Essay by Eric Worrall
How do Alarmists cope when their partner inconsiderately brings home a loaf of bread wrapped in plastic, despite a freezer is full of home made bread?
Help! I Care More About Climate Change Than My Partner
When it comes to disagreeing about climate change, can there be a middle ground?
By Brianna Sharpe
Updated September 13, 2023One afternoon, I was cleaning up after lunch with my toddler balanced on my hip when I saw it: a Ziploc bag in the garbage. “Eric!” I shouted in frustration at my husband, who wasn’t even home. My daughter looked expectantly at me. “Dada home?” I shook my head, glad that he wasn’t. The words I was thinking of were not playground-approved.
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Eric thinks climate change is real and concerning. But my anxiety about the planet’s future is foreign to him. Recently, when we chatted about our kids’ lives 20 years from now, he described a future with things like careers, homes and families. All I could picture was a world they wouldn’t want to bring their own children into. How can we share so much, but diverge so drastically on this?
Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist with the University of Bath and the Climate Psychology Alliance, says this kind of tension is increasingly common; she’s even seen couples break up over the strain of differing environmental views. “You’re not talking about whose turn it is to take the rubbish out; you’re talking about extinction and survival,” she says. While successful relationships are built on communication and compromise, “people are not willing to compromise on this.”
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This tension even led to a stalemate on whether to have children. MC worried about their child’s future and the ethics of bringing another person onto the planet. Her husband still wanted kids. After years—and lots of support and space for MC—they found a way forward, and she’s due any day. But when it comes to the big picture, their conversations still turn into a battle.
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Although he’s supported her since then, he’ll also bring home plastic-wrapped bread right after she’s stocked the freezer with homemade loaves. “It’s a lot of work to make bread, soap, canned vegetables and everything else,” Heather says, frustrated by her husband’s consumerism. She lovingly calls their relationship one of “comedic tension”; she likes to wag her finger at him in jest, “and he gives me all kinds of excuses to do that.”
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Read more: https://chatelaine.com/health/sex-and-relationships/climate-change-relationships/
Don’t forget folks, their vote counts as much as yours does. And no, Brianna is married to a different Eric.
Regarding home made bread, she could ask her partner how her home made could be improved. Maybe she is doing it wrong – getting bread right is a surprisingly subtle art, even small changes make a big difference.
In any case, I doubt home baking is the climate conscious choice Brianna thinks it is.
I love making home made bread, but the fact is heating up the oven just for a single loaf of bread, or a small number of loaves, likely takes lot more energy than mass producing thousands of loaves of bread in a production line oven. Surface area to volume ratio helps ensure the heat insulation on really big ovens is a lot more effective than small household ovens. And producing that biodegradable plastic wrap for shop bought bread is a lot less energy intensive than running a freezer to preserve a batch of home made loaves.
As for washing out the ziplock bags – Brianna, where do you think the detergent you use for washing ziplock bags comes from? Hint Brianna – they don’t make detergent out of thin air.
But I guess we’ve all come to expect this level of fundamental ignorance from our most zealous climate alarmists.
By the way, please keep using the detergent, or switch to using new ziplock bags every time. I know dish washing detergent is a petroleum product, just like the ziplock bags you re-use, but you need to think about the health of your young child. E. Coli infection from improper food handling can wreak havoc on the health of the very young. Perhaps you could switch to a brand of detergent which makes a big deal of their fake carbon credits.