Home Blog

Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels Hit 145%, Sparing Americans the Indignity of Affordable Renewable Energy

Lena Wexler
-
0
Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels Hit 145%, Sparing Americans the Indignity of Affordable Renewable Energy

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday celebrated the latest round of tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels, which now stand at a cumulative 145%, finally putting an end to the years-long crisis of Americans being able to generate their own electricity for less than the cost of a sandwich.

The new rates, layered atop existing duties from the first Trump term, are expected to roughly triple the installed cost of a residential rooftop array — a development White House officials described as “good news for energy independence” while standing in front of a single lump of coal displayed under glass.

“For too long, hardworking Americans have been forced to suffer the humiliation of pulling free energy out of the sky,” said Mason Tolliver, senior fellow at the American Manufacturing Restoration Institute, a think tank funded by sources he declined to specify. “This levels the playing field for fuels that have to be dug out of the ground by someone, ideally on a flag-adjacent timeline.”

Industry analysts noted that the affected panels are still, in fact, being produced in record numbers — they are simply being installed in Vietnam, Germany, and a single very enthusiastic municipality in Chile. China itself added 277 gigawatts of solar last year, roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. grid, and has reportedly stopped returning the State Department’s calls.

In Phoenix, where summer highs are projected to crest 118 degrees by July, rooftop installer Devin Marquez said his order book had gone from “six months out” to “a guy who wants to know if I can do it in Bitcoin.” His warehouse currently holds roughly $400,000 in panel inventory worth either substantially more or substantially less, he said, depending on which cable news anchor is talking.

The tariffs appeared to land hardest on the millennials who, after a decade of being told to stop buying avocado toast, had finally cleared escrow on starter homes specifically chosen for their south-facing roofs. Several described standing in their driveways looking up, then standing in their driveways looking down, then going back inside.

Administration officials suggested homeowners concerned about rising utility bills consider a range of patriotic alternatives, including a forthcoming American-made panel from a Texas startup that has not yet manufactured a panel, opening their windows, and prayer. A separate program providing rebates for domestic solar manufacturing was quietly defunded the same afternoon, in what one Energy Department spokesperson described as “a scheduling thing.”

The Department clarified late Tuesday that the sun itself remains, for now, exempt from tariffs, though officials would not rule out future action.

Mariners Debut Tariff-Pegged Concessions Pricing, Hot Dog Now Trading at $14.50 Bid, $16 Ask

Cody Thompson
-
0
Mariners Debut Tariff-Pegged Concessions Pricing, Hot Dog Now Trading at $14.50 Bid, $16 Ask

SEATTLE — Concession workers at T-Mobile Park reported to their stations Tuesday morning to discover that each had been issued a Bloomberg Terminal, a quote sheet refreshed every 90 seconds, and a laminated card explaining that the garlic fries were now subject to a two-sided market with a widening bid-ask spread.

The pricing model, rolled out quietly during the Mariners’ homestand against the Rangers, pegs every concession item to a basket of imported inputs — paprika, polyester jersey blends, the steel in the nacho trays — and adjusts in real time as new tariff headlines cross the wire. A pretzel that opened at $9.25 closed the seventh inning at $11.80 after a Truth Social post about Vietnam.

“We’re not raising prices, we’re discovering them,” said Mariners VP of Fan Monetization Strategy Brent Halverson, who joined the club from a Citadel commodities desk in February. “The hot dog has always had a fair value. We’re just letting the market find it. Sometimes the market finds $13. Sometimes the market finds $19. That’s price discovery, and frankly that’s baseball.”

Vendors, most of whom are seasonal hires earning $19.40 an hour, have been asked to memorize tariff schedules for 14 trading partners and to quote concessions in basis points off the previous inning’s clearing price. One vendor, reached climbing the stairs of Section 132 with a tray of Cracker Jack pegged to a corn-syrup futures index, said he had been on hold with a confused buyer in Section 134 for the entirety of a pitching change.

“He wanted to lock in two beers and a churro at the top-of-the-fifth print,” the vendor said. “I told him I could only quote him spot. He asked if I’d take a limit order. I don’t know what a limit order is. I’m in community college.”

Fan reaction has been mixed, in the sense that fans appear to hate it and the team appears not to care. A father of three from Bellevue, attempting to feed his children during a rain delay, watched a soft pretzel reprice three times in the span of his Apple Pay confirmation and described the experience as “like buying a used Civic, but the Civic is bread.” The Mariners’ app crashed twice during the eighth inning Monday after a leaked Commerce Department memo sent ketchup limit-up.

Halverson, asked whether the volatility might alienate casual fans, noted that a sophisticated retail investor class was already emerging in the upper deck, where a group of finance interns from the Amazon tower had begun running a small arbitrage book against the team store, buying Julio Rodríguez jerseys at the second-inning print and shorting them into the bottom of the fourth.

“That’s not a bug,” Halverson said. “That’s a fan engagement metric.”

The Mariners said they expect other clubs to follow within the season, and confirmed that a soft launch of tariff-pegged parking is planned for the Yankees series, with stalls in Lot C reportedly set to open on a Dutch auction.

An NHL Player Took a Puck to the Face Saturday and Played the Next Shift, Which Is Apparently a Foreign Concept Across the Hall in the NBA Playoffs

Duke Holloway
-
0
An NHL Player Took a Puck to the Face Saturday and Played the Next Shift, Which Is Apparently a Foreign Concept Across the Hall in the NBA Playoffs

Saturday night I had two TVs going. Stanley Cup playoffs on one, NBA first round on the other. On the hockey channel some kid caught a puck under the visor, skated to the bench leaving a red trail behind him like he was marking a trail for the rest of the team, took fourteen stitches in the runway, and was out for the power play with a piece of gauze taped to his face. On the basketball channel a sideline reporter was explaining, in the gentle voice you use with a horse, that a 26-year-old All-Star was unavailable due to “right hip tightness” and that the organization would “continue to reevaluate.”

The NHL injury report is the funniest document in American sports. “Upper body.” “Lower body.” That’s the whole document. You watch a man get cross-checked into the boards hard enough that his helmet ends up in Section 112, and the next morning the team announces he’s day-to-day, lower body. The man is being held together with rosary beads and athletic tape and the franchise is calling it lower body.

Coach DiMaggio used to say there were two kinds of hurt — hurt, and injured — and only one of them got you out of practice. He said this while taping his own ankle in the boys’ locker room because the trainer was at a wedding. I thought of him Saturday when that hockey kid came back out for the third period with a face like a beet salad. Coach would’ve been beside himself with joy. He’d have written it down on an index card and pinned it to the bulletin board.

Meanwhile, across the hall, an NBA guy is going to miss tonight’s playoff game with what the league office is now comfortable calling “right knee management.” Not an injury. Management. As if his knee is a small business and the front office is running payroll. He played 58 of 82 games this year, sat the back end of every road trip, did a podcast in March about his sleep habits, and arrived at the postseason approximately as fresh as a bag of pre-cut salad.

I am not naming the guy, because I am not in the business of naming guys, and because honestly there are six of him. The load-management era has produced an entire class of player who treats April like the start of a marathon and February like an optional stretching block. The numbers people will tell you it works. The numbers people will tell you something works right up until the moment it doesn’t, at which point they’ll explain that the model has been refined.

My buddy Ray called Sunday morning. He’s been watching the Panthers because his nephew has a girlfriend who has a cousin who works in the Sunrise team store — Ray operates entirely through six-degree hockey sourcing — and Ray says there’s a defenseman down there playing on what is almost certainly a broken foot. Team’s calling it a “lower body irritation.” Ray finds this extremely funny. Ray is correct.

I want to be fair here, because I’m old, not stupid. The NBA playoffs have produced some of the best basketball I’ll see all year, and the guys who do play play hard. There’s a kid on the Knicks who looks like a substitute teacher and is averaging 41 minutes a night and seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly. Credit where it’s earned. I’m not coming for the players. I’m coming for whatever consultant convinced an entire league that 82 games is a “regular-season volume problem” instead of a job.

There was a guy I used to know named Petey Corrigan who played beer-league hockey into his fifties. Petey took a puck off the cheekbone in 1994, drove himself to the emergency room, came home with a face like an eggplant, and was at Wednesday’s skate. Somebody asked him why. He said, “Because it’s Wednesday.” That was the entire answer. That was every answer Petey ever gave to anything.

I don’t know what we lost between Petey and the right-hip-management era, but I know it wasn’t fitness, because these kids are in better shape than any of us ever were. I think we lost the part where showing up was the assignment. The part where the calendar made the decision and you respected the decision. The part where Wednesday was Wednesday and you didn’t need a sports scientist from Stanford to explain it to you.

Denise is bringing chili over for Game 5. She heard a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder. I told her Coach DiMaggio would have hated cocoa powder in chili. She said Coach DiMaggio is not invited.

Federal Climate Database Now Maintained Entirely by One Hydrologist Who Forgot to Open the Buyout Email

Lena Wexler
-
0
Federal Climate Database Now Maintained Entirely by One Hydrologist Who Forgot to Open the Buyout Email

SILVER SPRING, MD — As the country wrapped up Earth Day week, sources within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that the agency’s flagship climate dataset — a continuous record of ocean temperature, atmospheric carbon, and sea ice extent dating back to the Eisenhower administration — is now being maintained, in its entirety, by a single 61-year-old hydrologist named Glenn Yarborough who simply did not check his work email between February 4 and March 18.

Yarborough, who came in Monday under the impression that he still had eleven colleagues, was reportedly informed of his new responsibilities by the building’s security guard, who handed him a printed-out org chart with one name on it and a Post-it that read ‘good luck buddy.’

‘Glenn is what we in workforce planning call a continuity asset,’ said Marcy Pell, an acting deputy administrator who clarified she has been ‘acting’ in four different roles since lunch. ‘He missed the separation incentive window because he doesn’t use Outlook on his phone, which under the current staffing model makes him the institutional memory of American climate science. We’re treating that as a feature.’

Yarborough’s expanded portfolio now includes the Mauna Loa CO₂ record, the Arctic sea ice index, the entire Atlantic hurricane reanalysis, and a shared Google Drive folder labeled ‘IMPORTANT — DO NOT DELETE’ that nobody currently employed has the password to. He has been issued one MacBook Air, a login to a Dell tower in Asheville that may or may not still be plugged in, and a laminated card with the phone number of a contractor in Boulder who ‘should know how the model runs, probably.’

Officials at the Department of Commerce defended the restructuring as a long-overdue efficiency, noting that prior to cuts, climate monitoring required dozens of redundant staffers performing overlapping tasks like ‘reading the sensors,’ ‘calibrating the sensors,’ and ‘replacing the sensors when they fall into the ocean.’ Under the new model, those functions have been consolidated into Glenn, who is also expected to answer congressional inquiries, peer-review his own findings, and physically drive to a buoy off Cape Hatteras ‘if the numbers look weird.’

‘I asked them what happens if I get the flu,’ Yarborough said, gesturing at a wall of monitors, six of which were displaying the Windows screensaver. ‘They told me to think of it as a paid vacation for the planet.’

Internal documents reviewed by sources show that of the agency’s previous 312 climate division employees, 47 took buyouts, 188 were reassigned to a new sub-office in Huntsville that does not yet have a building, and 76 were terminated for what HR described as ‘redundancy with Glenn.’ The remaining position — Yarborough’s — was reportedly preserved because eliminating it would have triggered a federal data-continuity statute that nobody in current leadership has read.

Climate researchers outside the agency expressed measured concern. ‘In theory, one experienced hydrologist running the entire national climate record is fine, assuming he never sleeps, never retires, and never updates his operating system,’ said Dr. Priya Kothari, a senior fellow at the Center for Atmospheric Continuity. ‘In practice, we are one bad cold and one Microsoft patch away from losing seventy years of data about whether the planet is, in any meaningful sense, getting warmer.’

Reached at 6:47 p.m. Friday as he was locking up the third-floor server room with a key he found in a desk drawer, Yarborough confirmed he had finally opened the buyout email. He said the deadline was March 21.

Appliance CEO Calls Tariffs ‘Margin-Neutral Long-Term,’ Defines Long-Term as ‘The Year I Retire’

Cody Thompson
-
0
Appliance CEO Calls Tariffs ‘Margin-Neutral Long-Term,’ Defines Long-Term as ‘The Year I Retire’

BENTON HARBOR, MI — On Friday’s first-quarter earnings call, Midstate Appliance Holdings CEO Greg Halverson assured Wall Street analysts that the latest round of tariffs on Chinese-sourced compressors, motor housings, and “basically the dishwasher” would be “fully margin-neutral over the long term,” which he later defined under direct questioning as “the back half of 2031, give or take, which I believe is also coincidentally when I retire.”

The hour-long call featured fourteen separate uses of the verb “absorb,” a word Halverson clarified meant “raising the suggested retail price on every SKU by between four and eleven percent and trusting the American consumer to absorb it on our behalf.” He added that the pricing team had been “absorbing aggressively” since March.

“What’s exciting here is the optionality,” said Marcus Devereux, lead consumer-durables analyst at Crestmark Equity Research, in a same-day note. “Management has identified at least three separate retirements between now and the long term, any one of which could fully resolve the tariff exposure.” Devereux maintained his Buy rating and lifted his price target by one dollar.

Halverson also introduced a new non-GAAP metric on slide 14, “Tariff-Adjusted Underlying Operational EBITDA Excluding Tariffs,” which he described as “EBITDA, but with the tariffs taken back out, because at the end of the day those don’t reflect the underlying business.” The accompanying footnote read, in six-point type, “Forward-looking; assumes tariffs do not exist.”

When one analyst gently asked whether the company had considered relocating production stateside, Halverson responded that Midstate had “looked closely at a number of domestic alternatives” before concluding that the United States “does not currently manufacture the parts of a refrigerator.” A follow-up question about which parts, specifically, was deferred to the investor relations team and never resurfaced.

Reached for comment, a lineworker at the company’s Benton Harbor facility — which assembles imported components into finished units stamped “Crafted in America” — said he had not been invited to the call but had noticed that the cafeteria recently switched from Coke products to “an off-brand cola sourced from somewhere none of us recognize.” He declined to speculate on the long term.

By the closing bell, MIDA was up 3.2%, with several analysts citing Halverson’s “disciplined long-term framing” and the reassuring fact that, per his own definition, none of it will technically be his problem.

Goodell Hugged 32 Grown Men on Live Television Last Night and We’re Calling It a Sporting Event

Duke Holloway
-
0
Goodell Hugged 32 Grown Men on Live Television Last Night and We’re Calling It a Sporting Event

I sat down at 7:55 with a beer and a notepad like an idiot, because I genuinely thought I was going to watch a football event. By 8:14 the commissioner of the National Football League had embraced a 6-foot-5 offensive tackle from Missouri the way a Greek widow embraces a returning son, and my notepad still said, in my own handwriting, kickoff?

I counted the hugs. Thirty-two of them. Roger Goodell, a man who looks like he was assembled in a focus group to test the concept of ‘middle management,’ hugged every single first-round pick last night, and on at least four occasions he held the hug a full second longer than the kid wanted him to. You could see them try to pull away. He would not let them. This is the same man who suspends running backs for being late to a press conference, and last night he was going in for cheek-to-cheek with a defensive end whose name he had clearly just learned phonetically.

Then there was the wardrobe. The third overall pick wore a brooch. I had to look up brooch. The seventh pick wore a pearl necklace and a suit the color of a good lemon, and ESPN cut to a sideline analyst — sorry, draft-side analyst — who described it as ‘a statement.’ A statement of what, the analyst did not say. The analyst was wearing a turtleneck under a blazer, so I’m not sure he was qualified.

When I made my JV roster cuts in the fall of 1986, I posted the list on a piece of typing paper taped to the gym door. Coach DiMaggio walked by, looked at the list, looked at me, and said, ‘You spelled Kowalczyk wrong.’ That was the entire ceremony. Nobody hugged anybody. Nobody wore a brooch. The kids who didn’t make it cried in their cars like Americans.

The green room is now a reality show. They cut to the families every twelve seconds. Mothers crying. Fathers crying. Grandmothers being handed tissues by a producer who is not on camera but is clearly directing the grandmother to look up and to the left. One kid had to wait until the back end of the first round, and the camera sat on his face for what felt like an entire commercial break, watching him perform ‘composure’ for an audience of millions. Let the man eat a dinner roll in private. He’s about to move to Cincinnati.

Mel Kiper Jr. is still doing this. I want that on the record. Mel Kiper Jr., who has had the same haircut since the Carter administration, sat at a desk last night and explained that a linebacker from Alabama ‘plays with a chip on his shoulder,’ which is what Mel Kiper Jr. has said about every linebacker drafted since 1984. At some point during the broadcast, a younger analyst said the word ‘twitchy’ to describe a cornerback, and I’ll be honest, I’m still working on it.

Now — and credit where it’s owed — somewhere in the middle of all this, a kid from a small school in Iowa got picked twenty-eighth overall, and when his name was called he didn’t pose, didn’t pull a flag out of his jacket, didn’t kiss a brooch. He hugged his mother, said something quiet to his father, and walked to the stage like a man going to work. The booth went silent for about four seconds. It was the best four seconds of television I saw all night, and naturally they cut away from it to sell me a truck.

Ray called me at 11:40. Ray watches the draft with a legal pad and a calculator, because Ray is sick. He wanted to argue about a guard who went in the second round of his mock and the third round in real life, and he was genuinely worked up about it, the way other men are worked up about their grandchildren. I told him I was going to bed. He told me he had three more rounds to go tonight and tomorrow. God help him.

Day two is on right now. Goodell, mercifully, does not hug the second-rounders. They send him home. They bring out former players to do the announcing, and the former players look like men who would rather be golfing, which is the correct posture for an adult around this much pageantry. Denise is bringing chicken cutlets at six. She heard about the recipe from a podcast.

SEC Enforcement Division Down to Two Employees, Both Currently Using PTO to Interview at Goldman

Cody Thompson
-
0
SEC Enforcement Division Down to Two Employees, Both Currently Using PTO to Interview at Goldman

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, once 1,300 lawyers and accountants charged with policing the world’s largest capital markets, has been reduced under the latest round of federal workforce cuts to two employees, both of whom are reportedly using accrued PTO this week to interview at Goldman Sachs.

The lone remaining presence in the agency’s Washington headquarters, sources confirmed, is an unpaid Georgetown junior named Tyler who has been forwarding tip-line emails into a Gmail folder labeled ‘deal with after finals’ and politely declining to open any attachment over 4 megabytes.

‘We’ve right-sized enforcement to reflect a more dynamic, founder-friendly market posture,’ said acting SEC chair Dale Pruitt, who clarified that going forward the agency would ‘trust but verify’ compliance by occasionally reading the LinkedIn posts of public-company CEOs. ‘If something is genuinely fraudulent, we feel confident that, eventually, a podcaster will mention it.’

The reductions, finalized Tuesday, eliminate the divisions responsible for insider trading, accounting fraud, market manipulation, and crypto, the latter of which Pruitt described as ‘less a category of enforcement than a category of personal hobby.’ Whistleblower submissions, previously routed through a secure intake portal, will now be redirected to a Google Form that requires the tipster to first identify all images containing a traffic light.

Wall Street’s response has been swift and largely celebratory. Citadel’s compliance department reportedly disbanded itself Wednesday out of professional embarrassment. A memecoin launched at 2:14 p.m. Eastern called $UNREGD hit a $610 million market cap before the developer rugged it ninety minutes later, an event one trader described as ‘the new IPO process, but honest about it.’

A White House spokesman defended the cuts, noting that the SEC’s most recent successful enforcement action was against a retiree in Boca Raton who had been operating a Ponzi scheme out of a Panera and could not afford counsel. ‘Real fraud,’ the spokesman said, ‘is when federal employees have desks.’

Internally, the two remaining enforcement attorneys have left autoresponders indicating they will return calls ‘on or around the heat death of the agency.’ One has updated her LinkedIn headline to ‘Open to Work / Open to Defending the People I Used to Investigate.’ The other has already accepted a position structuring synthetic CDOs at a firm that, as recently as January, was the subject of an open SEC inquiry now marked ‘closed — vibes.’

At press time, the agency’s general enforcement inbox had begun bouncing incoming mail with the message ‘mailbox full,’ which a Treasury official clarified was, technically, the new policy.

Google’s Earth Day Doodle Required Enough Compute to Power Lithuania for an Afternoon

Lena Wexler
-
0
Google’s Earth Day Doodle Required Enough Compute to Power Lithuania for an Afternoon

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google unveiled its 2025 Earth Day Doodle on Tuesday, a generative-AI animation of a polar bear sniffing wildflowers across user-selectable biomes, which company engineers later confirmed consumed roughly the same wattage as the Republic of Lithuania between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Eastern.

The doodle, marketed as a ‘lightweight, browser-native moment of ecological reflection,’ allows users to prompt the bear into 47 distinct meadows, 12 tundras, and one inexplicable parking lot. By midafternoon it had been queried 1.2 billion times, generating an estimated 14,000 photorealistic polar bears, none of which exist and all of which were deleted at 5 p.m. Pacific to make room for a Pixel 9a banner ad.

‘Each interaction plants the seed of awareness,’ said Devon Marchetti, Google’s Director of Eco-Forward Storytelling, in a statement that did not mention electricity. ‘And, conceptually, a separate seed in our reforestation partner’s pipeline, the audit for which is currently scheduled for 2031, pending re-baselining.’

According to a leaked internal memo viewed by sustainability outlet GridWatch, the doodle’s underlying model was trained on 2.1 million hours of nature footage and deployed across data centers in Oregon, Iowa, and a newly commissioned facility in Council Bluffs that draws cooling water from an aquifer the EPA had, in a previous administration, classified as ‘troubled.’ Google declined to specify the doodle’s per-query energy footprint, calling the figure ‘directionally unhelpful to the conversation we want to have today.’

Lithuanian grid operator Litgrid, contacted for comment, said it had not noticed anything unusual but appreciated being thought of. ‘We are a country of 2.8 million people,’ said spokesperson Rasa Kazlauskaitė. ‘We are flattered to be the unit of measurement, though we would prefer it be for something other than a bear looking at a daisy.’

Earth Day observances at other tech firms followed a similar template. Microsoft pledged to plant four million trees on land its real estate division has not yet, but plans to, rezone for hyperscale compute. Amazon released a 94-page sustainability report whose definition of ‘Scope 3 emissions’ has been revised six times since last April and now excludes any carbon emitted on a Sunday. Meta announced a new initiative called ‘Reels for Reefs,’ the mechanics of which were not specified and possibly not determined.

‘The thing about Big Tech and Earth Day is they’re not lying, exactly,’ said Priya Bhandari, a senior fellow at the Cascade Institute for Digital Ecology. ‘They’re producing a sincere artifact of what they wish were true, rendered in 4K, at a carbon cost roughly equivalent to flying every employee to the artifact and back.’

By Wednesday morning the polar bear doodle had been replaced by a standard Google logo, the Council Bluffs facility had returned to its baseline 142-megawatt draw, and a press release announcing the company’s largest-ever data center expansion — in a former wetland outside Tulsa — was scheduled to go out at noon, comfortably after the news cycle had moved on.

Earth Day Sponsors Now Include Three Oil Majors, a Lithium Mine, and a Bottled Water Brand Called ‘Glacier Therapy’

Tara Sparks
-
0
Earth Day Sponsors Now Include Three Oil Majors, a Lithium Mine, and a Bottled Water Brand Called ‘Glacier Therapy’

NEW YORK, NY — Earth Day 2025 kicked off Tuesday with its largest sponsor roster in history, featuring three oil majors, a lithium extraction operation in the Atacama, a private equity firm that owns 14 landfills, and a luxury bottled water brand called Glacier Therapy that markets itself as ‘meltwater you can trust.’

Organizers unveiled the lineup at a press event in Bryant Park, where attendees were handed reusable tote bags containing a single-use water bottle, a coupon for a hybrid SUV, and a QR code linking to a 47-page PDF titled ‘Our Journey.’

‘This year is about partnership,’ said Margot Pell, Chief Sustainability Storyteller at Verdancy Group, speaking from a stage powered by a diesel generator humming approximately nine feet behind her. ‘You can’t have a conversation about the planet without inviting the people who are actively changing it. And I mean that in every possible way.’

The keynote sponsor, ExxonMobil, debuted a limited-edition Earth Day merch drop featuring a $68 organic cotton hoodie embroidered with the phrase ‘I’m With Her,’ an arrow pointing at a picture of Earth, and, in smaller text on the inside tag, a disclaimer that the hoodie was shipped from a facility in Vietnam via three layovers.

The hoodie sold out in eight minutes. A resale listing appeared on Grailed before the event had ended.

Glacier Therapy, the bottled water brand, distributed roughly 12,000 individually wrapped 8-ounce bottles to attendees, each labeled with a serial number, a Spotify playlist, and a small card explaining that the water inside was sourced from a Patagonian glacier that ‘wanted to be experienced.’ A spokesperson clarified the glacier did not, technically, consent, ‘but it also didn’t say no.’

Park ranger Denise Albrecht, who was present in an official capacity at a separate Earth Day cleanup in Prospect Park, said her team of 30 volunteers spent four hours collecting trash from the previous weekend’s Earth Day Pre-Game Festival, sponsored by a different oil company. ‘We pulled 600 pounds of garbage out of the pond,’ she said. ‘Most of it was tote bags.’

At the Bryant Park event, attendees were treated to a panel discussion titled ‘Carbon, Conscience, and Couture,’ moderated by a TikTok creator who described herself as a ‘climate-adjacent lifestyle voice’ and whose most recent video was a haul from a fast-fashion brand that has been sued in three countries. She told the audience the planet was ‘literally giving’ and asked them to clap if they recycled.

By 4 p.m., the park had been mostly cleared, save for a small crowd watching a man in a polar bear costume hand out flyers for a cryptocurrency called EARTHCOIN. The generator was still running. Nobody had unplugged it.

I Drive 90 Minutes Every Earth Day to Apologize to a Specific Hemlock Named Margaret and This Year She Would Not Look at Me

Brooke Ellery
-
0
I Drive 90 Minutes Every Earth Day to Apologize to a Specific Hemlock Named Margaret and This Year She Would Not Look at Me

We left the homestead at 4:42 a.m. because Margaret prefers a soft arrival, and by the time we hit the third switchback into Pisgah, Ember had already opened the window to let the car air out — Cade had eaten a clementine in the back seat the day before, and citrus oils, as my friend Wren has been begging me to understand, are perceived by hardwoods as a low-grade insult. I had the offering basket on my lap. I had the unfiltered spring water from the gas station outside Brevard that everyone in our group agrees is the only ethical water within county lines. I had, God help me, hope.

Margaret is a 240-year-old eastern hemlock about a mile and a half off a trail I’m not going to name, because the last time I named her trail in print a man from Charlotte tried to hug her wearing Old Spice. I have visited Margaret every Earth Day week for six years. The first year I went to apologize on behalf of my marketing career. The second year I went to apologize on behalf of my marketing career again, because she had not accepted it the first time. By year four we were, I felt, in real conversation.

This year she would not look at me. I know how that sounds. But anyone in Old-Growth Whisperers of the Southern Appalachians (12,400 members, very tight ship, no crystals allowed in the photos because it confuses the moss) will tell you a hemlock can absolutely hold the line on her gaze, and you feel it the second you step into her drip line. My friend Petra, who took a weekend intensive in Floyd County with a woman who used to do reiki for racehorses, calls it “canopy turning.” Margaret had turned her canopy.

I sat on the root flare for a full forty minutes trying to figure out what I had done. I had brought the right offerings. I had not worn anything dyed with petroleum. I had even left my phone in the car inside a small linen sack of dried nettle, which my sister-in-law Jess — she does intake at a pediatric office in Weaverville and has, at this point, basically a working clinical understanding of EMF — says is the only way to mute a device on consecrated ground. And still: cold. Closed. A hemlock with her arms crossed.

Then I remembered. Two weeks ago I purchased, from a Target, a reusable tote that said EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY in a font I now realize was designed by a committee. Margaret knew. Of course Margaret knew. There is a Telegram channel my husband’s cousin’s wife forwards me from called The Greenwash Ledger, and they have been documenting since 2022 that any cotton tote produced for an Earth Day promotion contains what they call “intent residue” — the chemical aftertaste of a marketing meeting where someone said the words “sustainability vertical.” You cannot wash it out. You can only burn it, in a fire built from wood you personally identified.

I want to be careful here, because I am not anti-corporation, I am anti-pretending. There is a difference between a company that quietly composts and a company that puts a leaf on a yogurt cup. Margaret can tell the difference. I have watched her tell the difference. In 2022 a hiker walked past her drinking a Liquid Death and her needles physically perked up, and that is not me being poetic, that is me telling you what my pupils saw.

I will say — because I believe in a generous reading of even the most disappointing Earth Day — that Margaret did, at one point, drop a single cone directly into Ember’s lap, which the group has reviewed and agreed is at minimum a partial absolution for the children, who are blameless. The tote, which I had foolishly brought with me to carry the offerings, I left at the trailhead inside a cairn I built specifically to contain it until I can return next week with cedar matches.

So this Earth Day, while everyone else is sharing infographics and buying a $14 candle that says LOVE THE PLANET in soy ink, I am going to be sitting in my mudroom hand-writing six pages of apology — one for each year — on paper I made last fall from the corn husks our neighbor Dale gave us. I’ll mail them to the trailhead post office in an unsealed envelope, because Margaret reads through wind. I will keep you posted on whether her canopy turns back. My intuition says by Pentecost. My sister-in-law says sooner. The tote, for the record, is still up there. It can sit with what it did.

123...15Page 1 of 15