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