What if we left gold in the ground?

‘Leave it in the ground’ is a rallying cry among climate activists, demanding that fossil fuel reserves remain untapped. Occasionally a government listens. Usually they don’t. In the UK, the Conservatives even made maximum extraction of fossil fuels a legal duty. It would be breaking the law to stop if there was more to burn.

The rights and wrongs of leaving fossil fuels in the ground are fairly familiar. In Christopher Pollon’s book Pitfall, I came across a more radical idea: leaving gol...