A geologist and author reflects on how far we have come » Yale Climate Connection

A lot of people enjoy the thrill of driving a fast car, but I've never been one of them. I appreciate the alluring appeal of speed, but the negative effects of pollution ruin all the fun. In fact, I carry a twinge of guilt with me almost every time I drive.

But now things have changed. My car drives in the sun. After years of saving, my husband and I bought an electric car and installed solar panels on the roof. We then endured the agonizing wait for the system to be connected, inspected, and approved until we finally got the go-ahead to flip the most satisfying switch I've ever seen. Let the sun shine in.

Electric cars are fun. It’s fun to not have an electric bill anymore. It’s also fun to feel virtuous. But the satisfaction goes beyond that because this is my life’s mission. In the 1980s, long before climate change was taught in school, I studied it as an independent study in geology. I dove headfirst into learning about the carbon cycle, ice ages, and how burning fossil fuels changed everything.

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

In the early 1990s, breaches continued to occur at thousands of gas stations in the United States. At the time, underground tanks for storing gasoline and diesel were made of steel—a design flaw with devastating consequences. The steel tanks corroded and cracked, leaking their contents into soil and groundwater. In the United States alone, more than 500,000 underground storage tanks are leaking. Gas stations pose a particularly insidious risk because they are located in neighborhoods, near schools, and near lakes, rivers and aquifers that provide drinking water.

The first step in every job is to dig a well and collect soil and groundwater samples. I traveled with a mobile drilling rig and a small crew of drilling crews that I was supposed to manage. I was 21 years old and had basically no real world experience, so life was about to get real. One of the first things I learned while working with a driller was an impressive array of curse words. Drilling is difficult and complex. Something always goes wrong, and what follows is a dizzying litany of profanity that matches the filthiness of the murky, contaminated water gushing from the wells we're drilling.

I learned absolutely none of this during my liberal arts degree.

The lessons came hard and fast. Living in hotels and eating at truck stops is not a good life. Physical labor is tiring; the weather is hot and cold. I managed to get out of situations where my personal safety was compromised, and to this day I'm surprised I survived this job without being attacked.

Like many geoscientists, I initially became interested in geology because I loved mountains, grand canyons, and oceans. I love learning the secrets of the earth, how to interpret the landscape and understand its story. I learned to time travel forward and backward and imagine the events that shaped this awful planet.

I did none of these things while working on the drill. We find sludge underneath almost every drilling site. Our drill cores yielded soil that had a rainbow sheen to it from leaking gasoline. I used a special probe to measure the layer of gasoline floating above the water table: six inches, one foot, two feet thick, flowing freely underground. The stench of hydrocarbons seeped directly into my intestines, triggering waves of nausea. This is not at all how I imagined the life of a geologist to be. But I like it. I realized that in order to make the world a cleaner place, I had to get dirty first.

Week after week, traveling from one contaminated site to another, my life's work was motivated toward a single goal. Cleaning up an oil spill can be really difficult. It would be much easier not to spill it in the first place. Faced with the ugly pollution happening every day and everywhere, I developed an unshakable sense of responsibility. We cannot survive without this planet; we must do better. This became the value I held most deeply and worked toward every day.

Many people who take this path also have a special sense of guilt because you know how harmful your actions were. Since my formative years, every time I pumped gas at a gas station it made me feel a knot in my stomach, as if I were still on the job site. But what choice do we have? For 30 years I have been reluctant to participate in the fossil fuel economy because there was no real alternative. so far.

Now I can leave the gas station for good.

Shortly after we turned on the solar panels, I adjusted the amperage of the electric car charger to match the energy produced by the roof. I see cheerful little arrows in the app lighting up the path from the roof to the car. For the first time, I could drive a car without fossil fuels. The leaky gasoline supply chain is finally starting to shrink. The change has been painfully slow. But it's finally here.

I accelerated away from the stop sign, feeling the thrilling speed that electric powertrains are known for. I imagine how energy is flowing from the sun, my roof, and my car, now propelling me down the road with increasing intensity, the satisfying purr of a clean, efficient drivetrain. I couldn't contain my huge smile as I let out a cry of joy. Damn, that was fun.