Beady unblinking eyes, some red and some white, stare out from my phone charger, coffee maker, speakers, PC, printer, and elsewhere. The average U.S. home has about 40 electronic devices draining power, accounting for around 10 percent of one’s energy bill. Some call this leaking electricity or vampire energy.

Things I used to get done on a regular basis now seem to take forever. I never used to squeak right up against deadlines, beg out of regular obligations, fail to answer necessary texts, forget things like sympathy cards. Never, ever. But I have the last few years, excoriating myself all the while.

Adding up U.S. households, all this leaking energy totals the output of 26 power plants. This in a time when people in the U.S. use more electricity, per capita, than nearly anywhere else in the world. 

Sometimes I cancel a walk with a friend, a walk I’ve been looking forward to, because I just can’t muster up whatever it takes to get myself out of the house. Then I wonder what the heck is wrong with me when surely both my friend and I need the restorative pleasure of time in nature.

Energy consumption, especially in industrialized countries, is one of the main factors behind increasing and permanently destructive climate change. Disastrous floods and fires, extreme storms, record-breaking temperatures, drought, crop failure, and much more. The health impact on living creatures, including us, is already severe.

I manage to work, make meals, and sometimes floss my teeth, that’s about it. Books have always been one of my favorite ways to retreat. Thanks to insomnia I’ve gotten a lot of reading in over the years, but I’m reading more now. A lot more. (I try to track titles on Goodreads, because I find myself mistakenly checking out library books I’ve already read.)

Even half-measures political leaders try to put into place are failing, almost entirely thanks to greed. We don’t need to look much farther than Joe Manchin III, of West Virginia, who almost singlehandedly got the proposed U.S. climate agenda pulled from the current budget bill. This jobs-intensive program to replace much of the nation’s dependence on fossil fuel with renewable energy is gutted. I don’t understand why it isn’t against the law for elected officials to take legislative action that blatantly promotes their own or their family’s financial self-interest. Manchin is the top recipient of campaign contributions from coal, gas and oil, utilities, and other dinosaur industries while his family-owned coal brokerage firm Enersystems paid over one million to Manchin and his wife last year alone. Meanwhile people in his state rank dead last or darn close in areas such as economy, infrastructure, health care, education, and overall well-being, Heck, West Virginia comes in last in a “happiest states in America” ranking. It’s almost as if we haven’t noticed the damage done by rapacious partnerships between officials and fossil fuel companies over the last century. This sort of thing has gone on throughout history everywhere people have held power over others, but there’s no longer even an attempt to hide the appalling moral failings of those in charge, failings that will haunt this planet long after they are gone.

I’m a cool weather weirdo. While most people I know exult in summer’s bright heat, it depletes me. Give me a brisk autumn day with a breeze combing bright leaves into the air and I’m in bliss. Give me a sunny winter day with millions of ice crystals gleaming from the snow, bliss again. But summer’s heat and humidity persisted here in Northeastern Ohio through September and well into October. Temperature-sensitive crops like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and summer squash are still abundant in my gardens when normally we would have long since pulled out those plants. This feels inexpressibly wrong somewhere deep in my cells. I know anomalous weather wreaks havoc on the exquisitely timed needs of birds, pollinators, and other creatures. Only this week, three-quarters of the way through October, are we finally experiencing seasonal weather.  Well, except for the two tornadoes in our county this week.  

We’ve long been told that we as individual consumers are the world’s energy vampires. If we all stopped using straws and carried groceries home in fabric totes, the threat of climate change would melt into a concern no more worrisome than a few extra sunny days. Fingers of shame have been pointed at those who travel by air or eat meat. Individual action is important, but it also deflects from the world’s worst contributors to climate change. The U.S. is again ramping up the military budget when the U.S. military is already the world’s single largest consumer of oil, a worse polluter than as many as 140 countries. And for half a century, giant corporations have known and concealed the dangerous global effects of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. In a carefully orchestrated distraction, these companies have engaged in what a new report calls well-funded “cutting-edge propaganda” which cast doubt on climate science and steered media attention toward consumer responsibility. Twenty of these companies are responsible for more than a 35 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, as noted in a Guardian article, where climatologist Dr. Michael Mann is quoted as saying, “The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price — in the form of a degraded planet– so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits.” Climate change, of course, hurts the poorest people the most both in the U.S. and around the world.

Something vital is drained from us when human decency is set afire by those in power. It saps hope and exhausts our strength to make positive change happen. For most of us, deadly racism, viciousness aimed at asylum seekers, the constant and cumulative trauma of far right extremism overlaid by an ongoing pandemic constantly drains our inner resources, depleting our mental and physical energy, making it hard to even get through our daily obligations. This happens even if much of it is below our minute-by-minute awareness. I still want to believe there is a core of true humanity within every person. I still want to do my part for the next seven times seven generations. Thank God our local library system doesn’t impose late fines any more…

I highly recommend what my wise and visionary friend Dr. John C. Robinson has to say about all this in his books and articles. In Climate Change: From Darkness To Hope , he asks us to “notice how your deep self responds to the climate threat” in order to find where we feel called to respond. As he writes, “we must learn to live again on this planet as if everything were new, unfamiliar, and sacred, and reorganize our communities to meet the dramatic needs of a new reality. No one can do this alone but all of us just might be able to do it together. Though still in my own personal alchemical transformation, I feel it happening, I trust it: I am moving from haunted to focused; I am preparing for a greater role in Creation’s evolutionary unfolding, as we all are.”