The Ministry for the Future

56

The International Criminal Court was separate from the UN, founded by its own international treaty to prosecute crimes that were somehow outside of nation-state court systems’ jurisdiction. It was targeted toward individual crimes, and could be effective only when a combination of factors came into an unlikely conjunction. The US and several other big countries had withdrawn from the court’s jurisdiction after negative rulings against their citizens.

The World Court, more properly named the International Court of Justice, was a UN-sponsored body, so that all member states of the UN were theoretically bound to follow its rulings; but it was designed to adjudicate state-to-state disagreements, and all UN agencies were forbidden to bring cases before it. The Ministry for the Future was an agency created in the implementation meetings of the Paris Agreement, but the Paris Agreement had been brokered under the umbrella of the United Nations; so the ministry was forbidden to bring cases to the World Court.

What it came down to was that to prosecute a state, you needed to be a state, and not the UN or an individual. More than that, you had to be a state that had agreed to be within the World Court’s jurisdiction. To prosecute an individual outside a national court system, you needed to convince one of the international courts to take your case, and historically this had been hard to do. In short, these two international courts, both located at The Hague, were not well-designed as places to litigate climate justice.

Tatiana was getting more and more frustrated by this situation. If the ministry had been founded to bring legal standing and therefore lawsuits on behalf of the people of the future and the biosphere itself, fine, she said, fine fine fine: but in what court?

Tatiana concluded one of her reports to Mary with this:

Mary read this and ground her teeth. Tatiana was one of her fiercest warriors. They were now at atmospheric CO₂ levels of 463 parts per million.

The crash in insect numbers put every ecological system on terrestrial Earth in danger of collapse. Collapse—meaning most of the species currently on Earth dead and gone. The surviving species subsequent to this event would be free to spread in all the empty ecological niches, spread and evolve and speciate, so that in twenty million years, maybe less, maybe only two million years, a differently constituted array of species would fully re-occupy the biosphere.

Mary replied to Tatiana’s memo with an instruction: Pick the ten best national cases from our point of view. Do what you can to help them.

The inadequacy of this, the futility of it, made her shudder. Hoping to counter this desperate feeling, she convened her nat cat group. Natural catastrophes: it was possibly a contradiction in terms, maybe the group should be called anthropogenic catastrophes, but anyway, them. Also the infrastructure and ecology groups. She needed to get away from legal abstractions.

They spoke enthusiastically of carbon-negative agriculture, clean energy, fleets of sailing ships, fleets of airships, carbon-based materials created from CO₂ sucked out of the air and replacing concrete; thus direct air capture of CO₂, a necessary component of the drawdown effort, would provide most construction materials going forward. Cheap clean desalination, clean water, 3-D printed houses, 3-D printed toilets and sewage, universal education, vastly expanded medical schools and medical facilities. Landscape restoration, habitat corridors, ag/habitat combinations—

“Okay!” Mary said, chopping short their flood of suggestions. She could see that the people in these divisions were feeling a little neglected. Finance had filled her head for too long. And as Bob Wharton had just said, you could literally fill a medium-sized encyclopedia with the good new projects already invented and waiting to scale. “Admitted; there’s no end to the good projects we could fund, if we had the funds. But what should we be telling national governments to do now?”

Bob said, “Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.”

“The six biggest emitters being?”

“Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector.”

“Cross-sector?”

“Everything not in the other five. The great miscellaneous.”

“So those six would be enough.”

“Yes. Reduce those six in the ten biggest economies, and you’re hitting eighty-five percent of all emissions. Get the G20 to do it, and it’s essentially everything.”

“And how do you get reductions in those six sectors?”

Eleven policies would get it done, they all told her. Carbon pricing, industry efficiency standards, land use policies, industrial process emissions regulations, complementary power sector policies, renewable portfolio standards, building codes and appliance standards, fuel economy standards, better urban transport, vehicle electrification, and feebates, which was to say carbon taxes passed back through to consumers. In essence: laws. Regulatory laws, already written and ready to go.

“This sounds like a litany,” Mary observed.

Yes, they told her, it was standard analysis. US Department of Energy in origin, quite old now, but still holding up well as an analytic rubric. The EU energy task force had done something similar. Really there were no mysteries here, in either the nature of the problem or the solutions.

“And yet it’s not happening,” Mary observed.

They regarded her. There is resistance to it happening, they reminded her.

“Indeed,” she said. They were caught in a maze. They were caught in an avalanche, carrying them down past a point from which there would be no clawing back. They were losing. Losing to other people, people who apparently didn’t see the stakes involved.

She walked down to the park fronting the lake. She sat on her bench and stared at the statue of Ganymede, holding his hand out to the big bird. She watched the white swans beside the tiny marina, circling about, hoping for bread crumbs. Beautiful creatures. Bodies so white against the black water that they looked like intrusions from another reality. That would explain the way water rolled off them, the way the light burst away from them, or perhaps right out of them. Not creatures of this world at all.

It wasn’t going to happen from the top. The lawmakers were corrupt. So, if not top-down, then bottom-up. Like a whirlwind, as some put it. Whirlwinds rose from the ground—although conditions aloft enabled that to happen. People, the multitude. Young people? Not just congregating to demonstrate, but changing all their behaviors? Living together in tiny houses, working at green jobs in co-operative ventures, with never the chance of a big financial windfall somehow dropping on them like a lottery win? No unicorns carrying them off to a high fantasy paradise? Occupying the offices of every politician who got elected by taking carbon money and then always voted for the one percent? Riot strike riot?

She didn’t know if her failure to imagine that bottom-up plan working was her failure or the situation’s.

Then Badim appeared before her.

“Mind if I join you?”

“No. Sit.” She patted the bench by her. She supposed he had been able to consult her bodyguards to find out where she was. This was a little disturbing, but she was glad to see him.

He sat beside her and regarded the view. “Who was Ganymede again?” he asked, regarding the statue.

“I think he was one of Zeus’s lovers.”

“A gay lover?”

“The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to think about things in those terms.”

“I guess not. Didn’t Zeus rape most of his lovers?”

“Some of them. Not all. If I recall right. I don’t really know. In Ireland it wasn’t a school topic. What about in India?”

“I grew up in Nepal, but no. Greek mythology was not studied.”

“What about Hindu mythology? Don’t they have gods behaving badly?”

“Oh yes. I don’t know, I never paid it much attention, but the gods and goddesses seemed like a family of, I don’t know. Distant ancestors. Very heroic and noble, very proud and stupid. It made me wonder what the people were like who told each other these stories in the first place, as if they were interesting stories. Like Bollywood musicals. So melodramatic. I was never interested.”

“What interested you?”

“Machines. I wanted my town to be like the towns in the West, you know. Clean. Easy. Full of shiny buildings and trams. And cable car lifts, for sure. I had to walk four hundred meters up and down to get to school and then back home, every day. So. I wanted it to be kind of like Zurich, actually. I wanted to move into the present. I felt like I was caught in a time warp, stuck in the middle ages. You could see on the screen shows what the world was like now, but for us it wasn’t like that. No toilets, no antibiotics, people died of diarrhoea all the time. In general people were sick, they were worn out, they died young. I wanted to change that.”

“You were lucky to want something.”

“I don’t know. Wanting something can make you unhappy. I was not happy. I lashed out.”

“Happiness is overrated. Is anyone ever really happy?”

“Oh, I think so. It looks like it, anyway.” He gestured around them.

Zurich, so solid and handsome. Were the Zurchers happy? Mary wasn’t sure. Swiss happiness was expressed by a little lift at the corners of the mouth, by thumping down a stein after a long swallow. Ah! Genau! Or by that little frown of displeasure that things were not better than they were. Mary liked the Swiss, their practicality anyway. Undemonstrative, stable, focused on reality. These were stereotypes, sure, and in the part of their lives hidden except to themselves, the Swiss were no doubt as melodramatic as opera stars. Italian soap opera stars, another stereotype of course, those were all they had once they started thinking about groups, they simplified to an image, and then that image could always be turned to the bad.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “People who have it all, who don’t want anything, they’re lost. If you want something and your work gets you closer to it, that’s the only happiness.”

“The pursuit,” he said.

“Yes. The pursuit of happiness is the happiness.”

“Then we should be happy!”

“Yes,” she said unhappily. “But only if we get somewhere. If you’re pursuing something and you’re stuck, really stuck, then that’s not a pursuit anymore. That’s just being stuck.”

Badim nodded, regarding the great statue curiously.

Mary thought he had come down here to tell her something, surely; but he had not done that. She watched him for a while. Nepal had fallen to a Maoist insurrection that had killed thirteen thousand people over a period of about ten years. Some would call that a lot; others would say it wasn’t so many.

“I notice things happening out there,” she said to him. “Davos gets seized and the happy rich folk put through a reeducation camp. Glamping with Che. Then all those planes going down in one day.”

“We didn’t do that!” he said quickly. “That wasn’t us.”

“No? It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.”

He shook his head, looking surprised she would even think such a thing. “I wouldn’t do that, Mary. If we had any such violent action in mind, I would confer with you. But really we’re not in that kind of business.”

“So, these so-called accidents happening to oil executives?”

“It’s a big world,” he said. Ah ha, Mary thought. He was trying not to look uneasy.

“So,” she said, “what did you come down here to discuss? Why did you find me and come down here?”

He looked at her. “I do have an idea,” he said. “I wanted to tell you.”

“Tell me.”

He looked off at the city for a while. Gray Zurich. “I think we need a new religion.”

She stared at him, surprised. “Really?”

He turned his gaze on her. “Well, maybe it’s not a new religion. An old religion. Maybe the oldest religion. But back among us, big time. Because I think we need it. People need something bigger than themselves. All these economic plans, always talking about things in terms of money and self-interest—people aren’t really like that. They’re always acting for other reasons than that. For other people, basically. For religious reasons. Spiritual reasons.”

Mary shook her head, unsure. She’d got enough of that kind of thing in her childhood. Ireland had not seemed to have benefited from its religion.

Badim saw this and wagged a finger at her. “It’s a huge part of the brain, you know. The temporal lobe pulses like a strobe light when you feel these emotions. Sense of awe—epilepsy—hypergraphia…”

“It’s not sounding that good,” Mary pointed out.

“I know, it can go wrong, but it’s crucial. It’s central to who you are, to how you decide things.”

“So you’re going to invent a new religion.”

“An old one. The oldest one. We’re going to bring it back. We need it.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“Well, let me share some ideas with you.”