54
Mary hunkered down in the wan light of winter Zurich, meeting daily with her team to plot their next moves. The whole baker’s dozen gathered in the mornings to share the news and plan the day, the week, the decade. It was like a war room now, yes, and their work felt like war work. Not war, however; there was no opponent, or if there was, it consisted of fellow citizens with a lot of money and/or passion. If it was war, they were outgunned and on the defensive; but really it was mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides. It was a civil war, perhaps, a body politic punching itself over and over. In any case, war or not, it had that same besieged awful feeling of existential danger, of stark emergency that never went away. The large number of people living rough in Zurich, busking for change, looking for work, or worse, not looking for work; that never got ordinary. It was not a Zuri thing.
Nevertheless, Mary’s life settled into a routine that was, she had to admit, almost pleasant. Or at least absorbing. Busy; possibly productive. There were worse things than having a project in hand that felt crucial. She stayed in Zurich. When its winter gloom got to be too much for her, she took a Sunday train up to one of the nearby Alpine towns, popping up through the low cloud layer that banked on the north side of the Alps and made winter life in Zurich so sunless and gloomy. There had been eight hours of sunlight in the first fifty days of this year, they told her, scattered over several days; it was like them to quantify a thing like that. But on a Sunday she would take a break and train up into brilliant snowy light. The ski resorts were too crowded, and Mary was not a skier; but there were many Alpine towns that had no skiing to speak of, being surrounded by sheer cliffs: Engelberg, Kandersteg, Adelboden, some others. In these towns she could walk on cleared snow trails, or snowshoe them, or just sit on a terrace, soaking in the chill brilliant light, the small crystalline sun in its big white sky. Then back down into the gloom.
In Zurich she met with her team and with outside helpers and antagonists. The fossil fuels industry’s lawyers were getting more and more interested to learn how much they could extort from the system if they chose to sequester their asset. This was by no means a trivial topic, indeed it was a crucial matter, and Mary entered into it with great interest. To a certain extent it felt to her like she was negotiating to buy off terrorists who had explosive vests strapped around their waists, and were saying to her and to the world at large, pay us or we blow up the world. But this was not exactly right. First, if no one would buy their product, their explosives wouldn’t go off, and they couldn’t blow up the world. So their threat was hollowing by the day, which explained why they were talking to her at all; their leverage as terrorists, with the biosphere as their hostage, was lessening. And as the Ministry for the Future was one place where they might be able to negotiate a settlement, they were coming to Zurich to bargain.
Then also, they were not terrorists. It was an analogy, maybe a bad one, or at least a partial one. Civilization needed electricity, and it was citizens who had powered themselves on these fossil fuels for the last couple of centuries. The owners of these fuels were sometimes private individuals who had gotten fantastically rich, but many times they were nation-states that had claimed ownership of the fuels found within their boundaries as assets of the state and its citizenry. These petro-states controlled about three-quarters of the fossil fuels that had to stay in the ground, and they too were seeking compensation for the losses they would incur by not selling and burning their fuels.
So it was a mixed bag in that respect. ExxonMobil was big, yes, and held more in assets than many nations in the world; but China, Russia, Australia, the Arab states, Venezuela, Canada, Mexico, the US— these were bigger in carbon assets than ExxonMobil and the other private companies. And they all wanted compensation, even though all of them had agreed in the Paris Agreement to decarbonize. Pay us for not ruining the world! It was extortion, a protection racket squeezing its victims; but the victims were the national populations, so in effect they were putting the squeeze on themselves. Or their elected politicians were putting the squeeze on them. So the situation was bizarre, both hard to define and constantly changing.
So meetings kept happening. Mary kept on pushing the idea of creating the money to pay for decarbonization and all the necessary mitigation work. As the weeks passed and the global economy went from recession to depression, Dick almost convinced her that taxation might be a good enough tool to do the job all by itself. What counted, he said, was differentials in cost and benefit. So in that sense, meaning in effect the bottom line in accounting books, taxes were both stick and carrot. On the bottom line, whether a person’s or a company’s or a nation’s, there was no difference between stick and carrot. They were both incentives. And if nations levied taxes they got the money themselves, rather than having their central banks print new money; they took in rather than shelled out. So if you did something that was stiffly taxed, and progressively taxed the more you did it, that tax was a stick to beat you away from that activity; then, if you didn’t
