They were working with Germany’s centrists to isolate Norway, Anders Breivik, and the EU countries now in the throes of a carbon-powered fascist movement. With the passage of ERASE, the stock prices of oil and gas companies had plunged, and Norway’s plan to renew its fossil sector looked as stupid as it was evil. Protests, boycotts, and occupations had broken out across Norway, Italy, France, Spain, Hungary, and Austria. Russia refused to sign on to the agreement under any circumstances; their gas was simply worth too much and the government would do whatever it could to undermine its enemies’ imperialist agenda. Similarly, India refused to sign on and would remain a problem. It had simply built so much coal-generating capacity so quickly that it had an entrenched political class subservient to the dirty energy. The increase in dangerously hot days had, by itself, spurred a boom in the installation of air-conditioning units, which had added nearly two hundred gigawatts of power to India’s grid. Though coal use had peaked in 2032, India planned to operate most of its coal-fired plants well into the second half of the century. As Tony had been saying since his book came out in 2017, the only logical solution was nuclear energy. His presentation to India focused on how it might execute a rapid buildout of its available pressurized heavy water reactors, and how this could allow for a rapid retirement of coal plants. In return for taking this pathway, the US could facilitate technology-sharing and financing for improvements to its dismal electric grid.
After the meeting with India, Ash said to him, “Nothing was mentioned of the massacres.”
Tony looked up from his cigarette. They stood in the small indoor garden of the diplomatic building where Ash always joined him when he ill-advisedly smoked. It was so unusual to hear Hasan express anything besides cold logic. He’d barely spoken of his sister in the months since August 15.
“I’m surprised to hear you’d want to bring it up,” said Tony.
“It is my ancestral homeland. My mother’s entire family has fled. The government is violent, irrational, and condones policies against Muslims that are near-genocidal. Why wouldn’t I care?”
“It’s not about caring. It’s about decoupling the issues. We don’t live in black-and-white. Never have, and certainly never will in this future. We need to hit net zero as fast as possible or everything we’re seeing is going to get much worse.”
“Every decision we make now, day by day, week by week,” said Hasan, “will be irrevocable. It would be arrogant if I didn’t express my reservations about working with such a government.”
Tony sucked on the smoke, but his lungs were too tired to enjoy it much.
“We take what looks like the moral path as often as we can. With what information we have available, as you always say. That’s all we can do.”
Ash smirked, a very strange expression for him. Tony had never seen anything like that on his face.
“I’ve come to decide morality and justice are overutilized words expressing misunderstood ideas. In the systems models we see civil breakdown, mass refugee flows, unchained barbarity waged by populations of people trying to snatch or defend scarce resources. What if we reach that tipping point in which there is nothing left to be done but truly ghastly and draconian measures? You’ve seen the CryoSat data from this summer.”
His lungs couldn’t bear it anymore. Tony dropped the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. “Bad choices and bad alternatives abound. We’re trying to save ourselves from being faced with the worst of them.”
They took two days off for Christmas, which Tony spent holding his granddaughter and thinking about tombstone dominoes. The CryoSat-2 measuring the thickness of polar ice was returning shocking numbers; modeling for the Amazon was looking extremely dire, forewarning that the lungs of the planet could be little more than a fire-scarred wasteland by 2050; the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate was finding multiple methane flares that were starting to reach the sea surface; permafrost with its 1.8 trillion tons of carbon was belching out from the Arctic in Siberia, Canada, and Alaska. The Tombstone Domino Theory of feedback loops was, as he’d been telling people for twenty years, probably initiated as soon as the world hit 365 ppm. At the current rate they were going, atmospheric carbon would not peak until 685 ppm, and even if this was the turning point and the global order reached net zero (an improbable miracle), most of the land ice on the planet would end up melting. Sea levels would rise by 230 feet eventually. Earth was on its way to four, five, or possibly six degrees of additional temperature rise. It was an endgame that would push the planet past anything a human could conceive of, and it might happen within the lifetime of his granddaughter. The last of his useless generation would die watching this down payment on chaos unspool. Holly, Catherine, and their peers would witness civilization entering its violent disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and armed conflict over water and arable land. Hannah Gail Yu’s generation would then see firsthand climatological events without precedent. Summer by summer, the planet would warm so quickly that whole nation-states and regions would incinerate in fires and dust storms while walls of water carried by unprecedented typhoons and rain bombs would wash away coasts and the world’s major cities would crumble into the sea. People would be assaulted by terrifying phenomena humanity had never before experienced. Hannah would watch these biospheric horrors rise, raze, and slaughter every few months for however long she could survive. There would be very little food production because agriculture would be next to impossible, and the food web would unravel as mass extinction wiped out species after species. She would not grow up to be president or a great ballet dancer or a neuroscientist or a VR influencer. She would be, like most of her generation, a scavenger, likely a part-time cannibal. Her life would be hard and violent. Then the generation after hers—the one that should have been populated by his great-grandchildren—would likely be the human species’ last because the surface of the planet would be too hot to sustain life.
He was back in D.C. two days later, sitting in a numbing meeting with Rathbone about Basel IV and the notion of “carbon quantitative easing” to make money out of thin air and tie it to carbon drawdown.
“What would we call it?” said some empty-suited pap from the financial sector. “A C-note? A Car-bill?”
Tony was wondering how all these dithering fools found their way into every important deliberative body, when suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Yellow tendrils fireworked in his eyes, and he gripped his chest as if he could rip out the blockage suffocating him. The last thing he remembered was slumping out of his chair onto the scratchy carpet, laying his cheek down on its fibers, and believing he was dead.
He’d barely been awake for an hour before the doctor at Sibley Memorial came in to ask if he knew that he had cancer. Later, the combination PET/MRI and PET/CT scans would reveal several large metastatic tumors in his lungs and liver, as well as the abdominal cavity. They could see a tumor like never before, while the fight against it remained primitive. A pelvic MRI, after an hour of its uneasy clanking and thrumming, found yet another tumor on his hip. This made him aware of his own body in a way he’d not wanted. Now with every step he thought of that tumor, one of many playpals, growing inside him.