He seemed to wilt into his acceptance of this new information. “This AI thing—that’s fucking dystopic.”
“It’s what we should’ve seen coming.”
He started walking again, and she nodded to the blue flame in the window of an apartment. “Then there’s this bullshit.”
“What about it?”
“Of all the do-gooders, Kate Morris is the apotheosis of liberalism’s pitiful fucking response to environmental collapse.”
“Right. So who fucking cares? She’s out to write the screenplay for her own biopic.”
“That’s why we need to move faster, Kai. Idiots like her are out there trying to lifestyle brand our way to better consumption in an extinction event, but what have we done, Kai? I mean, really, what have we done? Maybe we’re just as pitiful.”
“Yeah, well,” he scoffed. Then he started laughing, a slightly manic and infuriating sound. “At least she’s foxy, right?”
A weight came bearing down on her then. “Glad this is funny to you.” They’d been ambling, but now she bolted ahead of him, into the dust and dark. He was maddening. Over a decade of learning to be idle, to slink into these quiet lives of mud. Fifteen years of the plans and protocols, and what did they have to show for it? A few busted oil and gas pipelines? She was a lonely waitress and broke single mother shuttling coded messages over the mountains while the world cooked.
Kai caught up to her on the road. He snatched her elbow, and she wrested free of his grip.
“The fuck,” he said.
“I didn’t drive two thousand miles so you can treat this like a joke.”
On the street, crows descended giddily on a possum ground into the pavement. Kai released an exaggerated, exasperated breath. Finally, he said, “Obviously, I don’t think it’s a joke, Alvarez.” Her old name left his mouth gently.
“We’re moving too slowly,” she said. “We’re wasting our time on cheap bullshit.”
“I wouldn’t call what we’re planning cheap bullshit by any measure.”
“We need to escalate. And we need to start executing more quickly.”
“Quick gets us caught.”
“And slow gets us killed. Slow ends our world.”
They’d walked too far. She was suddenly filled with the sensation that she’d check the baby monitor, slick in her sweating palm, and there’d be a man standing over her daughter, glowing black-and-white in the night-vision camera.
“We meet at the cabin,” said Shane. “After this operation. All the Principals. To plan what comes next.”
When they got back to her place, she asked him to stay one more night before heading back to St. Louis. It wasn’t about sex or intimacy—he would sleep on the couch—it was about having someone there, in her home. They stayed up another hour, and he showed her maps of the facility. They studied the routes until the conversation winnowed and they had nothing to turn over but errant memories of the muggy days in New Orleans when they’d been young. He made up the couch and then went to shower the dust from his hair.
While he was using the bathroom, she picked with compulsion at the lattice structures the windblown soil had created in each nostril. He’d been sleeping in her bedroom, and now he’d moved his pack next to the couch. She couldn’t help herself. Smushed inside along with some basic T-shirt and jeans outfits, he had his copy of The Stand, and stuck inside, one of their flyers. She hadn’t seen this one before, though. It was addressed to Styx Capital Management in New York City. She replaced it and zipped the pocket shut.
That night, she couldn’t sleep and found herself thinking of the last of the gorillas, the tigers, the blackpoll warblers. The last of the wild. All those eyes in the sky incidentally bearing witness to a holocaust the scale of which had only occurred five other times in Earth’s four billion years. She often lay awake with this dark clarity of the world her daughter would know.
In the morning, Kai bid her farewell, dropping Lali off at daycare on his way out of town. Shane put on a new mask and went outside to brush the dust from her windows with a snow scraper. Her shift began at two. She drove under the bonfire heavens, but the dust was moving on. By the time she reached the highway, the billboards again beamed brightly. All around her, omnicidal frequencies cruised the airwaves, and she could feel each and every one of them adrift, sagging into the long night of extinction that lay in wait.
The New York Times
OPINION | GUEST ESSAY
A New Hope for the Planet
Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen
December 10, 2028
Following the haunting dust storm that descended on the East Coast this Thanksgiving, we would warn citizens and policymakers not to bury their heads in the accumulating drifts of soil from the plains, but to consider the patient crisis that can no longer be ignored.
Forty years ago, one of the authors, Dr. James Hansen, testified before Congress about the threat posed by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Global warming, as an idea, a threat, and a policy priority, entered the mainstream conversation. In the intervening decades we have seen from politicians, business leaders, and the media equivocation, delay, and denial in confronting the most urgent matter not only of our time but of all human history. All three of the authors have dedicated their lives to warning that a reckoning is near.
Delay has cost the world dearly. The global average temperature is now 1.2 degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels and rising faster than predicted. At just a 0.8–1.2-degree rise we have seen unprecedented weather events strike our planet with increasing regularity: record-setting floods, heat waves, and hurricanes. A decade of extreme heat, drought, and voracious wildfires have tormented California and the Southwest, destroying homes, farms, and lives while rattling the insurance industry and real estate market. In the African Sahel, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia, water scarcity is killing people by the thousands each month and sparking further refugee flows to Europe. Climate refugees will continue to surge into Western countries in numbers that will make accommodation increasingly difficult. The effects on food security and disease vectors are also frightening. Tropical diseases now thrive in regions where no doctor had ever before seen a case in her lifetime. Having fought back the scourge of Covid-19, the world waits with anxiety as each year new pathogens emerge while the epidemiology of known diseases mutates. Scientists have no clear playbook for when one of these new mass killers may break loose, but Covid-19 may simply be a harbinger of things to come.
As dire as these consequences may be, none of it holds a candle to the threat of sea level rise. This past summer, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica experienced a partial collapse. Half a Pennsylvania’s worth of ice broke away over a long weekend. Scientists estimate the other half may be lost in the next two years. This is a frightening development not because the Thwaites itself will raise sea levels, but because it buttresses a mountain of ice in West Antarctica. If and when the Thwaites collapses for good, the West Antarctic ice sheet will begin sliding into the ocean. This could raise sea levels by nine to thirteen feet, which is doomsday for every coastal city in the world.
Given the severity of events we’ve witnessed at one degree, one might think the world would mobilize, but delay continues to be the operating principle of our economic and political leaders. We’ve squandered precious years and staying below the 1.5-degree threshold is in all likelihood now impossible. Two degrees looms, and any temperature increase beyond that would likely be the end of global civilization as we understand it today.