The nineteen largest organizations doing this will be, in order of size from biggest to smallest: Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, Petróleos de Venezuela, PetroChina, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Iraq National Oil Company, Total SA, Sonatrach, BHP Billiton, and Petrobras.
Executive decisions for these organizations’ actions will be made by about five hundred people. They will be good people. Patriotic politicians, concerned for the fate of their beloved nation’s citizens; conscientious hard-working corporate executives, fulfilling their obligations to their board and their shareholders. Men, for the most part; family men for the most part: well-educated, well-meaning. Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. When they go to the concert hall of an evening, their hearts will stir at the somber majesty of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. They will want the best for their children.
9
Down in Zurich’s Niederdorf, the old medieval district bordering the east side of the Limmat under the tower of the Grossmünster, Zwingli’s austere warehouse of a cathedral, there were still some little bars tucked here and there, too stodgy to attract many tourists. Not that Zurich got many tourists in November. Rain was turning into sleet, and the old black cobbles in their pattern of overlapping fans were getting slippery. Mary Murphy glanced down a broader street that led to the river; there stood the construction crane that wasn’t really a construction crane but rather a work of art, a sculptor’s joke at the ubiquity of cranes in Zurich. The city was always rebuilding itself.
In one of the smallest bars she sat down with Badim Bahadur, her chief of staff, who was hunched over a whisky reading his phone. He nodded at her in a morose greeting, pushed the ice around in his glass.
“What’s the word from Delhi?” she said as she sat across from him.
“It’s to start tomorrow.”
She nodded at the waiter, pointed at Badim’s drink. Another whisky. “What’s the reaction?”
“Bad.” He shrugged. “Maybe Pakistan will bomb us, and we’ll retaliate, and that will start a nuclear winter. That will cool the planet quite nicely!”
“I should think the Pakistanis would want this as much as anyone, or even more. A heat wave like the one that just happened could kill everyone there.”
“They know that. They’re just piling on. China is doing it too. We are now the pariah of the world, all for doing the needful. We’re getting killed for getting killed.”
“It’s always that way.”
“Is it?” He glanced out the window. “I don’t notice Europe hurting too badly.”
“This is Switzerland, not Europe. The Swiss stay out of shit like this, they always have. That’s what you’re seeing here.”
“Is it so different in the rest of Europe?”
“They killed Greece for getting killed, remember? And the rest of southern Europe isn’t doing much better. Ireland neither for that matter. We got killed by the Brits for centuries. Something like a quarter of all the Irish died in the famine, and about as many left the island. That was something.”
“Post-colonials,” Badim said.
“Yes. And of the same empire too. It’s funny how England never seemed to pay too much of a price for its crimes.”
“No one does. You pay for being the victim, not the criminal.”
Her whisky arrived and she downed half of it. “We’re going to have to figure out how to change that.”
“If there is a way.”
“Justice?”
Badim made a skeptical face. “What is that?”
“Come on, don’t be cynical.”
“No, I mean it. Consider the Greek goddess of justice. Bronze woman in a toga, with a blindfold covering her eyes to make her be fair. Her scales held up to measure the balance of crime and punishment, no consideration given to individual influence. But nothing ever really balances in those scales. If it’s an eye for an eye, maybe. That will balance out. But if someone is killed, no. The murderer gets fined, or jailed for life— is that a real balance? No.”
“And thus capital punishment.”
“Which everyone agrees is barbaric. Because if killing is wrong, two wrongs don’t make a right. And violence begets violence. So you try to find some equivalent, and nothing is equivalent. So the scales are never balanced. Particularly if one nation murders another nation for three centuries, takes all its goods and then says Oh, sorry— bad idea. We’ll stop and all is well. But all is not well.”
“Maybe India can get England to pay for this casting of dust.”
He shrugged. “It costs like ten euros. I don’t see why everyone isn’t supporting it one hundred percent. The effect will only last three or four years at most, and during that time we can see what it does, and decide whether we should keep doing it or not.”
“Lots of people think it will have knock-on effects.”
“Like what?”
“You know them as well as I. If doing this stops the monsoon, you’ll have doubled your own misery.”
“So we decided to risk it! After that it’s no one else’s business.”
“But it’ll be a worldwide effect.”
“Everyone wants the temperatures lowered.”
“Not Russia.”
“I’m not so sure. The sea ice is melting and the permafrost is thawing, that’s half their country. If their rivers don’t freeze, Siberia has no roads for nine months of the year. They’re made for the cold there, they know that.”
“There’s cold and cold,” Mary said.
“But it’s colder than ever there, sometimes! You know that. No. They’re just piling on, like everyone else. Someone takes the bull by the horns, grabs the wolf by the ears, and everyone takes that opportunity to stick knives in his back. I’m sick of it.”
She took another sip. “Welcome to the world,” she said.
“Well I don’t like it.” He downed his drink. “So what are we going to
