It was beautiful! And she was getting her work done. So— where had this obsession with speed come from, why had everyone caved to it so completely?
Because people did what everyone else did. Because first no one could fly, then everyone could fly, if they could afford it; and flying was sublime. But also now a crowded bus ride, a hassle. And now, on most of the planes Mary flew on, people closed their window shutters and flew as if in a subway car, never looking down at all. Incurious about the planet floating ten kilometers below.
On the eighth day her ship sailed into New York harbor, a dream of a harbor, Cosmopolis itself, and she debarked on a Hudson dock and took a cab to Penn Station and got on a train headed west.
Okay, this was less interesting. But still she could work, sleep, look out the window. And the Americans had finally gotten some high-speed rail built, including this cross-continent line, so it was only another day and then she was in San Francisco, coming out of the ground and walking over to the Big Tower and taking an elevator up to the top, where she had met with the central bankers years before. Her trip had taken nine days, and she had worked every day as if home in Zurich, except that she got more done. And the carbon burn, as calculated by Bob Wharton’s own personalized calculator, had been the same as it would have been if she had stayed at home. And the ocean crossing had been beautiful. She had sailed across the Atlantic! And now stood before a picture window in the Big Tower, looking across a huge wedge of the Pacific. Amazing!
“We’ve been so stupid,” she said to Jane Yablonski, still chair of the Federal Reserve; she had been reappointed by a new president who had been terrified by all the changes. Yablonski looked mystified as she tried to parse which stupidity Mary might be referring to. Mary did not elucidate.
Not immediately, anyway. She needed to hear how they thought things were going first.
The group talked over events they often named— the Heat Wave, Crash Day, the Little Depression, the Transition, the Intervention, the Strange Times, the Super Depression— and she saw it again: these were the rulers of the world, if indeed anyone could be called that. Maybe not, maybe that was the change they were trying to catch with all their glib names: the system as such had escaped them. Change itself was changing.
Still, they undoubtedly held a lot of whatever power remained. No doubt about that. Because money mattered.
Now they were gathered to discuss the first years of their big experiment, what Bob Wharton called their Hail Mary: the carbon coin. It was very like meetings convened to discuss the Indians’ Pinatubo interventions: climatologists in those meetings, bankers in this one. Here too they had made an experimental casting into the air, in this case of gold dust. What had happened?
They listened to their assistants give reports on that for a couple of hours. Abstract after abstract, information crushed to crystalline density. Then it was back to them, looking at each other around the big table. Time for reckoning: had it done what they hoped it would? Had it worked?
Yes and no and maybe. The usual answer to any question these days. But in many senses, yes, it had worked. This was what Mary heard them saying to each other, cautiously and indirectly. Around this table set so high above the beautiful city, looking at each other, she saw that their faces were pleased, even when expressing nervous concern.
They agreed on these points:
The new carbon coin had stimulated many short-term investments in carbon sequestration projects, and many longer-term investments in the coin itself. It had caused some of the biggest carbon owners to cash out and keep fossil carbon in the ground, or use it for plastics if they could. Coal had become just a black rock you could turn into money by leaving it alone. They had created and paid out trillions of carbon coins, and yet had seen no signs of inflation, or deflation, for those who held that theory; no noticeable price change.
There were currency exchanges where they had seen efforts to manipulate the value of the carbon coin against the values of other currencies, including people trying to drive it down in value, in hopes of buying low and selling high later on. Combatting those efforts, if they needed to do that, had been best accomplished by attacking the manipulators in ways that would cause them to desist, while also warning others away from such actions. Tools existed to strongly sanction those who tried it. One report on this had used the phrase financial decapitation.
As part of altering the investment climate further, their staffs had written up draft legislation to propose to their governments several related reforms, including strong currency controls; attacking and eliminating tax havens; shifting all money from cash to digital forms tracked by blockchain technologies; and mounting the pressure on carbon by way of increased taxation and regulation. A lot of momentum on
