by Paul Briggs
The hearing was already going on. It was Radcliffe who was talking. Somehow, he still looked like the chairman of the Young Republicans on some college campus. “You’re saying you want subsidies for farmers who alter their planting schedule for some of their fields, but not others,” he was saying. “And you’re confining this program to the states of… let’s see… Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. Can you explain your reasoning?”
“Certainly,” said Hammond. She looked something like a black version of Carrie herself—tall, fortyish, and just shy of obese. Her skin was very dark, and her expression was calm.
“According to our computer models,” she said, “if farmers in these states had planted wheat and corn in the fall like they do in India, they’d be bringing in a big harvest right now. The food shortage would be over. But—there is no guarantee that the same thing’s going to happen this year. If they plant in the fall and we get anything like a normal winter, we’ll lose another whole crop. Which we cannot afford to have happen.
“And that’s the problem—uncertainty. In any given year, we might have a winter, or we might not. This summer, we might have heat kill or we might not. So the only strategy that makes any sense is to plant some fields by the old schedule and some by a different one. That way, no matter how things turn out, we’ll know we’re going to get something to eat. I’d rather have the certainty of fifty percent loss than the possibility of a hundred percent loss.”
“And is this the president’s plan,” said Radcliffe, “or is it your own?”
“The plan was developed by myself with the support of President Pratt.”
“How much support exactly?” he said, in tones that suggested he was trying to resist the urge to jump up and scream Run for your lives! The Secretary of Agriculture has gone rogue!
“What my colleague is trying to say,” said another congressman whose name Carrie didn’t happen to know, “is that we have yet to hear from the President or his spokespeople on the subject of this bill, or the problem it’s intended to address.” Carrie mentally translated this into you are a mere Cabinet official, and we are Lords of the Legislature, and you need putting in your place.
Or maybe they really were worried. For the most part, Pratt was his own brain trust. There wasn’t any shadowy cabal of advisors who controlled him. Whatever policy came out of the executive branch either came from Pratt himself or had been brought to him first. That was a hard thing to get used to from a Republican president.
“Henry Pratt’s got a lot to keep track of right now,” said Hammond. “He’s not an expert in ag issues, but he’s got an old boys’ network that could fill this room. He could have picked anybody for this job. He picked me because he wanted somebody who would act with initiative to do what needs to be done. Well, that’s what I’m here to do.”
Carrie had another appointment coming up, so she put her phone away. Hammond’s plan, at least, was probably going to pass in something close to its intended form. Democrats weren’t going to object, and as much as Republicans disliked the concept of federal intervention in… anything, really… most of them were from rural states and districts. Helping farmers was something they could see the point of. And if they couldn’t, their constituents would be happy to explain.
And of course, Hammond was right. There was too much uncertainty in the weather right now. If every farmer who guessed wrong on what the next few months would bring was allowed to go bankrupt, in a few years the United States would suffer its very first famine.
* * *
Like most of the West Coast representatives, Jared Chiang (D-CA) was a big supporter of the Norfolk Plan in its original form. In California, Oregon, and Washington, the Plan was already being implemented with state resources. The government of Hawaii wanted to, but rising aviation fuel prices had drastically reduced tourism and crashed the local economy. As for Alaska, they were rebuilding Anchorage according to the Plan—and well they might, since the waterfront was the most badly damaged part of the city—but that was about it.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” said Chiang sadly.
“All right,” said Carrie.
“This isn’t going to be your year. You’re trying to protect the coasts from long-term damage when a big chunk of the interior has suffered short-term damage. You can’t blame people from Ohio and Iowa for trying to get more rebuilding money. We really haven’t done enough for them.”
“What about Darling? He’s from Ohio.”
Chiang shrugged. “Darling does what Darling does,” he said. “You really want to know how you could help?”
“How?”
“Help us pass some tax reforms that would give us a little more money to work with. I mean, Pratt… he means well, but he’s got us passing laws that we were talking about ten years ago and we should have passed twenty years ago.”
“Like that carbon fee and dividend?”
“Exactly. It’s like, now that the hole in the dike is three feet wide and growing, he’s turning to the Dutch boy and saying ‘Okay, fine, you can stick your finger in.’ So the taxpayers are getting some money back, which is good, but it doesn’t give us anything to work with.”
“Wouldn’t Pratt veto anything that increased revenue?”
“He probably would.” Chiang sighed. “I supported him as much as anybody after Anchorage. Now… I am so damn sorry we have to wait two years to vote for you.”
“That might be the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.”
* * *
As she left, Carrie almost literally bumped into Gov. Tejera, who was heading down the hall with a couple of aides following. He stopped to talk.
“So what brings you to D.C.?”
“Trying to get something added to the SUSTAIN Act,” he said. “Something for New Mexico. What are you up to?”
“I’m… trying to do the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do. Don’t take it personally.”
“I don’t. I know, the Norfolk Plan is your baby and you don’t want to see it messed with.”
Carrie nodded. “Considering the feeding frenzy it’s turned into, I don’t blame you for wanting a piece of the action.”
“It’s not really for ourselves,” said Tejera. “This spring was the hottest we’ve ever seen, and from the looks of things it was just warming up… so to speak.
“Right now every town in New Mexico—every town that isn’t abandoned, anyway—has its own heat shelter. If we start seeing sustained temperatures over one-twenty like they had in Australia, we’ll be ready. The counties of southern California are still catching up, but they should be ready in a year or so.”
“So why do you need help from the federal government?”
“The problem is Arizona and Texas. They have no heat shelters. They haven’t even started building them. If a heat wave hits, it’s not going to respect state borders. Our little state doesn’t have the shelter space, water or anything for ourselves and our neighbors too. But they’ll be coming, and we couldn’t stop them if we wanted to.”
“Couldn’t the FEMA camps take them in?”
“No FEMA camps in New Mexico—we don’t have enough water. Besides, Pratt’s trying to get people out of those camps, not into them.”
“I hate to say it,” said Carrie, “but it sounds like you’re doing the right thing.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Carrie was in the elevator that she noticed the NameDrop app blinking on her phone. She clicked on it. Time to find out what people in the news were saying about her.
The app had gotten a one-minute clip. It was Sen. Brent Ramos (D-FL) speaking on C-SPAN. He was about sixty, a man of average height with tan skin, and hair white around the temples and black everywhere else.
“And for all the people who are complaining about ‘delaying tactics,’” he was saying, “I just have one question. What is the rush? What is the goddamn hurry? ‘Run for your lives, the ocean is rising, it�
��s coming for us all’—at maybe one inch a year! Why do we have to solve the problem in this session? Or this year? Or this decade, even? Why not wait and take the time to come up with a better plan?
“In fact, why are we even discussing this? We should be debating how to protect our people and their property, not how to abandon them! The United States of America has never ceded territory to a foreign power in its history, and Carolyn Camberg wants to cede our most valuable lands to Davy Jones! She’s a quisling for the fish!
“If you ask me, our colleagues in the other chamber have the right idea. We should be trying to protect as much as we possibly—” The snippet cut off there.
Well, that was a surprise. Carrie knew Ramos was an opponent, but she hadn’t expected him to be so vocal about it. So far, opposition to the Plan had mostly been low-key and quiet. The Plan was being rewritten or held up, but the only people speaking against it were Republicans from High Plains states who couldn’t for the life of them see why the government was going to this much trouble on behalf of people who lived on the coast.
Before Carrie could fully process this, especially the part about being a quisling for the fish, she got a text message. It was from Grant Curtis.
Interesting. The chairman of the party wants to meet me, and tomorrow, not next week or later this year.
* * *
Carrie hoped Curtis would be on time for this meeting—or better yet, early. With temperatures in the high nineties, the sun blazing off the white marble and the air stinking of heated asphalt, nobody wanted to stand around outside in D.C. any longer than necessary. Even if you’d found one of the rare shady spots near the Russell Senate Office Building.
As luck would have it, he arrived at precisely 1:15 p.m., no more nor less. Democratic Party chair Grant Curtis was black, about fifty, and had his graying hair cut to an even length of a quarter inch around his head. He was approaching Carrie with the bone-weary look of a man whose job involved dealing with obstreperous children he wasn’t allowed to discipline.
Carrie followed him into the building, through a security checkpoint and into the elevator. They exchanged updates about their families, but Curtis said nothing about the meeting until they were in front of the door to an office.
It was Senator Ramos’ office. Carrie turned to Curtis, drawing in a breath to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.
“Just come inside,” he said. She followed him into the back room where Ramos was seated at his desk. When he looked up and saw them, his jaw dropped. He didn’t know this was happening either.
“You can both plot revenge against me later,” said Curtis. “In fact, that would be great as long as you did it together. See, what I need you two to do right now is kiss and make up. Okay, you don’t literally have to kiss, but… look, we both know how it works. Republicans could be chasing each other around D.C. with machetes and chainsaws, but the media’ll take any excuse if they can report ‘Democrats in Disarray.’ Right now, you two are that excuse.” Curtis pulled up a chair in front of Ramos’ desk, and motioned for Carrie to sit in it, which she did. It should have been Ramos making the invitation, of course, but given what he’d said about her, she was entitled to a little disrespect.
“Brent, Carrie here doesn’t want to destroy America,” said Curtis. “Carrie, Brent doesn’t want… whatever bad thing you think he wants. When you’re both running for president—yes, we all know it’s coming—you can tear each other down to your hearts’ content. Until then, sort this shit out between yourselves and Stop. Being. Enemies.” He stood over by the antique filing cabinet, arms folded, glaring down at them.
Carrie looked at the senator. “You go first,” she said.
Ramos rubbed his temples. “I don’t even know where to begin,” he said. “This… Norfolk Plan of yours. I’m trying to understand here, I’m trying to get inside your head, and I just can’t! You’re proposing gutting our whole economy right now over a threat that’s going to be here in fifty years! It’s like we’ve been in the lifeboat for five minutes and you’re already trying to talk us into eating somebody! Can we maybe wait a little longer?”
“What is it you think is going to happen if we wait? Who’s going to save us?”
“I don’t know—it could be anybody! Look at your friend Sandra Symcox with her graphene batteries! The biggest drawback to battery technology was lithium storage and mining pollution, and now suddenly we don’t need lithium anymore! We’re finally putting a carbon fee and dividends in place, and we don’t know if it’s even going to end up moving any money! All the world’s most brilliant minds are working around the clock now to fight global warming! Why are you betting against them?”
“Okay, I’ll play along,” said Carrie. “Let’s suppose—just for the sake of argument—that at some point in the next fifty years, somebody invents… I don’t know, a freeze ray or something that can re-grow the glaciers and the ice caps back to where they were in the twentieth century. Do you honestly think the world’s going to say ‘It’s too bad we can’t use this thing, but we promised Carrie we wouldn’t try to save the coastline?’ Of course not. If they can actually solve the underlying problem, they’ll make a merry bonfire out of the Plan! And if I live to see it, I’ll personally light the match! It won’t be needed anymore!
“You see, the point isn’t to limit our options, it’s to protect the present and the near future. It’s to respond to what we know is coming.”
“Have you ever tried seeing it from the point of view of somebody in Florida?” said Ramos. “Anybody who owns anything on the coast? The people you’re supposedly trying to protect? Do you realize what the Plan means to them? You’re saying millions of people have to abandon their homes and businesses—most of their net worth—and even if they were willing to do that, they can’t leave because they can’t sell their houses! Property values have gone through the floor, which means property taxes are down, which means no money for schools, which means even if the house is on high ground, families with kids don’t want to move there! And the best part? Not only has the state’s bond rating gone down to junk, but the legislature, right now, is talking about raising taxes to pay off all the assholes cashing in the bonds they’ve already bought!
“And go to Louisiana! Maryland! Delaware! New Jersey! North Carolina! They’ll tell you the same story! Your goddamn Plan is declaring war on us just by existing! As an idea! Without anybody even trying to implement it! And you wonder why we’re fighting it?”
“I notice you left Virginia out of that list,” said Carrie. “I’m from Virginia. I used to live and work in Norfolk. I know at least as much about the problem as you do.”
“That’s just it! If you were from some godforsaken flyover state like North Dakota or something, it would make sense. You wouldn’t have any way of knowing what you were destroying. But you know!”
“Yes. I do. And you know as well as I do that the Plan is not the problem. The problem is rising sea levels. Without the Plan, the problem would be worse.”
“No, without the Plan, we’d have a better Plan. A Plan that protects everything. A Plan that doesn’t accept excuses about why things can’t be done and places can’t be saved. If a wall sinks, build another one on top of it! If water gets in under it, pump it out! Or do something else!”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know! That’s your problem—you keep asking! You never ask engineers what’s possible—you tell them what to do and let them figure out how!”
Carrie shook her head. “First of all, if we try to do things your way, the cost alone will break us. By the time we’re ready to do things my way, we won’t be able to afford the Plan because we’ll be spending so much money meeting the interest on the national debt. Second—I really shouldn’t have to explain this to a fellow Democrat—failure is disheartening. The government tries to do something, it doesn’t get the results people are hoping for, and instead of saying ‘let’s try harder’ people say ‘let’s give up.’ That�
��s been the story of so many government programs. Hope is like money—false hope drives the real thing out of circulation. And the more you try to print, the less people take it seriously.”
“By the time this becomes a problem, your daughter’s going to be old enough to run for president. Why are you making decisions now based on problems that might come up then? Why can’t you trust future generations to fight their own battles?”
“Because that kind of thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place,” said Carrie. “You and me—once upon a time, we were the future generations that were supposed to solve the problem. We were supposed to have the tools that would make it possible. Well, here we are. We have some of the tools, but the problem’s grown enormously. Do you really want to hand things over to our children—or their children?”
“What I want,” he said, “is to fight. I want to fight sea level rise on the beaches, I want to fight it in the marshes, I want to fight it everywhere like Churchill. There’s a reason why I called you a ‘quisling for the fish’—I want us to treat this problem the same way we’d treat a foreign invasion. I want us to cede nothing. If we fail, we try again. If we need more money, we get more money—tax it, borrow it, print it, whatever. If we need more hope, then we hope. We never, ever give up. Certainly not at this stage.”
* * *
When Carrie left the meeting, she turned on her phone. She’d gotten a text from Thel assuring her that she and her friends had arrived safely in D.C. and were on their way to see Rodomontade live at the Verizon Center. After hearing some of their music, Carrie would have been more tempted by seeing Rodomontade dead at the Verizon Center, but at least somebody in the family could come to this city and get what they wanted.
* * *
