Fred spent most of lunch talking shop. The fund had a year as the newest belle of the ball, but that was long gone. Tara had stalled out, for now, as a midlevel fund, working with $2 billion in assets. Other firms had played the global food shock better.
“We’re in for nearly eighty thousand hectares of farmland in Ukraine. I told Peter everyone has assurances the new Kremlinized government will not mess with these holdings, which is why Love allowed Russia to go in in the first place.” Fred cracked a piece of sourdough over his soup. He’d been getting treatments at the Noxium Spa. He looked young, but the tan gave his skin an orange hue that looked less than natural. “Thirteen years ago it’s life or death for democracy, but now the world needs that ag production. China, on the other hand, has everyone freaked.”
“What’s happening in China?” I asked. “I mean, aside from the riots and hunger and—not to be dismissive,” I added, rolling my eyes at the way I sounded. Everyone in finance begins speaking like this, and I tried to at least catch myself in the act.
“These student groups—or whatever they are—6Degrees in Cantonese. They’ve locked themselves in a couple of police stations and a military base. Somehow they managed to take over prime government installations without firing a shot. All hacking and subterfuge and occupation tactics. Stuff they copied from Morris and the siege.”
“How does that affect Tara, though?”
Fred’s eyebrows shot up with a goofy, knowing look. “Chinese government’s never exactly been known for its tolerance of disobedience. Kashgar is in meltdown with the Uyghur situation, but people are in the streets all over the country. The rural areas are eating about a bowl of rice a day. Peter said to me, ‘It’s easier to price nuclear war than it is civil unrest in China.’ ”
“What about that report.” I speared a shrimp on my fork. “Chaos of Investment or something? I’d like to read that.”
“Sure. It’s based on proprietary modeling, though, so it’ll have encrypted portions,” he explained, referring to the security procedures Peter had put in place around the al-Hasan model. “Basic premise is that the socioecological situation in the Arctic is going to be one of the biggest investment opportunities of the century, and it has to be handled by the good guys, or the whole region could end up strip-mined. We have companies that think they can fit these operations into an ESG portfolio.”
Though he was still nominally the head of investor relations, Fred had taken a much greater interest in the firm’s day-to-day bets. I’d focused my work on Tara’s ESG investing and philanthropic work. I wanted Tara to carve out an advantage by becoming one of the most socially responsible hedge funds on the street. This wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. These positions and trades moved so fast, powered by incomprehensible complex systems models, and socially responsible investing could become an ever-retreating goal. Still, I thought this was an excellent way to capture the attention of new investors. I’d even managed to convince a reporter for the New Yorker to profile the fund, but that had turned into a sticky PR situation. The reporter, Farooki, had been looking to court me, not the other way around. She was interested in a firm called ANøNosiki, which I knew nothing about. After a few frustrating back-and-forths on the subject, I referred her to Media Relations, and Fred got in touch with a few contacts to kill the story from there. The name ANøNosiki stuck with me, though.
“Really? Mining the Arctic as ESG?”
He looked up at me and wiped his mouth. “Well, people have been ringing alarm bells on the melt for decades, right? But the warming is having all these incredible benefits. We now have ice-free ship passage in the Arctic, the greatest boon to world trade since the Clinton administration. Then there are the new energy horizons in Greenland, just these unfathomable fortunes of minerals, uranium, and even oil and gas if the majors can lean on them to reopen exploration. And the precision companies can operate with now—we’re talking minimal impact. It’ll be like they weren’t even there.”
I laughed. “You’ve never been much of a recycler.”
“Come on, Jack, I’m serious. We’re forging this new direction—it’s exciting. Peter wants to call it ‘socially responsible extraction,’ but I don’t like the word ‘extraction.’ We need another term there.”
When Fred sat with investors, he would talk about growing up in Humboldt County and how his dad had lost job after job as the timber industry was more or less legislated and regulated out of California. “The environmentalists were basically at war with these working-class logging guys, and it was just so baffling and backward,” he once told me. “My dad loved the forest—hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, that’s all we did. It was our home, and it just felt so unfair the way we got vilified. And it didn’t have to be like that. It was these few rapacious investors versus hard-line, no-compromise greens, and neither side actually lived there. No one cared about the communities they were invading or the ecosystems they claimed to be protecting. And when the Sustainable Future folks hired us, I met with some of the guys in the production fields, and I can see the exact same thing happening in oil and gas. All these high-paying working-class jobs that could be gone soon. I grew up watching my dad lost and depressed until he had the heart attack, so it’s hard not to let all this get a little personal.”
It wasn’t until he told me this story that I really understood Fred—why, despite his wild successes in two of the most competitive fields in American business, he carried such a broken heart. We both learned an instinctive lesson as children. To paraphrase my father: If you’re not on top of the mountain, then you’re scrambling over loose rock, and that’s a damn dangerous place to be. Since I’d become wealthy beyond anything I’d ever imagined for myself, I’d been trying to focus my efforts on giving back, but like Fred, I carried the secret knowledge that so many of our affluent peers would never understand: what it felt like to be broke in America. How it could practically change your DNA.
Looking up from his meal, he asked, “Do you remember all the fears of peak oil?”
“Not really.”
“That was the boogeyman in the 2000s. Then of course, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling come along and suddenly America’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia. Demand for energy will never peak, so if you keep prices low, oil and gas are cheap enough to get to market over anything. And now we have innovation with aerosol injection about to prove doomsayers wrong about global warming.”
I picked at the shrimp, not wanting to waste it, but also fully stuffed.
“You never worry, do you?”
“About what?
“Heat storms.”
We’d spent the summer of ’34 holed up in the Hamptons to escape the frying city. For ten days, I barely went outside except to get in and out of the car, anxiously watching news of the siege as sweat-soaked reporters described the agony of the temperature. Fred rolled his eyes.
“Our boy Norm Nate is about to corner the market on albedo management, and once he starts, the governments of the world are going to have to keep paying him to put those nanoparticles into the sky for the next century, at least. Managing the temperature will become about as easy as you and I playing with a thermostat. As long as we don’t elect anyone dumb enough to interfere and strand good tech fixes—that’s the only thing that freaks me out, if an AOC or Aamanzaihou administration shuts down innovation. All this to say, we might be making a few campaign contributions to The Pastor next year.”