Fifty Degrees Below

‘Wouldn’t that require help from NASA?’

‘Yes, NASA should be part of this. A really big booster is a prerequisite for any conceivable space solar, naturally.’

‘And what about DOE?’

‘Well, perhaps. We have to acknowledge that some federal agencies have been captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Clearly the Department of Energy is one of these. They should have been taking the lead on clean energy, but they began as the Atomic Energy Commission, so for a while they would only look at nuclear, and now they are creatures of the oil industry. So they have been obstructions to innovation for many years. Whether that can change now, I don’t know. I suspect the only good that can come from them is some version of clean coal. If coal can be gasified, it’s possible its carbon and methane could be captured and sequestered before burning. That would be good, if they can pull it off. But beyond that, the unfortunate truth is that DOE is more likely to be one of the impediments to our efforts than a help. We will have to do what we can to engage them, and dance around any obstacles they might set up.’

She clicked again. ‘Now, carbon capture and sequestering. Here, the hope is that ways can be found to draw down some of the CO2 already in the atmosphere. That could be a big help, obviously. There are proven mechanical means to do this, but the scale of anything we could afford to build is much too small. If anything’s going to work, it almost certainly will have to be biological. The first and most obvious method here is to grow more plants. Reforestation projects are thus helpful in more ways than one, as stabilizing soil, restoring habitat, growing energy, and growing building materials, all while drawing down carbon. Poplars are often cited as very fast growers with a significant drawdown possibility.

‘The other biological method suggested would involve some hypothetical engineered biological system taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than it does now. This brings biotech into the game, and it could be a crucial player. It might have the possibility of working fast enough to help us in the short term.’

For a while they discussed the logistics of initiating all the efforts Diane had sketched out so far, and then Anna took over the Power Point screen.

She said, ‘Another carbon sequestration, in effect, would be to not burn oil that we would have using our current practices. Meaning conservation. It could make a huge difference. Since the United States is the only country living at American consumption levels, if we here decided to consume less, it would significantly reduce world consumption levels.’

She clicked to a slide titled Carbon Values. It consisted of a list of phrases:

• conservation, preservation (fuel efficiency, carbon taxes)

• voluntary simplicity

• stewardship, right action (religion)

• sustainability, permaculture

• leaving healthy support system for the subsequent generations

Edgardo was shaking his head. ‘This amishization, as the engineers call it – you know, this voluntary simplicity movement – it is not going to work. Not only are we fond of our comforts and toys, and lazy too, but there is a fifty billion dollar a year industry fighting any such change, called advertising.’

Anna said, ‘Maybe we could hire an advertising firm to design a series of voluntary simplicity ads, to be aired on certain cable channels.’

Edgardo grinned. ‘Yes, I would enjoy to see that, but there is a ten trillion-a-year economy that also wants more consumption. It’s like we’re working within the body of a cancerous tumor. It’s hopeless, really. We will simply charge over the cliff like lemmings.’

‘Real lemmings don’t actually run off cliffs,’ Anna quibbled. ‘People might change. People change all the time. It just depends on what they want.’

She had been looking into this matter, which she jokingly called macrobioinformatics: researching, refining and even inventing various rubrics by which people could evaluate their consumption levels quantitatively, with the idea that if they saw exactly what they were wasting, they would cut back and save money. The best known of these rubrics, as she explained, were the various ‘ecological footprint’ measurements. These had been originally designed for towns and countries, but Anna had worked out methods for households as well, and now she passed around a chart illustrating one method, with a statistical table that illustrated her earlier point that since Americans were the only ones in the world living at American consumption levels, any reduction here would disproportionately shrink the total world footprint.

‘The whole thing should be translated into money values at every step,’ Edgardo said. ‘Put it in the best way everyone in this culture can understand, the cost in dollars and cents. Forget the acreage stuff. People don’t know what an acre is anymore, or what you can expect to extract from it.’

‘Education, good,’ Diane said. ‘That’s already part of our task as defined. And it will help to get the kids into it.’

Edgardo cackled. ‘Okay, maybe they will go for it, but also the economists should be trying to invent an honest accounting system that doesn’t keep exteriorizing costs. When you exteriorize costs onto future generations you can make any damn thing profitable, but it isn’t really true. I warn you, this will be one of the hardest things we might try. Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it’s the happy religion.’

Frank tended to agree with Edgardo’s skepticism about these kinds of social interventions; and his own interests lay elsewhere, in the category Diane had labeled ‘Mitigation Projects.’ Now she took back the Power Point from Anna and clicked to a list which included several of the suggestions Frank had made to her earlier:

1) establishing one or more national institutes for the study of abrupt climate change and its mitigation, analogous to Germany’s Max Planck Institutes.

2) establishing grants and competitions designed to identify and fund mitigation work judged crucial by NSF.

3) reviewing the already existing federal agencies to find potentially helpful projects they had undertaken or proposed, and coordinate them.

All good projects, but it was the next slide, ‘Remedial Action Now,’ that was the most interesting to Frank. One of the obvious places to start here was with the thermohaline circulation stall. Diane had gotten a complete report from Kenzo and his colleagues at NOAA, and her tentative conclusion was that the great world current, though huge, was sensitive in a nonlinear way to small perturbations. Which meant it might respond sensitively to small interventions if they could be directed well.

So, Diane concluded, this had to be investigated. How big a sea surface was critical to downwelling? How precisely could they pinpoint potential downwelling sites? How big a volume of water were they talking about? If they needed to make it saltier in order to force it to start sinking again, how much salt were they talking about? Could they start new downwellings in the north where they used to happen?

Kenzo’s eyes were round. He met Frank’s gaze, waggled his eyebrows like Groucho. Pretty interesting stuff!

‘We have to do something,’ Diane declared, without glancing at Frank. He thought: she’s been convinced. I was at least part of that. ‘The Gulf Stream is an obvious place to look at remediation, but there are lots of other ideas for direct intervention, and they need to be evaluated and prioritized according to various criteria – cost, effectiveness, speed, all that.’

Edgardo grinned. ‘So – we are going to become global biosphere managers. We are going to terraform the Earth!’

‘We already are,’ Diane replied. ‘The problem is we don’t know how.’

Later that day Frank joined the noon running group, going with Edgardo and Kenzo down to the gym to dress and join Bob and Clark, from the Antarctic program on the seventh floor. The group was sometimes larger than this, sometimes smaller. They ran various routes, usually on old rail beds now converted into bike and running trails all through the area. Their usual lunchtime special ran parallel to Route 66 east for a while, then back around the curve of the Potomac and west back to NSF.

They ran at talking speed, which for this group meant about an eight-minute mile pace. A lot of the talking came from Edgardo, riffing on one thing or another. He liked to make connections; he liked to question things. He didn’t believe in anything. Even the scientific method was to him a kind of ad hoc survival attempt, a not-very-successful concoction of emergency coping mechanisms. Which belief did not, however, keep him from working maniacally on every project thrown his way, nor from partying late almost every night at various Latin venues. He was from Buenos Aires originally, and this, he said, explained everything about him. ‘All of us porteños are the same.’

‘There’s no one like you, Edgardo,’ Bob pointed out.

‘On the contrary. In Buenos Aires everyone is like me. How else could we survive? We’ve lived the end of the world ten times already. What to do after that? You just put Piazzolla on the box and dance on, my friend. You laugh like a fool.’

You certainly do, Frank didn’t say. Of course Edgardo also did mathematics with applications in quantum computing, cryptology, and bio-algorithms, the last of which was the only aspect of his work that Frank understood. It was clear to him that at DARPA Edgardo must have had his fingers in all kinds of pies, subjects that Frank was much more interested in now than he had ever been before.

Where it paralleled Highway 66 the running path became a thin concrete walk immediately north of the freeway, between the cars and the soundwall, with only a chain link fence separating them from the roaring traffic to their right. The horribleness of it always made Edgardo grin. At midday when they usually ran it was totally exposed to the sun, but there was nothing for it but to put your head down and sweat through the smog.

‘You really should run with an umbrella hat on like I do.’ Edgardo looked ridiculous with this tall contraption on his saturnine head, but he claimed it kept him cool.

‘That’s what hair is for, right?’

‘Male pattern baldness has taken that away as an option for me, as I am sure you have noticed.’

‘Wouldn’t that make baldness maladaptive?’

‘Maladaptive in more ways than heat control, my friend.’

‘Did you read that book, Why We Run? Explains how everything about us comes from adaptations to running? Even hair staying on the tops of our heads?’

Edgardo made a rude noise. ‘Why We Run, Why We Love, Why We Reason, all these are the same, they are simply titles for the bestseller list.’

‘Why We Run was good,’ Frank objected. ‘It had stuff on the physiology of endurance. And it talked about how lots of native peoples ran animals down, over a matter of several days, even deer and antelope. The animals were faster, but the chase group would keep on pounding away until they wore the animals out.’

‘Tortoise and hare.’

‘I’m definitely a tortoise.’

‘I’m going to write one called Why We Shit,’ Edgardo declared. ‘I’ll go into all the details of digestion, and compare ours to other species, and describe all the poisons we take in and then have to process or pass through, or get poisoned by. By the time I’m done no one will ever want to eat again.’

‘So it could be the next diet book too.’

‘That’s right! Atkins, South Beach, and me. The Alfonso Diet. Eat nothing but information! Digest that for once and never shit at all.’

‘Like on Atkins, right?’

They left 66 for the river, passed through trees, and then the sun beat down on them again.

‘What did you think of Diane’s meeting?’ Frank asked Edgardo when they were bringing up the rear.

‘That was pretty good,’ Edgardo said. ‘Diane is really going for it. Whoever heads these agencies can make a lot of difference in how they function, I think. There are constraints on what each agency does, and the turf battles are fierce. But if an agency head were to get an idea and go after it aggressively, it could get interesting. So it’s good to have her pushing. What’s going to surprise her is what vicious opposition she’s going to get from certain other agencies. There are people out there really committed to the status quo, let us say.’

They caught up with Bob and Kenzo and Clark, who were discussing the various odd climate interventions they had heard proposed.

Bob said, ‘I like the one about introducing a certain bacterial agent to animal feed that would then live in the gut and greatly reduce methane production.’

‘Animal Flatulence Avoidance Feed! AF AF – the sound of Congress laughing when they hear about that one.’

‘But it’s a good idea. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and it’s mostly biologic in origin. It wouldn’t be much different than putting vitamin A in soy sauce. They’ve done that and saved millions of kids from rickets. How is it different?’

They laughed at Bob, but he was convinced that if they acted boldly, they could alter the climate deliberately and for the good. Kenzo wasn’t so sure; Edgardo didn’t think so.

‘Just think of it as something like the Manhattan Project,’ Bob said. ‘A war against disaster. Or like Apollo.’

Edgardo was his usual acid bath. ‘I wonder if you are fantasizing physically or politically.’

‘Well we obviously can change the atmosphere, because we have.’

‘Yes, but now we’ve triggered abrupt change. Global warming is a problem that could have taken centuries to fix, and now we have three years.’

‘Maybe less!’ Kenzo bragged.

‘Well, heck,’ Bob said, unperturbed. ‘It’ll be a matter of making things up as we go along.’

Frank liked the sound of that.

They ran in silence for a while. Fleeting consciousness of the pack; immersion in the moment. Slipping slickly in your own sweat.

‘Hotter than hell out here.’

After these runs Frank would shower and spend the afternoons working, feeling sharper than at any other time of the day. Mornings were for talking and prepping, afternoons were for work. Even algorithm work, where the best he could do these days was try to understand Yann’s papers, now growing scarcer as Small Delivery made his work confidential.

There was always more to do than there was time to get it done, so he pitched in to the items on the list and set his watch’s alarm for five, a trick he had picked up from Anna, so he would not forget and work deep into the evening. Then he cranked until it beeped. These hours disappeared in a subjective flow where they felt like minutes.

More work was accomplished than there is time to tell, ranging from discussions in house to communications with other people in other organizations, to the endless Sisyphean labor of processing jackets, which is what they called the grant proposals, never mind they were all onscreen now. No matter how high in the Foundation a person got, and no matter how important his or her other tasks might be, there was always the inevitable question from above: how many jackets did you process today? And so really there was no conceivable end to the work that could be done. Given Diane’s interests now, there could never be enough networking with the outside world, and this of course brought Frank news of what everyone else was doing; and sometimes in the afternoons, first listening to a proposal to genetically engineer kelp to produce bulbs filled with ready-to-burn carbohydrates, then talking for an hour with the UNEP officer in town to plan a tidal energy capture system that placed a barge on a ratcheted piling in the tidal zone, then conferring with a group of NGO science officers concerning the Antarctic microwave project, and then speaking to people in an engineering consortium of government/university/industry groups about cheap efficient photovoltaics, he would come out of it to the high beeping of his watch alarm, dizzy at the touch of the technological sublime, feeling that a good array of plans existed already – that if they could enact this array, it would go a long way toward averting catastrophe. Perhaps they were already in the process of doing so. It was actually hard to tell; so much was happening at any one time that any description of the situation had some truth in it, from ‘desperate crisis, extinction event totally ignored’ to ‘minor problems robustly dealt with.’ It was therefore necessary to forge on in ignorance of the whole situation.

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