In the following days the representatives of the central banks kept meeting in the same room, and while the Zurichsee provided emotional guidance by way of a succession of brilliantly sunny days, marked by tall clouds like galleons, sailing over the lake as if carrying vast treasure, the central bankers finally invented a proposal they could all agree on. It was as bold as anyone could want, and Mary felt that none of the central bankers there would have touched the plan with a ten-foot pole if all of them weren’t in it together to take the heat sure to follow. They would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS: one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air. They promised to establish a floor in the value of this carbon coin, which exposed them to great danger from speculators trying to scare money out of the plan; and they foretold a rise in the value of the currency over the coming decades. By doing these things they made this investment a sure thing, assuming civilization itself survived. That by itself would guarantee a certain large amount of capital from many different sources looking for just such a sure thing. Pension funds, small national reserves, big corporate assets, really anyone responsible would want the security involved, especially now that there was no security anywhere else. In essence it was like throwing a life ring to drowning people. It could overwhelm the system, actually, if everyone grabbed at once; but carbon had to be sequestered to create the coins in the first place, so if there was a mad rush to do that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. And the central banks could always adjust upward the amount of carbon saved that would be required to earn a coin, creating derivative complications of all kinds and giving them more control knobs. Getting the certification teams for the sequestrations up and running was going to be a crazy effort. In fact, at the end of the agreement they all lent some fiat money of the ordinary kind, pooled into a fund administered through the BIS, which would be enough to pay for this new bureaucracy of verification that would have to be created to certify that carbon was really being sequestered. This was a bureaucracy so vast no single bank could afford it, nor of course the ministry, not even close. It was almost a full employment plan all by itself.
So it was a total program. Mary’s team wrote it up in detail, in consultation with the bankers on hand and their staffs, taking all their suggestions and folding them in, and then in the end, after each bank had consulted with its government back home, they announced it, and offered the first tranche of carbon coins for purchase. Began to disburse them too; and the trade price for them held, even rose a little.
Then nothing happened.
This, Mary thought as the days and weeks after the meeting passed, was beginning to look like a pattern. They were only really doing things to try to ameliorate the situation they were falling into after it was too late for those things to succeed. They kept closing the barn door after the horses were out, or after the barn had burned down. At that point their actions, which a few years or decades earlier might have been quite effective, weren’t enough. Maybe even close to useless. Over and again it was a case of too little too late, with nothing stronger anyone could think of to apply to the worsening situation.
If this were really true for something physical, like the Arctic’s permafrost melt, or the ocean’s acidification past the point of life at the bottom of the food chain surviving it, or the Antarctic’s ice sheet collapsing fast— then they were fucked and no denying it.
And yet there were still people fighting tooth and claw. And it could be that it was only in the realm of the social that they were so far behind the curve of the moment. Anyway people were fighting.
Although not just for the good, but also against the good— fighting tooth and claw to forestall their efforts, to hamstring them. Thus in effect there were people trying to kill every living thing on Earth, in some awful genocidal murder-suicide. Here they were, walking a tightrope over the abyss, and these fuckers were jumping all over the balancing pole they were holding, doing their best to cast them all down to disaster and death.
“There will always be idiots,” Badim intoned as Mary cursed another manifestation of these people.
But it was worst than that. “There will always be assholes,” she said viciously.
Badim said, “Focus on all the people still fighting for the good. There are many more of them than the other kind.”
Then one month after the carbon coin announcement, a bomb went off in their offices on Hochstrasse.
It happened at night, with no one in the building; perhaps that had been the bombers’ intent, but there was no way to tell. The Swiss police who accompanied Mary to see the wreckage were taut with apprehension, and they were not so much apologetic as they guarded her, as stolidly disapproving. Blaming the victim being one of the errors that law enforcement people were so often prone to.
They advised her to accept more police protection. In fact they insisted on it. And it was true that the sight of their offices, solid stone Swiss buildings, built to last a thousand years, blown open, shattered, their interiors visible from the street, a black
