Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Can you make a copy of that for distribution?”

“Yes. It would also make sense to reach out to all the scientists in government, and ask them to get behind the National Academy statement on the climate for starters, then help us to work on the agencies they’re involved with.”

“Sure. But they don’t decide, and there’s management who will be against us no matter what their scientists say, because that’s why they were appointed in the first place.”

“There’s where your firing one of them may have an effect.” Frank grinned and Diane made a face.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to talk to Energy then. If they’re scared that they’ll lose their funding, that’s the moment to strike.”

“Which means we should be talking to the OMB?”

“Yes. We definitely need the OMB on our side. That should be possible, if Chase has appointed the right people to head it.”

“And then the appropriations committees.”

“The best chance there is to talk to their staffs, and to win some new seats in the midterm election. For Chase’s first two years, it’ll be a bit uphill when it comes to Congress.”

“At least he’s got the Senate.”

“Yes, but really you need both.”

“Hm.”

Frank saw it anew: hundreds of parts to the federal government, each part holding a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, jockeying to determine what kind of picture they all made together. War of the agencies, the Hobbesian struggle of all against all—it needed to be changed to some kind of dance. Made coherent. Lased.

In his truncated time off it was hard to get many hours in with Nick anymore, as Nick was often busy with other people in FOG, including a youth group, as well as with all his other activities at school and home. They still held to a meeting at the zoo every third Saturday morning, more or less, starting with an hour at the tiger enclosure, taking notes and photos, then doing a cold-certification course, or walking up to the beaver pond to see what they might see. But that time quickly passed, and then Nick was off. Frank missed their longer days out together, but it wasn’t something that he could press about. His friendship with the Quiblers was unusual enough as it was to make him feel awkward, and he didn’t want them wondering if he had some kind of peculiar thing going on about Nick—really the last thing that would occur to him, although he enjoyed the boy’s company greatly. He was a funny kid.

More likely a suspicion was that Frank might have some kind of a thing for Anna, because there was some truth to it. Although it was not something he would ever express or reveal in any way, it was only just a sort of heightened admiration for a friend, an admiration that included an awareness of the friend’s nice figure and her passionate feelings about things, and most of all, her quick and sharp mind. An awareness of just how smart she was. Indeed, here was the one realm in which Frank felt he must know Anna better than Charlie did—in effect, Charlie didn’t know enough to know just how smart Anna was. It was like it had been for Frank when trying to evaluate Chessman as a chess player. Once while waiting for Nick to get ready, Frank had posed the three-box problem to Anna, and she had repeated his scenario carefully, and squinted, and then said “I guess you’d want to change to that other box, then?” and he had laughed and put out his hands and bowed like the kids on Saturday Night Live . And this was just the smallest kind of indicator of her quickness—of a quality of thought Frank would have to characterize as boldly methodical.

Charlie only grinned at the exchange and said, “She does that kind of thing all the time.” He would never see the style of her thought well enough to know how to admire it. Indeed what he called her quibbling was often his own inability to see a thrust right to the heart of a problem he had not noticed. She had married a man who was blind in exactly the area she was most dashing.

Well, there were no total relationships. Maybe what he felt for Anna was just what friendship was with certain co-workers of the opposite sex. Nietzsche had declared friendship between men and women to be impossible, but he had written many stupid things among his brilliant insights, and had had terrible relationships with women and then gone insane. Surely on the savannah there would have been all sorts of friendships between the sexes. On the savannah things might have been a little more flexible at the borders.

But he did not want Charlie to misunderstand, and so all this was just a matter of thoughts. Trying to figure things out. Feelings and behaviors. Sociobiology was like a green light cast over their naked faces. Sometimes he classed these among the thoughts that made him worry about his mentation.

At work now, however, he missed Anna very much. He tried to focus on the various problems on his master list of Things To Do, and about twice a day he would have gone over to ask her a question about something or other. But not anymore. Now he forged on with what was in effect Diane’s list of Things To Do, compiled by them all. Frank focused on the solar-power front in particular, as being the crux of the problem. If solar did not step in immediately, they were going to have to commission and build a whole lot of new nuclear power plants. Or else they would go ahead and burn the 530 gigatons of carbon that would raise the atmospheric level of CO 2to five hundred parts per million, frying the planet.

Put like that, the priority on solar power went pretty high. Which made it baffling to see how little money had been invested in it in the past three decades. But what was done was done. And looking forward, it was a little encouraging, even gratifying, to see results beginning to come out of the experiments he had funded in the previous two years, because some of the new prototypes were looking pretty good. There were new photovoltaics at 42 percent efficiencies now. This was getting closer and closer to the holy grail. And at the largest scales, the Stirling engines were doing almost as well, at even less expense.

Really, with results like that, it was now only a matter of money, and time, and they could be there. Clean power.

Sometimes he even skipped to the other items on the list.

Among the really big-ticket items when it came to carbon emissions, transportation and agriculture ranked up there with power generation. Here again, the expense of changing out such a big and fundamental technology would be very high—until one compared it to the cost of not changing.

This was the case that Diane wanted to make to the reinsurance companies, and the UN, and everyone else. Say it cost a trillion dollars to install clean energy generators and change out the transport fleet. Weigh that against the financial benefit to civilization of continuing with approximately the sea level it now enjoyed, the weather, the biosphere support, etc.; also the difficult-to-calculate-in-dollars but undoubtedly huge benefit of avoiding a great deal of human suffering. Not to mention a mass extinction event for the rest of the biosphere, which might threaten their very survival.

Wouldn’t it pencil out? It seemed like it would have to. Indeed, if it didn’t pencil out, maybe there was something wrong with the accounting system.

Compare these costs to the U.S. military budget. Two trillion dollars would not be more than three or four years of the Pentagon’s budget. This gave Frank a shock—that the military was so expensive, sure, but also that they could shift to clean power and transport so cheaply relative to the total economy. Electricity now cost about six cents a kilowatt hour, and they spoke of clean energy costing up to ten—and then said it couldn’t be done? For financial reasons? “It wouldn’t take much of a carbon-ceiling regulation to make it pencil out immediately,” Frank said to Diane when they were talking on the phone. “Companies like Southern California Edison must be begging for a strict emissions cap. They’ll make a killing when that happens. They’ll be raking it in.”