“Fund-raising?”
Eve’s lip curled. “I hate it with a passion.”
“But it’s part of the game,” McGarvey said, and he realized that being with her was easy and pleasant. She was good-looking and very bright.
She smiled. “I don’t suppose you have a spare billion or two for the cause?”
The Department of Energy’s auditorium was large enough to seat two hundred, and the hall was packed this afternoon: people from the department, of course, and environmentalists and earth scientists, but people from Homeland Security too, which Eve supposed was because she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday; the Coast Guard, because of her work in the Gulf Stream, also coincidentally just offshore from the nuclear power plant; representatives from the White House and the State Department, because what she was proposing would cost in the trillions; a few executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and others, and a couple of senior analysts from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Department of the Interior, which controlled oil drilling and mining and the Department of Commerce which ran NOAA.
And a rep from the International Energy Agency, who stood up and told the group that an investment of one trillion dollars per year would be needed through 2030 just to keep up with the demand for conventional energy.
That had opened the debate after Eve’s familiar forty-minute talk about not only the need for alternative energy sources and her solution, but the need to control greenhouse gas emissions, which would effect global weather patterns, and with her broader, thus more controversial, proposal to
But looking out at her audience, all of them smart people, many of them the top minds in their governmental departments, think tanks, and universities, she was struck once again how much they were
“If you’re talking about dumping oil and especially coal to produce energy in favor of ethanol, we’ll run into a big problem right off the bat,” an alternative energy expert from the University of Manitoba argued. “Just to replace oil we would have to plant corn on seventy-five percent of all the farmland on the entire planet.”
To which one of the oil reps got up and reported that his company was cutting all of its investments in hydrogen, solar, and wind power in favor of biofuels.
While the vice president of another oil giant told the audience that his company was scaling back its alternative energy research and returning to its primary goals of finding more oil reserves and more efficient means to pump it out of the ground, and how to better refine and use it.
“The point is,” Eve broke in, keeping her anger in check as best she could, “we all have to agree that natural gas and especially oil are not renewable resources. We will run out sooner or later — probably sooner.”
“With present technologies, and what’s on the drawing boards, that won’t happen until well into the next century,” the same oil executive argued, and Eve could see a general agreement among a sizable portion of her audience.
“And greenhouse gases, and global warming?” she asked, though she suspected her question was rhetorical here. “Those issues will not go away. I don’t think there can be much argument about that basic premise, which is why my proposal for a World Energy Needs program is so important.”
She stood at the podium at one side of the small stage, while the diagrams and some calculations she’d brought with her had been projected on the big flat-panel monitor to her right. The DOE had been gracious enough to allow her to make her presentation, and had been in some ways even more cooperative than Commerce.
Her boss, Bob Krantz, had come over from Silver Spring, and was seated at the back of the auditorium. She’d gotten the proof she’d needed from her work last year in the Stream, and despite the accident — sabotage hadn’t been proved or disproved — he’d finally agreed to let her publish her findings.
“But you’ll need a lot more,” he’d warned her. “You’ll have to convince a lot of people to go along with your scheme — not only other scientists and environmentalists, but the politicians and administrators.”
“I know,” she’d agreed. “And the oil people.”
“They’re the ones with the big bucks, and the ones whose throats you want to slit.”
He hadn’t painted a very pretty picture, and this far away from him now, even though she couldn’t really tell the expression on his face, she knew damned well that he was thinking: I told you so.
Don Price had been seated next to Krantz, but he was gone, and for some reason his absence bothered her.
“Look at the science and the data and draw your own conclusions,” she told them. “For the next stage of my research I need money to purchase an out-of-commission oil drilling platform, refurbish it, and have it towed to a spot in the Gulf Stream just offshore from the Hutchinson Island power station. I need money to commission General Electric to build four Pax Scientific impellers, just like the ones aboard the
“Hutchinson Island will probably be down for a long time,” someone in the audience said without standing up. “Could be years.”
“I spoke by phone earlier today with Sunshine State Power and Light’s chief engineer who says the power connection would most likely be feasible in one year or less, and it will take us that long to prepare the rig and the generators and run the cable ashore.”
“You have claimed that your original Gulf Stream experiment was sabotaged, which resulted in the death of one of your crew members, and the near drowning of another,” someone else from the audience spoke up. “And Hutchinson Island may have been sabotaged. So now aren’t you concerned that if you go ahead with your experiment that you’ll become a target again?”
“I’ve considered that possibility. Yes.”
“Yet you’re willing to gamble your life and perhaps the lives of your crew to test your hypothesis?”
“I think solving our energy needs and reducing the intensity of destructive storms around the planet is worth the risk,” Eve said.
“Who’s behind the attacks on you and on Hutchinson Island?” the same man asked. She thought he was one of the reps from the White House, but she wasn’t sure. “No group has come forward to claim responsibility.”
And it was the sixty-four-dollar question she’d hoped wouldn’t be asked, but had expected. Here and now, however, was not the time or place to give them the answer that was on the tip of her tongue, had been on the tip of her tongue since she’d evacuated from the power plant. Oil interests, she wanted to tell them, and their reactions would be as predictable to her as they would be inevitable. Preposterous. No evidence. Certainly no proof. And she would be cutting her own throat, as Krantz had warned. Blaming big oil, or the financial organizations that most profited from the manipulation of oil exploration, market development, and the futures and derivatives that resulted, would completely cut her off from funding by them. Even though it was for a project that would guarantee the future of their companies.
Think beyond oil production, she wanted to tell them. Think energy production instead. From her project, from wind farms, from solar mining.
But in the end what she most wanted to say to them was that once the impossible was eliminated, whatever was left — however improbable — would be the truth.
Don Price came in from the rear of the auditorium, said something to Krantz, and then headed up the aisle to the stage, with such an over-the-top look of excitement on his face that he practically ran the last few feet and leapt up the stairs to her side.
“Excuse me, Doctor Larsen,” he blurted.
And something in the way he said it — he never called her Doctor Larsen — was alarming. But it wasn’t bad news. She didn’t think.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said into the microphone on the podium. “But this is important.” He looked at Eve and smiled in the way she found devastating.
“What?” she asked.
But he turned back to the audience. “I got word just a few minutes ago that Dr. Larsen had received an e- mail at her lab from Oslo, Norway, informing her that she has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on
