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.
T
HE
Y
EARS OF
R
AIN AND
T
HUNDER
: P
ART
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?”