The Deluge, page 10
“Papa’s death, my work—these subjects have nothing to do with each other. I had no interest in finance, and I wish you would learn to keep your feeble opinions to yourself.”
My mother’s jaw snapped open: “Do not speak at me like that. I know you think I’m a silly old woman, but when you have all these amazing offers from these financial peoples, what did I ask? That you take those jobs and make yourself wealthy?”
I agreed she had not. I apologized. I hoped that would be the end of the discussion. Sitting at a long red light, a tree lush with spring’s nutrients hovered over the car, and a wild light seeped through slits in the leaves, running over my mother’s face like the shadows cast by sun-dappled water. She said:
“You have come so far, Ashir. God gave you an amazing talent. He put something inside you that very few people have. I only want you to learn that happiness is about using such gifts for that which is beyond yourself. I am not even talking about something holy. Just something higher.”
Conclusion: Sitting at the desk in my childhood room, I’ll finish this rambling excursion by saying only that my problem, I suppose, is that the model worked. Perhaps Peter and I will begin to win a great deal of money, but that is of no interest to me. What is of interest is recapturing that moment of profound focus and pleasure spawned during the three years of working on the model. Because here I am despite it all, stranded in a universe of colossal scope and maximum entropy where human concerns are infinitesimally purposeless dust motes. And yet when one views those motes under a microscope it becomes clear that they too are each a colossus. They are formations worthy of our dedication, what I’ve heard people call “love” or our “heart.” But they are really more like a fever. Or a fugue.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTS
ARTS | BOOKS | BOOKSHELF
Warmed-Over Bunk
One of global warming’s most spectacular and dangerous ideologues emerges. Why claims of “environmental crisis” will never go away.
By John Taylor Jr.
July 19, 2017
For those who view “Green New Deal” environmentalism as virtuous at best or benign at worst, I beseech you to pick up a copy of One Last Chance: How to Save Civilization by Moving to Total War on Climate Change by Dr. Anthony Pietrus.
Pietrus, an oceanographer, climatologist, and contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, exemplifies the kind of near-psychotic delusions that have come to characterize the environmental Left. His new book, which is being touted as the New Testament of global-warming action plans, is a frightening reminder of what lies in store should such extremists ever gain electoral power.
“We are not at a crossroads,” Pietrus writes in his introduction. “We long ago took the wrong fork. Now we must do everything in our power, including sacrificing our comfort, our livelihoods, our economy, and partial, carefully excised pieces of our democracy, to save our species and all species.”
Much of Pietrus’s radical wish list is unremarkable, well-trod territory of the climate vanguard. What differentiates One Last Chance is that last part, the “carefully excised pieces.” It’s also what should send a chill down the spine of every American.
First, however, his stunning grab bag of policies deserves comment, if only to deracinate it: the purchase and stranding of all US coal supplies and shuttering of all coal plants within five years; the nationalization of the thirty largest fossil-fuel-producing companies in order to “unwind” their operations; limits to production on virgin aluminum, cement, iron, plastics, and forest products; a buyback program to replace the entire US vehicle fleet with electric vehicles within ten years; achieving a 50 percent reduction in air travel by levying heavy taxes on each ticket; a rapid buildout of nuclear power plants; and massive public works projects ranging from the construction of a smart grid to carbon capture systems that would draw CO2 from the air and sequester it in the ground and offshore.
The nation’s farmers will not escape either. Pietrus also insists on draconian taxes to lower dairy and beef consumption and advocates a price collar system on agricultural emissions with auctioned credits, which would “quickly and effectively shift the economy toward zero-carbon energy and food production.”
To pay for all this, a “project on par with the rapid militarization of the US economy following Pearl Harbor,” he proposes levying taxes not only on carbon but increasing the marginal income tax rate, instituting a consumption tax on “luxury” goods (i.e., nearly everything the average American household might want to purchase other than basic foodstuffs), and the issuing of “climate bonds.”
Lest other countries push back against this lunacy, he proposes economic war to force compliance. “The US, China, and the EU could easily draw the rest of the world into joining the new carbon compact by instituting a tariff on goods from any nation without similar carbon pricing.” However, the US must be ready to go it alone: “The current economic order did not emerge without the political and military will of the largest empire the planet has ever seen, and similarly, a new carbon-free regime can be forced upon the world with greater ease than trying to get 190 nations to sign on to a new protocol.”
If this all doesn’t sound like madness yet, just wait. Pietrus claims he’s spent “many years studying how such aims may be achieved. I’ve concluded that the only way forward is a new governing paradigm similar to war mobilization.”
He would create two new government bureaucracies. The first would be modeled on the War Production Board, Franklin Roosevelt’s agency that took control of the US economy during World War II and dictated what would be built and how much of it. Rather than being housed in the executive branch, however, the agency would be independent, an “environmental Federal Reserve,” tasked with building wind farms and solar panels in order to “insulate it from near-term politicization and weathervane cold feet.” To put it bluntly, he’d put the entire American economy under the aegis of an unelected scientific bureaucracy. To play the role of watchdog, he suggests a separate agency, an overseer, that reports to Congress and ensures the “climate Fed” doesn’t run amuck or become invested in “crony capitalism.”
Is your jaw on the floor yet? If not, take this brazen admission: “As in the Second World War, mobilization strategies will, by necessity, not involve much participatory democracy. Therefore, maintaining public support through information campaigns designed to shape the public psyche by highlighting the consequences of failure in the ‘1.5-degree war’ will be paramount.”
He wants not only to create an authoritarian environmental regime—he wants to build a propaganda department right alongside. Even George Orwell couldn’t envision so audacious a plan.
Even if one does believe in anthropogenic climate change, One Last Chance at no point engages in a measured debate on the matter. Rather, it pulls the curtain back on what global warming and other attenuated environmental concerns are typically deployed for: Trojan horses for socialist policies. The Trump administration recognizes the threat posed by environmental socialism by fiat, and over the course of his tenure Trump and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt have bravely moved to return the agency to its traditional role. Pruitt has stalled or slowed agency actions, legacies of the Obama administration, despite widespread condemnation from the radical Left and intransigence in the courts. According to insiders, he will soon put forward a proposal to end the toxic Clean Power Plan, crippling to American industry. The administration has shown courageous leadership in defending American families and American business as the Left reveals its true radical aspirations.
Pietrus, meanwhile, spends much of his manifesto shamelessly invoking World War II, the threat of Nazism, and the Holocaust to build urgency. The difference between the Nazis and global warming is that the Nazis were indisputably real. Global warming is a potential problem that may in the distant future have negative consequences, or perhaps benefits.
As most of us long ago figured out, global warming and its sister “threat” ocean acidification are manufactured crises, and if those both fall through, you can count on environmentalists coming up with another. Their ideology, which includes a profound hatred of the free market, industry, and yes, as demonstrated by Pietrus’s book, democratic rule, insists they devise a threat of apocalyptic terror to justify their notions of redistribution and central planning.
THE YEARS OF RAIN AND THUNDER: PART I
2017
The first time I saw Kate, she was walking down the dock on Jackson Lake, a backpack slung over her shoulder, sturdy hiking boots clomping on wood. Her legs and shoulders held the bronze of the summer sun, and she had a mass of dark blond curls piled in a makeshift bun. She was smiling like someone was telling her a joke in one of her earbuds.
I’d come to work in Wyoming after graduation, driven by directionless aspirations to become a writer. My cap and gown barely hit the floor of my room before I was striking off from Chapel Hill to the wild blue yonder of the American West. My senior year I happened to read a book of short stories about Wyoming by Annie Proulx, and it lingered as inspiration. Why not light out for the territories? I found ads for seasonal positions at Grand Teton National Park and landed on the docks of Colter Bay about fifty minutes north of Jackson. Most of my belongings went back to my parents’ house in Raleigh where my dad made nervous rumblings about this half-baked plan. Law school would always be there, I told him.
I’d been working for about a month the day I met Kate. We marina employees wore white polo shirts with a green GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK logo on the breast and spent most of our time renting canoes and motorboats to tourists who’d putter around the lake for a few hours. Captain Ray was our manager, a white mustachioed, beer-bellied man of few, though creative, words. He had a nose of burst capillaries like a misshapen beet and chuckled a lot—a raspy cigarette-smoker’s laugh that came chuffing out whenever one of us did something stupid. On my second day, this foreign kid, Ghezi, was trying to take a broken Yamaha 9.9 off one of the motorboats, which was at least a two-person job. Captain Ray saw him struggling to lift the engine and came ambling over with a cigarette dangling from under his mustache, green Teton ballcap perched in defense of his sunspotted dome.
“If that winds up in the lake, you’re going down there with a snorkel mask to dredge it up.”
Sheepishly, Ghezi stopped his struggle.
“Hey, you. Tar Heel,” Ray called across the dock. “Give us a hand.” I set my book down and made my way to them. “Snorkel, you lift, we pull.”
Together, the three of us lifted the engine, and I carted it back to the boathouse where Captain Ray tinkered all afternoon while I handed him tools as he chain-smoked. Ghezi forever became “Snorkel.” I became “Tar Heel.” Ray was one of those unintentional linguistic wizards I thought I’d someday figure into a novel.
We were a small crew. Ghezi, from Macedonia, spoke in halting English, had big bug eyes, a face like a crustacean, and was extremely good-natured about all the xenophobic shit Ray gave him. “We got plumbing and TP in America, Snorkel. No more shitting in a hole and wiping with your hand.” Maybe Ghezi didn’t find this hilarious, but he laughed like he did. Damien became my best friend, a pothead who’d just graduated from the University of Arizona. He had buried a jar of weed in the woods because the company had a one-strike rule on drugs. Sometimes after work, we’d trek out to this quiet spot, dig for a minute, and split a bowl in the still summer evening.
A month in, I’d begun to worry about the mundane flow of my days, fearing this job might not give me as much writerly inspiration as I’d imagined, when Kate came down the dock with a pink canoe slip in her hand.
Ghezi elbowed me in the side and said in that goofball Macedonian way of his, “Ah. Babe o’clock.”
I’d quickly realized Colter Bay wasn’t exactly awash in attractive women, and our clientele was mostly Asian tourists and the minivan set. Even if we’d been renting canoes strictly to beauties, Kate would have caught anyone’s attention. Tall and athletic, her stride registered in the world. First, I took in her dark skin and huge head of curls. Then, as she got closer, her pretty snub nose, full lips, and a wide, hungry smile.
She held out the slip and looked at the three of us like she’d caught us comparing scrotums.
“Tourists need this much help getting into canoes?”
Ghezi took the paper and pinned it to the clipboard. “We aim to please,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat. Damien snorted in disbelief. He brought a canoe around by its rope, and I took it from him before Ghezi could.
“Got it.” I sat on the dock with my feet inside to steady it. “Just you?” I asked her.
She unslung the backpack and tossed it in the center of the canoe. Damien handed her a life vest and a seat cushion.
“No, my friend’s in the bathroom.”
“So we have a spiel we have to give you, and you can give your friend the CliffsNotes.”
“Lay it on me.”
“You’re going to go out with two seat cushions, two paddles, two life vests, and we expect you to bring them all back. If you don’t, we prosecute you, and in Wyoming that means you have to fight a bear in a pit.”
“Yeah, that’s just called justice.”
“You may canoe anywhere you wish but be careful about going out too far on the lake, and whatever you do, do not try to cross to the other side. It’s really far, and I don’t want to have to come out at dusk to rescue you.”
“But you’d be my hero.” She finally popped out the earbuds and buckled the vest over a sky-blue tank top. She sat down beside me on the dock, resting her boots beside mine. I saw her eyes now, brown and icy, but with chips of green, a color impossible to pin down.
“Also, we have a gift shop where you can buy overpriced, Chinese-manufactured Grand Teton swag. Do you enjoy key chains?”
“Get out of my head, kid. They’re only my favorite ever.”
I could have sat there all day doing this. It was something I’d come to see about her: that she could play to the personality of whoever she was talking to, match wits. Only later would I learn she always had you at match point. I stole a glance at her legs, brown and smooth but peppered with scratches and mosquito bites.
As I prepared to ask her name, she looked behind me and said, “Get your tinkle out, Luce?”
The friend was short, wide-hipped, her face hidden behind a big pair of sunglasses. She had her black hair buzzed. She wore a cutoff shirt over a sports bra and didn’t bother to buckle the life vest after shrugging into it. She looked strong, sturdy, and like she wanted to shove me into the lake as she slid beside Kate on the dock. Without saying anything, she leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. I heard Ghezi behind me let out a quick, sharp breath while I saw one of Damien’s bored eyebrows ratchet up in intrigue. He nodded his head once approvingly. Of course, I felt caught. This butch woman had seen me bantering with her girlfriend and wanted to demonstrate what the situation was to everyone. When their mouths parted, Kate looked amused, dazzled, invigorated. “Let’s do this, lady,” she said. They each slipped into the canoe quickly and expertly, thanked us, and with a thrust of their arms, shoved the canoe away from the dock.
“That was, uh, amazing,” said Ghezi mournfully.
“She was a cutie,” Damien admitted. “Matt, you about knocked Ghezi into the lake to get to her.”
We laughed and ragged on each other the way we would all summer, while I stole glances until she disappeared onto the sun-rippled folds of the lake.
* * *
I was up in the office running an errand when they returned. The butch girlfriend hopped out without a totter and offered Kate a hand, both of them laughing. As they came up the dock, she kept a hand on the small of Kate’s back, and then headed into the office to pay while Kate veered toward the marina’s bathrooms.
Ray called me over. He spent most of his day sitting on the tailgate of the shit-colored marina truck, surveying the docks and waiting for his moment to troubleshoot, as in the case of Snorkel and the Yamaha motor.
“What’s up, Captain?”
He tilted his cap back to scratch at the vanishing gray stubble beneath.
“Tar Heel, you might as well’ve shit your eyes outta your head. That how lovestruck you get every time you spot a pretty girl? You ain’t gonna see twenty-five years, son.”
I laughed him off. “We don’t get a lot of them out here. I gotta stare at your ugly face all day.”
Ray bobbed his head to grant me the point. “Snorkel’s about the prettiest thing out here, ain’t he?”
I laughed again. “Jesus, Ray.”
“Just don’t say I never did nothing for you, Tar Heel.” Before I understood what he meant, he called out behind me. “Hey, darling. These guys are all too stupid and chickenshit to approach you like a gentleman. But this one’s the least stupid of ’em.”
Of course, there she was, walking back from the bathroom, drying her hands on her shorts. She looked neither surprised nor offended, though I felt a flush brighten my neck and creep into my cheeks.
“Least stupid, huh?” she said. Her voice was deep and had a smoky quality that ended all her comments in a trail of vocal fry.
“They’re all some kinda stupid nowadays,” Ray muttered. He scooched off the tailgate and stalked into the garage, flicking his cigarette onto the pavement. I was left alone with her.
