Said Alice: “Isn’t that what you big-brained PhDs got the free flight for? What do your models say?”
Haniya: “I think it’s prudent to start talking about a minimum of six feet.”
Otero: “No—no way. Six feet, and you’re talking about buying out most of Miami and the Gulf Coast.”
Haniya: “It’s a reasonable estimate.”
Otero: “That’s a nonstarter.”
Rathbone: “I agree. We’re edging into furthering the panic instead of—”
Tony: “Fifty.”
Everyone looked at Tony, myself included. The remaining hair on the back of his head was sticking up, like he’d not bothered to comb it after getting out of bed. Secretary Rathbone looked incensed: “Excuse me?”
“We should draw the line at fifty feet of sea level rise.”
Otero snorted a laugh.
Rathbone chewed on a smile. “Sure, Tony. We’ll just relocate all the coastal states to South Dakota and call it a day. Could we return to a serious discussion?”
“I’m perfectly serious, Marty. You all worship the IPCC like a holy text. It’s been wrong consistently, and it’s wrong now. Like Haniya said, the rate of rise is accelerating. Doubling roughly every seven years, in fact. There’s no reason to think that’ll abate. And given what’s happening in West Antarctica, we have to assume that East Antarctica is not nearly as stable as we thought, nor Greenland. Trust me, fifty feet is not even the worst-case scenario. If all the ice on the planet melts, there’s two hundred and thirty feet of sea level rise in there.”
Said Admiral Dahms: “You’re proposing a decades-long refugee catastrophe, not a managed retreat.”
Rathbone shook his head. “It’s ridiculous. We choose a politically realistic line and build the policy around that.”
Tony’s irritation bloomed. “This isn’t some academic musing between economic Panglossians, Marty. The physics of marine ice cliff instability doesn’t give two fucks about what’s politically realistic.”
Secretary Rathbone looked to me. “Ashir, what is the most realistic line you can give us that is not fifty fucking feet of rise. One we can start building policy around?”
I pretended to stew for a moment. One must be careful in the handling of difficult realities. People cannot hear bad news all at once. “I’ll say fifteen feet by 2100, though I feel a great deal of hesitancy predicting that.” Though the truth was I did not.
Secretary Rathbone looked to the ceiling in frustration. “Fifteen feet by 2100.” He rubbed his eyes. “No way, no how can we use that number. Not without making everything worse.”
I continued: “We are talking about an ensemble of processes of enormous complexity. In all my work on social and economic consequences of warming, not one system dynamics model spat out The Pastor’s electoral victory or Victor Love’s abdication or the political crisis that ensued. We can only do our best with the information we have available.”
Rathbone regarded me wearily. “What the fuck are you talking about, Ash?”
Alice scolded him: “Rathbone, let the man have his say.”
“Sorry! It would just be nice to know if this guy has any fucking nerve endings is all.”
I went on: “Dynamic adaptive pathways planning can help us utilize the strategies that will work immediately. For instance, if we draw our coastal line too low, that may be okay, so long as aleatory uncertainty is priced in at certain topographical intervals.”
Otero: “What?”
Dahms: “You’re saying the solution—in regards to coastal retreat—is something low-end for now, but with a way of gradually moving people inland. Start with a line at three feet of rise and ratchet it up?”
Ms. Li Song finally spoke up: “Like a tax on homeowners, businesses, and renters living in the three- to ten-foot range. Then a smaller one in the ten- to fifteen-foot range.”
Haniya: “But at speed. Still offering buyouts for a window of time.”
Rathbone: “Call it a ‘Get the Fuck Out the Way’ tax.”
Of course, I’d already thought of all this, but after a long career in science and politics, I’ve learned it’s best to nudge people in the direction of the correct answer and allow them to think they’ve thought of it themselves. I told them: “Yes, that could arrest the present crisis while allowing room to maneuver in the future. What markets, media, and citizens need now is a sense that someone has command of the situation. Through many bizarre kinks and convolutions of history, that has fallen, at least for the moment, to us. Oh, and this is why I also think it would be best, Tony, if you, in place of Secretary Rathbone, addressed the media tomorrow.”
If optics were key, then my intuition proved correct. At the presser, Rathbone turned the podium over to Tony, who unfolded a piece of paper and began reading in a dull monotone:
“Currently, we are in a death spiral of escalating foreclosures, a crashing real estate market, and toxic securities leading to a wider paralysis of the financial system. But these mortgages are obviously not all worthless, and we are not all doomed. We are going to simultaneously deal with the financial crisis and the climate crisis. We in the president’s working group intend to draft legislation that will draw a defensible line around the coast of the United States and make people living on either side of that line secure so as to break the back of the panic. Then, through a program of economic stimulus, regulation, and adjustments to global trade we will finally speed the transition away from fossil fuels in order to stabilize planetary temperature rise below 2.5 degrees Celsius. Any questions?”
Thirty to fifty hands shot up, and a clamor for detail ensued. Tony remained impatient and irritated throughout. “Obviously, the devil will be in the details, and we don’t want to preempt ourselves here. You’ll see the full scope of our recommendations when we deliver it to the president and Congress.”
The questions came rapid-fire: “When will that be?”
“Soon.”
“Why are oil and gas companies represented in this process? How do you square that?”
“They are major stakeholders, but Earth’s nine billion people and their interests will come first.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“No.”
“But how can one piece of legislation avert the chaos sea level rise will cause? And how can one bill seemingly reverse decades of inaction on global warming?”
“Look, you want me to tell you we’re going to pass a bill and suddenly unicorns will start shooting out of my ass? Doubtful. But we’ll all still have a civilization to wake up to in the morning. Next question.”
“Will the country have to go deeply into debt to finance this plan? Will taxes go up?”
“You have an emergency, you called the lifeguard, now we’re swimming our asses out to you in choppy waters. But you know what the worst part is about trying to save someone from drowning? They’re panicking and trying to pull you down with them. Ask a better question next time.”
It went on like that for forty minutes with Tony more or less grousing the reporting pool to silence without saying much at all about the policy we had not yet agreed upon whatsoever. He was very convincing.
For a month we proceeded. The urgency was dire, but there were simply too many contingencies to consider. On July 2, Joe Otero asked if he could have a word with me in private.
“I have to leave.”
“For what reason?”
“The threats.”
This was about The Pastor. He’d declared his former running mate, President Hamby, the Antichrist and our task force the devil’s anti-Christian socialist takeover. In so many words, he was demanding violence to put a stop to whatever legislation we proposed. Because he represented congressional Republicans, Otero was being singled out by a collection of dangerous people with megaphones. Clearly, he was frightened even though the president had designated our meeting a Special National Security Event.