The Ministry for the Future

71

Notes taken for Badim again, regular executive meeting with Mary and leadership group. The usual summary of points, plus impressions (B wants more). Will clean this up later. Typing as they speak. I keep forgetting to go to the bathroom first.

Badim next to Mary, silent, distracted.

Tatiana Voznesenskaya next to him, also distracted. She’s being sued back home, can’t go to Russia safely, here no longer living in same place. Her report: Lawsuits in over a hundred countries. Also joined defense of nearly four hundred groups being sued for doing good things. T not happy.

Imbeni: MftF being attacked might have caused others to step up. African Union backing all nationalizations in Africa, means a united front toward China, World Bank, all outside forces. Africa for Africans the fastest growing party in every country there. Pressure on Nigeria in particular to claim the carbon coin like Arabia and Brazil. Doing so could fund a lot of other things. Basic infrastructure and education, then more. Possession of oil now seen as a curse to be exorcised. Chance here to help leverage good change. Africa led by Africans.

Bob, Adele, Estevan in a team report. Mostly Antarctica. Test projects pumping water out from under glaciers getting positive results. Pine Island Glacier slowed from hundreds of meters a year to tens of meters. We should help scale this up, support it fully. 60 Antarctic glaciers, 15 Greenland glaciers. Big push, but amazing cost-benefit. Bang for buck. Let’s do it. M nodding.

Kaming not so cheery. Rate of extinctions still rising. Sumatran tiger, northern white rhinoceros, more river dolphins, these just the latest charismatics confirmed to be gone in wild. Orangutans next, along with 350 other mammal species in red zone danger of extinction.

Indra: Direct air capture now more powerful and less expensive, need to scale up appropriately, then find places to sequester billions of tons of dry ice. Progress being made in this technology means more should be invested in it. Like most of the MftF budget, and a huge dose of carbon coins.

Elena: The 4 per 1000 movement has made an accurate, uncomplicated, inexpensive test kit for year-by-year changes in carbon in the soil. Measurement now possible, need a whole army of certifiers to certify, then good to go.

Mary: Anyone paying farmers for losses incurred in transition to new ag methods?

Elena: No. No payers found.

Mary: But this is perfect for carbon coins! Why shouldn’t they be getting carbon coins?

Dick: The banks have to make it clear the carboni can be issued in fragments of a coin. Like carbon pennies.

Elena: We would like to see that. But we’re only just now able to quantify what’s being sequestered. Also, defining sequestration becoming an issue.

Dick: The standard definition from CCCB is being held in storage for a century.

Mary: Is that long enough?

Dick: Long enough for now. Kick the can down the road a century, not bad compared to not kicking it at all. Emergency definition, in effect.

Indra: This is part of why geoengineering no longer a useful word or concept. Everything people do at scale is geoengineering. Glacier slowdown, direct air capture, soil projects like 4 per 1000, they’re all geoengineering.

Mary: But solar radiation management is definitely geoengineering.

Indra: Sure but so what? The American heat wave has brought that one back again for sure. Indian results still debated. Claim that a double Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by three degrees for the five years following the event, a degree in the decade after that. Now we’re back to pre-intervention levels. But so many confounding factors, all these figures contested.

Mary: Not in India. They’re going to do it again.

Indra: Generally agreed there that their intervention worked. So you can see why they might want to. Talk of it now also in US Congress. Controversial. Meanwhile, we’re working with CCCB to list all ways carbon drawdown could be quantified and confirmed, in ways that would allow for carbon coins to be created and paid to individuals. All geoengineering, all good. The word itself needs to be rehabilitated.

Mary: Good luck with that. Dick, what’s going on with finance? World still in Super Depression but finance sailing along just fine, what’s up?

Dick: Effect of carbon coins on global finance a nice stimulus for them! (joking as usual). Finance unfazed by anything, carbon coins just another tradeable commodity, listed in currency exchanges just like any other currency. Betting on the spread between the stick and the carrot. Thus you see people shorting carbon coins, meaning the worse the climate does the more money they make. They’ve hedged the apocalypse.

Mary: Can we stop them?

Dick: A falling price on carbon coin is a sign that the incentives to not burn carbon are not strong enough yet. Also, measurement of anything always leads to financialization of the measurement method itself. So, just the usual thing.

Mary: What can we do to up the pressure on carbon burning?

Dick: Get WTO to change rules in ways that penalize carbon burn of any kind. Up carbon taxes progressively. Publicize sabotage of petro now happening more and more frequently, this will encourage more sabotage copy-cat style. In short: arbitrage and sabotage.

Mary: Ha ha.

But some of us laughed for real.

Dick: The market needs the state healthy, to back money itself. The state needs the market healthy, to keep the economy liquid. But state and market aren’t working hand in hand. Or they are hand in hand, but only because they’re arm wrestling! Struggling for control of the situation they comprise together.

Mary: And we want the state to win.

Dick: States make laws, laws run the system. So yes, state is the crucial actor. But we can’t just banish market. Not now. It’s too big, it’s the way of the world. We just have to force it to invest in the things we want.

Badim nods at this.

Janus Athena: Something Dick said before bombing hiatus struck those here in the AI group. (Meaning JA themself, but they never use any pronouns referring to themself.) That ministry should form a sort of shadow government, Dick said, so that when the system breaks down, people have a workable Plan B to turn to. So AI group has been trying to sketch a workable shadow government and put it up on websites. Plan B open source. We’re seeing an increasing rate of uptake on YourLock. Already a new internet; now its users may be turning into a new kind of citizen of the world. Gaia citizenship, or what have you. Earth citizen, commons member, world citizen. One Planet. Mother Earth. All these terms used by people who are coming to think of themselves as part of a planetary civilization. Main sense of patriotism now directed to the planet itself.

Matriotism, Dick jokes.

JA nods. Support growing fast. Could cross a tipping point and become what everyone thinks. A new structure of feeling, underlying politics as such. Global civilization transcending local differences. A different hegemony for sure. Shadow government plans are just one part of that larger movement. Like a software for a feeling.

Mary: The global village.

JA: Sort of. That’s an old name. Not really a village. Planetary consciousness, biospheric governance, citizen of Gaia, One Planet, Mother Earth, etc. More like that. Village not really the right word.

Badim: It should be an explicit religion, like I’ve been saying. A call for devotion or worship.

Mary, not hearing Badim: What about AI? Are your machines learning?

JA squints, looking pained. Embarrassing question, somehow. Naïve. Says: Names here keep deceiving people. Data mining tells us things we wouldn’t have known unless we did it. That could be called artificial intelligence, but it’s what we used to call science. What we have really is computer-assisted science. Best to call it that. It’s getting stronger. But we still have to figure out what to do with it. Main potential for advancement here is in human understanding—

Mary, chop chop, cuts off JA’s vocabulary worries. Brings meeting to a close. She says, We probably got attacked because of something specific we were doing. The Swiss got attacked too, so now they’re very much on our side, and looking into it. That means it was probably financial, somehow. We may be able to see things they can’t, you never know. Keep on the lookout for something of that nature. Because we’re in some kind of crux now. Push has come to shove.