Big Oil makes it unsafe for kids to play outside
Earlier this month I had an experience — quite a sad experience — that made me write this piece for The Boston Globe, which I wanted to share with you. Thanks for taking a look.
***
It should have been such a lovely moment. Two little boys
who live down the road rang our doorbell on a recent afternoon and asked if our
4-year-old son could come outside and play. I never grew up with a
self-assembling crew of neighborhood kids, but it always seemed like a
marvelous thing for a child to have. So I felt real joy as I turned and called
for our son, ready to send him off to join his first little street troop.
But then my wife reminded me — weren’t we trying to keep the
kids inside today?
I’d momentarily forgotten. For four days in a row earlier
this month, we, like millions of Americans across the Midwest and Northeast,
had been living under a haze of poor air quality. For four days, the sky was an
undifferentiated gray and the sun stayed slightly blurry behind a film of smog.
And for four days, every breath we took outside felt ever so slightly chalky,
like it was coating the inside of our mouths with a touch of residue.
That residue is all that remains of forests located thousands of miles away, burned up in the massive wildfires raging across Canada this summer. The sheer scale of these conflagrations is hard to wrap your head around: Over 16.3 million acres have burned in 2025, larger than Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Vermont combined.
.webp)
Hundreds of millions of trees and
countless animals have gone up in the smoke that has covered our skies, filled
our air, and penetrated our lungs, causing imminent health threats for many and
contributing to long-term damage to the health of millions more. As UMass
Lowell environmental health professor Joel Tickner said of
the air quality that first week of August, “The level of danger is real, and
you want to prevent exposure if you can.”
These fires are not natural disasters. They’re a predictable
consequence of climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Mike
Flannigan, the research chair for fire science at Thompson Rivers
University, put
it this way: “This is our new reality … The warmer it gets, the more
fires we see.” And the unrelenting physics of this crisis means these are
climate disasters in more ways than one. Canada’s 2023 wildfires released
3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or nearly
four times the carbon emissions of the global aviation sector. And
2025 is on
track to match this record.
None of this is breaking news. But that is what has been scaring me the most this summer. Two years ago, when the smoke from the Canadian wildfires was similarly intense, it was a huge story. And I don’t just mean in the media, where the image of New York City’s hazy orange skyline became ubiquitous.
Where I live, in Providence, it felt
like the madness of the wildfires came up in practically every conversation.
And no wonder! Our world was filled with carcinogenic smoke from fires so
mind-meltingly massive they were affecting us from thousands of miles away. It
was eerie, it was unsettling, and it was not something any of us could accept
as normal.
But it turns out we can, in fact, accept these smoke-filled skies as normal. This year, in my circles, people barely mentioned the air quality around us. Yes, it’s been unpleasant — in fact, the experience for my family has been harder this summer.
We have a 3-month-old now, and it was an
extra challenge to be cooped up with him inside all day, unable to take him on
a stroller walk to help him fall asleep. But it was unpleasant in a way that
already is becoming just “the way things are.”
There’s a viral post that gets reshared during every extreme weather event: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”
As I stood in the doorway of
my home earlier this month, debating with my wife whether or not we would let
our child join his 6-year-old neighbors waiting patiently on our porch, ready
to jump and laugh and race each other down our block, it occurred to me that
climate change is manifesting in another insidious way: enshittification.
This term was coined by author Cory Doctorow to
describe how online platforms decline in quality over time as tech corporations
degrade their services, little by little, to maximize their profits. But it
aptly describes how our lives are changing in this era of climate crisis.
Just as our experiences online are being steadily
enshittified by Big Tech companies, our time on this earth is being steadily
enshittified by Big Oil companies and their allies in the federal government.
These climate-denying bastards are driving the extreme
weather disasters devastating communities across the country. But that’s not
all they’re doing. They are also forcing on us a million smaller — but still,
in aggregate, incredibly hurtful — degradations: summers filled with weeks too
hot to enjoy; winters with fewer snow days; walks in the woods marred by more
ticks; and increasingly frequent negotiations between parents and kids about
the safety of going outside to play when doing so means breathing in toxins
that will bury themselves in our bodies and never come out.
Humans are incredibly adaptable. And this may be the best
reason to hope that, as a species at least, we will survive the coming climate
breakdowns. But our ability to just keep trucking while the world around us
gets shittier and shittier, while the water comes closer and closer to a boil —
as the frog knows, it has its downsides.
Ultimately, we let our son join his friends. But we allowed
just 20 minutes of play before I went to retrieve him. As we were walking, hand
in hand, back up the road to our house, he looked up at the hazy sky and said,
“The sun is less shiny today. But it’s still pretty.” I looked up, too. “Yeah,
I guess it is,” I said.
