As a society, we could use a win. Get ourselves some learned hopefulness.

Brightside

2020 (before it all starts) - Brightside - The City

The day I was fired and dumped, I got an email from Project Lodestone. It was a reminder to get wasted. Apparently I’m supposed to be at the navy barracks drinking with Captain Chaos. I have no idea who Project Lodestone is, or why they’re reminding me of plans I never made. But, I like Captain Chaos, and have no reason to be sober, so out the door I go.

I walk into the barracks and everyone cheers. Most of them don’t know me. But, at the barracks, beer sells for 50 cents a bottle. Cheers come pretty cheap too. I buy 40 bottles and lug an armload of them over to the table Captain Chaos is at.

Chaos pops up and hugs me. She’s older, brawny, hawkish. A dear friend I haven’t seen in a long time. She’s also an evil minded battle dyke with kills on 4 continents. I love her.

“Hey Man! How’s it going?”

“Great!” I say. “How’s it going for you?”

“Great!” she says. “I’m here. Drinking.”

“Me too.”

“Aside from that, the rest of my life is shit.” she admits.

“Oh, thank god. Me too.”

“That’s a relief. This evening was going to be a chore if you were actually doing great.”

“No worries, I’m fucked.”

“I got divorced and demoted.”

I tap my chest. “Dumped and fired.”

She laughs. “I haven’t seen you in years, and we’re still doing everything together. You make your boss look bad?”

“Almost.” I shake my fist. “They squashed my report before it got out. Did you get dumped cause you were an unreliable provider for her hypothetical future children?”

“Nah, I ate out a bunch of Japanese chicks.”

“Fuck. That sounds way better than my story.”

“You can use it if you want. Nobody’s gonna call you on it.”

We sit. Drink. Captain Chaos asks what my report was about.

“Necessary Delusions and the Future.”

“I thought you worked on global warming?” she asks.

“This is about global warming.”

“Ha! Nice. Give it to me.”

I drink. Think. Alright. Let’s do this.

“This is a tale of three futures. The one we think we’ll have. The one we could have. And, the one we’re gonna have.

“When we think of the future, we’re usually thinking about tomorrow or next week. Maybe a couple years from now. This future is the same as today, except we’ve accomplished a few personal goals. Finished school, lost a few pounds, got a promotion, mowed the lawn. Whatever.

“We don’t think about our lives being destroyed by circumstances beyond our control. Which is delusional, because that’s the inevitable future for all of us. Time will take all you love, until death comes for everything else.

“Ignoring this is a necessary delusion. To be human is to realize you’re doomed, and then forget about it. It’s our most essential coping strategy. The only way to live a life worth living.

“But, successful coping strategies have a way of becoming our biggest problems. Our delusional omissions of the future - which allow peace and happiness - are no different. Because the same skill that lets us forget that we’re gonna die of cancer, allows us to ignore global warming. And so we fry.”

Captain Chaos drinks. Thinks. “Shit. So we can’t solve global warming because it’s too painful to think about global warming?”

“No. We’ve already solved global warming. It’s not that tricky. It’s just hard to implement the solution, because it’s painful to think about the future in general.”

“Fuck, what?” she exclaims. “We’ve solved global warming?”

“Sure, it’s just sunshine and bacon slime. Global warming is caused by energy and meat production. Mostly. If we swap fossil fuels and two billion cows for solar panels and artificial meat, we’re pretty much done.

“It’s more complicated than that, but not much. To use solar energy we’ll all need electric cars and heat pumps. Which sounds expensive, but gas furnaces are rusting junk and gas cars are rolling garbage. Most are gonna be in a trash pile in 10 years, so we gotta replace them anyway. Making a solar grid will cost trillions of dollars, but that’s cool. All that money will be pumped into the economy. It’s coming right back to us. It’s not like we’re throwing it in a hole.

“So, we can stop global warming pretty easily. That’s the future we could have. But it's not the future we’re gonna have."

"Right. We're all gonna die." guesses Chaos.

"Well no. It's highly unlikely that we'll let it get that bad. I mean, maybe we will. Oblivion can ghost up on you, especially when you're knocking links out of the food chain. But it’s probably just the poor who will die. And by die, I mean we’ll shoot them. Maybe I should explain that?”

“Please do.”

“As we ignore global warming, it’s getting worse. People are dying from it now, but it’s people who die a lot anyway, so it’s not that noticeable. The elderly, the homeless, refugees, elderly homeless refugees. People like that. But, eventually a heat event is going to wipe out an entire city, and that’s going to be hard to ignore.

“A human can only survive a few hours if the wet bulb temperature gets higher than 35 Celcius. We can survive temperatures above 50 Celsius by sweating to cool ourselves, but sweating doesn’t work when it’s humid as fuck. Also, cities tend to be 10% warmer than the surrounding countryside, because of few trees and abundant concrete. So, if you’re in a humid city that gets a 50 Celsius heat wave, you need air conditioning, or you will die.

“A heat event is a power failure, during a humid heat wave, in a city that’s slow to evacuate, that kills pretty much everybody. Statistically, we’re going to have one in the Middle East or Asia in the next five years.

“After that happens, we’ll get serious about redundant power generation and geoengineering. All the money we should’ve spent on solar panels and artificial meat, will be spent on back-up generators and planes that pump the stratosphere with solar reflective particles. This will quickly solve the heat event problem, but it will cause unpredictable changes to rainfall patterns, which will drastically affect the local climates, food production, and habitability of existing cities.

“There will be winners and losers in this scenario. Some places will become awesome, some will become hellholes. It’s impossible to know which cities will come out ahead, but the rich will buy them and shuffle the poor to the new shitty places.

“And that’s why this is the future that’s going to happen. Desperation to stop the heat events, disruption of food production, and drastic changes to property values, will all lead to a historic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The powers that be won’t be able to help themselves. Taking the cash will be too easy.

“Eventually, the new weather will render some country uninhabitable. We will let the rich out, and shoot any poor person who tries to sneak across the border. That sounds insane, but if we let the poor escape, that’s the same as helping them for free. Basically letting them steal from us. What kind of message would that send to the other poor nations who are selling land cheap so they buy our back-up generators and temporary climate solutions? Some people have to die to keep the desperate people paying. It’s the same model as our healthcare system.”

We drink quietly for a bit.

“Well, I don’t like your vision of the future.” says Captain Chaos.

“Me neither. Maybe I’m wrong.” I say.

“Meh.” she scoffs. “They’ve been turning the military into border police for a while now. We’re already sending people back to die.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m about done with it.”

“You gonna quit?”

“Nah, that won’t solve anything. I figure I’ll turn my guns around and take a few shots at the fuckers who are profiting from this disaster. Oil companies. Agribusiness. The billionaires who own them. Let’s just fucking off them.”

“Wow.” I say. “That sounds drastic.”

“Drastically awesome!” says a small woman in a sundress. She staggers over to our table. Helps herself to a beer. “It won’t work, but it is awesome.”

“Who are you?” asks Captain Chaos.

“Special Agent Darkness, Homeland Security, Domestic Terrorism Division.”