AUTHOR: Fred Branfman in the Sacramento News and Review
LENGTH: 3,852 words, including artsy quotations
SUBJECT: Climate change and the conference at Copenhagen
EXPLANATION OF GLOBAL WARMING DENIAL: Humans fear death
DEEP SENTENCE: "We will only know if humanity will choose life over death when it understands that this is its choice"
THE SITUATION: Hamlet all over again, with the stakes being the survival of human civilization to the year 2080
WHAT WE NEED: "Giant advertising campaigns focusing on existential issues" like donating kidneys and supporting carbon taxes
WHERE WE NEED IT: The nation's living rooms
THE ANSWER TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS: "Terror management theory"
SUGGESTED READING: Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness
INDIVIDUALS QUOTED: William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, and psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton
OTHER OFFERINGS: Explanation of climate change's threat to academia, analogy to Moishe the Beadle in Holocaust tale Night, and categorization of Rush Limbaugh's and Steven Levitt's stages of climate change denial (anger, bargaining, respectively)
RIDDLE ME THIS: "Unconscious denial of death can kill"
EXIT QUESTION: "Do we deserve to live?"

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Heather Horn