The video is at the jump, with my face holding a weird grimace in the still.
And here's the text, more or less verbatim what's on the video:
I get it.
I get why people love fossil fuels.
They’re these really powerful, concentrated, flexible sources of energy that allow us to accomplish things our ancestors couldn’t even have dreamed of.
They’re like a surprise inheritance from an eccentric relative you didn’t even know you had.
The executor reads out the will, and it turns out that there’s all this valuable stuff in the ground, and it’s yours to use.
Sure, you have to do the work of digging it out of the ground and figuring out how to use it, but as you start doing that, you realize that this stuff is gold. Actually, it’s so powerful that it makes gold look silly.
You’ve been handed a pile of stuff that will help you achieve quadrillions of dollars worth of wealth, and it’s yours to spend.
About a hundred years after you come into the stuff, the executor pulls out a small, scribbled note that says that there might be unexpected consequences of spending this inheritance.
But you’re busy fighting a world war, dealing with a Great Depression, fighting another world war, and then getting locked into an existential struggle against communism (or, from another perspective, an existential struggle against capitalism).
While you’re engaged in that existential struggle, you start getting more notes from the executor. It turns out that if you spend too much of this inheritance, at some point in the future there may be some warming.
But this is rather vague.
How much is “too much”?
When is “at some point in the future”?
And warming? Why is that a problem?
Besides, that existential struggle against communism is over, and you won—congratulations!—but now you’re dealing with the threat of global terrorism. (Or, from the other side of the fence, Struggle against capitalism is over. Congratulations—you lost. You are now capitalist. Sort of.)
But you keep getting more notes from the executor, and the writing is getting clearer.
