Climate Curfew – A Daniel Craig Adventure

Look. Let’s be honest adults. The reality is that we missed our opportunity to prevent climate change. In fact, the change is already happening. We needed to get to serious work in the 1980’s. BUT, that does not mean we are powerless and should throw in the towel on our future. Every action we take in the right direction WILL reduce the impacts of climate change and shape our overall future.

Let’s use an analogy – being late for curfew as a teenager. Curfew is at midnight. You’re having fun with your friends. I’m not going to ask what you are doing, that’s your business. Your friend says “Uh, it’s ten past midnight. Wait. Don’t your parents turn their phasers on kill if you get home past midnight?”

Okay. Let’s stop there for a minute. Phasers? Obviously, this analogy is being created by a sci-fi geek who is now faced with a middle-age crisis, wondering why he never pursued that flying car project he saw in the back of Popular Science. Insert your own scared teen hyperbole. I was just trying to avoid expletives, okay?

The reality sets in. You are late. Punishment is coming. Suck it up. It is now a matter of how serious the punishment will be because the penalty doubles at midnight-fifteen and again every 15 minutes after that. For Gen-X middle-class Americans, maybe it was being grounded or having the car keys taken away. For Gen-Z, maybe it involves blocking the Tik Tok account. I don’t know. Or the ultimate punishment: parental iPhone tracking.

So, according to Apple Maps, it’s a 30-minute drive home. Of course, with the way you drive, you can shave ten minutes off and get home by 12:30. You’re a teenager, right? What does Apple Maps know? Especially in the 1980’s? And what’s with all the the Android hate?

This is the plan: Do everything possible to walk in your door by 12:29. You climb into your hand-me-down 1972 Ford Country Squire station wagon with vinyl wood “paneling” and you turn the key and DRIVE. This is known as the climate change “MITIGATION” strategy – where we do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero. Everyone. Oil companies, businesses, individuals all do their part. We are all involved in creating the problem through how we do most activities every day so we have to address it everywhere in our lives and economy. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It’s no coincidence that the Academy gave lots of awards out for that movie. It’s because of the title. By the way, go see it. It’s fabulous.

But there is another option. You can make a call and have Daniel Craig swoop in with a helicopter, pick you up and parachute you into the street in front of your parent’s home in ten minutes. Kind of like what he did for the Queen at the Olympics. It is going to cost you what seems now like a crazy amount but it’s the more realistic strategy for getting home before the stakes escalate… and it’s way cooler, isn’t it? This strategy is the equivalent of initiating massive, coordinated efforts by world leaders and business leaders at the insistence of their citizens and customers to make huge investments and policy changes to proactively rescue the life support systems of our planet. We can call this the “CARPE DIEM!” (“Sieze the Day!”) approach.

What about the cost? What’s the business case? When Covid arrived, did your employer ask for a financial analysis showing a positive net present value before shutting down the office and switching everyone to remote work? Sometimes you do things because it’s serious and you NEED to do them. Perhaps your midnight curfew isn’t a random time but the time you need to give your grandmother a critical medical injection.

The enormous investments are likely to have positive returns in the long run… but you’re doing them because NOT doing them could lead to catastrophic consequences. There is a saying that “people change when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing.” We don’t want to wait until that point because it will be too late. With climate change, what we do today impacts what appears decades later. When you train for a triathlon, you train in advance of race day. We need to all start working out on our own and together.

But wait …there is even a third curfew strategy! Believe it or not, Daniel Craig can actually mount a time machine aboard the helicopter and roll back time a bit as you fly. The more technical term for it to make us humans look smart is “CARBON REMOVAL AND SEQUESTRATION.” It involves taking carbon back out of the atmosphere with machines and with magical technologies that nature has perfected over millions of years, like trees, algae, kelp, and grassland soils. Anyway, your time machine only works when powered by the helicopter. We can’t turn back the clock unless we are simultaneously seriously reducing new greenhouse gas emissions. After all, how much can you ask Daniel Craig to do by himself? Now, if you can turn back the clock five minutes during a ten-minute flight, you could get home by 12:15 and further reduce your consequences.

Now, what we haven’t discussed is who has been cast in the role of your parents, a.k.a. Mother Earth. Is it the Alien and “It”? Or is it Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan? I would say the casting has not happened yet and we have a huge say in the matter. Today, we need to focus on the helicopter with the time machine in order to earn our say in the casting decision… that is our mission.

(c) 2023 Mick Dalrymple