They spoke enthusiastically of carbon-negative agriculture, clean energy, fleets of sailing ships, fleets of airships, carbon-based materials created from CO2 sucked out of the air and replacing concrete; thus direct air capture of CO2, a necessary component of the drawdown effort, would provide most construction materials going forward. Cheap clean desalination, clean water, 3-D printed houses, 3-D printed toilets and sewage, universal education, vastly expanded medical schools and medical facilities. Landscape restoration, habitat corridors, ag/habitat combinations—
“Okay!” Mary said, chopping short their flood of suggestions. She could see that the people in these divisions were feeling a little neglected. Finance had filled her head for too long. And as Bob Wharton had just said, you could literally fill a medium-sized encyclopedia with the good new projects already invented and waiting to scale. “Admitted; there’s no end to the good projects we could fund, if we had the funds. But what should we be telling national governments to do now?”
Bob said, “Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.”
“The six biggest emitters being?”
“Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector.”
“Cross-sector?”
“Everything not in the other five. The great miscellaneous.”
“So those six would be enough.”
“Yes. Reduce those six in the ten biggest economies, and you’re hitting eighty-five percent of all emissions. Get the G20 to do it, and it’s essentially everything.”
“And how do you get reductions in those six sectors?”
Eleven policies would get it done, they all told her. Carbon pricing, industry efficiency standards, land use policies, industrial process emissions regulations, complementary power sector policies, renewable portfolio standards, building codes and appliance standards, fuel economy standards, better urban transport, vehicle electrification, and feebates, which was to say carbon taxes passed back through to consumers. In essence: laws. Regulatory laws, already written and ready to go.
“This sounds like a litany,” Mary observed.
Yes, they told her, it was standard analysis. US Department of Energy in origin, quite old now, but still holding up well as an analytic rubric. The EU energy task force had done something similar. Really there were no mysteries here, in either the nature of the problem or the solutions.
“And yet it’s not happening,” Mary observed.
They regarded her. There is resistance to it happening, they reminded her.
“Indeed,” she said. They were caught in a maze. They were caught in an avalanche, carrying them down past a point from which there would be no clawing back. They were losing. Losing to other people, people who apparently didn’t see the stakes involved.
She walked down to the park fronting the lake. She sat on her bench and stared at the statue of Ganymede, holding his hand out to the big bird. She watched the white swans beside the tiny marina, circling about, hoping for bread crumbs. Beautiful creatures. Bodies so white against the black water that they looked like intrusions from another reality. That would explain the way water rolled off them, the way the light burst away from them, or perhaps right out of them. Not creatures of this world at all.
It wasn’t going to happen from the top. The lawmakers were corrupt. So, if not top-down, then bottom-up. Like a whirlwind, as some put it. Whirlwinds rose from the ground— although conditions aloft enabled that to happen. People, the multitude. Young people? Not just congregating to demonstrate, but changing all their behaviors? Living together in tiny houses, working at green jobs in co-operative ventures, with never the chance of a big financial windfall somehow dropping on them like a lottery win? No unicorns carrying them off to a high fantasy paradise? Occupying the offices of every politician who got elected by taking carbon money and then always voted for the one percent? Riot strike riot?
She didn’t know if her failure to imagine that bottom-up plan working was her failure or the situation’s.
Then Badim appeared before her.
“Mind if I join you?”
“No. Sit.” She patted the bench by her. She supposed he had been able to consult her bodyguards to find out where she was. This was a little disturbing, but she was glad to see him.
He sat beside her and regarded the view. “Who was Ganymede again?” he asked, regarding the statue.
“I think he was one of Zeus’s lovers.”
“A gay lover?”
“The ancient Greeks didn’t seem to think about things in those terms.”
“I guess not. Didn’t Zeus rape most of his lovers?”
“Some of them. Not all. If I recall right. I don’t really know. In Ireland it wasn’t a school topic. What about in India?”
“I grew up in Nepal, but no. Greek mythology was not studied.”
“What about Hindu mythology? Don’t they have gods behaving badly?”
“Oh yes. I don’t know, I never paid it much attention, but the gods and goddesses seemed like a family of, I don’t know. Distant ancestors. Very heroic and noble, very proud and stupid. It made me wonder what the people were like who told each other these stories in the first place, as if they were interesting stories. Like Bollywood musicals. So melodramatic. I was never interested.”
“What interested you?”
“Machines. I wanted my town to be like the towns in the West, you know. Clean. Easy. Full of shiny buildings and trams. And cable car lifts, for sure. I had to walk four hundred meters up and down to get to school and then back home, every day. So. I wanted it to be kind of like Zurich, actually. I wanted to move into the present. I felt like I was caught in a time warp, stuck in the middle ages. You could see on the screen shows what the world was like now, but for us it wasn’t like that. No toilets, no antibiotics, people died of diarrhoea all the time. In general people were sick, they were worn out, they died young. I wanted
