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to fifteen years. When union members picketed city hall, Reed invited them all into his office—in shifts—and patiently explained, with charts and spreadsheets, that without pension reform everyone’s pensions would eventually go bust. By getting the city’s budget under control, Reed then had some money to invest in more police and, what he wanted most, to reopen the sixteen recreation centers and swimming pools in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which had been shuttered for lack of funds. “People were shooting dice in the empty pools,” he said. Local businesses have since funded some after-school job-skills programs in the reopened centers.

Cutting some programs, raising some taxes, and increasing some necessary investments—that will be the essence of American politics as we try to overcome our dalliance with the notion that math doesn’t matter. Here we are in total agreement with Erskine Bowles, who said that the biggest lesson he drew from co-chairing the president’s commission with Alan Simpson was this: “When we started out on this project, we said, ‘We’re doing this for our grandchildren.’ Then we said, ‘We’re doing this for our children.’ Now we realize that this is for us.”

He is absolutely right. This is our job. This is our mess. It cannot wait. We made it. We need to fix it in our time, at our expense—but with an eye on the future, not just the present. What is at stake here is nothing less than whether or not we’re going to give the next generation a chance at the American dream.

TEN

The War on Physics and Other Good Things

Virtually all of America’s energy and climate challenges today can be traced back to one pivotal year and the way life imitated one dramatic film.

The year was 1979, and the film was The China Syndrome.

Set in California’s fictional Ventana nuclear plant, The China Syndrome stars Jane Fonda as a television reporter, Michael Douglas as her cameraman, and Daniel Valdez as her soundman. The movie opens with the three of them being escorted to the observation room at the nuclear reactor to do a feature story on its operations for a local TV station. The room has large soundproof windows that overlook the control room below. Douglas is told not to film but surreptitiously does so anyway. Suddenly there is a panic in the control room. A close-up of a watercooler shows bubbles floating to the top. There is a vibration. “What the hell is that?” asks the shift supervisor, played by Jack Lemmon. An alarm sounds. He taps a gauge, which quickly changes to show the level of coolant to be low. “We have a serious condition!” he says. The panicked staff watches the gauge, as it appears that the reactor core could be exposed. Eventually the coolant levels return to normal and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. In an editing room back at the TV station, Douglas shows his footage to his colleagues. His producer refuses to air it for fear of a lawsuit.

Leaving the station after the evening news, Fonda is told that Douglas has absconded with the film and that she has to get it back. She finds Douglas in a screening room showing the film to a physics professor and a nuclear engineer. The engineer says that it looks as if the reactor’s core indeed may have come close to exposure. The professor says that that could have led to the “China Syndrome.” “If the nuclear core is exposed,” he says, “the fuel heats up and nothing can stop it. It will melt through the bottom of the plant, theoretically to China. As soon as it hits groundwater, it blasts into the atmosphere and sends out clouds of radioactivity. The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind is blowing.”

The professor then adds ominously, “This would render an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable.”

In the film’s final scenes, Fonda, Douglas, and Lemmon commandeer the control room, locking it from the inside, and begin to broadcast an exposé of the plant’s dangers. Security guards break in and gun down Lemmon. Suddenly the room begins to shake violently. Part of the cooling system begins to crack apart, but