Life Before the Law: Foreword

This series is written for those ready to move beyond symbolic virtue and confront the deadly arithmetic of energy decisions past and present. It begins with a simple but shattering recognition – the kind you have when you finally step out of a Platonic cave thick with smoke and shadow: nuclear energy, stigmatized for decades, has in fact been one of the safest and most life-saving technologies available. And yet our laws, policies, and movements have refused it. In doing so, they have all become complicit in the mass death caused by burning fossil fuels – and in the climate catastrophe driven, step by step, by that lethal combustion, already killing by the millions, and certain to kill far more in the climate to come.

Life Before the Law traces how that refusal became structural: moralized into narrative, ritualized into law, and enshrined in a death-drive-inflected, fossil-serving regime of legal delay we politely call “climate law.”

In developing this argument, the book brings into conversation what are arguably three of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. From Einstein, it takes E = mc² and the emancipatory promise of nuclear power derivable from that brilliant insight – the possibility of extraordinarily dense, zero-carbon energy that could have spared millions of lives if it had been treated as cure rather than curse, remedy rather than poison.

From Freud, it takes the notion of fetishistic disavowal, the split in which we “know very well” and “all the same” act as if we did not, allowing purity fantasies to guide us in ways that support his late speculation about a death drive – a drive toward repetition, suffering, and self-injury in the name of an ideal.

And from Derrida, it takes the most: above all, his deconstruction of the Law. From Derrida we take the pharmakon, différance, and the distinction between law and justice as tools for reading how legal orders are built from “legitimate fictions” that present themselves as natural and necessary. We follow his insistence that there is no pure, self-present Law outside history; that every rule is shot through with internal tensions and gaps; and that undecidability is not an excuse to postpone judgment but the very condition of decisions that are truly responsible.

Life Before the Law applies this Derridean lens to what I call Fossil Law, exposing the legitimizing fantasies that keep us waiting at Kafka’s gate – coughing in the smoke, told that the door is not yet open even as we die in front of it – and insisting that every “not yet” in climate and energy law is already a decision about who is allowed to breathe and who is left to choke.

What began as a fundamentally false political taboo hardened into a legal architecture of mass death and climate change. This foreword returns to a personal and intellectual origin story not to claim neutrality, but to show why the psychic, narrative, and juridical defenses around fossil harm must be dismantled – and why any jurisprudence worthy of the name must begin with the Right to Breathe and the Right to clean, firm energy, putting life before the Fossil Law.

How Nuclear Realism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Critical Legal Theory Came Together Against Fossil Harm

I did not arrive at this argument from nowhere. I grew up in a world where nuclear power was never the villain.

My father was an Apollo astronaut and later the first Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In our house, nuclear energy was not a shadow over the future; it was one of the most serious attempts humanity had made to power modern life without choking on its own exhaust. I grew up in a conservative, right-wing family, but somehow always maintained what felt like an innate progressivism. I am still not entirely sure where it came from—perhaps from watching my grandmother care for my immobile grandfather, who had MS, in a hospital bed set up in the living room of their small house, essentially on their own. They had already lived through the Depression; being left to manage catastrophe without much social support was, for them, simply what life was.

In that context, I pushed back against my parents’ right-wing beliefs, but I never experienced being pro-nuclear as part of those beliefs or as a betrayal of my own. What I now think of as my inner progressivism—anti-racist, baffled that anyone could oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, concerned for the poor and for workers, for public health, and for global justice—was already there, but not in any form I could yet name (I’m thinking mostly of the 1970s, when we lived in D.C., Oslo, and what would become Silicon Valley). It hovered in the background as a kind of familial, fetishistic arrangement: I “knew” my family was on the right and that many of my emerging convictions didn’t fit their worldview, but I still clung to a different, inarticulate sense of what counted as justice.

Nuclear power always seemed to me perfectly consistent with that half-formed progressivism and with the intuition that we needed to move beyond fossil fuels as quickly as possible. I never felt a contradiction between that latent progressivism and the pro-nuclear commitments I absorbed from my very politically different father. If anything, it always seemed obvious—well before I could give it a theory—that the genuinely progressive position should have been pro-nuclear.

Instead, as I moved through adolescence and into academic and political life, I watched almost the opposite alignment take hold. Across Europe and North America, people who shared my commitments on civil rights, gender equality, labor, and the environment became deeply anti-nuclear. The “left” adopted nuclear fear as a kind of badge of seriousness. In green circles, being anti-nuclear was how you signaled that you understood the dangers of technology, the arrogance of “playing God,” the sins of the Cold War, and later the promise of a supposedly pure, renewables-only future.

At the same time, I was never entirely persuaded that these progressives were simply right about nuclear risk. I had grown up hearing, from people who knew what they were talking about, that Three Mile Island at the end of the 1970s was not a major disaster; even then, it was clear to me that its actual safety impact was minimal at most. I also knew that progressives like Jane Fonda could get things badly wrong: The China Syndrome was a grossly misleading nuclear nightmare fantasy, and her visit to the so-called “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War—where American POWs like John McCain were being tortured, which was a war crime, in the middle of a war that was itself one long American war crime—was still politically stupid and seems to have resulted in more torture for those POWs, doing nothing to expose America’s actual crimes in Vietnam and instead handing the American right a convenient alibi for its lies about the war’s supposed justification. (In the 1990s, I would do my initial psychotherapeutic training at an extremely progressive and profoundly charitable non-profit clinic founded by Jane Fonda, The Valley Community Clinic, then in North Hollywood.)

With Chernobyl, which happened in 1986 when I was a junior at a Cold War military academy, the picture was murkier. I was told—accurately, as we now know—that it was the result of Soviet negligence and poor engineering, not some inherent impossibility of running nuclear power safely, and that it remains the only true nuclear power catastrophe in history. (Footnote: There will be more on Fukushima and how only one person died as a result of that accident from radiation later.) It should always be understood in that context: a disaster produced by gross negligence in a Soviet Union that was already a financial basket case by 1986, and that would collapse just a few years later, in part under the economic and political strain Chernobyl added to a system it also tried desperately to keep the world from seeing. Still, from where I stood then, it was difficult to assess the scale of the catastrophe or disentangle legitimate fear from Cold War propaganda and Western self-justification. So I carried a kind of double consciousness: I suspected my progressive peers were overreacting to nuclear and underreacting to fossil fuels, but I didn’t yet have the evidence or conceptual tools to express just how off they were.

What I took from all this was that being broadly right about justice, civil rights, or imperialism doesn’t guarantee you’re right about everything. Progressives can be vastly wrong or naïve on issues that are technically complex and/or saturated with identity and moral self-image—nuclear power being one, and, in a different register, the kind of absolute pacifism that would have refused to fight the Nazis even as they were carrying out the Holocaust. And it isn’t exactly rocket science to see why a young progressive in a right-wing family might end up in the military, especially when his grandfather was a Naval Academy graduate wounded in the 1937 Panay Incident—bombed by the Japanese in what I grew up understanding as part of the long prelude to a just war that had to be fought.

I was raised to see WWII as a genuinely just war and to regard the American military—especially figures like Eisenhower—as admirable, even heroic. Eisenhower, of course, would go on to give his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech at the UN, rightly insisting that nuclear power could and should be developed as a peaceful source of firm, clean energy. In a sense, that’s the core intuition of Life Before the Law: the world should have listened to the general who helped defeat Hitler and taken seriously his call to use nuclear power for life rather than war—to adopt its immense capacity for clean, reliable energy in place of fossil fuels, and in doing so spare millions of lives that have since been sacrificed to fossil combustion.

Taken together, all of this was, for me, not only a strategic error but a moral failure. By the time I began working on Life Before the Law, the epidemiology and energy arithmetic were already clear enough: fossil fuels continued killing millions each year through air pollution (and in the last decade or so million more were being added to annual tallies by climate disruption), while nuclear power’s risk profile has sat in the same ultra-low range as wind and solar for many decades, with essentially no air pollution and vanishingly low life-cycle emissions.

And once you stop looking only at sticker price and start thinking in terms of total cost of ownership – the full infrastructure of extraction, pipelines, refineries, shipping, and the environmental and health damage they lock in – it becomes obvious that fossil energy is far more expensive, in money and in lives, than building and running nuclear ever was, despite the fossil industry’s decades-long campaign to brand nuclear as “too expensive.”

Yet many of the people most committed to the environment and to justice were helping, often unwittingly, to keep the dirtiest fuels in power – and they still are. That disconnect is one of the core wounds this series is trying to think through: how did a politics that cares deeply about the environment and justice come to disavow the one very safe, firm, zero-carbon technology that can realistically displace coal and gas at scale?

This foreword is a brief sketch of how my own path led me to see that question as not only political and technical, but also juridical and psychoanalytic – and why, eventually, I had to write this series.

From the Air Force to Derrida to the Clinic

Given my family, it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t ended up at a service academy, inner progressive or not. My grandfather graduated from the Naval Academy in 1927, my father in 1955 before switching to the Air Force; my brother went to the Air Force Academy, and I graduated two years behind him. There, I studied physics and engineering, even as my own progressivism sat sharply at odds with the institution, and I developed a hard skepticism toward the stories powerful institutions tell about themselves.

Having been born in 1964, I had grown up with the Vietnam War on television in the background, without much sense of what I was actually seeing. At the Academy in the mid-eighties, I was sickened by what I learned about that relatively recent war – not only the scale of the atrocity it was, but the blindness in the military, and in the U.S. center and right more broadly, to what the war was and why the U.S. fought it. I watched people around me remain blind to the roughly three million people who died in Southeast Asia, shielded by fantasies of American goodness and the idea that America knew better than the Vietnamese how they should be governed.

I was not only horrified by that blindness; I was fascinated by it. How did it work? How could so many people deny the obvious? The Fog of War frames Vietnam as a tragedy shrouded in uncertainty, but there was never much “fog” here: even in the early years, it should have been clear that helping the French hold on to their colony put the United States in the role of empire, and Ho Chi Minh in the position of the anti-colonial “founders” he explicitly invoked.

Later, watching The Fog of War and seeing McNamara circle around his own responsibility without ever really owning it, while revealing no real grasp of Vietnamese history or national identity, only confirmed that my early cynicism about the military’s and U.S. history’s treatment of the war had been, if anything, too mild. The fact that POW–MIA flags still fly over government buildings, even though the movement’s founding narrative of abandoned American prisoners is, among historians, widely recognized as a myth at best, came to feel like a small everyday monument to the tenacity of fetishistic fantasy: a way of clinging to a consoling story of heroic American victims who might yet be rescued, rather than confronting the reality of the millions of Vietnamese who died for no good reason—lives sacrificed to a mix of American ignorance, violence, and confused national identity. That same fantasy, amplified in the Rambo series and wider popular culture, offered Americans an alibi—allowing us to see ourselves once again as potential saviors and sufferers, not as the authors of an atrocity.

At the same time, Hollywood was doing its part to encourage that blindness more broadly: from the powerful but deeply distorting Deer Hunter to the grotesquely fetishized violence of Rambo, American cinema re-scripted Vietnam as a stage for wounded American heroism rather than U.S. criminality—helping to normalize the narratives later amplified by Fox News and the American right of the 1990s and beyond, simply by getting the war so wrong. Those were the stories that saturated the deeply conservative family and military world I grew up in.

By the time the first Gulf War came, I was an officer going to night school at Harvard, watching the conflict gather around oil and “stability” and nearly being sent to Riyadh in service of a fossil-capitalist order I already understood well enough to deeply oppose. Those years planted two seeds that never left me: a respect for scientific rigor, and a suspicion that institutions – military, political, and cultural – will do almost anything to preserve a story about their own innocence, even when that story requires a kind of willed blindness to its own mass “hysteria” and to the mass death that morally deranged blindness was already costing.

As a serving military officer at Harvard, I was often coming straight from work to my night classes. More than once that meant walking into a seminar on feminist literary theory in full uniform, because changing would have meant missing half the class I genuinely valued (and the feminist ideas I would later use in my doctoral dissertation on Freud’s phallogocentrism). I was not treated as a curiosity; I was treated, more often than not, as an interloper – assumed to be a right-wing freak, a Reaganite plant, essentially someone who had no business being in those rooms. The fact that I apologized for the uniform, had chosen that class as a matriculated graduate student, was clearly already moving left, already furious about Vietnam and U.S. foreign policy, simply didn’t register – and no one asked. The uniform decided who I was supposed to be. That experience of being read and dismissed by members of the left on the basis of a surface sign stayed with me, and it rhymes painfully with how being unapologetically pro-nuclear now often marks me, in progressive circles, as someone who “must” be carrying my right-wing upbringing forward or shilling for industry.

At Harvard, I encountered writers and theorists who gave me language for what I had sensed. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending helped me see how cultures cling to certain stories about crisis and salvation, resisting any fact that would force a change of plot. Freud’s case histories, especially his work on masochism, opened up the idea that people – and by extension, institutions – can be driven by something other than rational interest or self-preservation – something "beyond the pleasure principle." My early work on moral masochism in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and on psychoanalysis more broadly began to make it clear that people and groups can choose purity fantasies over their own lives – and very easily over the lives of many others. The first half of this book, “Purity Over Life,” is a direct descendant of that early work, extending its insights from individual moral masochism to the collective purity politics that have shaped our response to fossil harm, nuclear energy, and, as you see, to climate change.

A PhD in English allowed me to go further into these questions. I was able to study with the English translator of Derrida’s Glas and to immerse myself in deconstruction – not as an academic parlor game, but as a rigorous way of reading how texts and institutions build their authority from contradictions, exclusions, and “legitimate fictions.” Derrida’s work on law, justice, and undecidability became central to how I understood modern institutions, from the military I had served in to the legal and political orders that now organize our response to energy and climate.

After my PhD in English, I trained and practiced as a clinical psychoanalyst. I had already begun bringing Freud and Derrida together in my dissertation work; my later collaboration with psychoanalyst and Derrida scholar Alan Bass deepened and expanded that project in the clinic. I founded The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis, and Alan and I both edited it, with Alan serving as the senior editor. The journal was conceived as a forum at the border of metaphysics and psychoanalysis, taking its name from both the theory of unconscious processes and Derrida’s thinking about undecidability – a way of treating psychoanalysis as deconstruction and keeping the question of undecidability, and with it the question of justice, open across disciplines. (I argued in my inaugural essay, "Let Us Not Forget the Clinic," that the journal also needed to be "deconstruction as psychoanalysis," but that, unfortunately, fell on mostly non-clinician and deaf ears.)

Life Before the Law emerges from that trajectory. The argument of this series is not that a few new reports “converted” me from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear; I was never anti-nuclear. Rather, it is that my lifelong pro-nuclear, progressive stance could only crystallize into this legal and psychoanalytic project once it was armed with the tools I picked up along the way: the scientific training and institutional skepticism of the Air Force Academy, the narrative and theoretical work of literary studies, the hermeneutics of suspicion I developed in reaction to my conservative family and college world, the rigor of Derridean deconstruction, and the clinical insight of psychoanalysis.

As the threat of climate change intensified, those tools turned my critique toward what I now call Fossil Law, and within it what I later name climate-law delayism: a legal order that inherits the old pattern of law built by and for the powerful but wraps its “not yet” in the language of care, prudence, and transition – a fossil alibi apparatus that presents delay as responsibility rather than as abandonment. It dawned on me, slowly and then all at once, that this order treats it as lawful – not awful – that on the order of eight to nine million people die each year from fossil emissions, even though a very safe, firm, zero-carbon alternative in nuclear has been available for decades. Climate and energy law, as they currently exist, make themselves impotent by accepting this ongoing mass death as a regrettable background condition rather than the central injustice of our time. Life Before the Law is my attempt to confront that fact, and to imagine a jurisprudence that no longer treats fossil deaths as normal collateral, but as the very thing the Law must finally put before itself.

It was there, in these crossing zones of science, culture, and politics, that I began to see the architecture of fossil delay from the inside out.

Suspicious, Progressive, and Pro-Nuclear: Beyond the Cabin in Vermont

Looking back, I think of this phase of my development as an apprenticeship in the hermeneutics of suspicion – a way of reading that assumes surface stories are often alibis for deeper conflicts, interests, and drives. In that tradition (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, critical theory), the central question is not only what an institution says, but what it must not know about itself in order to go on saying it. Life Before the Law stands explicitly in that line.

Here I turn that suspicious lens not only on the right-wing institutions I grew up around, but also on legacy environmental groups and left-liberal circles whose “green” politics have made fossil harm and anti-nuclear purity seem natural. Instead of taking anti-nuclear, degrowth, and austerity discourses as self-evident virtues, I ask what they must disavow about energy, class, and mass death in order to feel righteous: what has to be kept in a split so that anti-nuclear dogma can pass as care for the vulnerable while, in practice, helping to keep fossil fuels in power.

On that terrain, Earthrise Accord looks like a cousin to The Breakthrough Institute: pro-nuclear, pro-abundance, pro-worker, impatient with hair-shirt environmentalism, and skeptical of romanticized pre-industrial pasts. Where we diverge is on the simple question of what to do with fossil fuels. For Earthrise, the answer is that fossil fuels must be phased out as quickly as physically and politically possible, and the fossil-fuel industry is a proper villain in the story. Breakthrough’s “pragmatism,” by contrast, treats rapid phase-out as naïve and insists there are “no villains” in climate change. Functionally, that line normalizes continued fossil use and moves moral and legal blame off the industry and into abstractions like “humanity” or “modernity.”

From an Earthrise perspective, that isn’t just an intellectual disagreement; it marks the boundary of what is philanthropically comfortable in the U.S. donorsphere. A progressive, pro-nuclear, anti-fossil nonprofit is structurally unwelcome in a world where most large donors have fossil entanglements and where legacy NGOs that fought nuclear while fossil capital consolidated its power are still treated as unquestioned “good guys.” Within that constraint, the safest niche is exactly the one Breakthrough occupies: pro-science and pro-nuclear, celebratory of abundance and innovation, sharply critical of “extreme” activists and litigation, and silent on the need to rapidly wind down an industry that is killing millions now.

Earthrise Accord and Life Before the Law were conceived as refusals of that discipline. The project assumes that nuclear realism must be joined to fossil realism: recognition of nuclear energy’s safety, scalability, and moral necessity has meaning only if paired with an equally clear recognition of fossil energy’s ongoing violence. Rapid fossil phase-out is not a stylistic preference but a mass-death-reduction strategy and planetary survival imperative. On this view, the fossil-fuel industry and its political allies must be brought before the law as responsible agents in a system of organized, avoidable harm, not treated as unfortunate background conditions.

Read in that light, Life Before the Law treats suspicion as a clinical-legal instrument. It asks what legacy environmental groups, climate NGOs, and allied intellectual circles must keep in a fetishistic split – what they must both know and refuse to know about energy, class, enjoyment, and mass death – in order for anti-nuclear orthodoxy and “managed” fossil decline to appear as care rather than complicity in Fossil Law. The aim is not suspicion for its own sake, but to clear conceptual and juridical space for a different alliance: one in which environmentalism, labor politics, and energy realism are brought together on the side of life, and in which the institutions and industries profiting from delay are finally named – ethically and in law – as responsible agents rather than faceless “drivers of emissions.”

Clarifying the Record: Marco Visscher, MIT, and 1.84 Million Prevented Deaths

Alongside this intellectual formation, a few key works helped crystallize what was at stake.

Among the writers who sharpened my sense of the evidence, the journalist Marco Visscher stands out. His book The Power of Nuclear is, among other things, a quiet exercise in intellectual courage. Visscher patiently reconstructs the nuclear accident record, walks through the numbers, and asks a question few “green” commentators are willing to pose: what happens if we judge nuclear power by the same standards we apply to everything else? He reads the Chernobyl Forum and UNSCEAR reports instead of treating Greenpeace press releases as gospel. He reminds readers that, beyond the tragedy of Chernobyl, no other civilian nuclear accident has produced large, empirically demonstrable numbers of radiation deaths, and that even at Fukushima – with three core meltdowns after an unprecedented earthquake–tsunami – there were no acute radiation fatalities and at most one officially compensated cancer case attributed to radiation. The main harms were from evacuation, stress, and policy overreaction – serious and unacceptable, but categorically different from the chronic slaughter inflicted by coal smoke.

Visscher’s reconstruction of the record made one thing impossible to ignore: anti-nuclear politics cannot honestly be defended as mere “caution.” If the accident record looks more like statistical noise than like the apocalypse we were promised, then the ethical stakes of anti-nuclear purity are far starker than many of us have been willing to say. A movement that treats Chernobyl as the essence of nuclear power, while treating the routine, uncounted deaths from coal and gas as background, is not just erring on the side of safety; it is accepting mass death from combustion as the price of its own innocence.

The 2018 MIT study The Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World added another piece. It is not a love letter to nuclear, but a sober, interdisciplinary assessment by people who understand both reactors and power markets. Its core conclusions are straightforward:

• The main value of nuclear energy is its potential contribution to deep decarbonization.

• The main obstacles are cost and policy, not insurmountable technical or safety barriers.

• Under serious carbon constraints (10–25 gCO₂/kWh instead of today’s ~500 gCO₂/kWh), systems that include nuclear are typically cheaper and more reliable than systems that try to get there with renewables and storage alone.

The MIT authors are explicit: if nuclear is on the table, least-cost decarbonization pathways use it. If nuclear is off the table, you need enormous overbuilds of renewables, massive storage, and much higher system costs. They also stress that nuclear’s non-climate benefits are real: reduced air pollution, grid stability, low land footprint, high-quality jobs.

The report did not tell me anything conceptually new; I had always believed nuclear was necessary. But it reframed the question:

• The nuclear question is no longer “can we make safe reactors?” – decades of operation have largely answered that.

• The question is: “Why have we made nuclear procedurally impossible, ruinously expensive, and politically taboo, especially in the places that could afford it?”

That is, in large part, a legal question.

Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen’s 2013 paper, “Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power,” drove the point home numerically. Instead of speculating about future scenarios, they look backward and ask: between 1971 and 2009, how many deaths and how much CO₂ did nuclear power already prevent by generating electricity that would otherwise have come from coal and gas?

Their answer is staggering:

• About 1.84 million air-pollution-related deaths prevented by historical nuclear generation up to 2009.

• In the 2000s, nuclear was avoiding on the order of 76,000 deaths per year.

• Between roughly 80 and 240 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions could be prevented by mid-century if nuclear displaces fossil fuels instead of being phased out.

• For Germany alone – now committed to a full nuclear phase-out – they estimate that past nuclear generation prevented over 117,000 deaths that would have occurred if coal and gas had supplied the same electricity.

They also assign a number to deaths “caused by nuclear”: up to about 4,900 over the same period. But this is not an observed body count; it is a modelled upper bound under a pessimistic linear-no-threshold radiation risk assumption, with Chernobyl weighted heavily and every other plant treated as if it delivered some diffuse extra risk. Even if one takes that high estimate at face value, the asymmetry is extreme: roughly 1.84 million deaths prevented versus at most a few thousand modelled deaths attributed to nuclear.

At that point the question ceases to be technical. If a legal order knows (or can easily know) that nuclear energy has played this role in preventing death, and knows that fossil combustion is killing millions each year, what exactly is it doing when it makes nuclear almost impossible to build while licensing coal and gas as “normal”?

That is where the law – and the unconscious – enter the foreground.

From Facts to Law: Purity, Delay, and Disavowal

By the time I began setting up Earthrise Accord and thinking concretely about how to “stop fossil harm,” I was already convinced by the physics, the epidemiology, and the systems modeling. Nuclear was not a dangerous outlier; it was one of the safest tools we had – and one of the only tools that can replace fossil firm power at scale. That much was “just reading.” The numbers on accidents, the MIT systems work, and Kharecha & Hansen’s prevented-deaths analysis all pointed in the same direction: if you cared about human survival and deep decarbonization, you could not honestly treat nuclear as the main danger.

What I did not yet understand was why, given all this, climate-conscious law and activism remained so anti-nuclear. Why were treaties, regulations, and NGO campaigns shaped as if Chernobyl were the norm and as if the 1.84 million prevented deaths were a rounding error? Why did “climate law” in practice treat nuclear as an emergency to be contained and fossil combustion as an unfortunate but normal background condition?

It was only when I brought my psychoanalytic and deconstructive training fully into the picture that things clicked.

The pattern looked unnervingly like the phenomenon Alan Bass describes as fetishistic disavowal: a structure in which we both know and do not know at the same time, maintaining identity and enjoyment by installing a fetish – an object or image that absorbs the anxiety we cannot otherwise manage. In Bass’s generalized reading of fetishism, the fetish is what allows us to acknowledge a disturbing fact “in theory” while neutralizing it in practice.

In this case:

• We know the numbers on fossil vs nuclear deaths.

• We know Chernobyl was a singular event in a uniquely negligent system.

• We know that shutting down a safe nuclear plant means burning more gas and coal.

And yet, politically and legally, we act as if the opposite were true. We treat nuclear as the nightmare to be avoided at all costs and fossil harm as an unfortunate but acceptable background condition. We build permitting and licensing regimes that make it faster and easier to build a gas plant than to keep an existing reactor online. We celebrate “renewables-only” purity even when it quietly locks in fossil backup for decades.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, this looks like purity over life: an arrangement in which the fantasy of remaining uncontaminated – “no nuclear, no GMOs, no ‘unnatural’ vaccines” – takes precedence over the survival of actual human beings. The fetish (here, nuclear-as-taboo) allows us to say we are “for life” while continuing to tolerate a system that kills on the order of eight to nine million people per year through air pollution.

From a Derridean point of view, it looks like a legal order built on legitimizing fictions that present a contingent fossil regime as if it were the natural state of things. Law behaves as if “the economy,” “energy security,” or “orderly transition” were neutral constraints rather than choices; it treats any decisive break – including taking the nuclear pharmakon seriously as cure – as a kind of illegitimate violence against “the Law.” The structural non-closure Derrida calls différance – the fact that there is no pure, self-present Law outside history – is disavowed. In its place we get a fossil-based legal order that pretends to be given, and a climate law that politely asks that order to adjust itself, later.

Once we take the death toll from air pollution seriously, delay is not neutral. It is not a policy compromise between extremes; it is an ongoing decision about who will breathe and who will not. A climate and energy law that endlessly defers the replacement of combustion, while obsessing over nuclear hypotheticals, is not a law that stands “for” life. It is a law that keeps life waiting outside the gate – a choreography of waiting that, like Kafka’s parable, tells those suffocating at the threshold that the door will open “later,” while quietly deciding, in the present, that their deaths are acceptable.

Why Life Before the Law

Life Before the Law grew out of this convergence:

• A lifelong conviction that progressive politics, if it means anything, must be willing to use the safest tools available to stop fossil harm.

• A body of scientific and empirical work – from accident records to MIT to Kharecha & Hansen – showing that nuclear has already prevented enormous amounts of death and could prevent much more.

• And the psychoanalytic and deconstructive tools I developed over decades of reading Freud, Lacan, Bass, and Derrida – tools designed to understand how people and institutions maintain “legitimate fictions” in the face of unbearable truths.

This Foreword is not an argument in itself; the series will develop the theoretical and legal claims in detail. It is, instead, a statement of gratitude and of intent. Gratitude to those who have done the slow work of clearing away myths and counting deaths per terawatt-hour instead of trading in vibes; and to those activists, especially in the global South, who have had the courage to say, in effect: “your purity is killing us.”

And intent: to use every tool I have – psychoanalysis, deconstruction, critical legal theory, and a stubborn unwillingness to look away – to understand how we got here, and to help us see a way out. Life Before the Law is my attempt to show that, if we are serious about surviving climate change and ending fossil harm, we will have to become pro-nuclear and progressive together, and we will have to re-write our laws to reflect that uncomfortable, necessary truth.

Reader’s note: This Foreword sketches the background and stakes for Life Before the Law. The first installment in the series proper is “Life Before the Law 2: Introduction I – Fossil Mass Death and the Global Anti-Nuclear Blind Spot,” which sets out the basic death arithmetic of our energy system, contrasts fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear, and shows how a global anti-nuclear blind spot and its fetishistic disavowal keep that mass death legally and politically invisible.