The Doomsday Show: A Comic Thriller about Climate Change
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, and journalists have written at length about the ever-growing danger, but all these alarms have failed to convince the public to stop burning oil, gas, and coal. We seem ludicrously unable to take the obvious steps to save ourselves from this oncoming catastrophe.
For ten years I was an editor at Scientific American, and I experienced the frustration of writing editorials about global warming that were completely 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 stone-hearted climate terrorists who vow to assassinate the fossil-fuel tycoons.
The Doomsday Show is a fast-paced thriller with gun battles and killer drones and speedboat chases across New York Harbor, but I tried to give it the same sense of 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 sketches at environmental protests. Max Mirsky, the company’s founder, has identified the five worst climate criminals -- the most prominent leaders and backers 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. At a time when the internet has given everyone the tools to publicize environmental despoliation, why aren’t more people mocking and excoriating the politicians and corporate chieftains who are profiting from the pollution? In The Doomsday Show, the climate criminals are recognizable figures, very similar to the real-life plutocrats who are getting away with their planet-killing crimes. I don’t feel bad about lambasting them. They thoroughly deserve it.
And, needless to say, a dose of humor makes any book more entertaining. Instead of writing another gloomy dystopian novel about climate change, I wanted to tell a funny, thrilling story that 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 executives of the fossil-fuel companies 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.