“But that cuts both ways,” T.R. pointed out.
“What do you mean?” Saskia asked.
“If folks all over the world are going to get riled up at billionaires messing with the climate even when we are not really doing a goddamn thing, then we got no real downside politically.”
“You don’t, perhaps,” Saskia said.
“We might as well take action and save a few hundred million lives,” T.R. concluded, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
“They’re going to condemn you no matter what,” put in Cornelia from the far end of the table, where all had gone silent to listen to this. “So let them condemn you for something that is real and not just a made-up conspiracy theory.”
“It is a bit different where I come from,” Saskia said, but she didn’t want to draw invidious distinctions between Punjabi farmers and Dutch coffee shop hipsters.
“Setting aside the political dimension,” Daia said coolly, “what about actual, physical reality? Will geoengineering damage crop yields in Punjab? Or . . . Bangladesh? Hubei? Iowa? It can’t be good for everyone, everywhere.”
“I would, of course, defer to Eshma, who actually knows what she’s talking about,” said Mark, with a glance down to that end of the table. “But when you put it that way . . .”
“Nothing can be good for everyone, everywhere,” Eshma confirmed. “The models tell us that much.”
Mark continued. “And yet uncontrolled global warming will certainly kill, as T.R. points out, hundreds of millions or billions. We can’t stop it from happening in any other way.”
“Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth,” T.R. said, “it wouldn’t undo what we’ve done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.”
“People will ask, why not put the same amount of effort and engineering cleverness into removing that carbon from the atmosphere?” Daia said.
“And are you asking that, Daia? Or merely pointing out that others will?” Mark asked.
“Both, I suppose. I really am genuinely curious.”
“Let’s put a pin in that, I got a neat little demo,” T.R. said. He thumbed a speed dial on his phone and muttered, “Yeah, could you bring in the bell jars?”
“This is only part of the demo we’ll be showing to the media tomorrow,” T.R. said, a few minutes later. “We are working on a bigger presentation. But I thought you might get a kick out of it.”
“Could you first say more about the media?” Saskia inquired. “I was told—”
“All NDAed, all embargoed. As my people discussed with your people when we set this up,” T.R. assured her. “Sooner or later, according to your man Willem, you’re going to make it public that you visited the site.”
“We have to,” Saskia said.
“The agreement was, you can do that on your own timetable. That agreement stands, Your Majesty. And it’s up to you whether you take a pro-, anti-, or neutral position.”
T.R. seemed rattled by how Saskia had just reacted, to the point where she now felt it necessary to put him at ease. “My job is an unusual one,” Saskia said. “The boundary between personal and public is complicated and somewhat ambiguous. One moment I am enjoying a lovely dinner with interesting people and the next I’m having to think about media. Pardon the interruption.”
“Pardon me for letting that dirty word out of my mouth!” T.R. answered. He glanced awkwardly at Daia (who had been a media personality) and then at the rest of the guests, who had fallen silent when one of T.R.’s aides had rolled in a stand supporting a pair of glass bell jars. Beneath one was a heap of powdered sulfur—a miniature version of the huge pile they’d seen earlier. Beneath the other was a mound of powder the same size, but black as black could be. “Two elements,” T.R. said, “alike in dignity! The yellow one needs no introduction. You’ll have guessed that the black one is carbon. Both alter the climate. Carbon makes it get warmer by trapping the sun’s rays. Sulfur cools it by bouncing them back into space.”
“We’ve been over this, T.R.,” Bob reminded him.
“Sorry. Preacher man gotta preach. What’s not so obvious is the incredible difference in leverage between these two substances. To put enough of this stuff”—he slapped the carbon bell jar, and his wedding ring made a sharp noise on the glass—“into the atmosphere to bring the temp up a couple degrees, we had to put a large part of the human race to work burning shit for two centuries. We chopped down forests, dug up peat bogs, excavated huge coal mines, emptied oil reserves the size of mountains. Hell, in Afghanistan they even burn shit. All that disappeared into the air. The total weight of excess carbon we put into the atmosphere is about three hundred gigatons. All those trees, all that coal, all the oil and peat and shit. Now. To reverse that change in temperature—to bring it back down by two degrees—how much sulfur do you think we need to put into the stratosphere? A comparable amount? Not even close. A smaller amount? Yes, but that don’t do it justice. Because sulfur has leverage like you wouldn’t believe. This amount of carbon here”—he once again did the wedding ring thwack on the bell jar full of black stuff—“could be neutralized, in terms of its effect on global temperature, by an amount of sulfur too small to be seen by the naked eye. So small that we couldn’t even demo it in these bell jars unless I rolled out a microscope. Tomorrow you’ll see the ratio. A boxcar of coal, and a cube of sulfur you can put in the palm of your hand.”
“You’re saying that removing the carbon from the atmosphere would be a much bigger project than putting sulfur into it,” Saskia said.
“We would have to make a pile of carbon the size of Mount Rainier. About thirty cubic miles. Imagine a cube a mile on a side, full of this stuff.” He rested his hand a little more gently on the carbon jar. “And now imagine thirty of those. To get that done in any reasonable amount of time—let’s say fifty years—you have to imagine a 747 cargo freighter loaded with pure elemental carbon dumping it onto the pile every nine seconds for fifty years, 24/7/365,” T.R. said. “Now, maybe someone will make that happen. But they gotta be a whole lot richer and more powerful than everyone sitting around this table put together.”
“We all live in technocratic societies,” Saskia said, “and we naturally think in terms of a certain style of doing things. A giant atmosphere processor that sucks in air and removes the carbon through a chemical process and loads it onto the 747s every nine seconds. But I am preparing, psychologically, to go home and talk about this with my daughter—whom you might think of as a proxy for millions of Greens. The question from them will be . . .”
“Why not plant a shitload of trees?” T.R. finished the sentence for her. “Or make algae bloom over big patches of ocean? Get plants to do the work for us.”
“Exactly. Is it just that plants can’t sequester enough carbon, fast enough?”
“Partly,” T.R. nodded.
“If I may,” said the lord mayor, “we have looked at this. Oh, England’s not big enough. Canada maybe. The scale of the program would be spectacularly enormous, and it would by its very nature have to be distributed over a significant part of the earth’s surface. Many jurisdictional boundaries crossed. Many nations would have to cooperate just so. And once the plants have grown and stored up all that biomass, you can’t allow the carbon to find its way back into the atmosphere, or else what’s the point? You basically have to chop down the forests, stack up the wood somewhere safe, make sure it never catches fire, and then start growing a whole new forest.”