Last week in Tallahassee, a group of earnest, clipboard-wielding activists unveiled a life-sized statue of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The gimmick, which I am sure killed in the pitch meeting, was that the sculpture was cast from solid gallium—a metal with a melting point of 85.6 degrees Fahrenheit (29.8 Celsius). As the blistering summertime heat of the state capital washed over the installation, the governor’s silvery face predictably sloughed off, revealing a permanent, unyielding skull beneath. The crowd of onlookers gasped, snapped their photos, and patted themselves on the back for delivering a supposedly devastating visual rebuke of the governor’s complete rejection of climate action.
As predicted, the resistance has decided to fight the warming of the earth by commissioning bespoke, energy-intensive metallurgical parlor tricks.
I watched the livestream of this grand unveiling from my home office—where my thermostat is kept at a sensible, grid-conscious 78 degrees—and I felt nothing but a profound, exhausting pity for the people cheering. We have less than a decade to decarbonize the global economy, and the supposed vanguard of the environmental movement is spending its afternoons pouring exotic liquid metals into novelty molds. Let us briefly consider the scope-three emissions of sourcing enough raw gallium to perfectly render the Florida governor's distinctive jawline. Gallium is largely a byproduct of bauxite mining and zinc processing, two industries not exactly renowned for their gentle stewardship of the earth. But by all means, let us tear up the crust of the planet so a few dozen college students can watch a shiny head melt on a Tuesday.
We genuinely believed that once the governor saw his own cheeks slide off into a puddle on the pavement, he would immediately reverse course and implement a statewide carbon tax.
This is the profound delusion of the modern climate activist: the belief that the people in power simply haven't seen the right metaphor yet. They believe that Ron DeSantis, a man who has proudly and consistently outlawed any state legislation designed to curb planet-heating emissions, is somehow in denial about the consequences of his actions. They call his agenda a "radical climate policy," assuming he will be ashamed of the label. He is not ashamed. He simply does not care about you, and I am beginning to think we should afford him the respect of acknowledging his honesty.
I was discussing exactly this dynamic last month over lunch with a senior risk analyst for ExxonMobil—a man whose pragmatic, clear-eyed acceptance of our collective demise I have come to value far more than the shrill optimism of the NGO class. He found the stunt hilarious. When a corporate entity plans to drill through a coral reef, they at least have the decency to release a glossy, 400-page ESG report lying to my face in a professional font. They do not build a melting statue to pretend the reef is going to survive. DeSantis’s actual climate policy is already the skull. The activists simply spent thousands of dollars to build a physical diorama of a reality the governor has been stating out loud for three years.
I recently purchased a lovely, high-elevation parcel in the Appalachians, funded entirely by my speaking fees on the futility of local climate action. It is from this vantage point that I can clearly see the absolute uselessness of "raising awareness." The real victims of this little art project are not the fossil fuel executives, who are doing just fine, but the working-class people tasked with managing the fallout of our performative guilt. Someone has to clean up the liquefied remains of the governor’s stunt-double.
My union rep says we aren't technically certified to handle pools of liquid thermochemicals, but the governor's office just gave us some heavy-duty shop towels and told us to sweep the melting skull into the storm drain.
When the last bit of silvery gallium has dripped off the statue's chin and washed into the Tallahassee municipal water supply, what are we left with? A useless husk of an art piece that achieved nothing except giving a few onlookers a fleeting rush of unearned moral superiority. The activists will go home, satisfied that they have raised awareness about the fact that Florida is hot—a scientific breakthrough previously known only to everyone who has ever stepped outside in Florida.
DeSantis, meanwhile, will continue to govern a state that is actively sinking into the ocean, and he will do so without the burden of pretending he can stop it. There is a purity to that. In a world drowning in empty corporate promises and fraudulent PR campaigns, a politician who looks at the rising sea levels and says, "Yes, and?" is the only one treating us like adults.
The skull isn't a warning. It is the destination. I suggest we stop melting metal to reveal it, and simply learn to love the bone.