A patient shows up at an ER with tremendous head injuries: black eyes, a split lip and missing tooth, a swollen and twisted nose, matted hair. He’s holding a bloody hammer. He’s rushed into a room where a medical team urgently assesses his vitals. “I just can’t stop hitting myself with this hammer!” he keeps repeating. His vitals look okay, though, and he’s in no immediate danger of death; a doctor prescribes oxycodone for the pain, 10mg, and the patient is released.
How did the doctor do? What’s your prognosis for the patient? All good?
Of course, this is absurd. No responsible doctor would treat such a troubled patient with an addictive drug and be done with it. “At least take the hammer away!” you exclaim. “Figure out why he’s hitting himself!”
Absurd though it may be, if the hammer is fossil fuels, we are both the patient and the doctor, and this is precisely our treatment plan. Has been for some time.
The current example of our hammer-induced head trauma is underway in Ukraine. Proximately, we may blame autocracy and Vladimir Putin; we may say he’s insane, a megalomaniac with an unhinged version of history lodged in his aging skull. While all of that is undoubtedly true, make no mistake; the hammer bludgeoning Ukraine is fossil fuels, and Vladimir Putin is just the current most visibly horrible wielder of it. Oil and gas sales, which account for roughly half of Russia’s GDP and surged in 2021, bought Putin the hammer. Indeed, his state-run fossil fuel economy is exactly the type autocrats most love. Unlike the vibrant and chaotic economies that characterize most democratic nations, an economy based largely on mining and distribution of geologic resources is an enormous and often monolithic endeavor, easily controlled by the autocrat in the big palace – easily skimmed off the top of to fund his own wealth, pay powerful buddies to enforce his oppression, and maintain a state-of-the-art military and a deadly and staggeringly expensive nuclear stockpile even as his population is kept in relative poverty and ignorance. Sen. John McCain once said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” and he wasn’t wrong.
Why is Putin swinging the hammer? Who can say for sure what motivates a man who has told lies for a living his entire adult life and has recently revealed himself to believe a decidedly wacky version of history? You don’t have to be an economic strategist or an investigative genius, though, to wonder whether it’s relevant that Russia has to pay Ukraine to move natural gas West. Or that Ukraine controls important shipping ports used for fossil fuel trade, one of which, Mariupol, was shelled to dust as one of the first apparent Russian priorities of the invasion. Coincidence? Unlikely. In Putin’s mind, Mariupol probably doesn’t need to be a place for kindergartens as long as the coal ports are re-built, and Ukraine might cut a more favorable deal on natural gas flatulence directed West after a good beating with the hammer. Certainly, Putin is swinging the hammer, at least in significant part, to buy more hammers.
But we ourselves are swinging the hammer right along with him. Who bought the oil and gas? In a very real sense, all of us in the industrialized world are locked in a common death grip on the filthy, oily handle of the hammer, the current unfortunate victim of which happens to be the innocent people of Ukraine.
As the awful evil in Ukraine unfolds before us – graphic images and descriptions of bombed hospitals and kindergartens, child corpses, bound execution victims guilty of having been outside searching for food for their starving families – we utter a collective scream of unrequited injustice. In this context, Richard Gallant recently noted psychological studies finding even 3-month-old babies with virtually no other useful skills have a built-in sense of rudimentary justice. This shared bit of human machinery drives our communal outrage, but we are profoundly frustrated because we all know we are witnesses to the worst kind of evil, and we are failing to do anything approaching enough. We sanction, and we pass well-crafted resolutions and eject Russia from the chummy club of nations. But history teaches us none of that is likely to save a single Ukranian life.
We argue about whether and how we should do more: no-fly zones; javelin missiles; if Poland gives Ukraine warplanes and we later give Poland warplanes, did they come from us? Western leaders are understandably cautious; a mind like Putin’s is notoriously inscrutable to the non-evil, and he’s got nukes. What measure of justice in Ukraine is worth a major Western city? These deliberations are nigh on impossible, and I would not profess to have a useful opinion on them.
Beyond a doubt, though, I do know this: We are not talking enough about the hammer.
Indeed, when we do talk about it, the conversation is demonstrably insane. Early exceptions to the otherwise increasingly comprehensive economic measures being taken by the West against Russia? Russian fossil fuel sales to Europe – literally, the money funding the hammer! Here in the U.S., the barest hint that gas prices might rise immediately drives breathless headlines that Biden will release oil from the national oil reserve to stabilize them. I don’t pretend this is all easy. We can’t have people freezing in their homes, and many can’t afford shock increases in fuel prices. Some measure of relief and stability for people is required on the part of responsible governments. But the headlines aren’t just about that. They’re also to “calm the markets” – to keep our economy humming along under the continued illusion that everything is somehow still okay. “Don’t worry,” they intend to say, “we still have the hammer and, unlike them, we are swinging it responsibly.” A Wall Street Journal opinion article optimistically proposes the rapid build-up of a trans-Atlantic oil, gas, and hammer trade that simply cuts Russia out. Oxycodone: thanks, Wall Street Journal, that felt like about a 10mg dose.
The thing is, at a deep level, things are not okay, we damn well know it, and the hammer is no longer helpful no matter who has its filthy grip. And as we deliberate over plans to stabilize the economy with short-term releases of oil from the national reserve, it’s not as if we’re also laying any very intentional longer-term plans to put the hammer down.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a new report. Suffice it to say, the IPCC’s reports, which aggregate findings from all the relevant scientific, economic, and political experts studying the climate, haven’t been getting any rosier. In a nutshell, we are currently living in an astoundingly short window of time – a couple decades – during which we will collectively determine the future of humans on Earth. This is not just my opinion; any rational reader of the report will arrive at the same conclusion. We have the opportunity to provide continued wealth and security to future humans, such as our children and grandchildren. Or, we can consign them to a future of decay, poverty, and wars just like the one in Ukraine. If we do nothing, mindless carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere will eventually kill all the people in one or more of at least about nine different ways. It’s all in the report; almost nobody reads it, even though it’s freely available by Google search and the Summary for Policymakers is just a few pages long. If you wish to tweet or post about the IPCC being stupid, corrupt, or wrong, bear in mind the electronic device on which you are tweeting or posting is a wonder of technology brought to you by scientists practicing exactly the same scientific method and using the same peer-reviewed publication infrastructure used in the preparation of the IPCC reports. You should credit them in your speech about their stupidity for giving you the medium.
In reflecting on the unimaginable human suffering in Ukraine (which of us living can fully imagine the suffering of a person tortured mercilessly, knowing they are going to die, then being killed?), I am reminded of a scene in the Russian author Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov. His character, Ivan, basically asks his brother, Alyosha, the well-worn question of how a good, omnipotent God can exist when there is suffering in the world. I have always found his treatment of the question particularly effective, however; after extracting from Alyosha an agreement that children are innocent, he restricts his argument to the detailed and graphic consideration of the suffering of one specific child. How could God let that happen? It’s a direct and particular appeal to that justice-seeking machinery that’s apparently operating in all of us before the age of 3 months.
The novel made a life-long impression on me, as I read it while serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, where I learned two main things. First, all people have the same hopes and dreams. You can meet a person with a radically different ancestry than you, who speaks a language you can’t comprehend, who worships unfamiliar Gods and eats foods that make you gag, and, upon getting to know them better, discover they have dreams at night shockingly similar to your own and, just like you, love their families to the point of distraction, would very much like to own something they can’t afford and also want their kids to have that thing, if they can’t, and want their kids to have a better all-around life than they do. The second thing I learned is that success in life depends very much on where you are born and that is profoundly unjust. I was the science teacher of at least one honest-to-God high school genius who was fated for early pregnancy and manual labor in an open-air market because she was born in rural Ghana rather than the U.S. Bay Area, where she would certainly have been a venture capital darling. I met people with life-long disabilities because of the unavailability of polio vaccines that we in the West have the luxury of declining to get if we are so moved by our bizarre, uninformed beliefs. I met people with goiters the size of grapefruits because both the salt and the rest of their diets lacked trace amounts of iodine that we in the North and West take totally for granted.
If we wish to restrict our discussion to the suffering of a single child, there are plenty to choose from in Ukraine today.
Religious friends and loved ones have expressed to me a faith that God has a Plan for us with respect to climate change and our relationship with the hammer. In combination, I cannot ignore the poll-proven fact that our politicians most opposed to individual actions related to the relinquishment of the hammer are often closely allied with organized religious institutions. I think I have a well-founded fear that we are sleepwalking into an extinction-level planetary climate catastrophe for the same reason there wasn’t enough food at the potluck: because too many of us think someone else has a Plan. Thus, with love, I wish to talk you out of a faith in God’s Plan that does not include our own very intentional actions as an essential ingredient.
Because of my observations in a Third World country and, having observed them, my sensitivity to similar injustices right here at home, I confess I am frustrated by accounts of “guardian angels” and the like. I would certainly not wish to denigrate the experience of anyone who has had a brush with death and, perhaps, seen something the rest of us haven’t. But if Jesus Takes the Wheel, I think we can agree He doesn’t take it for everyone, and the capricious and rare interventions of His divine hand appear very well correlated with more mundane forms of privilege, like whiteness and relative wealth. The mothers and daughters being raped and murdered in Ukraine have evidently been left to steer their own wheels. As have the Russian soldiers, who have been placed in a situation in which they have committed atrocities their internal justice machines will revolt against for the rest of their lives. Given the massive scale of the universe, I am persuaded that if God is fine with letting a child suffer and die in Ukraine under the weight of Putin’s hammer, He is probably fine with letting us all go down if we can’t let go of the hammer when we know we should.
I have seen breathtaking expressions of human love, kindness, and generosity; expressions of beauty; and accomplishments of genius that have made me know I was observing God in other people. Indeed, perhaps that infant justice machine psychologists have found is God manifest in us. I think this is a God we can agree on, and the God we need. In fact, I think if you believe God has a plan for us with respect to letting go of the hammer and saving ourselves, you have to believe the most reliable way to make sure God’s plan gets enacted is to enact it. Like, we need to get it done.
So, I’d like to propose a plan to deal with Vladimir Putin. It’s virtually guaranteed to succeed in time, is nonviolent, and has no risks above those to which we are already exposed. It’s the same as the most effective and lowest-risk way of dealing with a drug dealer – stop buying the drugs. Among the recent IPCC report’s high-level findings: “The continued installation of unabated fossil fuel infrastructure will ‘lock-in’ [greenhouse gas] emissions (high confidence).” In the context of the report, the “locked in” emissions are exactly the ones we cannot afford! Well, what do you think Putin is planning to do? Do you think he might have plans to build some more fossil fuel infrastructure?
For decades, the findings of scientists have unequivocally told us that our grip on the hammer is not good for us. That we are wounding ourselves with the hammer, and risk killing ourselves with it, even as there are alternatives. I propose we finally use the wanton, evil atrocities in Ukraine as our motivation to let go with intention. It’s as good a reason as any, and it happens to be going on at the best possible time to quit fossil fuels, which (as it has been for years) is NOW, because we haven’t yet invented a time machine to go backward. There are promising early signs. Germany has frozen the gas pipeline that would have carried it Russian gas, a courageous decision which will entail some sacrifice and must have involved some gritting of teeth on the part of German leaders. When the retreat of Russian forces from Ukrainian suburbs revealed civilian corpses evident of horrible Russian war crimes, a French finance minister admitted EU sanctions on Russian fossil fuel imports “are a possibility.” In the name of relinquishing the hammer and denying Russia its evil swinging of it, perhaps all of us freedom lovers in the West are capable of some short-term sacrifices.
And some hope.
You’ve seen solar panels. Imagine more of them! You’ve seen wind turbines. Imagine more of them! You’ve seen electric cars. Their acceleration is exhilarating! You’ve seen photos of coal miners with black faces (and lungs). Imagine those same people without black faces (and lungs)! Buck up, people! Down with evil tyrants and up with optimists! Stop voting for leaders who don’t have a detailed plan for addressing climate change, in part, to defeat evil tyrants. It’s really that simple.
Let’s this time, for real, let go of the bloody hammer.
