The smuggler was expensive, so much so that only those who had some considerable savings would be able to leave by using one. Most of my townspeople were stuck. But we could afford it. So I met my friend one night at our usual café, and he had a man with him. The man was polite but distant. Professional. He asked to see my money, asked about my family, when I could be ready, that sort of thing. He said he could get us into Turkey and then Bulgaria, and after that Switzerland or Germany. I went to the bank and withdrew the money, then went home and told my wife, and we told the children to pack one suitcase each, that we were going on a trip. That night at midnight a car pulled up to our apartment curb and we went downstairs and put our suitcases in the trunk and piled in the back of the car. As we drove off I looked out the car window at our apartment and realized I would never see it again. All that was over. I had had my routines, I liked to go down to the café after work or late at night when it had cooled, drink coffee and play backgammon and talk to friends. My wife and I got together with a few couples, made meals and watched their kids. We knew the people who ran the grocery and the local stores. We had all that, just like anyone. I remember what it was like. But just barely.
15
Taking notes for Badim on regular Monday meeting of ministry executive group. I’ll clean these up later to give to him.
Mary Murphy, convening her leadership team in seminar room next to her office, Hochstrasse. I should have gone to the bathroom.
Badim on Mary’s left, then thirteen division heads seated around the table, the rest of us behind them against the walls. George is going to fall asleep.
Tatiana V., legal. Just heard this morning World Court declined to take up her Indian case. Not happy.
Imbeni Halle. Infrastructure. Poached from Namcor.
Jurgen Atzgen. Zurcher. Gets to commute from his house down lake. Insurance and re-insurance. Swiss Re vet.
Bob Wharton, nat cat. American ecologist. Mitigation and adaptation.
Climate lead Adele Elia. French, coordinating our climate science. Started as a glaciologist, hates meetings like this. Once said so right in meeting. Lived eight years on glaciers, she said. Wants back there. As for world cryosphere, it’s still melting.
Huo Kaming, ecologist, Hong Kong. Biosphere studies, habitat restoration, refugia creation, animal protection, rewilding, biologically based carbon drawdown, watershed governance, groundwater recharge, the commons, the Half Earth campaign. She can do it all.
Estevan Escobar. Chilean. Oceans. Prone to despair.
Elena Quintero, agriculture. Buenos Aires. She and Estevan joke about Argentina-Chile rivalry. She cheers him up very skillfully.
Indra Dalit, Jakarta. Geoengineering. Works with Bob and Jurgen.
Dick Bosworth, Australian, economist. A card. Taxes and political economy. Our reality check.
Janus Athena, AI, internet, all things digital. Very digital themself.
Esmeri Zayed. Third of the E gals. Jordanian Palestinian. Refugees, liaison to UNHCR.
Rebecca Tallhorse, Canada. Indigenous peoples’ rep and outreach.
Mary starts meeting by asking for new developments.
Imbeni: Looking into plans to redirect fossil fuel companies to do decarbonization projects. Capabilities strangely appropriate. Extraction and injection both use same tech, just reversed. People, capital, facilities, capacities, all these can be used to “collect and inject,” either by way of cooperation or legal coercion. Keeps oil companies in business but doing good things.
Tatiana looks interested. Rest of group looking skeptical. Carbon capture and reinsertion into empty oil wells are both dubious as a reality.
Mary: Look into it more. We’ve got to have it, from what the calculations say about how much the natural methods can grab.
Jurgen: Insurance companies in a panic at last year’s reports. Pay-outs at about one hundred billion USD a year now, going higher fast, as in hockey stick graph. Insurance companies insured by re-insurance. These now holding short end of stick (tall end of stick?). Can’t charge premiums high enough to cover pay-outs, nor could anyone afford to pay that much. Lack of predictability means re-insurance companies simply refusing to cover environmental catastrophes, the way they don’t insure war or political unrest etc. So, end of insurance, basically. Everyone hanging out there uninsured. Governments therefore payer of last resort, but most governments already deep in debt to finance, meaning also re-insurance companies. Nothing left to give without endangering belief in money. Entire system therefore on brink of collapse.
Mary: What mean collapse?
Jurgen: Mean, money no longer working as money.
Silence in room. Jurgen adds, So you can see why re-insurance hoping for some climate mitigation! We can’t afford for world to end! No one laughs.
Bob Wharton: Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, others we can’t. Also, we can’t adapt to some things we are now failing to mitigate. Need to clarify which is which. Mainly need to tell adaptation advocates they’re full of shit. Bunch of economists, humanities professors, they have no idea what talking about. Adaptation just a fantasy.
Mary halts Bob rant very skillfully. Sympathetic squint as she chops air with hand. Preaching to choir, she suggests. Moves along to Adele and the rest.
Adele: You think that’s bad! Joke gets laugh. The big Antarctic glacial basins, mainly Victoria and Totten, hold ice sliding downhill faster and faster. Will soon be depositing many thousands of cubic kilometers of ice into sea. Now looking like could happen in a few decades. Sea level rise two meters for sure, maybe more (six meters!) but two meters enough. Doom for all coastal cities, beaches, marshes, coral reefs, many fisheries. Would displace ten percent of the world’s population, disrupt twenty percent food supply. Like a knock-out punch to dazed fighter. Civilization kaputt.
Jurgen throws up hands. Cost of this cannot be calculated!
Calculate it, Mary orders him.
J. frowns, pondering big picture in his head. A quadrillion. Yes, really. A thousand trillion is not too high. Maybe five quadrillion.
Dick: So just call it infinity.
Adele: Number of species threatened with extinction now at Permian levels. (Piling on here?) Permian the worst extinction ever. Now on course to match it.
Kaming: Ninety-nine percent of all meat alive is made of humans and their domestic beasts. Cattle, pigs, sheep, goats. Wild creatures one percent of meat alive. And suffering. Many species gone soon.
M: Soon?
K: Like thirty years.
Estevan: Only twenty percent of the fish now in oceans are wild fish.
Mary ends discussion, chop chop. Regards team. Speaks slowly.
MftF has budget 60B USD/year. Big. But world GDP 100 trillion/year. Half that GWP is so-called consumer spending by prosperous people, means non-essential buying of things that degrade biosphere. Ship going down. Parasite killing host. Even the productive half of GWP, food and health and housing, burning up world. In short: fucked.
Team watches her.
So. Have to find ways to spend our sixty billion that strike at leverage points.
Dick: Our money not enough to matter. Have to change laws— that’s our leverage point. Spend our money on changing laws.
Tatiana likes this.
Imbeni: Critical infrastructure needs funding.
Elena: Ag improvements.
Mary chops discussion. Chop chop chop! Stop. We need to lever change, and fast. However we can. By whatever means necessary.
Badim surprised by this last statement, I’m not sure why. Looks at Mary, surprised.
16
Possibly some of the richest two percent of the world’s population have decided to give up on the pretense that “progress” or “development” or “prosperity” can be achieved for all eight billion of the world’s people. For quite a long time, a century or two, this “prosperity for all” goal had been the line taken; that although there was inequality now, if everyone just st
uck to the program and did not rock the boat, the rising tide would eventually float even the most high-and-dry among them. But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic— beyond that, après moi le déluge.
A rational response to an intractable problem. But not really. There was scientifically supported evidence to show that if the Earth’s available resources were divided up equally among all eight billion humans, everyone would be fine. They would all be at adequacy, and the scientific evidence very robustly supported the contention that people living at adequacy, and confident they would stay there (a crucial point), were healthier and thus happier than rich people. So the upshot of that equal division would be an improvement for all.
Rich people would often snort at this last study, then go off and lose sleep over their bodyguards, tax lawyers, legal risks— children crazy with arrogance, love not at all fungible— over-eating and over-indulgence generally, resulting health problems, ennui and existential angst— in short, an insomniac faceplant into the realization that science was once again right, that money couldn’t buy health or love or happiness. Although it has to be added that a reliable sufficiency of money is indeed necessary to scaffold the possibility of those good things. The happy medium, the Goldilocks zone in terms of personal income, according to sociological analyses, seemed to rest at around 100,000 US dollars a year, or about the same amount of money that most working scientists made, which was a little suspicious in several senses, but there it stood: data.
And one can run the math. The 2,000 Watt Society, started in 1998 in Switzerland, calculated that if all the energy consumed by households were divided by the total number of humans alive, each would have the use of about 2,000 watts of power, meaning about 48 kilowatt-hours per day. The society’s members then tried living on that amount of electricity to see what it was like: they found it was fine. It took paying attention to energy use, but the resulting life was by no means a form of suffering; it was even reported to feel more stylish and meaningful to those who undertook the experiment.
So, is there energy enough for all? Yes. Is there food enough for all? Yes. Is there housing enough for all? There could be, there is no real problem there. Same for clothing. Is there health care enough for all? Not yet, but there could be; it’s a matter of training people and making small technological objects, there is no planetary constraint on that one. Same with education. So all the necessities for a good life are abundant enough that everyone alive could have them. Food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education.
Is there enough security for all? Security is the feeling that results from being confident that you will have all the things listed above, and your children will have them too. So it is a derivative effect. There can be enough security for all; but only if all have security.
If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.
To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is a good as a feast— or better.
Arranging this situation is left as an exercise for the reader.
17
Today we’re here to inquire who actually enacts the world’s economy— who are the ones who make it all go, so to speak. Possibly these people constitute a minority, as it is often said that most people alive today would actively welcome a change in the system.
Only a stupid person would say that.
Well, and yet I’ve just said it.
Yes.
But to get back to the question in hand, who do we think actually enacts the market as such? By which I mean to say, who theorizes it, who implements it, who administers it, who defends it?
The police. It being the law.
So but can we then assume that those people who make the laws are deeply implicated?
Yes.
But lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas. Can we assume they get their ideas about law from others?
Yes.
And who are some of those others?
Think tanks. Academics.
Meaning MBA professors.
All kinds of academics. And very quickly their students.
Economics departments, you mean.
The World Trade Organization. Stock markets. All the laws, and the politicians and bureaucrats administering the laws. And the police and army enforcing them.
And I suppose the CEOs of all the companies.
Banks. Shareholder associations, pension funds, individual shareholders, hedge funds, financial firms.
Might the central banks indeed be central to all this?
Yes.
Anyone else?
Insurance companies, re-insurance companies. Big investors.
And their algorithms, right? So, mathematicians?
The math is primitive.
And yet even primitive math still takes mathematicians, the rest of us being so clueless.
Yes.
Also I suppose simply prices themselves, and interest rates and the like. Which is to say simply the system itself.
You were asking about the people doing it.
Yes, but it’s an actor network. Some of the actors in an actor network aren’t human.
Balderdash.
What, you don’t believe in actor networks?
There are actor networks, but it’s the actors with agency who can choose to do things differently. That’s what you were trying to talk about.
All right, but what about money?
What about it?
To my mind, money acts as if it worked as gravity does— the more of it you gather together, the more gathering power it exerts, as with mass and its gravitational attraction.
Cute.
Ultimately this is a very big and articulated system!
Insightful.
All right then, back to the ones who administer our economic system as such, and teach others how to work it, and by a not-so-coincidental coincidence, benefit from it the most. I wonder how many people that would turn out to be?
About eight million.
You’re sure?
No.
So this would be about one in every thousand persons alive today.
Well done.
Thank you! And the programs they’ve written.
Stick to the people.
But if the non-human elements of the system were to break?
Stick to the people. You were almost getting interesting.
Who matters the most in that group of eight million?
Government legislators.
That’s a bad thought.
No it isn’t. Why would you say that?
Corruption, stupidity—
Rule of law.
But—
But me no buts. Rule of law.
What a weak reed to stand on!
Yes.
What can we do about that?
Just make it stick.
18
The PTSD model uses the word “trigger” as both noun and verb, to suggest the speed of a PTSD reaction, and the way it can be switched on by some incident that should be the equivalent of a small curved piece of metal, innocuous except when placed in a gun. One must learn not to pull these things.
Cognitive behavioral ther
apy is a hard thing to learn. One of the main strategies involved asks you to label the type of thought you are having, identify it as unhelpful or painful, and then switch tracks to a more positive train of thought. Often this strategy fails. You know what’s happening, you know it’s inappropriate— on it goes anyway. Your palms sweat, your heart pounds in your chest like a child trying to escape, and over that throbbing animal reality, you can be thinking to yourself, Wait, no danger here now— this isn’t a situation to be frightened in, you’re just sitting at a café table, midday, light wind, low clouds, all well, please don’t do this, don’t start crying, don’t leap up and run away— just still your shaking hands, just pick up your coffee cup—
But the trigger is pulled, and you are looking right down the barrel of the gun.
Enough times like that, and looking down the actual barrel of an actual gun, its trigger under your actual thumb— not your forefinger, because you have the gun pointed at yourself, resting against your sternum, and it’s the thumb that can best pull (or in this case push) the trigger— this can be seen as a huge relief, as a promise that the fear will finally stop. This happens all the time. It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this— you don’t have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.
It’s not easy to stay unafraid. It can’t always be done. Try as you might, want it ever so much, things are out of your control, even when they are in your mind, or especially because they are in your mind. The mind is a funny animal. If it were just conscious thought; or if conscious thought was something we could control; or if unconscious thoughts were conscious; or if moods were amenable to our desires … then maybe things could work. Things like cognitive behavioral therapy, or the project of sanity itself. Just make it happen!
The Ministry for the Future Page 6
