“I doubt that.”
He laughed, surprised. “How come?”
“We’re in Switzerland. The institutional wisdom all gets written down.”
“You would think. Anyway I’m there.”
“Feeding people?”
“Most of the time I’m in processing.”
“What does that mean?”
“People arrive and we try to figure out where they got Dublined, if anywhere.”
“It must have been somewhere, right? No coastlines in this Bohemia.”
He shook his head. “Smugglers. They get to Greece or the Balkans, they don’t want to get registered there. Switzerland has a reputation for quality, in this as in everything.”
“Despite the kind of attack that got you arrested.”
“But it’s worse everywhere else. So they want to come here and then get Dublined. A lot of them have mangled their fingerprints so you can’t ID them that way.”
“Which means they probably got Dublined somewhere else.”
“Sure.”
“So what do you do?”
“If we find out they were tagged elsewhere we have to send them back there. So we don’t try very hard. Most of them we can register here, fingerprints or not. They use retinal scans here. Then we try to find room for them in camps that already have people from their country.”
“Where are they from?”
“Everywhere.”
“Are they climate, political, economic?”
“You can’t tell the difference anymore. If you ever could.”
“So you think you’re getting real refugees.”
He gave her a look. “No one would leave home if they didn’t have to.”
“Okay, so you get them registered here, then you send them to a camp where they’ll have people from their country?”
“We try.”
“But you don’t visit the camps?”
“No. I have to be back here by eight every night.”
“Well, but you can get almost anywhere in Switzerland and back by eight.”
“That’s true. But I’m not supposed to leave the canton.”
“Doesn’t Zurich have any camps?”
“Yes, and I’ve gone to them. There’s a big one out beyond Winterthur, in an old airport or something. Twenty thousand people there. I see how they’re doing. Help in the kitchen. That’s what I like. Although I can help in the kitchen here too.”
“Does that get you time off?”
“I think so. I’m not so worried about that anymore. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
She regarded him for a while.
“Did you ever spend any time in the Alps?” she asked at last.
“A little bit.”
“They’re amazing.”
He nodded. “They look steep.”
“They definitely are.” She told him about her crossing of the Fründenjoch. He seemed interested in her tale, which to her was about the Alps, but when she was done he said, “So who do you think was after you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who loses the most when your ministry does well?”
She shrugged. “Oil companies? Billionaires? Petro-states?”
“That’s not a giant list of suspects.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be anyone, I suppose. Maybe it was some individual or small group that they’ve caught. It would make sense if it was just some nut who thought we were the important ones. When actually we’re just a cog in a giant machine.”
“But they might have thought you were the clutch.”
“What does a clutch do again?”
He almost smiled, which was his smile. “It clutches. It’s where the engine connects to the wheels.”
“Ah. Well, I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t your guards tell you if you asked them?”
“I’m not sure. We’re not that close. I mean, their job is to protect me. They might think I’m safer not knowing.”
“Why would that be?”
“I don’t know. The Swiss banks were attacked too. So they’re keeping pretty quiet about their counterattacks.”
He was smiling his little almost-smile. He gestured at his book. “You need an Inspector Maigret. He liked to explain things to the people he saved.”
“Or if he thought it would make them reveal themselves to be the actual criminal.”
“True. You’ve read them?”
“A few. They’re a bit too dark for me. The crimes are too real.”
“People are twisty.”
“They are.”
“So you need Inspector Maigret.”
“And you need the Alps.”
A woman and girl entered the room, and Frank looked startled. “Oh hi,” he said, then looked at Mary, and back at the two who had just entered. He didn’t know what to say, Mary saw. Nonplussed; confused.
He stood up. “This is Mary Murphy,” he told the two. Then to her: “These are my family.”
Mary squinted. The woman’s mouth had tightened at the corners.
The girl, about ten or eleven years old, broke to Frank and lifted the tension. “Jake!”
“Hey Hiba. How are you.”
“Good.” The girl gave Frank a hug. Frank leaned awkwardly into it, looked over the girl’s shoulder at the woman.
“How did you get here?”
“We took the train.”
“Where do you live?” Mary asked her.
“We stay at the refugee camp outside Bern.”
“Ah. How is that?”
She shrugged. She was looking at Frank.
“Listen, I’ll let you all catch up,” Mary said, standing and holding a hand out to block Frank’s objection. “It’s okay, I should be going anyway. And I’ll come back soon.”
“All right,” he said, distracted still. “Thanks for dropping by.”
69
In Saudi Arabia, during the height of the hajj, what appeared to be a coup by the military resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of Saudi princes. Reports ranged from twenty to fifty, but no one knew for sure. The king was in New York at the time, and was said to be in hiding and not planning on going home. He called on the world to support his legitimate government, and a few governments did, but none of them offered active help. The United States offered asylum. The new government had the backing of most of the people in the country, as far as anyone could tell; with the hajj in disarray and two million Muslims either trying to complete their pilgrimage or get home, confusion on the Arabian peninsula was general. The only thing that was obvious in that first month was that no one outside the Arabian peninsula knew very much about what had really been happening in Saudi Arabia. Which was now to be called simply Arabia, the new government told the world. The Sauds were done.
The other Sunni national governments were cautiously approving or disapproving of this removal, reserving their sharpest criticism for the disruption of the hajj. No one had liked the Saud family, it now appeared, but the ramifications of this were unknown, and potentially volatile throughout the region. The Shiite nations openly applauded the coup. Other governments around the world stayed reticent. They seemed to be trying to calculate what the change meant and what the new government would do, especially with its immense reserves of oil. The formerly implicit was now uncomfortably obvious; no one had cared about these people, only about their oil.
Then word came from Riyadh that Arabians respected the pressing need to decarbonize the world’s economy, and intended to use their oil only for plastics manufacture and other non-combustible uses. The new Arabian government therefore made an immediate claim to the CCCB, the Climate Coalition of Central Banks, which recently had been established specifically to administer the carbon coin, saying that their full conversion to solar power, to begin immediately, and their refusal to sell their oil reserves for burning, deserved compensation in the form of the CCCB’s newly created carbon coins, sometimes called carboni. At the rate of one coin per
ton of secured carbon, the Arabic claim was estimated at about a trillion carbon coins; at current exchange rates this came to several trillion US dollars, which would make Arabia instantly one of the richest countries on Earth, at least in terms of national bank assets. If the present currency exchange rates held, they would be wealthier than if they had sold their oil for burning.
After a period of delay the CCCB agreed to this exchange, but stipulated it was to be paid out on a schedule pegged to how fast the Arabian oil would have been produced and burned in that now deactivated alternate history, only a bit front-loaded and accelerated to reward Arabia for doing the right thing for the planet and human civilization. Meanwhile they could leverage this assured income stream, which they did. They accepted the deal and went to work.
This sudden loss of supply sent oil prices and oil futures sharply up. Oil was rarer now, therefore more expensive, which meant that clean renewable energy was now cheaper than oil by an even larger margin than before. And as the new carbon taxes being levied in every country in compliance with the latest commitments to the Paris Agreement, made at the COP43 meeting, were also scheduled to rise year by year by an increasing percentage, price signals were now all pointing toward clean renewables as the cheapest way to power the world. The social cost of carbon was finally getting injected into the price of fossil fuels, and that old saying, ridiculed by the fossil fuels industry for decades, was suddenly becoming the obvious thing, as being the most profitable or least unprofitable thing:
Keep it in the ground.
Soon after this, Brazil’s government entered another paroxysm of corruption charges, leading to the resignation of the right-wing president and then his arrest. Quickly there followed the triumphant return of the so-called Lula Left, now also called Clean Brazil, with a promise of clean government representing the entire populace, also an end to oil sales, clearly modeled on Arabia’s move; also the full protection and caretaking of the Amazon basin’s rainforest. They claimed compensation for this last policy also, to be paid in more of the CCCB’s carbon coins. The CCCB agreed to that, and by way of Rebecca Tallhorse’s negotiations, a lot of carbon coins were also given immediately to the indigenous groups of the Amazon, who had been keeping the rainforest’s carbon sequestered for centuries. That act of climate justice along with newly scheduled payments to the Brazilian federal government meant a few trillion more carbon coins were added to the general circulation, and now mainstream economists everywhere were fearful that this sudden flood of new currency was going to cause massive deflation. Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever. Some of them were asserting that the carbon coins were merely replacements for petrodollars, which had always been pulled out of the ground like rabbits out of a hat, having not existed before the oil was pumped up and sold. Pulled out of the ground, pulled out of a hat; was there any real difference between petrodollars and carbon coins, these economists asked?
There was, other economists insisted. Petrodollars had first been real pre-existing money, paid for a commodity turned into electricity or physical movement, thus turned into economic activity; carbon coins, on the other hand, were created by the actual removal of that same electricity and transport potential from the world, and thus from the Gross World Product. Petrodollars thus fueled GWP; carbon coins depleted GWP. They were functionally opposite.
Then again, still others argued, that absence of carbon burn, and even the resulting lowering of GWP itself, would save some difficult-to-calculate but real amounts of damage to the biosphere, also the necessary mitigation and remediation and ecological restoration work and insurance pay-outs that would have inevitably followed the carbon burn; and these costs could be calculated; and when they were, ultimately it seemed to amount to almost a wash, petrodollars or carbon coins, and thus the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, a nothing in economic terms.
So: either a huge boon, a complete calamity, or a non-event. Thus the economists, faced with explaining the biggest economic event of their time. What a science! They worked all over the world (including in the Ministry for the Future’s offices) trying to calculate the gains and losses of this event in some way that could be entered into a single balance sheet and defended. But it couldn’t be done, except in ways so filled with assumptions that each estimate was revealed to be an ideological statement of the viewer’s priorities and values. A speculative fiction.
Some pointed out that this had always been true of any economic analysis or forecast ever made. In this case, these people insisted, please go back to the basics. Here’s the true economy, these people said: since the Earth’s biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity’s existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere’s functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible. Macroeconomics had thus long ago entered a zone of confusion, either early in the century or perhaps from the moment of its birth, and now was revealed for the pseudoscience it had always been.
The upshot was that they had no real way of knowing what the global economy was doing now, or what would happen if the central banks continued to fulfill their pledge to create and underwrite a massive infusion of new money into the world. Carbon quantitative easing, CQE, was a huge multi-variant experiment in social engineering.
This was volatility indeed! To use not just the financial term, but simply common human language. It was without doubt a volatile situation. But recall that the financial markets of that time loved stock price volatility, as it made money for financiers no matter what happened, their having gone both long and short on everything. These were not economists, but speculators. Finance in that late moment of capitalism’s exhaustion meant gamblers, sure, but more than that, the casino in which people gambled. And the house always won. And carbon coins were the best opportunity to go long ever created. Almost a kind of sure thing. So in certain respects, the craziness of the time was simply good for investors. Those who had shorted fossil fuels and gone long on clean renewables were now making fortunes; and fortunes require reinvestment to actually be fortunes. Growth! Growth!
This was the world’s current reigning religion, it had to be admitted: growth. It was a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particular deadly form of life.
But this time, growth might be reconfiguring itself as the growth of some kind of safety. Call it involution, or sophistication; improvement; degrowth; growth of some kind of goodness. A sane response to danger— now understood as a very high-return investment strategy! Who knew?
Really, no one knew. The remaining big petro-states each regarded the new situation uneasily, or even in a panic. Together they sat on fossil carbon reserves that at current market prices ranged into the hundreds of trillions. These reserves could easily become stranded assets in the very near future, in fact it looked a bit like a financial bubble starting to burst. In that context it made sense to sell as much of the product as possible before prices collapsed completely. But if everyone holds a fire sale at once, who’s going to buy? The small prosperous countries had clean renewable energy already. The shipping industries, under the duress of their ships being sunk if they didn’t shift, had shifted already to wind and electrics and hydrogen. Aviation, under the same annihilating pressure, was shifting to electric planes, and mainly, airships. Ground transport was going entirely electric, and where it still used liquid fuels, was completely committed to renewable biofuels that bypa
ssed fossil sources.
Power plants were therefore the last interested customers, but even there, solar was cheaper and batteries getting better, and non-battery energy storage by way of water levels or salt temperatures or flywheels or air pressure were all becoming more and more robust. The developed petro-nations therefore tried to sell their oil to the developing non-petro nations, at a big discount. The developing petro-nations decided to power themselves with their own oil assets, and sold to their fellow developing nations-without-petro at even bigger discounts. These non-petro developing nations therefore were the last big carbon burners of note, and they were significant. But India had already shown what could be done by making their pivot to clean renewables after the heat wave. And China was leading the world in solar panel production. They were still selling and shipping their coal, and Japan was still importing it and burning it, among others. Russia and Australia were still exporting coal where they could. Despite all the sudden shifts, carbon was still being burned. Oh yes; to the tune of twenty gigatons a year. Did you think that because Arabia was virtuous, there would be no more cakes and ale? In fact, there was no quick end in sight. The image of a bubble bursting was apt in some respects, illusory in others. People still needed electricity and transport. Money still ruled, fire sales still sold carbon. The bubble that was bursting might still be the biosphere itself. The battle for the fate of the Earth continued.
Russia kept selling its oil and gas, which was a good thing for Europe, as much of Europe was heated in winter by Russian gas. As was made clear when the pipelines were bombed in the coldest part of that winter.
They were also selling their pebble-mob missiles. Either that or else they had sold, or given, or lost to theft or espionage, the plans for building pebble mobs. And in fact these missiles were not so hard to reverse engineer that they weren’t quickly becoming a part of all major militaries. Even part of some private armed forces’ arsenals, it appeared, which had to have purchased such high-tech devices from some major country. It was in fact somewhat terrifying that anyone at all owned such missiles.
The Ministry for the Future Page 34
