We are all going to die

As a member of "The Day After" generation I'm used to living with existential threats to the species. Like most of my generational compatriots I've felt overshadowed by The Bomb my entire life, but aside from an abortive attempt to study nuclear weapons policy I haven't done a thing about it. Disarmament is still my litmus test for a presidential candidate, but I am happy to report that global nuclear holocaust now appears highly improbable. Less happily, it also appears to be the lesser of the two great evils of the age: cower, you, before Global Warming!

As those with a modicum of statistical sophistication, or even just a window, now understand, Global Warming is happening. No one can say what exactly this portends, but the range of intelligently projected outcomes is increasingly awful, and as the father of young children I am finding it very hard to avoid the conclusion that they will live their lives--they, my two boys, not some putative grandchildren--in a world very much poorer than the one in which I will have lived mine.

What, as a parent, do you do if your vision of your children's future world is a bleak one? We're hardly the first generation of mamas and papas dealing with this question. Back to The Bomb. If you had children in, say, the 1960s, you faced much the same: certain activities, which you perhaps did not support morally and yet probably were not doing very much to stop, were making the world a worse place for your kids. What might have led you to this conclusion? The fact that, even absent nuclear war, the US and several other countries were routinely exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in the oceans, and on land. Starting with Trinity in 1945 and carrying on into the early '80s, together these tests literally poisoned the entire globe with radioactive material, more and more of it year after year, the eventual equivalent of some tens of thousands of Hiroshimas. My dear parents, those explosions you did not stop from happening will eventually cause some millions of deaths by radiation-induced cancer, and one of them might be mine. Tense teaser: Might you not then have been afraid your child would one day say this to you?

Not if you were Thomas Neff. Dr. Neff, an expert in the economics of uranium production, is credited with almost single-handedly arranging for the purchase of gargantuan amounts of weapons grade uranium from a rapidly disintegrating nuclear state (the USSR) by another nuclear state (the USA) to be used as fuel in the latter's nuclear power plants. The reduction of the amount of bomb-grade uranium in the world is an absolute good, and Dr. Neff has to his credit an idea that led to the elimination of perhaps a third of all such material on the planet. I don't know if Dr. Neff has kids, but if he does he can say this to them: without me, children, it would have been a lot worse.

Back to the future: what answer am I going to have for my children? That I, for one, drove a high-MPG car, lived in a house without air conditioning, and sometimes tried to eat less meat? That I couldn't imagine what I could do about the situation, so did nothing? Sorry, boys, about rampant desertification, insecure food supplies, regional water resource wars, a radically impoverished biosphere, and the fact that it's really damn hot out and we still don't have air conditioning? I would rather be able to give Dr. Neff's answer: without me, children, it would have been a lot worse. And it occurs to me that the way to give Dr. Neff's answer is to take a page from Dr. Neff's playbook: #letsbuyallthefuel.

Here are two facts worth considering:

1. If we extract and burn the known fossil fuel deposits in the world we are toast.
2. These deposits are owned by companies that have been created to extract them so that others can burn them, or by countries that have based their entire economies and societies on doing likewise.

Now again, my proposal: #letsbuyallthefuel. Specifically, let's buy the rights to extract fossil fuel from all of the companies and countries that currently own those rights. Let's buy them at a price that reflects the difficulties and uncertainties involved in extraction, as well as the possibility of radically revaluing those reserves. Let's buy them under terms that powerfully encourage the sellers not to try to extract that fuel in violation of contract. Let's place those rights in an irrevocable trust and let's leave enough of the reserves out of the trust to keep us all fueled within a set carbon budget for half a generation, the budget to be set so as not to push us into the unthinkably dangerous territory towards which we are currently careening. Let's do this impossible, ridiculous, unfair, counter-intuitive thing because sometimes when you do such things they turn out quite well, and because otherwise we are all going to die.

There, the idea's out there. Tediously, it turns out Dr. Neff didn't just come up with an audacious plan but spent many, many years midwifing it into being, the better part of a career it seems. OK, the idea first, the NY Times op-ed next. I'm going as fast as I can but I have kids you know, and let's face it, they really slow you down.

Creek folk

Just because you bought a house on a creek doesn't mean you're creek folk. The transformation takes time, and drought time produces a lot less of it than rain time. Certainly we're feeling much more creeky now than we have at any time since buying the place last August, as a nearly dry bed filled with three feet of water, seemingly overnight. And, having risen, it is now a constant presence, a sound I expect to grow to depend upon.

Let's just hope we can depend on our retaining walls....