Stop when You Must

This is the most arrogant stop sign in town. It stops three lanes of usual traffic to accommodate the unusual need to get a city vehicle out of the work yard. Worse, it is powered by an expensive solar array, battery, and flashing lights. The urgency and alarm of red flashing lights stop hundreds of cars and trucks a day, all day, all night to make way for the occasional city vehicle to join the streets. Adding stupidity to make the command, the solar cell on the opposite corner is facing North, the wrong way.

This is my local government imposing needless mandated stops (which, if incomplete, result in a ticket, a fine, and an increase in insurance premium), making everyone always halt, wasting momentum, taking time, and causing the polluting engines to pollute at their worst (when idling and accelerating) to – what? – let the exiting city vehicle not crash into cross traffic?

If pressed, perhaps they’d plead “safety reasons,” the universal put-off, explaining nothing. In a country hyperhyped on anxiety, such “answers” end inquiry and innovation.

I say the most arrogant because I generally view stop signs as arrogant. I agree with their regulation of traffic. But there are ways to keep traffic flowing without always having to stop.

For example, here in Oregon on my bike, I can legally roll through an intersection with a stop sign when I can see there is no cross traffic to stop for. When there is someone in the right of way, I stop. No problem. But when there’s not, I don’t stop. No problem.

I prefer a change in how we obey the law for cars and trucks as well. Instead of “You must stop,” it would mean, “Stop when you must.”

People react to this idea, imagining all sorts of unregulated crashes, picturing all the crashes we have now at regulated stops, only worse. My vulnerable experience on a bike convinces me I and others are capable of determining whether there is cross-traffic to stop for or not. When there is no traffic in the right of way to stop for, all the stopping we do in this town and across this country is wasted. We should have safely flowing regulated traffic, not overly cautious, constantly stifled, halting traffic. Regulate intersections, as they now are, but let the traffic flow when it’s safe.

My insurance company offers a lower rate by monitoring my driving and seeing that I do it safely and well. (It’s all by GPS.) They can tell if I totally stop, do a halting stop, or no stop. They can tell if I stop too fast or start too fast. Their vast records would show all the times someone stops and immediately goes. I assume they stopped only to obey the law. If they’re not waiting, there is no one there to wait for. All such stops are therefore wasted – legally mandated waste.

It’s as if the fossil fuel, brake manufacturers, and asthma physicians all met in a back room to discuss this issue, favoring keeping the stuffy, halting law, wasteful. Of the millions of stops per minute, how many were needed, and how many were wasted? What does this cost in wasted fuel and increased global warming?

Defenders of the current way we interpret the law might counter that we would get used to rolling through stop signs so much we’d do it too often, interrupting others or even crashing into them. It’s an imaginable anxiety. But it assumes we’re too obtuse to know whether there is traffic in the right of way to stop for our not. We’re not so inept.

Right-wingers and left-wingers would both favor such a change. We don’t need government overreach telling us what we see. We don’t need the needless waste of gasoline, money, and time, always stopping for no one and nothing. We need to regulate the right of way at intersections, not impede them. Those with a stop sign (and I would add a stoplight) are required by law to stop for whatever traffic there is in the right of way. But they would be legally allowed to not stop when there is no actual need to do so.

I’ve seen this magnified at stoplights. Those with the red sit in their cars, engines idling, sometimes six cars facing one way, another six facing the other way, all of them able to see there is no one in the green or even approaching the green, yet there they sit, waiting and wasting.

Calculate how much wasted gasoline and added pollution is created across the country by this system, millions of times a moment, all day and night, all year.

It isn’t just my time and money I’m griping about here, it’s the stubborn, antiprogressive insult this assumes about our driving ability and it adds to the assault on the planetary overheating we’re all beginning to endure. You’d think we’d be eager to find the many ways to alter our ways, to have great lives, healthier lives, and less expensive lives by changing how we live our lives.

We used to kill whales for oil for our reading lamps. Less injurious, but sooty, kerosine was cheaper and better. Then it turned out that iron spinning near magnets created electromagnetism (electricity) that brightened the filament in the vacuum of an incandescent bulb. Better again, but generating and wasting heat. Along came LEDs that ran cool and created ten times the light of the former bulb. The initial harsh color was mastered with an array of color choices. They lost longer and cost less.

Such progress in lighting is but one of the innovative ways humans devise to not kill, exhaust, and waste to have comfortable, safe, healthy lives.

For instance, one of the very little things I do to not add to global warming is to let the sunshine and breeze dry my clothes. I still have an electric dryer, but I only rarely use it. I still have a big, heavy Taurus V-6 fossil-fuel-driven car, but it gathers spider webs in the driveway because I almost always use my electric vehicles (a bike and a car) to get around town for far less cost and resultant pollution.

Global warming isn’t just a health or economic concern, it’s an ethical one. For me, it is wrong to keep wasting and polluting in the same old ways when there are newer, better ones.

Fellow theologian Michael Dowd, who I like and interviewed (https://www.earthlyreligion.com/interview-with-michael-dowd/), warns of ecological overshoot leading to probable collapse. It’s more than just global warming. That is enmeshed in our larger and more deleterious habits. Cities, transport, food, and social relations – they’re all problematic and need adjustment. Just as other civilizations have utterly collapsed from such blunders, ours is likely to fall.

“Ecology is the new theology,” he says, “Big history is the new Genesis.” Our lives are of the air, water, soil, and other life. This earth is our realm of reality, our chance to live well with Creation. You and I, our generation, are the incarnate ones for now. We’re writing our history as we go. I couldn’t agree more.

But I take issue with one point of his. He thinks appropriate technologies only perpetuate the mess. Our electric cars need exotic materials and they cost to create. Well, so do ICE cars. The difference is the former can run on sunlight and wind for their life – magnets spinning (or PV cells churning out electrons in the sunlight) at one end of the system drives or cars cleanly, quietly, and powerfully at the other end of that pulse. One will never pollute to run; the other will always pollute and waste to run. Similarly, LED lights run on almost no power. Should we eschew them because they also light the workplace where ICE cars are made?

A building is on fire. Various helpers bring buckets of water but are turned away because any one of them couldn’t put out the fire. Refusing advances that address global warming and other forms of global overshoot won’t put out the fire. It’s all hands on deck. It’s our time. It’s our responsibility. In this vast universe, earth is the only precious Eden we’ll ever have.

We’re recently aware of the so-called carbon cycle. For eons before people, carbon migrated between the ground and the sky. The firewood I put in my stove took perhaps a hundred years to be created. Leaves turned sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide from the air into cellulose, the stuff of limbs and tree trunks. Wood, coal, and oil are mostly made of air. When I burn them, the carbon goes back to the sky. Thom Hartman called it “ancient sunlight.” Primitive solar power changes carbon dioxide into the stuff of our fuels.

When we burn oil, coal, or, to use a sneaky Orwellian term, “natural” gas, we’re gathering thousands of years of carbon dioxide from the air, which was safely stored in the ground, to return to the sky in instants. Global warming started way back when we changed forests into houses and cooking fires. When we cut down millions of oaks for railroad ties, when we burned tons of coal to make the steel for the rails and the locomotives, when we then fueled the trains with wood and coal we were hurrying the carbon away from the ground and into our sky, heating it.

In a geologic instant, we went from balanced to overheating. It was just getting going, but especially since the massive industrialization of the last century and recent decades, it’s creating a hot top to an unnaturally warming world.

My dad was born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where Pennzoil was founded. His dad helped drive the earliest oil wells in the country. (Earlier, my dad’s grandpa helped dig the Erie Canal.) In those days, they brought up tar and oil for the lubricant qualities for wagons and waterwheels. The wasted by-product, gasoline, was burnt off in the ditch.

Using gasoline in car engines took off even though battery-driven cars were also popular then. Since then, ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) took off, both gasoline and diesel. I don’t blame or begrudge this fact. Rather, I marvel at the wizardry involved in gasoline and cars. I credit both industries for supplying what we wanted and used.

However, now we know what all that gasoline and diesel has been doing to our climate. Lots of little actions helped make our human-wide predicament; lots of little actions will rescue us from it and put us in a cleaner, healthier, more economical way.

The words of Yip Harburg’s tender song, “Little Drops of Rain” (made popular by Judy Garland), speak to our situation:

Little drops of rain
Little grains of sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land

Little drops of rain, little rays of sun, little ways of life – all of these worked together for geologic ages before humans to create a diverse, interdependent array of life. We’ve evolved of it and into it.

Hopefully, we wish to live with it and for it too. Little uses of coal, oil, and natural gas have accumulated in our warming skies, warming also our oceans, pumping up hurricanes and tornados, impairing what we have come to rely upon as ordinary weather.

Fortunately, we can largely stop doing the little things that create global warming and begin using the many little and large ways to live otherwise and better. A sunny window supplies what a darkened house once burned for heat. My clothesline drys my clothes as well as my drier used to. I get around town easily and safely on my bike or electric car for less pollution and waste than I used to. I still have a drier and a car, but I don’t usually use them.

These “little drops” accumulate, especially if millions join in the effort. The biggest bang for the buck in slowing and fixing global warming is electric cars. They’re far simpler than our former cars. My Taurus has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bearings just to run an engine that ends up supplying only about 25% of its energy to the wheels. The rest is lost in wasted heat. My electric car has three bearings, no transmission, supplies nearly 100% of its energy to the wheels, doesn’t pollute, and costs far less to operate.

As we find the will, we find the ways. Batteries are great now and they keep improving. The materials in a car and the ways to make it keep improving. Cars, houses, businesses, road design, traffic laws (see above), and food types and production all improve as we seek to improve them.

You’d think we’d eagerly all cooperate at this climate emergency. Yet petty politics and tribal thinking stubbornly impede it. China has produced most of the world’s photovoltaic solar cells and battery-driven cars. Yet, the domestic production of each (which I favor) is supposedly favored by President Biden’s 100% tariff. Our manufacturers churn out lots of Hummers and Escalades (big, heavy, expensive cars) while China could be supplying us with decent, simple electric cars for about $10.00 to $15,000. We’ll mostly keep driving ICE vehicles as our manufacturers dither and delay. Fossil-fuel-financed misinformation and lobbying divert our attention from the newer and better way in favor of the older and worse way. They fund tribal ney-sayers and maneuver to delay the eventual transition.

We must stop our denial, indifference, and perpetuation of what’s ruining us. Stop the poisons. Stop the cruelty. Stop the extinctions. Stop the needless waste of fossil fuels.

I saw a woman sitting in a huge Escalade on a nice day, the windows down, the engine running to run the air conditioner keeping her from realizing it was a nice day. “Damn Americans,” I muttered. Are we so wealthy we don’t need to care about the cost of the wasted gasoline or worry about the eventual cost to our grandchildren? Had she not heard about global warming and what is making it worse? It’s not a partisan issue. It’s physics, chemistry, and biospheric realities. It’s as injurious as expected already, only faster than we thought, getting worse. Running an engine for no reason seems offensive.

But those are my values. Others think differently. Many dismiss it because their favored leader called it a hoax. Such people are thinking with the few thoughts they’re given, buoyed by others in their circle. The fossil fuel companies spent millions amplifying such denial, staving off a few more years of unprecedented profit before the impending shift. (Ironic they would spend millions for a mere hoax.)

This is the greatest challenge our countries and humanity in general have had to face. It’s slowly warming, with spikes of temperature, drought, crop loss, and species loss to warn us. Droughts, fires, hurricanes, tornados, migration, sea rise, and more should alert our collective notice, yet the topic was mostly avoided in the current nomination process. Like her, though I do, Kamala hasn’t addressed this (or the bombing of innocents in Gaza with weapons made here and profiting us). Perhaps when she’s in she’ll do better on both.

Though there are a lot of people already sounding the alarm and offering solutions (Al Gore, Rick Hansen, Naomi Klein, Michael Dowd, Alan Journet, and many more) more are needed. More is needed to turn anxiety into action, to admit what had been denied, turning denial into desire. We need politicians, preachers, artists, and ordinary people to invest in humanity’s future, invest in the future of life on earth. It will pay off. How healthily could we live? How abundant and resplendent could Nature get here in our Eden?

Perhaps the guru Anandamurti was right, “The future will be better than you can imagine.”

Little notes that sing
Little words that rhyme
Make the mighty memories
And the dreams of time

What should stop is needless waste, not our flowing along together safely and well.

———————————————————————————————————–

I am sad to report Michael Dowd died last fall. Here’s what he calls the Cliff Notes (shorter) version of his Sanity 101 “Living Fully in an Age of Decline” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLBJjBcSSnY.

His main website is still: https://postdoom.com/