The reinsurance companies had underwritten most of the previous year’s North Atlantic salt fleet, so they were already acquainted with the huge costs of such projects, but also were the world’s experts in the even bigger costs of ignoring problems. They had been the one who ultimately had paid for the long winter, and they had their cost-benefit algorithms. And they were already well acquainted with the concept of robust decision making—something very desirable to them, as being less destructive to their business over the long haul.
Diane had invited representatives of the four big reinsurance companies to meet with her global-warming task force. About twenty people filled the conference room in the Old Executive Offices, including Anna, over for the day from NSF.
After Diane welcomed them, she got to the point in her usual style, and invited Kenzo to share what was known about the situation in the North Atlantic and more globally. Kenzo waved at his PowerPoint slides like a pops orchestra conductor. Then one of the reinsurance nat cat (natural catastrophe) guys from Swiss Re gave a talk which made it clear that in insurance terms, sea-level rise was the worst impact of all. A quarter of humanity lived on the coastlines of the world. About a fifth of the total human infrastructure was at risk, he said, if sea level rose even two meters; and this was the current best guess as to what might happen in the coming decade. And if the breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet went all the way, they were facing a rise of seven meters.
It was something you could be aware of without quite comprehending. They sat around the table pondering it.
Frank seized his pen, squeezed it as if it were his recalcitrant brain. “I’ve been looking at some numbers,” he said haltingly. “Postulating, for a second, that we have developed really significant clean energy generation, then, observe, the amount of water displaced by the detached Antarctic ice so far is on the order of forty thousand cubic kilometers. Now, there are a number of these basins in the Sahara Desert and all across central Asia, and in the basin and range country of North America. Also in southern Africa. In effect, the current position of the continents and the trade wind patterns have desiccated all land surfaces around the thirtieth latitudes north and south, and in the south that doesn’t mean much, but in the north it means a huge land area dried out. All those basins together have a theoretical capacity of about sixty thousand cubic kilometers.”
He looked up from his laptop briefly, and it was as he had expected; they were looking at him like he was a bug. He shrugged and looked back at the PowerPoint, and forged on:
“So, you could pump a lot of the excess sea water into these empty basins in the thirties, and perhaps stabilize the ocean’s sea level proper.”
“Holy moly,” Kenzo said in the silence after it was clear Frank was done. “You’d alter the climate in those regions tremendously if you did that.”
“No doubt,” Frank said. “But you know, since the climate is going haywire anyway, it’s kind of like, so what? In the context of everything else, will we even be able to distinguish what this would do from all the rest?”
Kenzo laughed.
“Well,” Frank said defensively to the silent room, “I thought I’d at least run the numbers.”
“It would take an awful lot of power to pump that much water inland,” Anna said.
“I have no idea what kind of climate alteration you would get if you did that,” Kenzo said happily.
Frank said, “Did the Salton Sea change anything downwind of it?”
“Well, but we’re talking like a thousand Salton Seas here,” Kenzo said. He was still bug-eyed at the idea; he had never even imagined curating such a change, and he was looking at Frank as if to say, Why didn’t you mention something this cool out on our runs? “It would be a real test of our modeling programs,” he said, looking even happier. Almost giddy: “It might change everything!” he exclaimed.
“And yet,” Frank said. “People might judge those changes to be preferable to displacing a quarter of the world’s population. Remember what happened to New Orleans. We couldn’t afford to have ten thousand of those, could we?”
“If you had the unlimited power you’re talking about,” Anna said suddenly, “why couldn’t you just pump the equivalent of the displaced water back up onto the Antarctic polar plateau? Let it freeze back up there, near where it came from?”
Again the room was silent.
“Now there’s an idea,” Diane said. She was smiling. “But Frank, where are these dry basins again?”
Frank brought that slide back up on the PowerPoint. The basins, if all of them were entirely filled, could take about twenty percent of the predicted rise in sea level if the whole WAIS came off. It would take about thirty terawatts to move the water. The cost in carbon for that much energy would be ten gigatons, not good, but only a fraction of the overall carbon budget at this point. Clean energy would be better for doing it, of course. What effects on local climates and ecologies would be caused by the introduction of so many big new lakes was, as Kenzo had said, impossible to calculate.
“Those are some very dry countries,” Diane said after perusing Frank’s map. “Dry and poor. I can imagine, if they were offered compensation to take the water and make new lakes, some of them might decide to roll the dice and take the environmental risk, because net effects might end up being positive. It might make opportunities for them that aren’t there now. There’s not much going on in the Takla Makan these days, that I know of.”
The Swiss Re executive returned to Anna’s comment, suggesting that the system might be able go through proof of concept in Antarctica, after which, if it worked, countries signing on would have a better idea of what they were in for. Antarctic operations would incur extra costs, to keep pumps and pipelines heated; on the other hand, the environmental impacts were likely to be minimal, and population relocation not an issue at all. Maybe they could even relocate the excess ocean water entirely on the Antarctic polar cap. That would mean shifting water that floated away from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet up to the top of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet.
“Of course if we’re going to talk about stupendous amounts of new free energy,” Anna pointed out, “you could do all sorts of things. You could desalinate the sea water at the pumps or at their outlets, and make them fresh water lakes in the thirties, so you wouldn’t have Salton Sea problems. You’d have reservoirs of drinking and irrigation water, you could replenish groundwater, and build with salt bricks, and so on.”
Diane nodded. “True.”
“But we don’t have stupendous new sources of clean energy,” Anna said.
Good photovoltaics existed, Frank reminded her doggedly. Also a good Stirling engine; good wind power; and extremely promising ocean energy-to-electricity systems.
That was all very well, Diane agreed. That was promising. But there remained the capital investment problem, and the other transitional costs associated with changing over to any of these clean renewables. Who was going to pay for it?
It was the trillion-dollar question.
Here the reinsurance people took center stage. They had paid for the salting of the North Atlantic by using their reserves, then upping their premiums. Their reserves were huge, as they had to be to meet their obligations to the many insurance companies paying them for reinsurance. But swapping out the power generation system was two magnitudes larger a problem, more or less, than the salt fleet had been, and it was impossible to front that kind of money—almost impossible to imagine collecting it in any way.
“Well, but it’s only four years of the American military budget,” Frank pointed out.
People shrugged, as if to say, but still—that was a lot.
“It’s going to take legislation,” Diane said. “Private investment can’t do it. Can’t or won’t.”
General agreement, although the reinsurance guys looked unhappy. “It would be good if it made sense in market terms,” the Swiss Re executive said.
This led them to a discussion of macroeconomics, but even
there, they kept coming back to the idea of major public works. No matter what kind of economic ideology you brought to the table, the world they had set up was resolutely Keynesian—meaning a mixed economy in which government and business existed in an uneasy interaction. Public works projects were sometimes crucial to the process, especially in emergencies, but that meant legislating economic activity, and so they needed to have the political understanding and support it would take to do that. If so, they could legislate investment, and then in effect print the money to pay for it. That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.
Other economic stimuli might also complement this old standby. Edgardo had done some studies here, and it could all be handed to Chase as a kind of program, a mission architecture. A list of Things To Do.
After that, they heard a report from the Russian environmental office. The altered tree lichens they had distributed in Siberia the previous summer were surviving the winter there like any ordinary lichen. Dispersal had been widespread, uptake on trees rapid, as the engineers at Small Delivery Systems had hoped for.
The only problem the Russian could see was that it was possible, at least in theory, that the lichen dispersal would become too successful. What they were seeing now led them to think they might have overseeded, or actually overdispersed. Since most of what they had dispersed had survived, by next summer the Siberian forest around the site would reap whatever the winds and the Russians had sown. In the lab it was proving to grow more like algal blooms encased in mushrooms than like ordinary lichens. “Fast lichen, we call it,” the Russian said. “We didn’t think it was possible, but we see it happening.”
All that was very interesting, but when Frank got back in his office, he found that his computer wouldn’t turn on. And when the techs arrived to check it out, they went pale, and isolated the machine quickly, then carried the whole thing away. “That’s one bad virus,” one of them said. “Very dangerous.”
“So was I hacked in particular?” Frank asked.
“We usually see that one when someone has been targeted. A real poke in the eye. Did you back up your disks?”
“Well…”
“You better have. That’s a complete loss there.”
“A hard-drive crash?”
“A hard-drive bombing. You’ll have to file and report, and they’ll be adding you to the case file. Someone did this to you on purpose.”
Frank felt a chill.
-
CHARLIE’S DAYTIME OUTINGS WITH JOE had to happen on the weekends now. Even though they were past the First Sixty Days and had had a pretty good run with them, they were trying to keep the momentum going, and things kept popping up to derail the plans, sometimes intentional problems created by the opposition, sometimes neutral matters created by the sheer size and complexity of the system. Roy was pushing so hard that sometimes he even almost lost his cool. Charlie had never seen that, and would have thought it impossible, at least on the professional level. In personal matters, Roy and Andrea had gone through a spectacular in-office breakup, and during that time Charlie had endured some long and bitter rants from Roy. But when it came to business, Roy had always prided himself on staying calm. Calmness at speed was his signature style, as with certain surfing stars. And even now he persisted with that style, or tried to; but the workload was so huge it was hard to keep the calmness along with the pace. They were far past the time when he and Charlie were able to chat about things like they used to. Now their phone conversations went something like:
“Charlie it’s Roy have you met with IPCC?”
“No, we’re both scheduled to meet with the World Bank on Friday.”
“Can you meet them and the Bank team at six today instead?”
“I was going to go home at five.”
“Six then?”
“Well if you think—”
“Good okay more soon bye.”
“Bye.”—said to the empty connection.
Charlie stared at his cell phone and cursed. He cursed Roy, Phil, Congress, the World Bank, the Republican Party, the world, and the universe. Because it was nobody’s fault.
He hit the cell phone button for the daycare.
He was going to have to carve time for an in-person talk with Roy, a talk about what he could and couldn’t do. That would be an unusual meeting. Even though Charlie was now at the White House fifty hours a week, he still never saw Roy in person; Roy was always somewhere else. They spoke on the phone even when one of them was in the West Wing and the other in the Old Executive Offices, less than a hundred yards away. For a second Charlie couldn’t even remember what Roy looked like.
So; call to arrange for “extended stay” for Joe, a development his teachers were used to. Another exception to the supposed schedule. Because they needed the World Bank executing Phil’s program; in the war of the agencies, now fully engaged, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were among the most mulish of their passive-aggressive opponents. Phil had the power to hire and fire the upper echelons in both agencies, which was good leverage, but it would be better to do something less drastic, to keep the midlevels from shattering. This meeting with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN organization, might be a good venue for exerting some pressure. The IPCC had spent many years advocating action on the climate front, and all the while they had been flatly ignored by the World Bank. If there was now a face-off, a great reckoning in a little room, then it could get interesting.
But the meeting, held across the street in the World Bank’s headquarters, was a disappointment. These two groups came from such different world-views that it was only an illusion they were speaking the same language; for the most part they used different vocabularies, and when by chance they used the same words, they meant different things by them. They were aware at some level of this underlying conflict, but could not address it; and so everyone was tense, with old grievances unsayable and yet fully present.
The World Bank guys said something about nothing getting cheaper than oil for the next fifty years, ignoring what the IPCC guys had just finished saying about the devastating effects fifty more years of oil burning would have. They had not heard that, apparently. They defended having invested 94 percent of the World Bank’s energy investments in oil exploration as necessary, given the world’s dependence on oil—apparently unaware of the circular aspect of their argument. And, being economists, they were still exteriorizing costs without even noticing it or acknowledging such exteriorization had been conclusively demonstrated to falsify accounts of profit and loss. It was as if the world were not real—as if the actual physical world, reported on by scientists and witnessed by all, could be ignored, and because their entirely fictitious numbers therefore added up, no one could complain.
Charlie gritted his teeth as he listened and took notes. This was science versus capitalism, yet again. The IPCC guys spoke for science and said the obvious things, pointing out the physical constraints of the planet, the carbon load now in the atmosphere altering everything, and the resultant need for heavy investment in clean replacement technologies by all concerned, including the World Bank, as one of the great drivers of globalization. But they had said it before to no avail, and so it was happening again. The World Bank guys talked about rates of return and the burden on investors, and the unacceptable doubling of the price of a kilowatt hour. Everyone there had said all of this before, with the same lack of communication and absence of concrete results.
Charlie saw that the meeting was useless. He thought of Joe, over at the daycare. He had never stayed there long enough even to see what they did all day long. Guilt stuck him like a sliver. In a crowd of strangers, fourteen hours a day. The Bank guy was going on about differential costs, “and that’s why it’s going to be oil for the next twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years,” he concluded. “None of the alternatives are competiti
ve.”
Charlie’s pencil tip snapped. “Competitive for what?” he demanded.
He had not spoken until that point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion. Everyone was staring at him. He stared back at the World Bank guys.
“Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it’s thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You’re helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It’s the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible.”
The World Bank guys flinched at this. “Well,” one of them said, “we don’t see it that way.”
Charlie said, “That’s the trouble. You see it the way the banking industry sees it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real world. You’ve spent a trillion dollars of American taxpayers’ money over the lifetime of the Bank, and there’s nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and you then insist on austerity measures even though your actions have shattered their economy. You order them to cut their social services so they can pay off their debts to you and to your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That’s your idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you’ve been the United Fruit Company.”
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