Every morning when I go to open my laptop, my husband has not hidden the fact that he was there the night before. What I am confronted with even before coffee is not a porno site, not a TED talk , not the credits of the movie he had watched, but how much CO2 is released by one gallon of gasoline. His first words this day are, “You will not believe this, Nance, one gallon of gas weighs 6.5 pounds and that converts into 20 pounds of CO2.”

I say, do you want pancakes?

He says, “I have to check that again. That can’t be right. One gallon of gas . . . 20 pounds of CO2?! How do you go from 6.5 pounds of liquid gasoline to twenty pounds of CO2 greenhouse gas?”

This must be a rhetorical question because he can’t possibly think I could remotely know the answer.

The gasoline, he continues undaunted, is a hydrocarbon. There’s a multiplying effect. That’s what it is. He’s talking to himself now. So when the gas burns and combines with oxygen . . .

Or an omelet, I interrupt.

I try to be as shocked and disturbed by these facts as he is. It’s not as if I’m countering with my own thrilling purchase of a pair of Manolos on eBay. I’m not entirely a lightweight. But I don’t eat, sleep and dream the planet’s future.

The fact is, if we as a species are to survive, we need more of him and less of me. He’s hyper-conscious of waste. He monitors friends when they wash dishes. Please don’t stand there talking while the water is rushing down the drain. It’s killing me, he says. He uses a small towel after he showers (which isn’t that often by the way, he says Americans clean too much) because washing a big towel takes too much energy. Meanwhile I’m wrapping myself in a bath sheet the size of Texas.

We’re just different. The problem is he almost can’t enjoy himself because he worries so much because he knows too much.

We are going on our first vacation in a long while. Unfortunately, I made the airline reservations the day after he discovered the thing about gas and CO2. When I tell him the dates and the times and the rest of the details about our trip to Tulum, he doesn’t say, oh, it will be so nice to relax on white sand and swim in turquoise water.

He says, can you imagine how much CO2 gets released by planes?

Maybe I do want him to visit a few harmless porno sites.

Nancy Slonim Aronie is the author of Writing from the Heart (Hyperion/Little Brown). She is a commentator for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop.