Todd Neff is a Denver-based writer. He got the fear while he was science and environment reporter at the Boulder Daily Camera. His website is www.toddneff.com.

As I type these words, electrical pulses in a notebook computer somehow
translate the mechanical thrusts of my fingertips into New Times Roman on
a flat-screen monitor. The laser printer hums to my right, the dishwasher
and washing machine rumble from different corners of the house. There
are lamps, phone chargers, a garage refrigerator/freezer keeping unhealthy
foods and bags of elderberries in a state of suspended animation. The furnace
just kicked on, turning Rocky Mountain methane—four hydrogens
mobbing a carbon, derived from photosynthesizers that haven’t bagged a
photon in 50 million years—into blue flames and parched, sustained gusts
from grated holes in the floor.

… When I accompany my daughters to their Montessori school, I bring
along 5,600 pounds of fossil-fired Chrysler Town & County. When I return,
I employ a device that uses a tiny propeller to atomize beans grown thousands
of miles south of Denver, and another to heat water somewhere below
the boiling point to strip vital stimulant from the carnage. And I think nothing
of it, generally, any more than I spend time thinking about all those liters
of blood flowing through my body, or about what my pancreas is up to at the
moment, or that I’m breathing.
Energy is so fundamental, so abundant, so pervasive, it has no real
meaning to us. Noticeable only when it disappears, it is classic infrastructure.
But unlike a road, we have no sense of energy as a thing in itself—only
its products: light, heat, work, motion.

…. What would reducing 80 percent of my carbon output mean? I think
about scarcely roughed-up coffee beans producing lukewarm swill, twohour
workdays, a January thermostat set to forty-two degrees. About driving
my preschoolers 25 percent of the way to school—to the convenience store
at Eleventh Avenue and Yosemite, roughly, from which they’d walk, through
rain, snow, and sleet, like little postal workers.