We are all going to die. 

Oh, no. Here he goes again. Wait, it’s not like that at all. Just a simple statement of fact. However, each of us, at some point in our lives, will have the eye-opener that there is a moment in time just before which we will be here and just after which, we will not. Until that revelation we go on our merry way with the intellectual knowledge of our mortality but without the visceral certainty which follows that depressing epiphany.

I had mine last Friday.

I won’t bore you with the details except to note that I’m pretty sure I survived the incident. If I didn’t then it’s going to be up to you to figure out what strange properties of the Universe are allowing me to continue knocking out these blog postings. It still seems like the same place to me. All of which is a little off topic.

While I was locked in the throes of my “incident” I was pondering the various options open to me and how the decisions I had made for myself, back when my imminent demise was a mere intellectual construct, would impact what I chose to do now. This pensive muddling drew me down a different path entirely and I found myself considering just exactly how we make the decisions that we do and more importantly, why.

It should be obvious to you by now that, when I was applying for this particular incarnation, I mistakenly checked the box for “Over Analytical” on the option sheet.

My line of thinking led me to the point where one decision, made by an unknown individual, may have sealed the fates of us all. 

That decision was 5.7 meters.

You may recall a few weeks back that, as my Campaign for King kick-off, I avowed to pursue nuclear energy as the only feasible option to provide clean, long term, and properly scaled power to the Earth’s masses huddled around their iPads and televisions. It may surprise you that I was not alone in this suggestion. Others, such as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, have called for similar initiatives.

Then the earthquake happened and all that went right out the damned window. 5.7 meters, you see, was the maximum height of an anticipated tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. The facility was designed to resist that height or lower. That the actual size of the tsunami was some 9 meters higher than 5.7 pretty much sealed the reactors’ fate. And ours. 

But why 5.7 meters? 

When they built the place they knew it was, as is pretty much all of Japan, in an earthquake prone area. The facility was sited at the ocean to provide necessary cooling water for the reactor and the designers knew that it would be in a tsunami area as well. So they sent geologists into the field to determine what size tsunami they could expect in the area. The answer was 5.7 meters. We will never be sure if 5.7 was the biggest one they found evidence for or at the top of a safe range or what. But the result was that some 15 feet of saltwater shorted the cooling system pumps, destroyed the control rooms, and swept into the reactor buildings. And washed our hopes for a nuclear fueled future right out to sea.

For most of us, radioactivity is a spooky substance. Despite the fact that we happily sit outside on a sunny day and bathe ourselves in the gamma rays, neutrinos, and God knows what else streaming at us from the Sun, put the words “uranium” or “plutonium” in the mix and we start to flip out.

Let’s look at the impact of a Plan “B” kind of thing and say that the Japanese decided to use an oil-fired plant at Fukushima instead of nuclear. In that case the tsunami would have flooded inland wearing a toxic slick of several hundred thousand barrels of combustible fuel oil. It could have been a flaming tsunami. The whole area would have had to endure the punishment of saltwater and burning petroleum. Natural gas as a fuel you suggest? Sure, then the result would have been an explosion that would have lived on in legend.

Because, whatever the infrastructure, 5.7 meters would still have been the decision. And there still would have been a disaster. The original decision to go nuclear, it could be argued, may have made the disaster the smallest it could possibly have been. But we’ll never believe it because it affected “uranium” and “fuel rods”. Once the tsunami took out the reactors, “nuclear” was closed down as an option for the foreseeable future. My plans for Kingship ended when the wave hit 6 meters.

When you look around – and you don’t even have to look that closely – you see all sorts of decisions that resonate “5.7 meters”. New Orleans, for example, is a city a lot of which is, below sea level. They make it livable with levees and pumps. When Hurricane Katrina swept through exposing the weaknesses of that system everybody saw how bad it can get. The national response: rebuild the levees better than before and fire up the pumps. But New Orleans is sinking, about 20 inches so far with some areas going down as fast as an inch per year. From a meteorological standpoint Hurricane Katrina was big, but not that big. The damage occurred due to subsequent rain and the resultant levee failure. But the decision was made that if we shore up the levees it’ll all be OK in the future.

There of course other examples of this man-against-nature hubris. The anticipated “Big One” in California. (No, California is not going to fall into the sea.) Will it be Los Angeles? Or San Francisco? Well, yes. But we don’t know when. Closer to my new home is the impressive Mount Rainier. There are 150-some-thousand people living on the old mudflow deposits that stretch from the mountain all the way to Tacoma. It wouldn’t even take an eruption, just an avalanche, to sweep a large part of the area clean. An actual eruption could potentially send an ashflow as far as Seattle. I better be ready to start walking because Rainier could still blow its top.

But we know all this. We know there are hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanoes. Then we decide to live under their threat anyway. We know the choices that we make now will impact us and others way out into the future – that 5.7 meter decision was made back in the 1960s. Yet we continue to make decisions for the near-term that impact our health and safety.

Consider the current debate on “global warming”. Oh, yeah I knew it was coming. Well, they call it “climate change” now because “global warming” sounded too benign. On the other hand, they didn’t want it to be too scary sounding because then nobody would believe it. “Swine flu” just doesn’t pack the punch it once did. So they opted for “climate change” instead of the more accurate “the one thing that is big enough to really screw things up for humans on a global scale”. Even the U.S. Government couldn’t come up with a peppy sounding acronym for that. But more to the point.

The reasons for “global warming” are unimportant. Yes, this is not going to turn into an enviro-rant. It really doesn’t matter if the underlying cause is the 30 billion tons of CO2 we pump into the atmosphere annually or merely variations in the natural climate cycle of Mother Earth. What matters is, in fact, the place is getting warmer. Lots warmer. The increase is rapid and sustained, and, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter what’s causing it. If we’re not causing global warming then there is nothing we can do to control it. If we are causing it then there is nothing we will.

But there are much bigger fish to fry. If this is a natural cycle then we have no idea how warm it’s going to get. Will we return to the natural greenhouse world of the Late Cretaceous or Early Eocene periods. (Both of which were a long time ago for you non-paleo types out there.) Sea level was about 100 feet higher then, than it is now. We don’t know, but we should care because even a three-foot rise in sea level will put a major dent in coastlines worldwide and totally drown entire countries. If, as the newest evidence suggests, there is an even more dramatic rise. Then these problems happen faster.

So decisions have to be made. As sea level rises do we continue to allow people to rebuild in the hurricane danger zone? How much are you willing to pay to rebuild somebody’s beach retreat after it was wasted by a hurricane? Do we build walls around low-lying countries to save them from incursion from the sea? How much are you willing to pay to save Bangladesh or the Maldives or the Bahamas? If not, then where do those people go? Do we build an even bigger wall around the City of New Orleans? If we do build the walls then how high do we make them? One meter? Two? 5.7?

Now, you and I both know that those decisions are not going to get made. They will get lost in the noise of a global political debate. They will fail under the weight of an unattainable consensus. The decisions will be reached, not by carefully planned action, but by spontaneous reaction. As with Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia, Turkey and others – just in the past year or so – we will treat the hazards of global warming as we treated all these major earthquakes.

Shit happens and then we go in and clean up the mess. That’s how we’ve always done it.

Which, at long last, brings me to the Why of it. Big decisions are never made – they are forced on us. None of these events, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, or sea-level rise, is certain in the short-term. Most can’t be predicted accurately, and, even if we know with certainty that a particular disaster is waiting to happen, we know it will not concern us. Because each of us – deep down inside – knows there is a moment in time just before which we will be here and just after which, we will not.

Then it’s somebody else’s problem.