Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Well, but we’re talking like a thousand Salton Seas here,” Kenzo said. He was still bug-eyed at the idea; he had never even imagined curating such a change, and he was looking at Frank as if to say, Why didn’t you mention something this cool out on our runs? “It would be a real test of our modeling programs,” he said, looking even happier. Almost giddy: “It might change everything!” he exclaimed.

“And yet,” Frank said. “People might judge those changes to be preferable to displacing a quarter of the world’s population. Remember what happened to New Orleans. We couldn’t afford to have ten thousand of those, could we?”

“If you had the unlimited power you’re talking about,” Anna said suddenly, “why couldn’t you just pump the equivalent of the displaced water back up onto the Antarctic polar plateau? Let it freeze back up there, near where it came from?”

Again the room was silent.

“Now there’s an idea,” Diane said. She was smiling. “But Frank, where are these dry basins again?”

Frank brought that slide back up on the PowerPoint. The basins, if all of them were entirely filled, could take about twenty percent of the predicted rise in sea level if the whole WAIS came off. It would take about thirty terawatts to move the water. The cost in carbon for that much energy would be ten gigatons, not good, but only a fraction of the overall carbon budget at this point. Clean energy would be better for doing it, of course. What effects on local climates and ecologies would be caused by the introduction of so many big new lakes was, as Kenzo had said, impossible to calculate.

“Those are some very dry countries,” Diane said after perusing Frank’s map. “Dry and poor. I can imagine, if they were offered compensation to take the water and make new lakes, some of them might decide to roll the dice and take the environmental risk, because net effects might end up being positive. It might make opportunities for them that aren’t there now. There’s not much going on in the Takla Makan these days, that I know of.”

The Swiss Re executive returned to Anna’s comment, suggesting that the system might be able go through proof of concept in Antarctica, after which, if it worked, countries signing on would have a better idea of what they were in for. Antarctic operations would incur extra costs, to keep pumps and pipelines heated; on the other hand, the environmental impacts were likely to be minimal, and population relocation not an issue at all. Maybe they could even relocate the excess ocean water entirely on the Antarctic polar cap. That would mean shifting water that floated away from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet up to the top of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet.

“Of course if we’re going to talk about stupendous amounts of new free energy,” Anna pointed out, “you could do all sorts of things. You could desalinate the sea water at the pumps or at their outlets, and make them fresh water lakes in the thirties, so you wouldn’t have Salton Sea problems. You’d have reservoirs of drinking and irrigation water, you could replenish groundwater, and build with salt bricks, and so on.”

Diane nodded. “True.”

“But we don’t have stupendous new sources of clean energy,” Anna said.

Good photovoltaics existed, Frank reminded her doggedly. Also a good Stirling engine; good wind power; and extremely promising ocean energy-to-electricity systems.

That was all very well, Diane agreed. That was promising. But there remained the capital investment problem, and the other transitional costs associated with changing over to any of these clean renewables. Who was going to pay for it?

It was the trillion-dollar question.

Here the reinsurance people took center stage. They had paid for the salting of the North Atlantic by using their reserves, then upping their premiums. Their reserves were huge, as they had to be to meet their obligations to the many insurance companies paying them for reinsurance. But swapping out the power generation system was two magnitudes larger a problem, more or less, than the salt fleet had been, and it was impossible to front that kind of money—almost impossible to imagine collecting it in any way.

“Well, but it’s only four years of the American military budget,” Frank pointed out.

People shrugged, as if to say, but still—that was a lot.

“It’s going to take legislation,” Diane said. “Private investment can’t do it. Can’t or won’t.”

General agreement, although the reinsurance guys looked unhappy. “It would be good if it made sense in market terms,” the Swiss Re executive said.

This led them to a discussion of macroeconomics, but even there, they kept coming back to the idea of major public works. No matter what kind of economic ideology you brought to the table, the world they had set up was resolutely Keynesian—meaning a mixed economy in which government and business existed in an uneasy interaction. Public works projects were sometimes crucial to the process, especially in emergencies, but that meant legislating economic activity, and so they needed to have the political understanding and support it would take to do that. If so, they could legislate investment, and then in effect print the money to pay for it. That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.

Other economic stimuli might also complement this old standby. Edgardo had done some studies here, and it could all be handed to Chase as a kind of program, a mission architecture. A list of Things To Do.

After that, they heard a report from the Russian environmental office. The altered tree lichens they had distributed in Siberia the previous summer were surviving the winter there like any ordinary lichen. Dispersal had been widespread, uptake on trees rapid, as the engineers at Small Delivery Systems had hoped for.

The only problem the Russian could see was that it was possible, at least in theory, that the lichen dispersal would become too successful. What they were seeing now led them to think they might have overseeded, or actually overdispersed. Since most of what they had dispersed had survived, by next summer the Siberian forest around the site would reap whatever the winds and the Russians had sown. In the lab it was proving to grow more like algal blooms encased in mushrooms than like ordinary lichens. “Fast lichen, we call it,” the Russian said. “We didn’t think it was possible, but we see it happening.”

All that was very interesting, but when Frank got back in his office, he found that his computer wouldn’t turn on. And when the techs arrived to check it out, they went pale, and isolated the machine quickly, then carried the whole thing away. “That’s one bad virus,” one of them said. “Very dangerous.”

“So was I hacked in particular?” Frank asked.

“We usually see that one when someone has been targeted. A real poke in the eye. Did you back up your disks?”

“Well…”

“You better have. That’s a complete loss there.”

“A hard-drive crash?”

“A hard-drive bombing. You’ll have to file and report, and they’ll be adding you to the case file. Someone did this to you on purpose.”

Frank felt a chill.

CHARLIE’S DAYTIME OUTINGS WITH JOEhad to happen on the weekends now. Even though they were past the First Sixty Days and had had a pretty good run with them, they were trying to keep the momentum going, and things kept popping up to derail the plans, sometimes intentional problems created by the opposition, sometimes neutral matters created by the sheer size and complexity of the system. Roy was pushing so hard that sometimes he even almost lost his cool. Charlie had never seen that, and would have thought it impossible, at least on the professional level. In personal matters, Roy and Andrea had gone through a spectacular in-office breakup, and during that time Charlie had endured some long and bitter rants from Roy. But when it came to business, Roy had always prided himself on staying calm. Calmness at speed was his signature style, as with certain surfing stars. And even now he persisted with that style, or tried to; but the workload was so huge it was hard to keep the calmness along with the pace. They were far past the time when he and Charlie were able to chat about things like they used to. Now their phone conversations went something like: