Haniya had expressed a similar sentiment before she left when she attempted to broach the topic of our mother: “I don’t think you get how much she’s changed. Since Papa died, it’s been one step after another. She didn’t blink when she met Pete. She has a new best friend at the country club who’s Black. Black, Ash. I remember back when she used to tell us that the races don’t belong mixing.”
“The issue is not that this person in my life is white, Hani.”
That single, terrifying sentence was as close as I’d ever come to admitting to my sister what I’m sure she’d already long known.
“I’m just saying, Ash, you have to give people the chance to not disappoint you.”
By the time Dr. Pietrus arrived, forty minutes late, I was so lost in thought on these personal issues that his entrance was akin to a plate shattering on the floor.
“I apologize,” he said without a hint of apology. “I met my daughter in New York for brunch and it was— You know, it was a whole thing.”
He slid into his chair and dispensed water into his glass. He wore a rumpled suit, and I was reminded that he was constantly in a state of dishevelment. His skin was dry and pallid, his lips chapped and peeling. He looked ten years older than he should and reeked of cigarettes. While searching the pockets of his jacket and pants, he muttered the question:
“You don’t have kids, do you?”
“No.”
“They get old enough so you can’t just give them a time-out or take away their doll. And they don’t listen to you anymore. You try to give them advice, but it’s useless.” He removed a tablet from his breast pocket and slid his finger across the screen to bring up his notes. He took the stylus and scrawled something, crossing his legs tight and pinching his lips. “I gotta say, it’s some pretty weak tea bullshit of Jane to send you. I’m insulted she didn’t at least come begging on her own.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you’ve both drank the Kool-Aid. You’re political totems now.”
“That’s not how we see it.”
“Then get your eyesight checked.”
Dr. Pietrus has never been accused of tact. One learns not to take too much offense at his brusque demeanor, but in my opinion, he’s been politicized into a rather rabid paranoia. I told him:
“I would think you’d be happy that the Randall administration views climate policy as its top priority and has brought in respected scientists to shape legislation.”
“Hasan, don’t be a dimwit. You won’t have a fingerprint on this thing by the time it gets through. If it gets through.”
“We’re modeling the legislation in NOAA’s IAM. We’ll be able to present the politicians with firm evidence of how the legislation will affect processes.”
“Right. Because politicians are always interested in sober evidence. Congress is just another neon-lit whorehouse.” He set his tablet down, leaned back, and laced his fingers over his small belly. His shirt had a stain near the third button and another on his jacket. “I was thinking on the ride down here, part of the problem is that you guys come from the world of modeling. That’s fine. I’ve done some myself. But it’s all hypothetical to you. The models haven’t kept pace with the chaos we’re observing. The modeling community is always lagging behind the observed trends. And that’s not to say you haven’t done impressive stuff. You get a computer with ten petaflops and grid spacing at six to ten kilometers, and you’ll turn some heads. But it doesn’t matter outside of what’s actually happening. You’re playing video games, boss. Complex systems with multiple processes and feedbacks will always exhibit emergent behavior that will surprise you. Too many dynamical pathways linking cause and effect, which is why our hypotheses that get encouraged by the models tend to break down in the real world.”
“Perhaps. But in your public advocacy, you display certainty. I don’t believe in certainty. It makes for bad science.”
“You’ve been giving denialists and slow-walkers ammunition for years, Hasan. And speaking of sloppy science, your models have been a disaster when it comes to soil respiration. Shifts in ecosystems are tilting to a net carbon loss.”
“The models still don’t agree on that.”
“Fuck the models. You saw the numbers coming in from Greenland this summer. Surface melting and ocean warming at the intermediate depths is now in overdrive. Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are frying. Hell, the West Antarctic sheet alone, once that melts—global civilization is a complex entity extremely vulnerable to disruption. This isn’t a pissant cold virus with a mortality rate a tick higher, this is nearly a million cubic miles of sea and glacier ice that’ll spill. Even mild regional effects could have dire consequences for humanity’s survival, and you’re sitting there with all the concern of a happy baby in a fresh diaper.”
“That’s not the matter at hand, Tony. If industrial chemists had used bromine instead of chlorine in the development of CFCs, it would have eradicated the ozone layer within a few decades, probably leading to the collapse of most societies. It’s only an accident of economies of scale that we avoided this. We do what we can with the information we have available. I’ll remind you that the job of a scientist is to view the world empirically, even if the results are in occasional disagreement with our ideological preferences.”
He smirked, nodding his head as if he’d anticipated this line of argument.
“Why am I here? Why did you and Jane make me truck three hours on a train to listen to this beshitted lecture?”
“Jane says the president wants your endorsement of the legislation. Or if you can’t give us that, then at least neutrality.”
“Are you kidding? I’m canceled! I have no say in anything! I lost my book contract, I got shuttled to an emeritus role at Yale. No one’s listening to me.”
“Jane seems to think you are one of the few people with the ability to detonate the policy if you speak out against it. Which, knowing you, I somewhat assume.”
“You see this graffiti the so-called terrorists are putting up? Weathermen or 6Degrees—whatever they’re called? ‘You are not a neutral witness.’ If it’s a bad bill, I’m gonna say so—I promise you that.”
“What would you have us do? If you were in our position?”
Dr. Pietrus laughed darkly at this question. “Are you kidding? I literally wrote the book on this.”
I was growing impatient with him, and the feeling seemed mutual. “Those involved seem to think it’s politically impossible to enact virtually any of your recommendations.”
“And guess what, the biosphere doesn’t give a shit about the craven vicissitudes of the American political system. You’re pushing modest standards, which can all be eviscerated if the administration changes, when we need a two hundred dollar per metric ton tax rising twenty dollars a year, every year, at minimum. We need to phase out coal in the next two years. That means beginning to shut down plants by fiat and have the government nationalize all coal stocks. Preferably we’d buy fifty-one percent stakes in every major carbon producer and unwind them as rapidly as possible. We need to be commissioning five new nuclear reactors a year for the next twenty. Then we need to hammer the shit out of India and China until they’re on board. The bottom line is no one really has any idea how rapidly we can decarbonize the global economy at this point, but we’re going to have to find out.”
It took many years for me to learn how to look people in the eye. Dr. Pietrus now drilled his into mine, and I reverted to a past self and cast my gaze down.
I said: “You have read the white paper then.”
“Oh, I’ve read it.”
“And your assessment.”
“My assessment? You’ve got no carbon price, a toothless set of standards for buildings, vehicles, and the utility sector that, best case, will let business-as-usual roll on another ten years, money to ill-advisedly arm coastal real estate, and on top of it all, a tax cut? No one involved in this legislation appears to understand the gravity of the situation. If we’d enacted this forty years ago, yeah, sure, maybe the economy would have moved toward a less carbon-intensive path. But it’s too late for that. We’re going to be at two degrees by the end of the next decade, on our way to at least four and maybe even six. We need all hands on deck. We need to go to war. And this? This is a joke. So my assessment is that this plan falls under the category of Don’t Even Fucking Bother.”