Oil and Honey Read online

  On the one hand, I understood why they were doing it. Gasoline had broached the four-dollar barrier, and it was the only stick the Republicans had left to shake at Obama’s reelection campaign. The Republicans had spent the past few weeks fighting birth control, which proved unpopular with those Americans who occasionally engage in sex without desiring offspring. Gay marriage wasn’t moving the needle for them anymore, either, so they were trying to climb out of the fever swamps of the Tea Party with that most traditional of election year issues, high gas prices. They were playing it for all it was worth—Newt Gingrich had a little gas pump that he would put on the podium while he talked. Presidents can’t actually control the price of oil, but since a large slice of the electorate can’t seem to figure that out, Obama needed some symbolism. Cushing was the place to stump for his “all of the above” energy plan.

  But it was the wrong thing to do—soon we’d be seeing photos of bulldozers wrecking farms to make way for one more pipe (and, blessedly, photos of brave people standing up to them). And it was frustrating and confusing to everyone who’d worked to block the pipeline. I had no idea quite how to react. When in doubt, tweet. “Solomon proposed splitting the baby. Obama always actually tries to do it,” I wrote. I went to bed but didn’t sleep much, knowing the next week would include a stomach-churning stretch of e-mails and conference calls with our friends in this fight, and knowing that it wouldn’t matter much what we did because Obama was focused on the campaign.

  As it turned out, though, the week was far more surreal than I would have guessed, because the heat wave that descended on the continent was not just a heat wave. Before it was over, weather historian Christopher Burt would be calling it “almost like science fiction.” Even as it began, it had that feel. Jeff Masters, the weather blogger, still lived near Ann Arbor, where he’d grown up, and he offered this account the next day:

  As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness from my home near Ann Arbor, Michigan, yesterday morning, I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It didn’t come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties—30 degrees above normal—greeted me instead. Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms. Beware the Ides of March, the air seemed to be saying. I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.

  Indeed not. That evening, in fact, the earliest F-3 tornado ever recorded in Michigan wrecked a hundred homes. And that was just the start. Saturday was the hottest St. Patrick’s Day in 141 years of records in Chicago, the third straight day of record heat that would turn into a record-breaking seven-day run. Consider the reaction of the National Weather Service, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It has collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards, and pleasant summer days. If anyone’s seen it all, it’s the NWS, which is why it was weird to see this quote from its Chicago spokesman: “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented.” The bureau’s official statement: “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day.”

  “Rare,” “unprecedented”—these became the standard descriptions as the heat wave wore on, day after day. Bismarck, North Dakota, went to 81 degrees, 41 above its normal for the day. International Falls, Minnesota, “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature record for the date by 22 degrees. Winner, South Dakota, hit 94—two days before the official end of winter. Ninety-four degrees in the Dakotas in the winter.

  Not surprisingly, the heat came with the highest levels of atmospheric moisture ever recorded in many places. (As I’ve said, a key fact for the twenty-first century: warm air holds more water vapor than cold; on average the atmosphere is already 5 percent wetter.) Torrential flooding rains broke out along the southern boundary of the heat, in parts of Texas where it actually helped recovery from the previous year’s devastating drought. Apples were blossoming in winter in Michigan; in Atlanta, apparently, everything was blossoming in the record heat, because pollen counts broke the all-time records by huge amounts, coating the city like “powdered sugar on a doughnut,” according to the New York Times. (One local carwash ran pollen specials—six dollars for a hose and dry, though as the proprietor admitted, “people need another one as soon as they leave.”) Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, made news one day when its low temperature for the day broke the old heat record; soon, that was a commonplace. The reptilian part of me was enjoying the heat—I stretched out on the deck in shorts as I fired off e-mails and sat in on conference calls. But it was one part savor to three parts dread—I knew enough to know just how wrong this was.

  When you have 100 or 150 years of records, the chances of breaking one are slim. But if you do, you’ll almost certainly break it by only a degree or two—that’s how statistics works. Unless something changes. When Mark McGwire took steroids, he broke the old home run record by nine. But this was as if the steroids had taken steroids. The new numbers weren’t just off the charts, they were off the wall the charts were tacked to. This was not the old planet. This was a new one, the “Eaarth” I’d described in my last grim book, where the atmosphere contained enough carbon to change everything. At some point midway through the heat wave, the “Extremes” section of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Web site simply crashed: too many records were being set for it to keep up with. Before the month was over, 15,785 high temperature marks would be set, compared with 1,385 places that saw their readings hit new lows. Jeff Masters did the regression analysis—this was something like a once-in-4,779-years event. But the numbers didn’t really do it justice. It was watching meteorologists react that really clued you in. The veteran Minneapolis forecaster Paul Douglas, after blogging an exhaustive rundown of essentially impossible temperatures, just gave up. “This is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota,” he wrote. Ditto just about every other place else east of the Rockies.

  The only people who seemed not to notice were running for president. The Republicans had been in Illinois for the heart of the heat wave, but, questioned about the warmth, Rick Santorum said, “This isn’t climate science, this is political science,” as if nature was engaged in exactly the same kind of spin as presidential candidates. (Later in the week, tape of a speech emerged in which he called climate scientists “Pharisees,” which is a severely not-nice word in his world.)

  Meanwhile, Barack Obama (who had watched a dozen people faint in record heat at one of his rallies) was, as promised, heading toward Oklahoma. All the green groups were phoning their connections in the administration to make increasingly plaintive pleas: “Don’t actually pose in front of the pipe—pose in front of the oil tanks instead.” But he did stand in front of the pipe, and his remarks couldn’t have been much worse.

  “You have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can,” he said, while protesters led by the Indigenous Environmental Network were kept in a “free speech pen” at a park six miles away. “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.” When you’ve gone from “in my administration the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet begin to heal” to “we’ve wrapped the earth in pipelines,” you’ve gone a long way.

  One hoped—
one prayed—that the president didn’t quite believe his own “all of the above” policy. Not choosing is the opposite of policy. (Imagine, say, an “all of the above” foreign policy, where all allies were treated equally and Great Britain and North Korea were pretty much the same.) In climate terms it made no sense at all: drilling everywhere you can and then putting up a solar panel is like drinking six martinis and then topping them off with a vitaminwater—you’re still drunk, you just have your day’s full allotment of C and D.

  This didn’t smell like policy, this smelled like fear. The president’s enemies had already begun running millions of dollars’ worth of ads against him focusing on energy; the Koch brothers, who own a tar sands refinery, had just announced that they were putting $200 million into the campaign. Political gravity was reasserting itself. We’d won our small victory in the fall, when the president desperately needed to consolidate his base. Now, after that base had spent the winter watching Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, they were fully consolidated, and the voters who mattered were in the middle. For the moment we’d kept our small win, but we were under no illusions that the president was on our side. A politician’s job is to be on his own side. Proof? The president went later that hot week to a fund-raiser in Atlanta, held at the filmmaker Tyler Perry’s thirty-thousand-square-foot French provincial mansion along the Chattahoochee River. “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures. When it is seventy-five degrees in Chicago in the beginning of March, you start thinking,” Obama said. “On the other hand,” he quickly added, “I really have enjoyed the nice weather.”

  * * *

  The ritual nature of political action—they say something, we say something back, they push, we push, constantly keeping just this side of an imaginary line—was grinding me down. It ran counter to every instinct of a writer, which is simply to say what’s true. The only time I felt completely honest was when an Associated Press reporter called, working on a story about how Republican candidates were painting Obama as an environmental radical. “Let me assure you that he’s the furthest thing from an extremist,” I said. “Really, nothing could be further from the truth.”

  The past eight months had taught me several things, such as how to send people to jail and what the news cycle felt like up close. But mostly it had taught me that the political world was not at the center of this fight. Even our rare wins couldn’t stand up to the full force of the fossil fuel industry. We were playing defense—inspired defense, but there’s no way we could slow global warming one pipeline at a time. There were too many—and too many coal mines and oil wells and fracking rigs. To have a chance we were going to have to go on offense. We’d need to take on the fossil fuel industry directly. So the afternoon of the president’s awful Oklahoma speech, in between tweets and radio interviews, my old friend Naomi Klein and I had the first in a series of conversations about how we planned to do exactly that—how we planned to challenge the underlying legitimacy of the whole coal and gas and oil machine. As absurd as it sounds, we thought we’d found a wedge of sorts: a lever we might stomp on to crack some things wide open. But since Naomi was seven months pregnant, and since I knew that presidential politics would drown out every other story for months to come, that would have to wait till November.

  In the meantime, we had months of political skirmishing to get through, and months of hot weather. Thank heaven there were the beeyards for a refuge.

  * * *

  Of course the beeyards weren’t fenced off from the rest of the planet, either. I could leave behind my cell phone when I went there, but not the record temperatures. Since it had suddenly turned so weirdly hot, the bees were out and flying weeks ahead of normal. Kirk was making the rounds, taking the insulating cardboard packing crates off the hives and counting how many colonies had survived the winter. “I’m going to put my veil on,” he said after our first stop. “These guys are a little nastier today than I’d expect. Usually in the spring they’re reluctant to sting, they need everyone they can to build the colony. But maybe they’re a little freaked out by the weather, too.”

  In thirty years in the valley, the earliest Kirk had ever seen bees gather pollen was the last few days of March. “Red maple is always the first good crop we get, and it’s usually between the tenth and fifteenth of April,” he said. But on St. Patrick’s Day (dressed in beekeeper white) we kept passing trees starting to come into bloom as we drove between the beeyards at the northern end of his empire. The pollen year usually follows a predictable pattern: red maple provides the food that gets the brood-rearing season under way. Three weeks after the first big day, new bees start to emerge from their cells. Then the willows and sugar maples tide the bees over till the dandelions bloom—the “big event of the spring.” Those usually emerge at the end of April, and by the tenth of May, Kirk said, “they’re always in full bloom. And no matter when they start, the dandelions always seem to end May twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth. The dandelion is where they get a lot of the energy that lets them grow into a colony large enough to take full advantage of the clovers and make a honey crop”—that is to say, it’s the dandelion that feeds the colony, and then the various clovers that let them put away the surplus that eventually feeds you and me. In a normal year those clovers—and the purple vetch and bird’s-foot trefoil and alfalfa—show up around June 15.

  This year, however, who could predict? We were under way insanely early—everything was suddenly budding out at once. If the weather reverted to anything even resembling normal, there’d definitely be a hard frost between March and mid-May. What would happen then? And would the soil, left naked in the sun so early, dry to dust by the time it should be growing clover? (By March 23, the state of Vermont was issuing “red flag” warnings to watch out for brush and forest fires.)

  For the moment, though, you could soak in the sun and hope. We ranged the valley, piling up the cardboard crates and looking at the hives. “I always feel like I’m reclaiming my apiary this time of year,” said Kirk. We visited the Mitchell farm, where the sheep watched suspiciously as we smoked the hives, and the Resnicks’, and the farm of the six Dutch brothers, stopping to eat our sandwiches on the banks of Otter Creek and enjoying, despite its portents, the heat. Even the sweat. It had been a mild winter, but in Vermont even a mild winter means you’re a little hunched against the cold; I could feel myself uncurling. Our count, by days’ end, showed 562 hives alive. “That’s up in the decent range,” said Kirk, consulting a calculator on the kitchen table. “That’s about a 74.9 percent survival rate. It’s really much better than I thought would be the case. It gives me lots more options. I’m not forced to stretch. I’ll be able to sell a hundred hives anyway,” which at $220 apiece would make for decent cash flow. “Maybe a hundred and fifty. And the honey I’ve got left in the shop is supposedly worth twenty thousand dollars. So all that will give me enough money to work with this year, to keep things going. And hopefully there will be a honey crop come summer.”

  The bees, unperturbed and adaptable, were doing their best that day to ensure there’d be honey soon. At one of the beeyards, near the hospital in Middlebury, I sat on the ground for a while next to one box, watching them return in a steady stream. Each had its twin saddlebags bulging with a dull yellow pollen—probably from ornamental silver maples in a nearby front yard. Watching them, you began to realize how it was all possible. Each clump of pollen was tiny—the size of a kernel of corn on one of those weird baby ears you get in Chinese restaurants. But the river of bees never stopped; you could almost feel it adding up.

  * * *

  Bees lead the animal world in cheap metaphor production, but there are times when despite all precautions you simply can’t avoid them.

  Early in April, about a week after the heat wave had ended, I was working in the Shoreham beeyard with Kirk. He was evaluating colonies, figuring out which ones were weak enough that they’d need a dollop of sugar syrup to get them through to the real spring. “Down near the lake here the
re aren’t as many sources of pollen,” he said. “It’s a little shaky till the dandelions bloom. Till then it’s still possible for them to starve.” So we were lifting the tops of boxes to see how many bees were in each colony and holding up frames to see if they were collecting pollen. We found queens laying eggs and plenty of cells already stuffed with the bizarre spring’s early pollen. In fact, the spring was so far ahead of schedule that a few bees were already hatching, the first of the year. “See how fast she’s moving?” he said, pointing to one new bee eating its way out of the cell where she’d matured. “It’s chomp-chomp-chomp. That’s so healthy. When the mite infestations were bad, it’d be chomp, rest, chomp, wait some more, chomp.”

  As we worked through the morning, the air around us was filling with bees, flushed from the hive by the gathering warmth. They seemed unbothered by us. “I think it’s going to be a good day for gathering pollen,” Kirk said. “They’re getting calmer and calmer.” Indeed, some early risers were already returning with the day’s first cargo, their saddlebags filled not with the dull yellow silver maple pollen of the week before but with egg-yolk yellow grains. “That’s red maple,” Kirk said. “You can tell how far away the tree is by how much they carry,” he said. “These are pretty light loads, which means they’ve had to come quite a ways. They can calculate exactly how much they should be carrying.”