He stood up. “This is Mary Murphy,” he told the two. Then to her: “These are my family.”
Mary squinted. The woman’s mouth had tightened at the corners.
The girl, about ten or eleven years old, broke to Frank and lifted the tension. “Jake!”
“Hey Hiba. How are you.”
“Good.” The girl gave Frank a hug. Frank leaned awkwardly into it, looked over the girl’s shoulder at the woman.
“How did you get here?”
“We took the train.”
“Where do you live?” Mary asked her.
“We stay at the refugee camp outside Bern.”
“Ah. How is that?”
She shrugged. She was looking at Frank.
“Listen, I’ll let you all catch up,” Mary said, standing and holding a hand out to block Frank’s objection. “It’s okay, I should be going anyway. And I’ll come back soon.”
“All right,” he said, distracted still. “Thanks for dropping by.”
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.
