Short story – “Hot Heads”

 “Hot Heads”

With a whimpered grunt, Jacob fell against a tree.  He immediately regretted the jolt that gave his broken rib.  A last-minute gust of wind had caught his parachute and slammed him into a tree trunk.  From the pain, he figured he had broken at least one rib, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was two or three.  He had also lost a bunch of skin along his right side and his upper arm.

Jacob had no idea how much time he lost from the various times he passed out from the pain or time spent trying to rip the parachute into bandages.  But he finally got moving.  He had to find the bomb.

Leaning against the tree, part of Jacob knew he needed to rest, but the rest of him knew that if he gave into the cries of his legs to sit down, he might never get going again.

“I have to go,” he told himself.  He remained leaning against the tree.

Taking as deep a breath as he could Jacob shouted, “I have to find the bomb.” With that, he took a staggered step forward.  He made it two or three trees before he needed to stop again.

He had only been there for a few seconds when he thought he heard something.  He tried to quiet his panting to listen.  At first, he figured he had imagined it, then he distinctly heard the thump of a distant helicopter.

Was it just a helicopter on a regular mission, or had the authorities been notified?  Despite the drought, there were still plenty of leaves on the trees, so it was unlikely they would spot him.  Regardless, he needed to find that bomb.

The helicopter didn’t seem to be getting any closer, so Jacob forced himself to keep going.  He was soon rewarded when the wind changed and brought him the scent of gasoline.  Looking around he saw the bomb’s parachute tangled in the branches.

Even with his goal in sight, it still took him a few minutes to reach the bomb.  It was just a metal case hammered out in a basement.  It had broken open in the crash, and the hundred gallons of homemade napalm were spilled out onto the forest floor.

Jacob dropped to his knees next to the bomb.  Fortunately, it had landed with the detonator panel almost on top.  Jacob took out his multi-tool and opened the screwdriver.  He unscrewed the screws from the panel and removed it.  One of the wires for the detonator had come loose.  Jacob couldn’t help but laugh.  All the weeks they had spent, ruined by a loose wire.

Their plan had been simple.  Sam had his own plane, so they built a bomb and dropped it in the dry forest hoping to start a massive forest fire.  But after they had pushed the bomb out, there had been no explosion.  After some debate, they flew back to the airport, picked up a parachute, and flew back to the site.  Since Jacob was the only one who had ever jumped from a plane – eight years earlier – he was volunteered to find out what had happened to the bomb.

The big biofuel companies planted vast forests only to pulp them for biofuel.  They planted new forests and the cycle repeated.  The trees took the carbon out of the atmosphere, and the fuel put it back.  In theory, no new carbon was added to the atmosphere, and the carbon already there was just recycled.  Their claim was that while it wouldn’t stop global warming, it would slow it down some.

The fools.  God was going to destroy the world with fire, and there was no use fighting the inevitable.  Jacob took a deep breath and let it out.  He said a silent prayer, then reattached the wire.

***

I first wrote this story over ten years ago.  At the time, I think it was about how crazy would someone be for wanting to destroy a feeble attempt at stopping climate change.  Not that terrorists are known for well thought out arguments, but still, once you reach some point of lunacy, you pretty much become ineffective.  Oh, for simpler times.

What too few seem to understand about fossil fuels

Recently, I had a bit of back-and-forth with a couple of guys on Facebook about fossil fuels vs. solar.  I didn’t think of this analogy at the time, but they seemed to put all our energy eggs into one basket of fossil fuels and nuclear.  When I suggested diversifying our energy sources by moving one egg over to solar energy, they treated me like a raving lunatic for even suggesting such blasphemy.  They started talking about that being a waste of resources, as if all the bricks and steel and money would be piled in the desert as some sort of modern art sculpture instead of building a power plant that would produce electricity indistinguishable from that produced by a coal or nuclear power plant.  I’m sure they thought they had a point, I just don’t know what it was.  I stopped replying because it was getting into the “arguing with idiots” area and one sort of hinted that since I didn’t share his belief in the glorious future of fossil fuels, I must be a socialist. 

In reality, I’m a realist.  For example, I know that Earth is finite, meaning there is a finite supply of oil, coal, and natural gas that we are rapidly burning through.  (Yes, there are some geological processes that are making more, but for every new barrel of oil the Earth makes we probably burn a few tens of billions.)  This means that – if nothing changes – there are only two possibilities.  The first is we squeeze every last bit of oil, coal, or gas from the ground.  The second is that there is still some left, but it is so deep or in such hard to reach locations that we can’t extract it at any profit.  Which means that at that point in time, even Ayn Rand would need to convert to a non-fossil fuel energy system. 

The Age of Fossil Fuels will end.  There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that.  There are only two questions: when will it happen, and will humans be smart enough to move over to an alternate power source before then.  Because if we run out of fossil fuels or they stop being economically viable before we have an alternative, that will lead to a mad scramble.  Economically, mad scrambles tend to be rather expensive, and socially they can be violent.  Common sense would seem to indicate trying to avoid them.

How do we avoid the mad scramble when fossil fuels run out?  By starting to build the alternative energy infrastructure now.  Every day we hem and haw or say things like “There’s enough oil for fifty years, that means we don’t have to worry about running out for forty-nine years,” we get a day closer to the economy ruining, bloody scrambling, human civilization ending(?) moment our children, or our children’s children run out of fossil fuels.  And I’m sure they will be proud their ancestors didn’t “waste” resources building something silly like a solar power station.