The Ministry for the Future

69

In Saudi Arabia, during the height of the hajj, what appeared to be a coup by the military resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of Saudi princes. Reports ranged from twenty to fifty, but no one knew for sure. The king was in New York at the time, and was said to be in hiding and not planning on going home. He called on the world to support his legitimate government, and a few governments did, but none of them offered active help. The United States offered asylum. The new government had the backing of most of the people in the country, as far as anyone could tell; with the hajj in disarray and two million Muslims either trying to complete their pilgrimage or get home, confusion on the Arabian peninsula was general. The only thing that was obvious in that first month was that no one outside the Arabian peninsula knew very much about what had really been happening in Saudi Arabia. Which was now to be called simply Arabia, the new government told the world. The Sauds were done.

The other Sunni national governments were cautiously approving or disapproving of this removal, reserving their sharpest criticism for the disruption of the hajj. No one had liked the Saud family, it now appeared, but the ramifications of this were unknown, and potentially volatile throughout the region. The Shiite nations openly applauded the coup. Other governments around the world stayed reticent. They seemed to be trying to calculate what the change meant and what the new government would do, especially with its immense reserves of oil. The formerly implicit was now uncomfortably obvious; no one had cared about these people, only about their oil.

Then word came from Riyadh that Arabians respected the pressing need to decarbonize the world’s economy, and intended to use their oil only for plastics manufacture and other non-combustible uses. The new Arabian government therefore made an immediate claim to the CCCB, the Climate Coalition of Central Banks, which recently had been established specifically to administer the carbon coin, saying that their full conversion to solar power, to begin immediately, and their refusal to sell their oil reserves for burning, deserved compensation in the form of the CCCB’s newly created carbon coins, sometimes called carboni. At the rate of one coin per ton of secured carbon, the Arabic claim was estimated at about a trillion carbon coins; at current exchange rates this came to several trillion US dollars, which would make Arabia instantly one of the richest countries on Earth, at least in terms of national bank assets. If the present currency exchange rates held, they would be wealthier than if they had sold their oil for burning.

After a period of delay the CCCB agreed to this exchange, but stipulated it was to be paid out on a schedule pegged to how fast the Arabian oil would have been produced and burned in that now deactivated alternate history, only a bit front-loaded and accelerated to reward Arabia for doing the right thing for the planet and human civilization. Meanwhile they could leverage this assured income stream, which they did. They accepted the deal and went to work.

This sudden loss of supply sent oil prices and oil futures sharply up. Oil was rarer now, therefore more expensive, which meant that clean renewable energy was now cheaper than oil by an even larger margin than before. And as the new carbon taxes being levied in every country in compliance with the latest commitments to the Paris Agreement, made at the COP43 meeting, were also scheduled to rise year by year by an increasing percentage, price signals were now all pointing toward clean renewables as the cheapest way to power the world. The social cost of carbon was finally getting injected into the price of fossil fuels, and that old saying, ridiculed by the fossil fuels industry for decades, was suddenly becoming the obvious thing, as being the most profitable or least unprofitable thing:

Keep it in the ground.

Soon after this, Brazil’s government entered another paroxysm of corruption charges, leading to the resignation of the right-wing president and then his arrest. Quickly there followed the triumphant return of the so-called Lula Left, now also called Clean Brazil, with a promise of clean government representing the entire populace, also an end to oil sales, clearly modeled on Arabia’s move; also the full protection and caretaking of the Amazon basin’s rainforest. They claimed compensation for this last policy also, to be paid in more of the CCCB’s carbon coins. The CCCB agreed to that, and by way of Rebecca Tallhorse’s negotiations, a lot of carbon coins were also given immediately to the indigenous groups of the Amazon, who had been keeping the rainforest’s carbon sequestered for centuries. That act of climate justice along with newly scheduled payments to the Brazilian federal government meant a few trillion more carbon coins were added to the general circulation, and now mainstream economists everywhere were fearful that this sudden flood of new currency was going to cause massive deflation. Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever. Some of them were asserting that the carbon coins were merely replacements for petrodollars, which had always been pulled out of the ground like rabbits out of a hat, having not existed before the oil was pumped up and sold. Pulled out of the ground, pulled out of a hat; was there any real difference between petrodollars and carbon coins, these economists asked?

There was, other economists insisted. Petrodollars had first been real pre-existing money, paid for a commodity turned into electricity or physical movement, thus turned into economic activity; carbon coins, on the other hand, were created by the actual removal of that same electricity and transport potential from the world, and thus from the Gross World Product. Petrodollars thus fueled GWP; carbon coins depleted GWP. They were functionally opposite.

Then again, still others argued, that absence of carbon burn, and even the resulting lowering of GWP itself, would save some difficult-to-calculate but real amounts of damage to the biosphere, also the necessary mitigation and remediation and ecological restoration work and insurance pay-outs that would have inevitably followed the carbon burn; and these costs could be calculated; and when they were, ultimately it seemed to amount to almost a wash, petrodollars or carbon coins, and thus the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, a nothing in economic terms.

So: either a huge boon, a complete calamity, or a non-event. Thus the economists, faced with explaining the biggest economic event of their time. What a science! They worked all over the world (including in the Ministry for the Future’s offices) trying to calculate the gains and losses of this event in some way that could be entered into a single balance sheet and defended. But it couldn’t be done, except in ways so filled with assumptions that each estimate was revealed to be an ideological statement of the viewer’s priorities and values. A speculative fiction.

Some pointed out that this had always been true of any economic analysis or forecast ever made. In this case, these people insisted, please go back to the basics. Here’s the true economy, these people said: since the Earth’s biosphere was the only one available to humanity, and its healthy function absolutely necessary to humanity’s existence, its worth to people was a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere’s functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible. Macroeconomics had thus long ago entered a zone of confusion, either early in the century or perhaps from the moment of its birth, and now was revealed for the pseudoscience it had always been.

The upshot was that they had no real way of knowing what the global economy was doing now, or what would happen if the central banks continued to fulfill their pledge to create and underwrite a massive infusion of new money into the world. Carbon quantitative easing, CQE, was a huge multi-variant experiment in social engineering.

This was volatility indeed! To use not just the financial term, but simply common human language. It was without doubt a volatile situation. But recall that the financial markets of that time loved stock price volatility, as it made money for financiers no matter what happened, their having gone both long and short on everything. These were not economists, but speculators. Finance in that late moment of capitalism’s exhaustion meant gamblers, sure, but more than that, the casino in which people gambled. And the house always won. And carbon coins were the best opportunity to go long ever created. Almost a kind of sure thing. So in certain respects, the craziness of the time was simply good for investors. Those who had shorted fossil fuels and gone long on clean renewables were now making fortunes; and fortunes require reinvestment to actually be fortunes. Growth! Growth!

This was the world’s current reigning religion, it had to be admitted: growth. It was a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particular deadly form of life.

But this time, growth might be reconfiguring itself as the growth of some kind of safety. Call it involution, or sophistication; improvement; degrowth; growth of some kind of goodness. A sane response to danger—now understood as a very high-return investment strategy! Who knew?

Really, no one knew. The remaining big petro-states each regarded the new situation uneasily, or even in a panic. Together they sat on fossil carbon reserves that at current market prices ranged into the hundreds of trillions. These reserves could easily become stranded assets in the very near future, in fact it looked a bit like a financial bubble starting to burst. In that context it made sense to sell as much of the product as possible before prices collapsed completely. But if everyone holds a fire sale at once, who’s going to buy? The small prosperous countries had clean renewable energy already. The shipping industries, under the duress of their ships being sunk if they didn’t shift, had shifted already to wind and electrics and hydrogen. Aviation, under the same annihilating pressure, was shifting to electric planes, and mainly, airships. Ground transport was going entirely electric, and where it still used liquid fuels, was completely committed to renewable biofuels that bypassed fossil sources.

Power plants were therefore the last interested customers, but even there, solar was cheaper and batteries getting better, and non-battery energy storage by way of water levels or salt temperatures or flywheels or air pressure were all becoming more and more robust. The developed petro-nations therefore tried to sell their oil to the developing non-petro nations, at a big discount. The developing petro-nations decided to power themselves with their own oil assets, and sold to their fellow developing nations-without-petro at even bigger discounts. These non-petro developing nations therefore were the last big carbon burners of note, and they were significant. But India had already shown what could be done by making their pivot to clean renewables after the heat wave. And China was leading the world in solar panel production. They were still selling and shipping their coal, and Japan was still importing it and burning it, among others. Russia and Australia were still exporting coal where they could. Despite all the sudden shifts, carbon was still being burned. Oh yes; to the tune of twenty gigatons a year. Did you think that because Arabia was virtuous, there would be no more cakes and ale? In fact, there was no quick end in sight. The image of a bubble bursting was apt in some respects, illusory in others. People still needed electricity and transport. Money still ruled, fire sales still sold carbon. The bubble that was bursting might still be the biosphere itself. The battle for the fate of the Earth continued.

Russia kept selling its oil and gas, which was a good thing for Europe, as much of Europe was heated in winter by Russian gas. As was made clear when the pipelines were bombed in the coldest part of that winter.

They were also selling their pebble-mob missiles. Either that or else they had sold, or given, or lost to theft or espionage, the plans for building pebble mobs. And in fact these missiles were not so hard to reverse engineer that they weren’t quickly becoming a part of all major militaries. Even part of some private armed forces’ arsenals, it appeared, which had to have purchased such high-tech devices from some major country. It was in fact somewhat terrifying that anyone at all owned such missiles.

They had been introduced by the Russians in the 2020s, and spread rapidly after that. They spread faster than the spread of the implications of their existence. Nation-states kept spending billions that could have been used elsewhere on navies and air forces and military bases, none of which could be defended against these new weapons. They were more powerful than the atomic bomb, in this very particular sense: you could use them. And they couldn’t be stopped. That was the main thing that was not being understood, either accidentally or on purpose, so that people wouldn’t have to change their armaments or their purchase orders: these missiles couldn’t be stopped. They were small, they launched from mobile launchers, they came from all directions in a coordinated attack in which they only congregated at their target in the last few seconds of their flights. They did not give off radioactive signals, and thus could be hidden until the moment of launch. And they were relatively cheap.

After you launched them, they flew at about a thousand miles an hour. That and the fact they only coalesced to their mob moment in the last seconds before impact was enough to forestall any realistic defense against them. They were lethally explosive versions of the drones that had brought down all the planes on Crash Day.

Aircraft carriers? Sunk. Bombers? Blown out of the sky. An oil tanker, boom, sunk in ten minutes. One of America’s eight hundred military bases around the world, shattered. Death and chaos, and no one findable to blame.

The war on terror? It lost.

Either everyone’s happy or no one is safe. But we’re never happy. So we’ll never be safe.

Or put it this way: Either every culture is respected, or no one is safe. Either everyone has dignity or no one has it.

Because why? Because this:

A private jet owned by a rich man—boom.

A coal-fired power plant in China—boom.

A cement factory in Turkey, boom. A mine in Angola, boom. A yacht in the Aegean, boom. A police station in Egypt, boom. The Hotel Belvedere in Davos, boom. An oil executive walking down the street, boom. The Ministry for the Future’s offices—boom.

What people then had to consider was that this list of targets could be greatly extended. The US Capitol, various houses of parliament, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, the Taj Mahal—and so on.

No place on Earth was safe.

Meetings at Interpol and many other agencies concerned with global security were inconclusive as to the source or sources of these attacks when they happened. Although, as with the nerve gas made by the Russians and used to kill Russian dissidents in Britain, these pebble mobs were definitely complex military devices, not something you could cook up in your garage. They were nation-state devices, in effect, made for fairly big and sophisticated militaries by fairly advanced aerospace and computer companies, then sold or given to smaller actors.

So, after the Interpol meetings, a rumor began to circulate that it was in Russia where the Arabian coup against the Saudi royal family had been planned. But wait, why would the Russians be party to that? Because with Arabian oil off the table, and then Brazilian oil too, Russian oil was that much more valuable. But this was speculation only. The Russian government denied all these rumors and identified them as part of the ongoing anti-Russian campaign common in the West and elsewhere. Nothing to it. Each nation responsible for its own security. Russia was a keeper of all its treaty obligations and a force for stability in the world. Pebble mobs might even be a force for good, because now war was rendered impossible. It was mutual assured destruction, not of civilian populations, but of war machinery. An end to the twentieth-century concept of total war, a return to the focus on military-against-military that had characterized armed conflict before the breakdown of civilized norms established at Westphalia in 1648, then forgotten in the twentieth century. Now back again.

But not really. Because anything could be targeted. So it was not really military-against-military, as Russia claimed, but anyone-against-anyone. If they could get hold of one of these assemblies.

A heat wave hit Arizona, then New Mexico and west Texas, then east Texas, then Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and the Florida panhandle. For a week the temperature/humidity index hovered around wet-bulb 35, with temperatures around 110 F and humidity 60 percent. For the most part electrical power remained functioning, and people stayed inside air-conditioned buildings; if they didn’t have air conditioning themselves, or were nervous about losing it, they congregated in public buildings where it existed. All fine, but then the heat wave was met by a high-pressure cell coming up from the Caribbean, and the so-called double wave created wet-bulb 38s, seriously fatal. Demand for power grew until there were power failures and brownouts, and even though some of these were planned to avoid blackouts, and all of them eventually contained, and relatively brief, they still exposed millions to fatal levels of heat. Somewhere between two and three hundred thousand people died in a single day during that heat wave.

Later that figure was revised, as it was discovered over time that the previous decadal census had significantly undercounted the at-risk population. But no matter the exact number, it was huge. Not as large as the great Indian heat wave had been, but this time it was Americans, in America. That fact made a difference, especially to Americans.

Although still, in the months that followed, people’s biases emerged. It was the South where it had happened. It was mostly poor people, in particular poor people of color. It couldn’t happen in the North. It couldn’t happen to prosperous white people. And so on. Arizona’s part in it was forgotten, except in Arizona.

This was yet another manifestation of racism and contempt for the South, yes, but also of a universal cognitive disability, in that people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence. It was some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism, some speculated, a way to help people carry on even when it was pointless to carry on. People living just twenty miles from a town flattened by a tornado in Ohio would claim that the flattened town was in the tornado track and they were not, so it would never happen to them. The following week they might get killed, in the event itself surprised and feeling that this was an unprecedented freak occurrence, but meanwhile, until then, they swore it couldn’t happen. That’s how people were, and even the torching of the South didn’t change it.

CO₂ levels that year were around 470 parts per million.

They had gone from driving a car to hanging on to a tiger’s tail. Hanging on for dear life.