Month: January 2020

So lately I’ve decided it’s time for a new vehicle. Yippee! Nothing like giving yourself a nice big present, right? And so soon after the holidays I almost feel guilty.

Currently I’m driving a Teeyota RAV4. “Teeyota” is how they say Toyota in Hawaii, or at least on the Big Island, where my wife and I lived when we bought the RAV. It’s been a fine set of wheels, and provided me with many satisfying trips to the Kona dump. Unlike everywhere else we’ve lived, trash collection in Kona wasn’t provided by the city or county. But the dump was free, and the line was never long.

But back to car shopping, which is something that in the past has sometimes been a big time sink. And not fun. Too many choices, for one thing. Lucky for me, it’ll be easier this time because some of the usual suspects are out of the running, including Toyota and Subaru, makers of our current stable, along with GM, Chrysler (I really wanted that Ram 1500!), Hyundai, Kia, Mazda and Nissan. In fact, it looks like the only makes I have to consider are Honda, Ford, BMW and Volkswagen. Fantastic. Life just got easier.

The reason for this shrinking car pool—smack yourself if you don’t already know—is that many automakers have decided to support Trump’s plan to roll back the fuel efficiency standards implemented under the Obama administration. Only four decided to stick with California’s standards, which were the basis for the Obama standards: Honda, Ford, BMW and Volkswagen.

Climate Change and Fuel Efficiency

Why is this important? Trump doesn’t just want to “adjust” mileage standards but demolish them—reducing the goal by about 35 percent. If this reduction is implemented, vehicles will emit about six billion tons of carbon dioxide over their lifetimes. That’s billions. That’s tons. And CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, increasing global warming.

If you agree that climate change is real and we need to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), we need to reward businesses that help society do so, and penalize those that don’t. So,no more Teeyotas, no more Subarus, no more GM, Chrysler, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda or Nissan.

You may wonder why I believe that California’s air quality standards will actually curb GHGs. Short answer: because I was there. In one of my prior positions I managed the portion of the state’s Department of Finance that oversaw all of California’s environmental and natural resource departments, including the California Air Resources Board. We had to approve all of their spending, financial legislation, and regulations. I looked closely at not just their regulations but the entire regulatory process.

When my staff and I reviewed CARB’s regulations, we would begin from a position of NO, you cannot implement the regulation unless you prove it’s economically cost effective; i.e., benefits exceed costs. I personally reviewed many of CARB’s major regulations. I’d pose questions to their engineers, managers and even the Executive Director if need be in order to understand the need for, costs and benefits of the regulations, as well as “who pays” and whether there were alternatives to the regulations that would be, on balance, more cost effective. In the end, CARB always made its case. They were smart and talented. They considered alternatives. They met repeatedly with the industries that would be affected by their proposed regulations and responded to their concerns. Invariably, they convinced me that their regulations made sense when considered from the perspective of society as a whole.

Do Businesses Have a Social Responsibility?

The automakers who side with Trump have indicated that their decision to do so is simply a business decision. Given climate change, and the fact that vehicles contribute about twenty percent of our GHGs, we need businesses to recognize their social responsibility. They need to consider their impact on society as a whole, the way CARB does.

But back to car shopping, the newly simplified and far more enjoyable version that I’m about to plunge into courtesy the Association of Global Automakers, who like to make business decisions with their heads stuck in the ground.

Thanks, too, to Trump. Because without Trump, the federal EPA never would have sought to reduce the fuel efficiency standards previously established to help combat climate change. But Trump has managed to install cronies at the federal EPA who have eliminated (or are in the process of eliminating) 95 major environmental rules previously established after careful scientific review (New York Times, Dec. 21, 2019). The current head of the EPA (after the first appointee, Scott Pruitt, was forced to quit due to numerous improprieties) is Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, and fossil fuel booster. Just what we need: more fossil fuel boosting?

Well, at least some people will be happy to boost global warming. Yes, Global Warming is actually a boon to certain parts of the world, such as RUSSIA, and we know who loves RUSSIA, and is best buddies with PUTIN, and will do absolutely anything –

Wait! Hold the presses. Does this mean I should be thanking Vladimir for making my life easier? Well I never! Life sure is complicated, ain’t it?

Sober For October In January

We were over in the UK in September 2018 when we kept hearing PSAs every time we turned on the telly for something that sounded like “sober for October.” After about the dozenth time I cracked the code: they were encouraging people to pledge to give up alcohol for October. Not cut back, but cut out. Completely. For a month. Apparently the Brits were enjoying their local pubs just a bit too much.

Now, part of our reason for being in Cornwall and then England and then Wales was to carry out alcohol related research tentatively titled, “Patterns of Sociological and Familial Decision-making in a Random Multivariate Cross Section of Homogeneous Populations Typically Found in Pubs.” As a result, our research required us to visit pubs. Sometimes our rooms were only just upstairs from the bar. Which sounds convenient, and was, but also inconvenient because easy access to the taps quickly grew distracting, the more so when I found that asking for a strong, hoppy beer yielded pints that were uniformly meek, taste-wise and alcohol-wise. In the end, I had to console myself with having learned the secret as to how folks could spend so much time in the pubs, and drink and drink and drink, and still be able to stroll home and, with a twinkle in their eye, give their honeys a big kiss. They weren’t really drinking.

But back to sober for October.

The Light Bulb Finally Goes On

I think it was in Stratford, after hearing about sober for October for fiftieth time, that it suddenly hit me: this is exactly what I need. I’d been searching for the gumption to tamp down my imbibing for some time. Single malt Scotch and craft brews had me in their thrall. And although I hadn’t progressed to the point where I’d wake up with an immobilizing hangover, I knew that little by little the fangs of alcohol were sinking deeper into my brain.

Still, cutting back seemed beyond me. After all, days were stressful. Ambition exceeded talent. Trump was president. Reasons to seek escape seemed limitless.

The Simple Solution

But then: sober for October. Such a simple idea. Cutting out alcohol completely meant avoiding the difficulties of alternative measures, such as the idea of only imbibing on weekends, a reasonable-sounding alternative until you tried define “weekend”. If a weekend were two days, Saturday and Sunday, did that mean drinking only those two nights? Or did it mean drinking Friday and Saturday? I could never decide, so invariably it became all three. Or four, when the almost-weekend night of Thursday was included as a reward for surviving the pressures of Monday-Thursday. Or five, when the shock of Monday demanded a special dispensation. And what the hell, if there were five evenings of allowable sipping, did it really make any sense to redline Tuesday and Wednesday? And at that point, was it even possible? No: a complete break was required. One hundred percent abstention. But only for a month. A single month. And then I could go right back to drinking, with the added benefit of enjoying it more for having been buzz-free for 744 straight hours.

We arrived home on September 26, which was perfect because it allowed me four days—Thursday thru Sunday—for one last splurge of booze. As I drank, I wondered if I’d really do it. Could I really do it? Or would I find a rational excuse to break my pledge? (We are all so good finding rational excuses!)

But I did it.

The first three days were easy. Didn’t even think about booze. After Day 3, the itch began to return. I resisted. But the more I resisted, the strong it got. By October 12—a Friday—I was sure I’d give in. It was TGIF, I deserved relief. But I held back. Saturday we battled again, the Itch and I, and still I didn’t drink. Sunday I didn’t drink, and on Monday the Itch began to fade, and quickly, like a tide going out, that fast.

As the end of October approached, I knew that in a few days I’d be able to drink again. I’d have honored my pledge (which was only to myself and my wife, but still). And then it occurred to me that I didn’t want to start drinking. I wanted to extend my abstention into November. So I did, not even faltering during Thanksgiving. And at the end of November I decided to keep that sobriety ball rolling into December. On December 7, at a holiday party, I had my first drink in over two months, about three ounces of wine—and felt a tremendous revulsion. The next day I was right back teetotaling, and kept it up until the end of the month, at which point I started drinking again, one to three drinks a night, without feeling any regret, or any guilt. I just started drinking.

The Health Takeaway

But the reason I’d kept going for three months was that I felt better being totally off booze. I’d read various articles about how alcohol is harmful to your heart, liver and other organs, how it increases your risk of cancer and worsens mental health. Consequently, eliminating alcohol from my system should have eliminated those problems from my body. But honestly, I couldn’t tell. All I could tell was that I felt better, and not in any single specific way, but overall. I recall thinking during November that I felt so much better with no alcohol in my system that it didn’t make any sense to ever go back to drinking.

Alcohol: the Fearsome Antagonist

But go back I did, until April 2019, when my wife and I decided to go off alcohol for a month prior to leaving for Italy, thinking that abstaining at home would set us up for a fine time with Italian wine. But as it turned out, I couldn’t do it. I lasted maybe a week, and then snuck a drink. Two nights later I snuck another, and then I was back to drinking every night. I kept on drinking all through May, June, July, August, and September.

And then October arrived again, and we started right in again. And this time it was easy, and I kept sober until Thanksgiving. After our guests left, I intended to get back on the wagon, but no dice. The itch got me again. Which made me realize that it was always there, even after another successful sober for October/November, and would always be there, ready to seize the littlest opening to shoot its itchiness through its fangs into my brain. Because that’s the way it is: the fangs are always there.

But then, lo and behold, I became so disgusted with myself that I told my wife to hide all the liquor we had and not to buy anything else (or at least not let me see it if she did). And so, since January 1, I’ve been doing Sober for October in January, and am confident I’ll be able to keep it up, at least until February 10th, when we plan to settle onto a couple of stools in the Green Parrot in Key West to begin our next research project, tentatively titles, “Spatial and Temporal Differences in Olfactory Response to Macromolecular String Arrays in Ethanol Variants of Non-discriminating Happy Hour Specials.”