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.
72
The habitat corridor idea was just one early move in the larger Half Earth project, but first things first. With wild animals critically endangered everywhere, it was necessary to do what we could right now, without delay. And habitat corridors had an already-existing tradition of methodologies and legal instruments already worked up. The famous Y2Y corridor, Yukon to Yellowstone, was going great. Not that this was the hardest corridor on Earth to establish, the Canadian Rockies being almost empty down their spine, and including a lot of federal and tribal land protected as parks and the like, on both sides of the border. Not to mention including two of the great remaining ecosystem populations, with the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem animals prospering at the south end, and the Arctic ecosystem animals doing fairly well in the north, if you didn’t count climate change melting their land or ice out from under them. Both populations might start migrating to the middle, but the corridor allowed them to do that. And both ecozones had relatively healthy populations of mammals and birds, in that they were not too poisoned, and big in number and geographical extent. As proof of concept, Y2Y has done wonders for showing people how it all could work. Animals had free passage up and down it, and protection from hunting. Roads still active in the region had been given under- and over-passes. Fences had breaks in them or were torn down entirely. Millions of animals were tagged, and thus now participating in the so-called Internet of Animals, which is basically a gigantic suite of scientific studies. It was not far from true that we had a better census going with the mammals and birds in the Y2Y corridor than we did for the humans in it.
All good! And tacking on a Y2Y-Cal, an east-west corridor from Yellowstone to Yosemite, had not been very difficult either. California was already in the vanguard of animal protection, going back to the days when they had saved the Sierra Nevada bighorn
