Mary saw Dick’s point, but at the end of every discussion, didn’t actually agree with him. Maybe it was just psychological rather than economic, but people liked to be paid for doing things more than they liked avoiding having to pay for something. There was a mental difference between carrots and sticks, no matter if the numbers were the same in a ledger. With the one you got fed, with the other you got hit. They simply were not the same. She would make this point to Dick over and over, and he would respond with his crazy economist’s smile, his acknowledgment of economics’ fundamentally alien nature, the way it was a view from Mars, or a helpful but clueless AI. Which last was more or less the case.
Also, in terms of making a carrot: the oil industry had equipment and an expertise that could be adapted from pumping oil to pumping water. And pumping water was much easier. This was good, because if they were going to try to pump some of the ocean’s water up onto Antarctica, the pumping effort was going to be prodigious. Even if they confined their efforts to draining the water from under the big glaciers, a lot of pumps would be needed.
So the oil industry needed to stop pumping oil, for the most part, but they could be hired to pump water. Or to pump captured carbon dioxide down into their emptied oil wells. Direct air capture of atmospheric CO2 was looking more and more like an important part of the overall solution, but if it scaled up to the size of the problem, it was going to produce an enormous amount of dry ice, which had to go somewhere; pumping it underground was the obvious storage location. In some ways, these reverse pumping actions were easier and cheaper than pumping up oil; in other ways they were a bit harder and more expensive. But in any case they made use of an already-existing technology which was very extensive and powerful. If the industry could be paid to do something with its tech to help in the current situation, all the better.
The fossil fuel lawyers and executives looked interested when this was proposed to them. The privately owned companies saw a chance of escaping with a viable post-oil business. The state-owned companies looked interested at the idea of compensation for their stranded assets, which they had already borrowed against, in the usual way of the rampant reckless financialization which was the hallmark of their time. Paid to pump water from the ocean up to some catchment basin? Paid to pump CO2 into the ground? Paid how much? And who would front the start-up expenses?
You will, Mary told them.
And why? When we don’t have it?
Because we’ll sue you if you don’t. And you do have it. You can pay the upfront costs of the transition, and if you invest in that, we’ll pay you in a guaranteed currency that is backed by all the central banks of the world to increase in value over time. As an aspect written into the currency itself. A sure bet no matter what happens.
Unless civilization crashes.
Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.
Go long. She found herself saying that a lot. Bob Wharton called it the Hail Mary pass. It was a little strange to be saying “go long” to middle-aged men, so sleek and smooth in their wealth; sexually satisfied, said their aura, such that saying to them “go long” might be enough to trigger what she had once heard described as a hard-on in the heart. Well, if she was enticing them to expand confidently into the world, to make an intervention into the body of great mother Gaia, so huge and vivid and dangerous, then fine. So what. Mary had no illusions that she herself, a harried middle-aged female bureaucrat in a limp toothless international organization, represented for these men any kind of stand-in for the Earth mother; but she was a woman, perhaps even the fine remains of a woman, as the pirates of Penzance had said about Ruth so hard of hearing. She could push that a little, and she did. Little sadistic lashings of what was really just Irish contempt for any form of pretense, of which there was a lot in these meetings. These men were often quite disgusting, in other words, but there was a higher purpose to be pursued.
Then one day Janus Athena came into her office. This person was the opposite of all that bankerly masculine erotic charge; the project for J-A was to efface gender, to exist in that very narrow in-between, the zone of actual gender unknowability. Which itself was a new gender, presumably. Mary wouldn’t even have believed that zone existed if it weren’t for Janus Athena standing before her every day, completely unknowable in that aspect of self, or to put it better, neither masculine nor feminine as any kind of dominant. This could only be the result of an extensive and canny effort.
Mary regarded her mysterious AI expert with her usual curiosity. She wanted to say, J-A, what gender were you assigned at birth, if any?
But this would be to break the social rules which either J-A or Mary, or society at large, had imposed on her. It would be to intrude or to interfere with J-A’s project. Probably J-A got asked this pretty often, one way or another, but Mary wasn’t going to. Acceptance of the other and their project; this was crucial.
“What have you got for me,
