We Could, We Should, We Must
On Insects As a Delivery System, and “Beneficial Bloodsucking.”
A few summers ago I gave consideration to moving to Florida or Texas. This was 2021 when it felt like there was a collective madness in my hometown of New York City. If you remember that moment, you remember the destinations where people like me were fleeing. I was looking into places like Florida and Texas. The so-called free states, the escape hatches (not my framing but more of a public consciousness in a particular demographic that I had seemed to become a part of). I compiled spreadsheets about neighborhoods, school lists and initiated other projects you do when you’re about to uproot your family.
And somewhere in that diligence I came across a company called Oxitec. They breed genetically modified mosquitoes. In May 2020, the EPA approved an experimental release permit. The two states cleared for field testing were Florida and Texas.
I’ll share what happened next in the spirit of transparency, even if it makes me look a little ridiculous in retrospect. I sat there and thought: the two states I’m considering as my escape are the two states approved for experimental GMO insect release. And then I wondered: are the escape hatches just honeypots to round up the dissidents?
And then I thought: who and what have I become? I mean that’s insane, right? Does a reasonable person wonder if Bill Gates personally zoned his retirement? I remember actually feeling embarrassed, alone in my own head. I’d spent two decades in tech. I didn’t know it at the time but I played my own tiny role in helping build some of the surveillance plumbing I now write about. I am not a man who is easily spooked by an internet meme. And here I was, pattern-matching my way out of a real estate decision as if the ticks had lobbyists.
For a variety of reasons we left NYC but stayed in the state. Partly logistics, but also because by 2021 I’d talked myself into the conclusion that whatever was happening was global, and if that was true, fleeing somewhere wasn’t really an escape. Some places might have had longer runways than others, but I wasn’t going to live as a man on the run. My wife and I decided it was better for us to optimize for quality of life, and we ultimately decided to stay in New York in a more rural setting. I’m not going to suggest that decision was vindicated, because it wasn’t, not cleanly anyway (though we’re mostly a happy family).
In the years since, however, I kept running into pieces of that mosquito story that I couldn’t quite make myself stop assembling.
•••
This past week Marty Bent posted something that made me revisit a lot of my research from that era.
Two professors at a medical school in Michigan published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Bioethics. Their argument is that it is “morally obligatory” to genetically engineer ticks to spread a disease that makes humans violently allergic to red meat.
My first reaction was the natural one, in my opinion. It had to be an Onion or Babylon Bee headline someone laundered through a fake citation. People don’t really write ideas like this down, do they? They certainly don’t get them reviewed by their peers.
So I checked and it turned out to be real. Bioethics, volume 39, issue 8, pages 772 through 781. Published online July 2025. It’s indexed in PubMed. You can pull it up on Wiley right now. The authors are Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, both at Western Michigan University’s Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. The paper is called “Beneficial Bloodsucking.”
The author’s actual argument – and remember this is not satire – is that alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the tick-borne red meat allergy, is a “moral bioenhancer.” Their logic: if eating meat is morally wrong, and the allergy makes you stop eating meat (because it will now kill you), then the allergy makes you a better person. From there they build what they call the Convergence Argument, which in plain English means “multiple different ethical frameworks all happen to point at the same conclusion, so the conclusion must be solid.” And the conclusion they land on is that promoting the syndrome is “strongly pro tanto obligatory” – which is bioethics-speak for “we have a strong duty to do this, all else being equal.”
What that means, in their own words, is that researchers have an obligation to “genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks.” Translation: engineer the ticks to spread the allergy more effectively. That people are obligated to promote its spread. And – this is the part I had to read twice – that efforts to develop an inoculation against AGS are morally problematic. The paper argues blocking the spread of AGS is “impermissible.” Because in their framing it isn’t a disease. A disease is something you’d want to fix. This is being presented as an enhancement, something which ought not to be cured.
Releasing engineered disease-carrying ticks on people who didn’t ask for it, they frame it as a “vaccination.” It “infringes” on your bodily autonomy, they say, rather than “violating” it.
Infringe versus violate is a distinction without a difference. But the authors argue that the “difference” is the delivery mechanism – a tick happened to bite you, rather than a person holding you down. But that argument only works if you’ve already granted the premise underneath it: that some authority gets to decide which of your behaviors requires an engineered biological correction, and that the only open question is whether the needle has legs. They don’t actually argue for that premise. My guess is that they just need you not to notice it’s there so you don’t realize it’s both grotesque and yet another violation of Nuremberg. (But who’s counting…)
And the paper goes further than tick engineering. It notes that “It may be feasible for a person to take synthetic AGS to grocery stores and secretly inject it into beef, pork, lamb, etc.” They’re not just theorizing about vectors. They’re walking through operational logistics.
Of course, you could file the whole thing under fringe academics doing the thing fringe academics do. Floating something that’s incredibly out there just to get cited. I might have done that had I not learned that this is not the first time this particular idea has been floated.
•••
In 2016, a bioethicist named S. Matthew Liao – director of the Center for Bioethics at NYU, an endowed chair, a serious person inside the institutions – was on a stage talking about climate change. He gets to the meat problem. People eat too much meat, it’s bad for the planet, and people won’t stop on their own. His phrase for it is “weakness of will.” He even includes himself – this steak is just too juicy, I can’t do it.
And then he says:
“So possibly we can use human engineering to make it the case that we’re intolerant to certain kinds of meat. And there’s actually analogs of this in life. There’s this thing called the lone star tick, where if it bites you, you will become allergic to meat. I can sort of describe the mechanism. So that’s something that we can do through human engineering.”
In 2016, the director of bioethics at NYU named the lone star tick as a delivery mechanism for engineering a population off meat. He didn’t make these remarks off the cuff – it traces back to a 2012 paper he co-authored, “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” which proposed biomedical modification of humans as a climate response. The tick was just the most vivid delivery system he landed on.
So now a decade after Liao names the vector, Crutchfield and Hereth argue deploying the vector is obligatory. Two different sets of academics, almost a decade apart. One says we could. The other says we must.
It gets even more alarming. Crutchfield – one of the two authors of the 2025 paper – has an earlier paper, also in Bioethics from 2019 called “Compulsory Moral Bioenhancement Should Be Covert.”
Remember, this is not a parody. The same man who in 2025 says it’s obligatory to spread the tick allergy argued in 2019 that compulsory moral bioenhancement – making people “better” against their will – should be done covertly. In other words, without their knowledge or informed consent. Formal responses to his argument appeared in print in Neuroethics and Bioethics; Crutchfield has replied defending his position in the peer-reviewed literature and released a full book expanding the argument in 2021 through Routledge. That paper is now a starting node in an active scholarly debate.
So the progression seems to be:
- We could do this.
- It should be done quietly.
- We’re obligated to do it.
While I never want to assume the worst of people it’s pretty hard to read that as merely a thought experiment anymore. People who are workshopping ideas in sincerity would not need or have an operational preference for secrecy.
I’m not telling you these papers are a defined plan from those in a position to deploy them. Anyone who’s spent enough time with people inside universities or think tanks knows these places are often homes for outrageous ideas. What I am suggesting is that this model is part of a tried and true playbook – a documented progression of credentialed people, in peer-reviewed journals, moving the same idea from “possible” to “obligatory” in under a decade. As always, I’ll try to do my best to discern what I can point to as fact from my own speculation.
•••
The weaponization of ticks is not a new idea. It has a history tied to the Cold War.
There’s a man named Willy Burgdorfer. If the name is unfamiliar, the thing named after him isn’t, at least in science circles – Borrelia burgdorferi is the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. It carries Willy’s name because he’s the one who identified it.
In 1951, Burgdorfer took a job at a U.S. government facility called Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. At the time it held the most extensive collection of ticks in the country. And this was the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. government was running a serious, well-funded biological weapons program – turning anthrax, plague, brucella, tularemia into things you could use on a population.
A Stanford science writer named Kris Newby spent years investigating this. Her book is called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons. She built the case from Burgdorfer’s own papers, FOIA requests, and interviews with him in his last years. Her core claim is that Burgdorfer’s work was weapons work – that the government was studying how to weaponize tick-borne pathogens – and that there’s an authentic, unresolved question about the relationship between that program and the Lyme outbreak that emerged in the 1970s near Lyme, Connecticut.
Newby’s investigation was published by HarperCollins, not some fringe press. The book includes an appendix that documents twelve uncontrolled tick releases between 1966 and 1969 – 282,800 radio-tagged ticks deployed across four sites in Virginia and Montana, with 152,000 of them lone star ticks released in Virginia between 1967 and 1969. These were research releases, published in entomology journals. They weren’t classified – they just weren’t dinner-table conversation either. The first lone star tick observed on Montauk, Long Island was in 1971 – four years after a release of 22,000 lone star ticks in Newport News, Virginia. I’m not sure what happened, but the timing is pretty interesting.
Montauk is quite familiar to me, as I grew up on the other end of Suffolk County. It’s a short distance from Plum Island, the federal animal disease lab off the tip of Long Island. There’s a guy named John Loftus – former Justice Department attorney who had top-secret clearance in the early 1980s to review the classified files on Nazi war criminals living in America, including Nazi scientists brought over by the U.S. government under Operation Paperclip. He went on to publicly challenge the government’s protection of those scientists; his work contributed to surfacing how Nazi war criminals were protected in U.S. archives. In his 1982 book called The Belarus Secret, Loftus wrote that the U.S. tested “poison ticks” on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s – and that “most of the germ warfare records have been shredded.” That’s a credentialed Justice Department attorney, on the record in a book published by a prominent main-stream press (Knopf), making that specific claim about that specific location and that specific era.
Plum Island’s early operations were also shaped by a German virologist named Erich Traub. Traub worked at Germany’s Reich Research Institute for Virus Diseases of Animals during World War II on weaponized animal pathogens. According to Michael Carroll’s 2004 book Lab 257, Traub’s work during WWII included weaponizing animal pathogens – specifically, dispersing foot-and-mouth disease from Luftwaffe bombers onto livestock in occupied territories.
After the war, the U.S. brought Traub over under Operation Paperclip. Carroll documents Traub’s role in laying the conceptual groundwork for Plum Island’s establishment and places him physically on the island at least three times between 1956 and 1958.
Newby, Loftus, and Carroll aren’t the only people who’ve documented these stories. In 2019, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced an amendment to investigate whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks as biological weapons. The amendment passed the House in 2019, again in 2021, and most recently as part of the FY26 NDAA. The 2025 version, now Sec. 1068 of the bill, directs the GAO to investigate whether ticks were used as hosts or delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents.
That isn’t just in the congressional record. It’s federal law. A sitting Congress took the allegations seriously enough to mandate a federal investigation into the underlying programs and documents.
Let’s take a step back and review what’s documented: a mid-century government program studying how to weaponize ticks, a disease that appeared near one of its labs, a Stanford journalist who spent years on the paper trail, a Justice Department attorney who named the lab and the era in print in 1982, and a Congress that went looking for the files in 2019.
An eerie fact is that Rocky Mountain Laboratories not only never closed, it’s still operational. To this day, it serves a federal infectious disease facility studying tick-borne pathogens and vector transmission. After 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, the U.S. expanded its biodefense infrastructure massively, and Rocky Mountain Laboratories became part of that apparatus. During COVID it conducted coronavirus research (of course it did… pandemic, biodefense expansion, that’s the logic). The institution evolved with each new crisis – and kept its focus on the same thing: how infectious agents move through populations. I’m not making an accusation – Rocky Mountain Laboratories openly documents this history on their website – I’m just calling out the continuity.
•••
Now back to the mosquitoes. When I went back to my old notes, what I found was the second half of the same story – the same infrastructure, logic and frame absorbing the question before it fully forms.
Oxitec, the company from my 2021 spreadsheet, has released hundreds of millions of genetically engineered mosquitoes. The Gates Foundation has funded large-scale mosquito breeding operations globally – including a $12.259 million grant to Oxitec in August 2024 to support production at scale. Those operations breed tens of millions of mosquitoes per week. Gates has talked, openly, on a TED stage, about mosquitoes as delivery vehicles for disease control, framing them as a tool in the fight against malaria. There’s even a U.S. patent number US8967029B1, for a “toxic mosquito aerial release system” – a drone designed to disperse engineered mosquitoes. That’s not a pitch deck. That’s a granted patent.
And the underlying technology being developed for these releases is called a gene drive. I’m not a geneticist, so I’ll try to describe it the way I had to learn it. Normally, when an organism reproduces, each gene has about a 50/50 shot of being passed to the next generation. A gene drive uses CRISPR to override that – it forces a modified gene into 100% of offspring instead of half. The key point is that it doesn’t stop. It propagates through a wild population on its own, generation after generation. Because there is no off switch on a gene drive, it means that once it is released, it cannot be recalled.
The inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive, Kevin Esvelt at MIT, has spent the last decade publicly arguing that releasing it into open ecosystems is, in his own words, “likely equivalent to creating a new, highly invasive species” – and that doing so without something close to global consent crosses a line we don’t get to walk back across. “Do you really have the right,” he asked the MIT Technology Review, “to run an experiment where if you screw up, it affects the whole world?” The National Academies of Sciences issued a 2016 report calling for caution. Gates has funded the technology’s development for mosquito deployment anyway.
The capability is also operational at scale. In Medellín, Colombia, the World Mosquito Program runs what its director Scott O’Neill calls “the world’s biggest mosquito factory” – producing 30 million mosquitoes a week. In a public talk, O’Neill describes the mosquitoes being packaged in gelatin capsules or, in his words, prepared “into a drone for aerial release.”
That program uses a different approach than Oxitec’s, and arguably a more publicly defensible one – they’re inoculating the mosquitoes with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which lives inside the mosquito and blocks its ability to transmit dengue. That’s a different mechanism from gene drive: it’s a microbe doing the work, not edited DNA, and it doesn’t keep amplifying in the wild population the way a gene drive would. The distinction matters, however, one might also argue the infrastructure is more or less the same. Industrial-scale insect breeding, aerial deployment, the operational floor for releasing engineered organisms into wild ecosystems on schedule.
When I first started looking at this 5 years ago, I had it in my head that the Oxitec releases were connected to the locally-acquired malaria cases that showed up in Florida and Texas in 2023 – the first local malaria transmission in the U.S. in twenty years. It was a tempting connection, especially for a pattern matcher, since it was in the same states during the same time frame. On the surface, it seems to all line up.
I was totally wrong though. Oxitec’s mosquitoes are Aedes aegypti – that’s the species that carries dengue and Zika. Malaria is carried by a completely different genus of mosquito, Anopheles. They’re related the way a dog is related to a fox: same family, but different animals, different behavior, and most importantly, different diseases. An Aedes release program doesn’t produce Anopheles malaria. An entomologist would have taken my hypothesis apart in about five minutes. I’m a dude who barely made it past high school science – how is it that it’s come to people like me digging through papers and patents to try to get to the truth?
What’s interesting though is that even though I was precisely wrong about the link to malaria, my instinct wasn’t totally off. After all, we’ve still got engineered-insect release programs, run by private companies, greenlit by federal agencies, deployed in specific states. We still have a billionaire on a TED stage describing insects as a delivery mechanism for public health initiatives. We still have a patent for a drone that aerially disperses toxin-carrying mosquitoes. We still have a technology – gene drive – that the inventor himself says shouldn’t be deployed in open ecosystems, being funded for deployment in open ecosystems. The specific malaria claim (that I admit I considered) doesn’t survive scrutiny. Naturally, it got debunked by the fact-checkers. But the shape of the thing – capability developed openly, infrastructure deployed openly, public conversation that treats anyone noticing as a crank – seems to have survived without much, if any, mainstream public scrutiny.
And sitting on top of it all, the explanation is ready to go: climate change. The lone star tick is moving north – into Suffolk County, onto Martha’s Vineyard – and the reason you’ll be given is warming, deer populations, second-growth forest.
To be clear, the ecological explanation isn’t made up. Warmer winters do extend tick seasons. Deer populations recovered enormously over the last fifty years, and the lone star tick rides white-tailed deer. The suburbs expanded into forested land. When development slowed, the forest came back – but differently. The new growth created more edge habitat, the kind where ticks thrive. The lone star tick moved with that edge. That’s part of the real story of why these ticks are showing up in Suffolk County, and any honest account has to include it. I’m not arguing that the explanation is wrong – it’s just incomplete.
A complete explanation would include the history of tick weaponization I’ve outlined here and how potentially deadly the alpha-gal syndrome really is. This is very important because once an explanation becomes culturally total, it stops being an explanation and becomes a frame. Pick any major outlet’s explainer. The New York Times in March 2026: “Ticks are flourishing because of the resurgence of the white-tailed deer.” NewYork-Presbyterian the same week: “this species of tick has moved north in recent years thanks to warming temperatures.” Both pieces are competent, but notice the gap. The NYT explainer – published four months after the peer-reviewed case report on the first confirmed alpha-gal death from eating meat – doesn’t mention the case at all. The NewYork-Presbyterian piece mentions it in a single sentence, doesn’t name the pilot, doesn’t reference the November 2025 case report, and moves on. The paper of record can write a “what to know” guide about a syndrome and skip the case that prompted half the country to learn it had a body count. Neither piece mentions Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Burgdorfer, the Chris Smith amendment, the Liao 2016 video, or the Crutchfield papers. They don’t need to. The story is quite obviously now about climate and deer. The story has been about climate and deer for as long as anyone reading or writing those articles can remember – because no alternative has ever been offered.
And it isn’t just a US story. As I’m writing this, CTV Toronto is running a piece about lone star ticks crossing into Ontario. The director of the new Canadian Tick Research and Innovation Centre calls it “a wave of ticks that are crossing the border and invading Canada” and attributes the migration to “a more suitable climate environment.” Public Health Ontario, in the same piece, says lone star ticks don’t have an “established” population locally. How do they know? Same way they know what’s driving the migration – the explanation was already in the room.
Maybe that’s not the writers’ fault, and I’m not suggesting they were explicitly told what to leave out. The frame absorbs the question before the question forms. When the alpha-gal cases spike in the regions where these things get studied and released, there’s already a tab open that says climate. You don’t go looking for the other tab. The question gets closed before it’s fully formed. That’s not censorship. It’s something more elegant and effective – a mechanism that absorbs the anomaly so smoothly you never even feel the bump.
And the reason this works is because the infrastructure is real. In March 2021, the Gates Foundation committed $1.4 million to Oxitec – the same company developing the mosquito releases in Florida and Texas – to fund work on a self-limiting genetically modified cattle tick for deployment in Africa. The cattle tick is a different species from the lone star tick that causes alpha-gal – one’s a livestock pest in Africa, the other’s the one moving up the Atlantic coast – so this is separate infrastructure for a separate problem. But the pattern is consistent: engineered ticks, Gates funding, multiple species, multiple geographies. The infrastructure isn’t theoretical or isolated. It’s a distributed, funded, operational capability. And it’s being explained away using an explanation that happens to be true. That’s the thing about true explanations – they work perfectly as cover. Nobody questions something that’s actually accurate.
•••
And the anomaly is real, and it’s already in people’s bodies.
Alpha-gal syndrome was a medical curiosity fifteen years ago. The CDC now estimates up to 450,000 Americans have it. A 2025 analysis of a national database of 114 million patient records found the diagnosis count went from 180 cases in the 2015–2020 window to over 10,000 in the 2021–2025 window.
The honest version of that number is more interesting than the scary version. Part of that rise is real incidence. And part of it is that doctors finally learned to look. A 2022 CDC survey found that 42% of healthcare providers had never heard of alpha-gal syndrome, and another third weren’t confident they could diagnose it. So the curve is partly the disease spreading and partly the medical system catching up to something that was already there. Which is alarming for a different reason: it means the real number was always higher than anyone was counting.
In September 2024, a healthy 47-year-old airline pilot in New Jersey died of it. He had a hamburger and a beer at a cookout, went home, mowed the lawn, and a few hours later his son found him unconscious on the bathroom floor. He couldn’t be revived. The cause of death sat unexplained for over a year – until his wife, comparing notes with a pediatrician she knew, wondered if it could be “that red meat thing.” Thomas Platts-Mills, the UVA allergist who discovered alpha-gal syndrome in the first place, tested the man’s postmortem blood and confirmed it. His tryptase level – the marker doctors use to measure fatal anaphylaxis – came back at 2,000. Platts-Mills has said the highest he’d ever seen in a patient who survived was 100. That’s twenty times the survival ceiling. The case was published in November 2025. It’s the first confirmed alpha-gal death from eating meat. “First confirmed” should tell you the counting has just started.
This syndrome is not a mild thing. One bite and you can lose mammalian meat for life. Beef, pork, lamb, venison. For some people dairy goes too, even gelatin capsules. A cancer drug grown in a mouse cell line has triggered fatal first-dose reactions. Pig heart valves have triggered reactions on the operating table.
The one mercy in biology that is strange enough to be worth sitting with: birds and fish never made the alpha-gal sugar. Old World primates – us – lost the gene for it about 28 million years ago, in an evolutionary event so far back it predates the entire human lineage, predates the great apes, predates anything you’d recognize as a face. Every ancestor you have, going back further than the imagination cooperates with, has been on the no-alpha-gal side of that line. So the foods that stay safe – eggs, chicken, turkey, fish – are safe because of a boundary drawn before primates had hands.
So this is really interesting. The thing that decides what is safe for you to eat is a line in the genome older than the hand you’d pick up the fork with. And there are now multiple academics, in peer-reviewed journals, arguing we should be deliberately spreading the condition that renders targeted foods – in this case meats – deadly.
•••
So back to Marty Bent. He asks the right question at the end of his post. At what point do we stop treating these papers as fringe academic exercises and start asking whether anyone is acting on them.
I think the honest answer to that question is that we already know.
No, I can’t tell you definitively that anyone has deliberately released ticks into the wild. I also don’t know if the alpha-gal surge is anything other than what the official story says it is – ticks moving north, deer populations recovering, warmer winters. I can’t draw the causal line, and I’m not going to pretend the dotted version is the solid one.
What’s documented is this: a mid-century program to weaponize ticks. A bioethicist who named the lone star tick from a stage in 2016. A co-author who argued in 2019 that this should be done covertly, in a paper now defended and engaged across the bioethics literature. A Congress that went looking for the files in 2019. A 2025 paper, peer-reviewed, calling it morally obligatory. A technology the inventor himself says shouldn’t be released – being funded for release. Industrial infrastructure clearly already in place. And a very real, potentially deadly syndrome in almost half a million people, on a curve that bends the wrong way.
Each one of those, by itself, you can wave off. The reason they’re easy to wave off one at a time isn’t that someone designed them to be. It’s just the nature of an anomaly. A single data point is always dismissible. That’s what makes it a data point and not yet a pattern. The pattern is what you get when you stop letting yourself dismiss them one at a time.
There are competing hypotheses about what is driving the surge that I am not remotely equipped to adjudicate. I mention that not to endorse them but because the same epistemological problem I am describing – a dominant explanation that closes the question before alternatives get examined – applies to any frame, including the tick explanation itself. I am aware of the irony.
The leap feels available now because of Covid. It’s not that everyone got crazier (though that’s possible). It’s that everyone watched the distance between “academic discussion” and “policy affecting your body” turn out to be much shorter than advertised. Gain-of-function was a fringe worry until it wasn’t. Bodily autonomy was a settled principle until it was renegotiated in a season. Once you’ve watched that gap close once, in real time, you don’t get to un-watch it. The threshold for “implausible” moved, permanently, and it moved because of things that actually happened, not because of things people imagined.
But this isn’t really about ticks. Or mosquitoes. Or any other single vector.
It’s the shape underneath. Your immune system is supposed to be your own. Your gut is your own. What you can physically eat is about as close to the bottom of the stack as a human being gets – it isn’t an opinion you can be argued out of, it’s just your body, the one piece of territory that was supposed to be unambiguously yours. Even sacred. But now there is a documented, decades-long, openly-published intellectual effort to get a hand in there. To convert the thing you can safely eat from a fact of your biology into a setting – one that someone else can administer, on a schedule someone else picks, justified in journals almost no normal people – or even journalists – read.
The lesson wasn’t “trust your gut.” It was that the distance between a fringe academic exercise and a thing that happens to half a million people is shorter than it is comfortable to admit. And the papers telling you what’s next are already published. They’re not even hard to find.
They’re not going to come for your hamburger with a law. They don’t need a law.
They’ll come for it with something the size of a poppy seed, and they’ll let the climate take the blame.