A geologist and writer reflects on how far we’ve come » Yale Climate Connections

Plenty of people enjoy the thrill of driving a fast car, but I’ve never been one of them. I appreciate the enticing pull of acceleration, but the downside of pollution ruined all the fun. In fact, pretty much every time I drove a car it was with pangs of guilt.

But now that’s changed. My car runs on sunshine. After years of saving money, my husband and I bought an electric vehicle and had solar panels put on our roof. Then we endured the agonizing wait to have the system connected, inspected, and approved until we were at last given permission to flip the most satisfying switch I’ve ever seen. Let the sun shine in.

EVs are fun. Having no more electricity bills is fun. Feeling virtuous can be fun, too. But the satisfaction goes way deeper than that, because this has been my lifelong mission. In the 1980s, long before climate change was even taught in school, I took it on as an independent study as a geology major. I dove headfirst into learning about the carbon cycle, the ice ages, and how burning fossil fuels was already changing all of that. 

Shortly after graduation, I landed a job cleaning up underground oil spills at gas stations, oil refineries, and other places where spilled oil had seeped into the ground. I quickly realized that no amount of schooling could have prepared me for this job.

In the early 1990s, many thousands of gas stations in America were steadily leaking. At that time, underground tanks that stored gasoline and diesel were made of steel – a design flaw with devastating consequences. The steel tanks corroded and ruptured, spilling the contents into the soil and groundwater. In the U.S. alone, over half a million underground tanks have leaked. Gas stations pose a particularly insidious risk because they’re situated in neighborhoods, near schools, and next to the lakes, rivers, and aquifers that provide drinking water.

The first step on each job was to drill wells and collect soil and groundwater samples. I traveled with a mobile drilling rig and small crew of drillers I was supposed to manage. I was 21 and had basically no real-world experience with anything, so life was about to get real. One of the first things I learned while working with drillers was an impressive array of swear words. Drilling was hard and complex. Stuff went wrong all the time, followed by a stream of eye-watering profanity, matched only in filth by the gush of muddy, polluted water bursting from the well we were drilling. 

I definitely did not learn any of that during my liberal arts degree. 

The lessons came hard and fast. Living in hotels and eating at truck stops was not a great life. The manual labor was exhausting; the weather was both brutally hot and numbingly cold. I wriggled out of situations that jeopardized my personal safety and to this day I’m amazed I survived that job without being assaulted. 

Like a lot of Earth scientists, I was originally drawn to geology because I loved mountains, the Grand Canyon, and the ocean. I loved learning the secrets of the Earth, how to read a landscape and know its story. I learned to time travel both forward and backward and envision the events that forged this badass planet. 

Working on the drill rig, I did none of those things. We found oily sludge underneath nearly every site we drilled. Our drill cores pulled up soil laced with the telltale rainbow sheen of spilled gasoline. I used a special probe to measure the layer of gasoline floating on top of the water table: six inches, one foot, two feet thick, flowing freely underground. The stench of hydrocarbons penetrated straight into my gut, kicking off waves of nausea. This was not at all how I’d imagined my life as a geologist. But I loved it. I realized that to make the world cleaner, first I would have to get dirty.

Week after week, traveling from one contaminated site to another, my life’s work was galvanizing into a single purpose. It’s really hard to clean up spilled oil. It’s way easier to not spill it in the first place. Coming face to face with the ugliness of pollution that was happening every day and everywhere kicked off an unshakable sense of responsibility. We can’t survive without this planet; we’ve got to do better. This became the value I hold most deeply and work toward every day.

Many of the people who share this path also share a special kind of guilt, because you know how damaging your own actions are. Since those formative years, every fill-up at a gas station left a pit in my stomach as if I was still at the job site. But what choice do we have? For 30 long years, I remained an unwilling participant in a fossil fuel economy because there were no practical alternatives. Until now.

Now I can leave gas stations behind for good.

Not long after we flipped the switch on our solar panels, I adjusted the amperage of our EV charger to match the energy generated on our rooftop. I watched in the app as cheerful little arrows illuminated the path from rooftop to car. For the first time, I can drive a car free from fossil fuels. The leaky supply chain of gasoline is, at last, starting to shrink. The change has been painfully slow. But it’s finally here. 

I accelerated away from a stop sign, feeling the thrilling surge of speed that electric drivetrains are famous for. I imagined how energy had flowed from the sun, my rooftop, and the car and now was propelling me down the road, with increasing intensity and the satisfying whir of the clean and efficient drivetrain. I couldn’t suppress a huge smile as I let out a whoop of joy. Damn, that’s fun.