All these changes were part of an integrated system, including major urban and suburban retrofits. California’s first infrastructure had been very shoddy and stupid, they told Mary; cars and suburbs, plywood and profit— another secondary gold rush, which had repeated the ugliness of the first one. Recovering from that crazy rush, redesigning, restoring, rebuilding— all that was going to take another century at least. But they were already a carbon-neutral society of forty million people, headed to carbon negative; this was a work in progress, of course, and they were still grappling with equity issues, being tied to the rest of the world. But those too were being worked on, until it would finally be the Golden State at last.
All this they told Mary while looking down on the pretty model of the landscape filling the warehouse, as if from a small airplane or satellite. Like a three-dimensional quilt, it seemed to her, the Lilliputian valley floor a vivid patchwork of greens, bordered and criss-crossed by what looked like hedgerows but were actually miles-wide habitat corridors, reserved for wild animals. The surrounding foothills were pale blond, dotted densely with dark green forest copses.
“It looks great,” Mary said. “I hope we can do this everywhere.”
“Models always look good,” Esther said cheerfully. But she was proud of it— not just the model, but the state.
Back in San Francisco, she met the chair of the US Federal Reserve on the top floor of the Big Tower, still the tallest skyscraper in the city. This meeting room gave them a view that made it seem as if they were almost as high as the peak of Mount Tamalpais, looming there to the north of Sausalito. It reminded Mary of the day before, looking down on the model California, but this time it was real, and vast. Alcatraz was a gray button in the blue plate of the bay, the bay’s far shores were green and hilly. Out there to the west, the Farallon Islands spiked out of the ocean like a sea serpent’s black back. Little bridges crossed the bay here and there. The city itself was rumpled and urban, the white buildings and grid of streets interrupted by a few parks. It was a grand view, and as the meeting began Mary found herself distracted by it. But quickly enough, what was happening in the room focused her attention.
The Fed chair, Jane Yablonski, had held her job for nine years, with three more to go. She had the patient look of someone who had heard a lot of exciting proposals in her time and had come to distrust all of them; a little too patient for Mary’s liking. About Mary’s age, black-haired, attractive in a silvery gray suit. Surrounded by assistants and some other Federal Reserve board members. She had been appointed by the previous president, and it was said that the current one was looking forward to replacing her.
Joining the Americans were several other central bank representatives, including China, the European Union, the Bank of England, and the Bundesbank in Germany. Just the people Mary wanted to talk to.
All central banks were curious hybrids, and the US Federal Reserve was no exception. It was a federal agency, therefore a public bank, but it was funded by private banks, at the same time that it oversaw them. It created money, being along with the Treasury the seigniorage function of the United States, and between that and setting interest rates it was thus responsible for the state of the US dollar, the strongest currency in the world, the currency every other currency was pegged to— the one everyone ran to whenever there was a currency scare of any kind. The money of last resort, so to speak. In this sense, a very crucial sense, the American empire was alive and well.
After some preliminary business, it was Mary’s turn to make her pitch. She explained to them Janus Athena’s idea for a carbon coin, wishing that she had J-A there, or Dick, to help her with the explanation. But she needed to be able to describe it herself, if it was going to make any headway. And the general ideas were clear to her.
Yablonski and the others had already heard of carbon quantitative easing, it turned out, and they were even familiar with the Chen paper and the associated discussions of it. Yablonski did not look impressed.
“I don’t see how we can get into the business of backing a currency that isn’t the US dollar,” she said when Mary was done. “The Federal Reserve exists to protect and stabilize the dollar, nothing else. That means stabilizing prices more generally, which means we pay attention to unemployment levels too, and try to help there as we can. So this idea is not really in our purview, and if we tried this new alternative currency and it somehow destabilized or harmed the status of the dollar, we would be worse than derelict in our duty.”
Mary nodded. “I understand. But you can’t just quantitatively ease your way
