Reflections on Easter Morning

Will we be saved?

For three days and three nights we waited. It wasn’t until I was much older that I questioned the math. I was raised in a very Catholic town by a very Catholic family and went to a very Catholic school and Good Friday was such a solemn day that even if the sun were shining and the forsythia abloom in its finest spring yellow, I would have sworn to you then that the skies darkened, and the trees turned bare. I could see Him, buried deep in the earth, his forehead pierced by the crown of thorns, nails driven through his hands and feet. I could feel the earth holding its breath as we waited for Easter morning when, if I believed and repented, He would, finally, rise from under the dark earth into the heavens and the world would awaken with Him in all its resplendent color and majesty. 

Despite the stout chocolate bunnies from Sensmeyer’s chocolate factory and the purple straw Easter baskets filled with jellybeans, Easter was my first experience with death.  Breathless, I waited for the trumpet to sound, for the resurrection to come and the promise of immortality to be kept.    

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” —1 Corinthians 15:49–53.

And what of my Jewish neighbors, so recently moved out from Brooklyn, who lived in that development a few blocks south of me in those rows of new homes constructed atop the place where the salt marshes once waved and ran with life? It was the time of Passover for them, and they too had constructed rituals against death, and they too performed them now at this transitional moment between winter and summer between dark and light.  

God sent the angel of death to kill the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. God told Moses to order the Israelite families to sacrifice a lamb and smear the blood on the door of their houses. In this way, the angel would know to 'pass over' the houses of the Israelites. This is why the festival commemorating the escape from Egypt is known as Passover.

Writing in The New Yorker in 2019 about what it will take for people to keep temperatures from rising beyond two degrees Celsius, the novelist Jonathan Franzen said this... “Every day instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.”

Except, of course, we don’t, we aren’t. A few weeks ago, the IPCC came out with yet one more report that says what it said last year and five years before: that we are running out of time, it is Code Red for humanity, it’s now or never.  Carbon emissions must be cut in half by 2030, brought to zero by 2050.  Death awaits us. Yet, the next day, at breakfast, we aren’t thinking about death, we’ve got juicier things to pay attention to, like the hot story about a porn star and a fuming ex-president.

Could it be that we’ve got this story about being saved so braided into our minds that really, deep down, we don’t believe all this hype about the death and suffering that awaits us?  Could it be we are waiting to be saved, for angels to see the signs on our doors and pass over us, for the trumpets to sound and the news to reach us that death has been conquered and immortality assured? Or even just waiting for a few red and purple eggs hidden under the couch by the Easter Bunny?

Carbon Capture, illustrated by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

But wait, what is that thing over there, in the corner called carbon capture, and what about green hydrogen and what about those spaceships promised by Bezos and Musk? Maybe salvation is at hand!  Maybe I can stop feeling guilty when I’m not thinking about death at breakfast and am instead breathlessly watching the news-feed, waiting for that sulking ex-pres to leave his Tower with the magic escalator and head uptown to get fingerprinted.

I dive into the research on carbon capture and green hydrogen, leaving spaceships aside as, honestly, I don’t want to leave home.  A whole morning goes by. I lurch from one scientific report to another. Yes, it’s promising. No it’s not. Well maybe.  But will either of them save us in time?

I need to talk to someone who really knows this stuff, whose opinion I can trust, and I know just who that person is.

Justin Mikulka is a research fellow for New Consensus who’s working on investigating the best solutions and policies to rapidly decarbonize the economy.  He answers questions like mine for a living. He’s wicked smart and he’s not getting paid by a fossil fuel company or a corporation dying for good greenwashing press. I met him last month at a dinner at his parents’ house and wished I could have downloaded the contents of his brain into mine.

I email him.  “Justin, I am sorry to bother you but, you know, it’s Easter, and, well, here’s the bottom line, do you think we are going to be saved?  Can I put my faith in green hydrogen or carbon capture and stop worrying about death at breakfast?” 

Justin’s answers come back quickly.

Can green hydrogen save us? Green hydrogen is necessary to decarbonize approximately 15% of the global economy and has potential for another 5%.  It will be very important but it is not going to save us and we won't be living in a world based on a hydrogen economy. 

OK..If green hydrogen isn’t going to save us, what about carbon capture?  Justin sent links to articles that all said essentially the same thing: that it will take too much energy to extract carbon from the atmosphere. “It’s simple math,” said his father, Tom, who’s also a scientist and has kept up with Justin’s research.

This sentence from a piece in a journal devoted to this kind of technology says it all:

'The amount of energy required by direct air carbon capture proves it is an exercise in futility.'

And in case you need more headlines, how about this one from Nature;

‘Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative.’

Here’s Justin’s bottom line about being saved:

So, will hydrogen or carbon capture save us? Not on their own. They are one of the many tools we have available now to eliminate the majority of our carbon emissions. What will save us is if we rapidly deploy those tools in smart ways while ramping down the oil and gas industry.

Oh phooey.

Here I am back to having to think about death. There will be no resurrection, no technological angels with just the right mathematical formulas coming to save life on this planet. But the good news is we aren’t doomed. Hard work by ordinary people, not gods, is what is called for and right now. Justin says “we” have to “rapidly” deploy these tools and “ramp down” the oil and gas industry. That’s code for fight like hell against not only the oil and gas industry but the banking industry which is amassing billions of dollars by its murderous profit-driven policies.

Death is here at breakfast: not just my own rapidly approaching death evidenced by the mottled brown spots on my skin akin those on a thrush’s breast but that of millions of species, including ours, because of the way we’ve so rapaciously messed up our Garden of Eden. She’s got steely gray eyes and she smells like burning oil and she’s looking at me, she’s looking at you and she’s got a question which I will let Dionne Warwick put to you this Easter morning:

What’s it all about Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie? Are we meant to take more than we give?