The Ministry for the Future

carrot, which she felt was the best way to lead: do it, she told them, and you are the saviors of the world, staving off chaos and allowing the huge resources of humanity and the Earth to be brought to bear on the greatest crisis in history. People would be writing about them, analyzing them and copying them, even celebrating them, for centuries to come; and a model would be built by them here and now which could be adapted to deal with any future crises of similar dimensions. Thus the carrot.

The stick: if they didn’t do it, Mary and her team could arrange the whole thing to happen through YourLock accounts as a distributed ledger coin, created and given by people to each other. This would cut hard into any power central banks might be said to have. Then also, the Ministry for the Future had allies within every relevant legislature, and Mary’s legal team had prepared detailed advice for governments to introduce new legislation that would expand legislative control over the central banks, giving them mandates and responsibilities to mitigate climate change proactively, as opposed to just responding to the financial risks reactively. The new mandates would require central banks to create a digital currency and manage the exchange rate of it, using all the mechanisms at their disposal. In short, Mary was prepared to start a movement worldwide in which governments put their central banks on leashes and directed them to act in ways governments wanted. The great example of how effective this nationalization or internationalization of the national banks could be was the takeover of the Bank of England by the British Treasury during the Second World War. Britain had commandeered the Bank of England to properly guide capital where it was needed to win the war. The same could be done again with climate change, if the relevant legislatures felt it was necessary. Country-appropriate laws were ready to be introduced by sympathetic powerful politicians in every country.

That’s what we’ll do if we have to, she concluded. She was being blunt again, as at the start; she was slipping into that certain Irish rhetorical mode that was so often useful, the one that said No more fucking around, reality has struck— said with blunt disdain for any naiveté or cowardice that refused to admit the obvious facts. That mode was a mode she liked.

But of course, she went on silkily, I don’t think a total takeover of central banks by governments, or replacement by a new people’s currency, will be necessary. Sharing for a moment a single basilisk glare with the Chinese minister, who clearly was enjoying her presentation. Renminbi was Chinese for people’s money, after all. The situation we’re facing is unprecedented, she went on, and its causes are clear, and now we have to act, and so we will.

Are the causes so clear? asked Jane Yablonski sharply. I’m not so sure!

Mary let Badim and the rest of her team make the case. She had asked them to prepare a kind of group presentation that ran around the table in cause/effect mode, describing each aspect of the problem in turn. Of course the causal chains ran in all kinds of directions, it was a cat’s cradle, but she could make that point at the end; for now, three minutes each to describe the problem: climate change caused by carbon dioxide and methane released to the atmosphere; knock-on effects very close to releasing vastly larger quantities of CO₂ and methane, now cached in the Arctic permafrost and the ocean’s continental shelves; oceans unable to uptake more CO₂ and heat; rate of extinctions already as high as at any time in Earth’s history, in terms of actual speed of extinctions per century, thus set now to match the Permian in terms of total percentage of species gone from the land, which was ninety percent; subsequent to that coming extinction, inevitable famine, dislocation, and war— possibly nuclear war— leading to the destruction of civilization; impossibility of insuring against such an eventuality, or clawing back from it. Irreversible and unfixable catastrophe.

Thus, ultimately, as a result of all these converging factors, Mary concluded at the end of her team’s presentations, they were facing the impossibility of stabilizing inflation rates and employment rates as the climate heated up. The specific principal tasks that central banks were charged with could no longer be fulfilled if the climate emergency got out of hand. In other words, central banks would fail in their principal tasks if they did not save the civilization that had charged them with those tasks. And although it was true that full employment would always remain a key objective for them, she finished, it wasn’t such a victory if the remnant of humanity that survived the crash ended up working as scavengers and peasant farmers. That wasn’t the kind of full employment that the world had in mind when central banks were created.

She saw that Yablonski and the Europeans were offended at this final sarcasm, and she pondered for a moment simply shouting suddenly in their faces, or taking her shoe off and pounding the table Khrushchev style. Or throwing a chair through the picture window and letting the storm pour in over them. Sudden fury at their mulishness: Fuck your inflation rates! she wanted to shout. Do the job that only you can do!

And judging by their faces, it was possible that her own face held all these sentiments and imagined actions and curses, perfectly visible in the way she was looking at them. The power of the eye. Not Medusa, turning them to stone or killing them with a strike from a snake on her head— instead, she fervently hoped, some kind of electrical jump-start, applied by jumper cables that had her two eyes as the contact grips, leaping the gap from mind to mind. Yes, she was very close to losing it.

Then she saw that the Chinese finance minister was grinning broadly, not even trying to hide