, so let’s insist on a goddamn accurate invoice.

Hell, there’s even nationalization to consider since it is clear that the fossil fuel industry needs to phase out over time, but today there’s little sign of that from the big corporations themselves. In fact, there are plenty of indications that Big Oil is happy to threaten the economy with a massive wave of stranded assets by building (or trying to build) more and more gas generators, no doubt hoping that their business of selling stinky molecules continues well past the planet’s sell-by date.

Basically, Big Oil is a big punk.

The climate movement—which today is also the democracy movement and the affordability/energy wealth movement—needs to start telling the truth about fossil fuel costs. There’s nothing easy about any of this, but the oppressive expense of using fossil fuels is part of the real story of the clean energy transition. Fortunately, we have established a better alternative to fossil fuels to build the world’s energy wealth and the advantages of clean energy are multiplying by the second: cheaper, safer, faster, smarter, and more likely to support a stable international order and fewer resource conflicts.

The rest of my advice on how to establish a perfect world?

Stay tuned, of course.

The post Price on Carbon is Pragmatic Because It Reflects Reality first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s a quick post about my guest blog entry and long essay appearing in ClimateCultures, where I discuss what should define climate fiction. Big surprise: I also talk about The Steep Climes Quartet, my literary climate fiction series.

What is ClimateCultures?

“Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments”

ClimateCultures is an online space that Mark Goldthorpe launched in 2017 for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments .“We are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces,” is how he describes the effort.

Who’s involved? ClimateCultures casts widely, including within the community of novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, and climate researchers. Designed as an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward. It’s also a continuation of some of Goldthorpe’s encounters when working with the charity TippingPoint a few years back, where he helped bring artists and scientists together for creative climate change events.

Here’s more about ClimateCultures and Goldthorpe’s motivation in creating the publication and group, taken from the site’s “Welcome” page:

I’d always been interested in artistic responses to the problems but this was my first deep exposure to such a number and range of perspectives, enquiries and works-in-progress. Those events left a strong impression — with me, and with the artists and scientists who took part. ClimateCultures builds on this legacy, exploring the power of an environmental imagination to help us develop a sense of agency in challenging times, as I discuss in a short article I wrote in February 2019.

The post I’m in ClimateCultures Talking about Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.