His dad would say, “Son, you are special and are going to be very successful one day. You are blessed with natural abilities, and I just want to be sure that you develop them. I also want you to live a normal life until you graduate high school.”
Sam liked hearing that he was special, so he had asked his dad, “Can you tell me again why I am so special?”
His dad would often say, “Son, someday I will not have to tell you how special you are. Just work hard and you will see it yourself.”
When his dad said that, it made him determined to study hard in school and learn as much as possible. His dad tended to travel a great deal. Sam began to form friendships in elementary school with many of his classmates. It seemed every week or so some new student joined his school from another part of the country. Sam would often ask them as they became friends, why they had moved to Colorado, but none of them knew why. Sam thought it was mysterious that so many children were moving into his school, but he really did not mind. He enjoyed meeting all these new students and competing with them on school tests. One of the fist students he me was Sally McDaniel.
When Sally McDaniel moved to Colorado from New York, Sam liked her right away. He was only seven when they met. Sally was very smart and was always smiling and laughing. Like the other students, Sally did not know why her family had moved from New York. Sam enjoyed hearing Sally tell him about the Statue of Liberty and some of the museums she had visited. Sally, like Sam, seemed to make friends easily. After he met Sally, he made friends with Jose Black. They became the ‘three amigos’ and spent a lot of time together studying and hanging out after school. They attended each other’s birthday parties and spent a lot of time with their parents. To Sam and his friends, it was just part of growing up and having a good time.
He and his friends could not imagine what was in store for them later in life.
Chapter 4 – Burning
Tom Burns, Aurora, CO
Sitting in his living room, flipping through a slide presentation explaining the components that went into making formate, a fuel that could be burned with no toxic derivatives, Tom took a moment to reflect. He was prepared for the meeting with the president, and he was burning mad. His Boeing colleagues used to laugh when he got mad and said it matched his name. Whenever he was ready to check someone on information or details, they’d called it being ‘Burned.’ He wondered if they’d even allow him to set up the slide presentation in the first place, but he was planning on coming prepared anyway. All these years of becoming informed and informing. Despite how unnerving it was to meet with someone so hellbent on discrediting people like him. How could he not address the painful mistakes that sitting on knowledge and potential applications had led to?
Where are you going with this? he asked himself.
It seemed like everything was coming to a head for him—years of conferences, years of studies and gathering evidence, years of working at Boeing. Maybe some saw life as if it was all a lab, testing their various toxic mixtures on everyone, seeing them as guinea pigs, but for Tom, it wasn’t about science anymore. It was about the willingness to throw their hands up and see how things turned out and say, “Well, we didn’t know, how could we?”
As he sat there collecting his thoughts, he wondered for the millionth time how long had it been that business as usual meant hiding things from the public. One of the members of his Boeing team regularly puckered her lips every time they talked about it. Now, far from his colleagues, he stared at the slide presentation and all he could think about was this inertia. He slapped his hands against his leg.
Now there was an invisible force that was threatening to kill them.
He’d been attending and speaking at conferences for years, making sure that the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas was understood to need upper limits, or else, and research outpost observatory sensors were registering higher levels increasingly. Though he was earning the respect of his peers, how had he and others like him become public enemy number one? Suddenly informed policy decisions had been replaced with something altogether larcenous in terms of stealing away the opportunities and future his father had wanted for him—that he wanted for Sam—and the potential for a full life became something altogether different. Was he living a full life running into former Boeing employees around town and wanting to talk about how informed policy had been the only thing they had all gotten rid of?
Dr. Thomas Burns was among the most respected environmental scientists and medical experts from around the world that attended a summit in Australia in 2011 a few years back to determine the changes necessary to reduce pollution of all kinds as well as shore up the ozone layer. But he knew he could no longer rely on prestige alone to help him. This problem had been occurring for many years. This ozone layer that surrounded the Earth acts as a shield protecting the planet from irradiation by UV light. It is located about twenty to thirty kilometers (twelve to nineteen miles) above Earth, though the thickness varies seasonally and geographically. This thin ozone layer is believed to have been in existence 600 million years ago. It was clear from the data presented at the meeting by scientists that the ozone layer was failing. The dangerous UV light was increasingly affecting all life on Earth and our oceans. Without an ozone layer, there probably would never have been anything alive on Earth, as the temperatures would have been too extreme.
In other words, at a particular date, it would be irreversible. It was estimated at the conference that if all countries in the world did their part, Earth could survive for several hundred years—or longer. However, failure to heed the warnings would only speed up the demise of Earth. While many countries started doing many good things to help prevent the death of the world, it would not be enough.
Some of the effects of climate change would be felt shortly. Cars, aerosols and so forth emitted off too many chemicals that caused the ozone layer to weaken. Skin cancer would become much more prevalent. More people would die from melanoma. The leaders of the world needed to do more, and he’d written to most of them over the span of his life.
When Barack Obama had been president, he made a great effort to cooperate with environmental agencies around the world. His efforts resulted in the signing of the Paris Climate Accords of 2015. The long-term goal of this agreement was to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to limit the rise to 1.5 °C since this would substantially reduce the risks and effects of climate change. Temperatures, however, on the average kept rising at a faster rate than desired.
Obama tried to reduce carbon emission into the atmosphere and attempted to convince other countries to do the same by ordering cars to be more gas efficient. He instituted rules to prevent the costly use of coal and signed environmental agreements with countries around the world. He attempted to force China to lessen its pollution since any pollution by any country would affect all countries. Dr. Burns was pleased with his efforts.
Donald Trump had repealed every effort made by President Obama including the Paris Climate Accord. In fact, the United States soon became the only country in the world that would not adhere to the standards set by this agreement.
With President Trump, chaos reigned supreme. It was a wonder he got away with it.