The Deep End

It is Saturday night and I’ve just finished up at a meeting of family physicians. It takes a while to wrap up some final paperwork and goodbyes, then I wend my way through the snarl of traffic I used to call Seattle and pick up my friend Neville for dinner. Neville says that when we lived here the traffic was the 18th worst in the country. “Now it’s the 3rd,” he says.

After dinner I drive by the Central Cinema. I love the Central Cinema! Dinner, drinks and dessert—a fabulous crème Brule, if I recall—while you watch a movie. It’s here that LL and I first saw “Best Worst Movie”, a charming documentary about what truly is the best worst movie ever made, “Troll II,” and then stayed up for the namesake midnight movie. Right now they’re showing “Groundhog Day” and I’m tempted enough that I park the car to check show times. Right in the middle. Too bad. I get back in the car and drive back up 23rd, then take Boyer to cut back west again. I drive past the church where I crashed a wedding in order to meet the band that LL and I ended up asking to play at our own reception.

Everything feels eerily normal.

Everything has felt too normal, ever since reading the introductory chapter to Naomi Klein’s latest work.

In language brilliant for its clarity, Klein lays out a thesis captured by her title. “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate”. I haven’t yet read beyond the 30-page introduction. Now at LL’s parent’s house, I can see the book out of the corner of my eye. It crouches on the desk, a fire-breathing dragon cloaked under a sky-blue cover. An ocean-blue cover. A tropical ocean blue, swallowing islands, cities, and the sky.

“The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017,” Klein writes, “our fossil fuel economy will ‘lock-in’ extremely dangerous warming. “ ‘The energy-related infracture then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed’ in our carbon budget for limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius…As Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, bluntly put it: ‘The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.’ “

2017 is 23 months away. Suddenly lower gas prices don’t seem so great. Seattle’s traffic mess, even as it buries a few billion dollars in a car-only tunnel that’s already way over-budget and way under current sea level, is one piece of a rapidly sinking planet. We are headed for deep water. And that’s if we were to stop, for all intents and purposes, now.

If we instead achieve the more-likely (without drastic action) prediction of 4+ degrees Celsius by centuries end, “even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. …This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States, as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.”

A chime. I look up. A text. My phone is pulling me back to the surface, back to the present, the normal, to a beautiful family 5 hours’ drive away on the other side of the Cascades, two beautiful boys who are asleep and a beautiful wife wanting to check in before sleep. I must go. “This Changes Everything” will have to wait. But not for long. Not for very long at all.