Of course, the service would include hagiographic words from his friends, fellow doctors, and members of the community. But these were the memories of the bereaved—rose-colored and necessary to the circumstances. They couldn’t know of my father’s curt, dismissive treatment of my mother, how he’d freeze her out for days at a time, barely grunting replies, or that despite the dogma he adhered to, he hid liquor and Budweisers in the garage, from which we were all forbidden, and drank many nights after work and spent the mornings hungover, or that despite his assurances, he found me an impossible child, and it made him an exhausted and bitter parent. The dead don’t receive honest criticism. Everyone is too stunned for impartial assessments, though they shouldn’t be. Death is only the second law of thermodynamics—everything evolves to a state of maximum entropy. Everything decays. The ultimate regression to the mean. I find this principle almost too useful. The human mind is dead set on resisting regression to the mean. Even those who are secular reject it at all costs. From religion to basketball, the mind yearns to believe in the extraordinary, the mighty, and this explicates so much about our fears, insecurities, and delusions. Perhaps this knowledge made me speak too curtly:
“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.”