First, powering everything in a most literal way, was the news that a lot of clean energy was being generated. Mary recalled Bob Wharton saying something to this effect many years before, back in the beginning, during that time that now seemed on the other side of a great mountain range, those invisible Alps over which there was a younger self she could barely remember: if we can generate lots of clean energy, Bob had said, lots of other good stuff becomes possible. Now they were doing that.
Also, crucially, even though they were creating more energy than ever before, they were burning far less CO2 into the atmosphere, less per year than in any year since 1887. So Jevons Paradox appeared to be foxed at last; not in its central point, which stated that as more energy was created, more got used; but now that it was being generated cleanly, and for fewer people as the population began to drop, it didn’t matter how much of it was being used. Since there was a surplus at most points of supply, most of the time, and created cleanly, they had simply outrun Jevons Paradox. And where excess energy was being lost by lack of completely effective storage methods, people were finding more ways to use it while they had it: for desalination, or more direct air carbon capture, or seawater pumped overland into certain dry basins, and so on. On and on and on it went. So clean energy, the crux of the challenge, had been met, or was being met.
Then also, another great poster: the Global Footprint Network had the world working at par in relation to the Earth’s bioproduction and waste intake and processing. World civilization was no longer using up more of the biosphere’s renewable resources than were being replaced by natural processes. What for many years had been true only for Cuba and Costa Rica had become true everywhere. Part of this achievement was due to the Half Earth projects; though this was not yet an achieved literal reality, because well more than half the Earth was still occupied and used by humans, nevertheless, broad swathes of each continent had been repurposed as wild land, and to a large extent emptied of people and their most disruptive structures, and left to the animals and plants. There were more wild animals alive on Earth than at any time in the past two centuries at least, and also there were fewer domestic beasts grown for human food, occupying far less land. Ecosystems on every continent were therefore returning to some new kind of health, just as the result of the planetary ecology doing its thing, living and dying under the sun. Most biomes were mongrels of one sort or another, but they were alive.
It was also the case, though not a single poster or panel referred to it directly on this day, that the global human replacement rate was now estimated to come to about 1.8 children per woman. As a level replacement rate was hit at about 2.15 children per woman, the total human population on Earth was therefore going down, slowly but surely. The idea that there was still a demographic surge ahead of them had gone away; demographers no longer predicted it. Some economic theorists worried that the economy couldn’t handle such a diminishing population; others welcomed the change. But all of this was so new and controversial that at this conference, they left it unspoken. It was a topic for another day. The old attack on the environmentalist movement, that it was antihuman, still had enough force to make many in the scientific community wary of speaking on the subject. It was too hot to handle. But in this case, good news; so it was mentioned pretty often, it was one of those things being spread by word of mouth.
It was somewhat the same in any discussion of the recent Super Depression, and how the social and economic disruption of that had actually been a good thing in terms of carbon burn and biosphere health. That events which had caused suffering for millions of people might be good for the rest of the planet’s life was again seen as a possible antihumanism. Best just to frame all this aspect of the general situation as managing disaster as best one could, making the best of a bad situation, etc. And in the flood of information being presented, some things were clearly being left to word of mouth, especially inferences and suppositions.
Over all of it, in the most literal sense because of the banner, and the air itself, the immense flux of information was often summed up well by what was being called the Big Index or the Big Number, meaning the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This had now dropped 27 parts per million in the previous five years. It was down to 451 now, same as in the year 2032, and it was on a clear path to drop further, maybe even all the way to 350, the pre-industrial high point on the 280–350 ppm sine wave that had existed for the previous million years, marking shifts in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. 350 parts per million of CO2, if they wanted that! The discussion now was how far down they wanted to take it. This was a very different kind of discussion than the one that had commanded the world’s attention for the previous forty years.
In this same period, the Gini index figures for the world at large had flattened considerably. Every continent was showing improvement. The pay justice movements, the wage ratio movements, and the central banks’ recommended tax plans, plus political movements everywhere supporting job guarantees and progressive taxation, sometimes under the rubric of “an end to the kleptocracy of the plutocrats,” as one poster put it, had had powerful effects everywhere. Setting a generous definition of a universal necessary income, guaranteeing jobs to all,
