When Elizabeth “Bunny” Glenn meets the man she will marry for the first time, lingering over mini quiches at a Houston rooftop party in 2010, he asks her if she wants to have kids. She hopes that he is asking flirtatiously. As a self-identified liberal who loves Obama and hates Republicans, Bunny has found it difficult to date since moving to Texas, deterred by the abundance, she imagines, of “meatheads, illiterates, or people who [don’t] believe in abortion.” At least the man before her, who introduces himself as Francis, believes in global warming. Even so, his question about kids turns out to be a leading one, a rebuff against her discomfort about the city’s booming oil industry. Sure, he concedes, fossil fuels might be driving widespread extinction. But what about technological achievement, and the unimpeachable march of human progress? Sensing that Bunny remains unconvinced, Francis encourages her to think about the issue within the scope of her personal life. Assuming that she does want to have kids one day, he says, where would she rather give birth: in a hospital equipped with petroleum-powered machines, or outside in a shed?
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