They borrowed a name Kate Morris first devised to shut down gas stations and political offices: the Seventh Day Protests, though they had little to do with the seventh of each month. A group of students, community leaders, and activists in Richmond, California, appeared to have been the first. They drove out to the Chevron refinery that had long lorded its influence over the city with little more than tents, sleeping bags, and sunscreen. Soon others joined. The tactics worked, failed, were amended, and spread, mostly via the swarm algorithms designed by my old friend Liza. Soon encampments had sprouted in eleven locations across six states. A blockade began at the Selma facility less than forty minutes from us.
Mo and I rented a box truck, filled it with food, water, jackets, hats, long johns, whatever else we could pick up. Police were standing down. In fact, they weren’t trying to stop anyone from joining, and we drove right into this bizarre festival that had risen around the gates of the refinery. We found the intake team, told them what we’d brought, and they helped us offload our supplies. Looking around, I could see the organization of tents into neighborhoods, a library, a kitchen, solar generators and batteries distributing power, and pop-up classes with all the kids’ attention directed toward a young teacher. Most noticeably there was a banner unfurled across an oil storage tank: WE ARE THE DELUGE.
Kate’s face was everywhere on signs and T-shirts, and of course it was the picture I’d taken of her in Wyoming twenty-two years ago when we had our second date on the Paintbrush-Cascade Loop. She looked so young, her hair threaded by the breeze, smiling to herself in that tight, inscrutable way, an inside joke you’d give anything to know. MAKE ME AN OUTLAW, read a woman’s tattoo, inked across her back, as she stood in shorts and a bikini top in the cold sun, off-loading our canned food and bottled water.
“Matt,” Moniza called to me. She stood with a woman holding a tablet. “Come look at this.”
On the screen there was a feed of another encampment, this one surrounding a parliamentary building somewhere, and the occupiers had strung up the same banner. Beneath it were dueling pictures of my former girlfriend and the storm that had wiped half of North Carolina off the map. Scrawled beneath: JUSTICE 4 KATE, JUSTICE 4 KATE.
“That’s Norway,” said the woman. “Breivik is out. The government fell.” She flipped to another screen. “This is Beijing.” A similar scene, hundreds of thousands amassed in Tiananmen Square. She flipped again. “Germany.” Brandenburg Gate surrounded by tents and a similar teeming crowd with blue shirts, armbands, face paint, even their hair dyed a watery blue. Then London, Rio, Cape Town, Moscow—they all looked exactly the same. In Washington, D.C., just a block south of the National Mall, protestors had locked down the street and erected an enormous mural in the middle of traffic—Kate screaming at the armored police vehicle, demanding it run her over, and below:
KATE MORRIS IS ALIVE AND WILD
Over the next two weeks we’d make seven more trips to the Selma oil facility, nearly emptying our savings to supply the blockade. In that time, the heads of every oil major demanded the president respond, that he do something about the illegal encampments. I like to think Hamby’s equivocation was calculated. He did nothing to stop the protests, and governors were equally queasy about trying to dislodge them. This example spread and where force was employed it only seemed to fan the flames of the blockades. Every rubber bullet fired, horror drone launched, sound cannon deployed, only drew more people, more determined. The protests spread, back to the gas stations, back to state capitals, back to Capitol Hill and the corporate headquarters of coal, oil, gas, factory farms, and Wall Street banks. Elyse Duncan-Michaels, daughter of the former CEO of Exxon, made grisly headlines when she showed up to the company’s headquarters and became the latest person to douse herself in gasoline and strike a match. No doubt she will not be the last.
The stock market plunged, and economists feared a renewed crisis, and still the resistance spread. The nation’s college campuses were clogged with student protestors. Classes shut down, tuition bills went unpaid. The nurses followed, coordinating to help deliver care to patients in critical need while maintaining work slowdowns and stoppages. Many of the country’s three million prisoners joined, throwing down their firefighting equipment, their sewing, their headsets in the call centers, and demanding a minimum wage. I saw Holly Pietrus and Rekia Reynolds in interview after interview, explaining that there could be no global set of demands for what was happening, but holistically they were asking for an end to corporate domination, fascism, the murder of refugees, internment camps, the dehumanization, the genocide, but most importantly and concretely, here in the US, the immediate nationalization and rapid shuttering of the entire carbon establishment. The press, the commentariat, the establishment scoffed at this, all but wrote it off, warned of bloodshed if the estimated five million blockaders across all fifty states didn’t stand down. Oil and gas prices had already been well below production since the crisis, and the wave of bankruptcies grew into a tsunami. Perhaps this had been a long time coming, years of tireless, maddening work to destabilize the industry, but it felt shocking and abrupt, as suddenly everything changed.
On February 4, 2040, three months into the new Seventh Day protests and occupations, President Hamby initiated the nationalization of all fossil-fuel infrastructure. It will still be years before these carbon giants can be properly wound down and the economy fully transitioned, but overnight there will be no one to pay the lobbyists, to spread the campaign money, to peddle influence.
A month later, my daughter, Aliah Stanton Farooki, was born, seven pounds, one ounce. Aliah had the squashed face of an alien when she popped out, which, my mom assured me, is how all babies look. Now on her first birthday, Aliah looks increasingly like her mother, for which I’m grateful.
Of course, every day I wonder what world I’m leaving my daughter. Her life begins at the brink, either of our annihilation or our resurrection.
I try to imagine what she will witness in her lifetime.
In utero, she bobbled along upside down as her parents helped feed, shelter, and hydrate those who disabled and dismantled the infrastructure of carbon civilization. I cradled her head as a newborn while I watched our old ally Tracy Aamanzaihou barnstorm her way to the Democratic nomination and then scratch and claw over Warren Hamby and The Pastor to the presidency. In Aliah’s second year of life, I saw the new president and her allies ram through one of the most radical reorganizations of American economic life in more than a century: expansions of ballot access, public health care, free college education, universal pre-K, the breakups of major media conglomerates and tech giants, a new tax regime for the hyper-wealthy, regulation of corporate data collection, new antitrust legislation, the repeal of Taft-Hartley, and a growing wave of unionization and labor empowerment.
With the thirty biggest carbon producers in the country now owned by the taxpayers, she and Congress created the Climate Mitigation Authority, also known as the Climate Fed, modeled on Roosevelt’s War Production Board and first championed by Dr. Anthony Pietrus in his book One Last Chance. This reorganized a variety of agencies within the federal government to coordinate the rapid drawdown of carbon from both the economy and the atmosphere. Congress was given control of the Climate Authority Auditor-General, a watchdog supervisory board tasked with delivering annual reports on the CMA’s activities and the ability to shut them down if they are deemed illegal under its mandate. In an attempt to insulate it from political pressure, the CMA was created as an eleven-member panel, each member serving a five-year term. Of course, the first chairman of the CMA was Ashir al-Hasan, who initiated nationalizations of electrical utilities, railroads and, more controversially, converted several failed banks that had financed carbon-intensive industries to long-term public ownership. According to progressives, the CMA can be used to shift the global order toward regenerative economics by bringing other damaging environmental practices under its purview. The Aamanzaihou administration used the threat of court-packing to forge ahead on the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which not only overturned the infamous Citizens United decision, but implemented the public financing of all elections and added seventeen-year term limits to the Supreme Court. All this in the war to keep the planet from breaching three degrees.