The Doomsday Show

There’s a dark absurdity in the story of climate change. Scientists have warned us for decades that fossil-fuel emissions are slow-roasting the planet, but these alarms have failed to stop the excessive combustion of oil, gas, and coal. We seem ludicrously unable to take the obvious steps to save ourselves.
   
   For ten years I was an editor at Scientific American, writing editorials about global warming that were largely ignored. So, I decided to try something new. I wrote "The Doomsday Show," a comic novel that asks a simple question: what’s the surest way to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy? Answer: a cadre of climate terrorists who vow to assassinate the fossil-fuel tycoons.
   
   "The Doomsday Show" is a fast-paced thriller with gunfights and killer drones and speedboat chases, all colored with the same dark absurdity that pervades the climate-change debate. The novel’s heroes are actors in the Doomsday Company, a street-theater group that performs political comedy at environmental protests. Max Mirsky, the company’s founder, has identified the five worst climate criminals -- the most prominent leaders of the fossil-fuel industry -- whom he ridicules in his street-theater sketches. But Max is astounded and appalled when the climate terrorists start to murder the targets of his jokes.
   
   Like Max, I believe that humor and satire can be powerful weapons in the fight against global warming. Why aren’t more people mocking and excoriating the people who are profiting from the pollution? In "The Doomsday Show," the climate criminals are recognizable figures, very similar to the real-life fossil-fuel plutocrats. I don’t feel bad about lambasting them. They deserve it.
   
   Needless to say, a dose of humor makes any book more entertaining. "The Doomsday Show" isn’t another gloomy dystopian novel about climate change; instead, it offers a practical solution to today’s challenges. No, I don’t advocate murdering climate criminals, but I think we should treat them the same way we treat other selfish violators of social norms. We should boycott and lampoon and ostracize the fossil-fuel kingpins and their political allies. We should ban them from our clubs and shun them on the street. And whenever possible, we should pass laws that clamp down on their fuel-burning businesses.
   
   Because if we don’t stop them now, violence is inevitable. We need to halt global warming before the damage grows too great and real-life climate terrorists take matters into their own hands.
   
www.markalpert.com