American institutions are used to measuring risks only to bury them under a pile of equations and hedge bets that are supposed to synthesize certainty. The risks one accepts to engage in acts of resistance can't be offset, but if it's any consolation, the risk management models haven't worked very well anyway, certainly not for carbon emissions or the housing market. And if we're not shielded from those risks - ecological catastrophe, economic collapse, etc. - the way we thought we were, then the equation changes. There is no safe baseline for comparison. Life becomes a question of what kind of risk we'd rather take: the frying pan or the fire.

Count my vote for the fire. I can think of no life more cowardly and dishonorable than one spent shoving and piling other, poorer people between me and the rising tide. Compared to the certain knowledge that that is what is required from Americans in the twenty-first century, what is there to risk? Status quo. "Out of the frying pan, into the fire" makes the first step to liberation sound like a pointless exercise, but there's no other route on offer, and the alternative could easily be just as bad depending on who you are, even in the short term. Better to risk it.