I can’t help but think back to that summer of meeting Ash for slushies near the Russell Building. I remember him saying, “It would be nice if we could conjure a crisis.” I asked him what he meant by that. He finished slurping a bit of blue raspberry ice and licked his lips. “We will never be able to move fast enough with all these interests and stakeholders dragging their feet. If we could somehow make those interests overplay their hand, I think it’s possible. What I’d prefer is to have the right kind of crisis descend with the right people in the right positions to exploit it. But that obviously is quite difficult to engineer.” Though it seems insane to entertain the notion, I do wonder about how many dimensions of chess Ashir al-Hasan was capable of playing.
Two years into my daughter’s life, one can see the changes everywhere, and far from the socialist dream I think a lot of climate activists envisioned back in the day, this new world rapidly under construction looks like an “entrepreneurial orgasm,” in Moniza’s words. Olivine is the latest gold rush because it reacts with water to capture CO2, so every new house has this dark emerald olivine roofing, and every new public monument is made of it—all to take advantage of a subsidy to use it as a building material. When I drive back to Chapel Hill, I see “solar trees” everywhere on campus, each one gobbling and photosynthesizing some gargantuan amount of CO2. They are sleek and decorative with translucent arms that tentacle to the sky. On the Carolina coast, near where my parents are attempting to rebuild on the smart side of the new CORDA line, aquaponics and seaweed farms are everywhere, menus swamped with oysters, kelp salads, and other aquatic recipes, the American diet undergoing a transformation I never would have believed possible ten years earlier. Moniza wrote a story about scientists arguing, highly hypothetically, what the world would do if it suddenly managed to plunge carbon levels back to 280 ppm—and accidentally risk lowering them further, initiating a new ice age in the process.
“I wouldn’t worry about it anytime soon,” I told her. On a day when CNN’s atmospheric carbon tracker was reporting levels of 452 ppm. Still growing at a steady clip of 1–2 ppm a year.
As methane vents from the Arctic hydrates and permafrost, as the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets continue their disintegration, as the rate of sea level rise reaches 1.19 inches per year, even more enormous changes are brewing. New governments have come to power calling for a radical reimagining of the world order. Civic rebirth where for decades people have stared numbly at screens. Feminist collectives in formerly vicious misogynist societies. Progressive eras in places that have known nothing but totalitarianism. There are no easy historical analogies. When history begins to happen all at once, there rarely are.
The reforms to global capitalism, the regenerative practices spilling across borders, the battle to curtail environmental degradation, a notion of true global citizenship prompting ideas of a “global welfare state” or a “worldwide safety net”—it could be a thrilling time for my daughter to grow up. And when governments’ commitments begin to slip, when they want to turn back the clock to electrified fences and the very tempting carbon deposits, hopefully they’ll be there: the Seventh Day, A Fierce Blue Fire, the Mossville Raiders, Minyun, Filhos da Meia Noite. Whatever they call themselves.
I bathed my daughter in the sink while listening to the news of the nascent electoral system of China producing a shocking break with the past as the Xin Shenghuo Party came to power. Born from the Minyun Movement, its platform has surged into the Western mainstream: It wants torture chambers ripped open, prisons torn down, techno-totalitarian surveillance systems dismantled; climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution reversed; women’s rights championed, racist castes annihilated; education free, healthcare systems expanded; weapons of every stripe, from small arms to nuclear, scrapped and melted down; migrants and refugees offered safe harbor; and a compact of rights between humans, ecosystems, and the species we share our habitats with. A massive system change to bring humanity into ecological peace with its one and only home.
Maybe Aliah will someday run for office on this platform, but until then, she’ll have to listen to her parents argue about what should be done in the here and now. Following Hurricane Kate, a theory emerged that two years of minimal solar radiation management might be creating more powerful storms. Most scientists disagree, but now that the idea is out there it will be difficult to dislodge. Many in the global climate movement howled in protest over albedo modification, and now that tenacity grows. I think it’s crazy to stop the injections, while Moniza can’t believe they started in the first place. Meanwhile, international teams are arriving in Antarctica to begin construction of two of humanity’s greatest engineering efforts to date. With the first, they will tow a nuclear reactor to the violent arctic seas and begin shooting freezing ocean water across the disintegrating West Antarctic Ice Sheet in an effort to buttress the ice and slow sea level rise. Eventually seven reactors will be anchored offshore, pushing eight thousand GT of water onto the ice over a ten-year period. The second project is the construction of wind turbines on the crown of Antarctica to freeze carbon dioxide using liquid nitrogen, which at the peak of its capacity could sequester one gigaton of CO2 per year. The process will eventually require as many turbines as it takes to power Germany. The cost of these projects is astronomical, and already governments are balking at their contributions to the price tag.
These will be just a few of the many political wars waged over biospheric policy in the years to come. Even Ash al-Hasan has admitted that many of the ideas implemented by CORDA are a mess. As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures. Even as American Shores National Park expands its boundaries in different regions, many homeowners, like my parents, return to the coasts or refuse to leave, and the government ends up bailing them out anyway. With the Climate Fed’s hand fully on the lever of pollution, drawing down US emissions faster than anyone once thought possible, we might someday soon solve one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Yet we must still coax the rest of the world to come along, adapt to the biophysical change already locked in, and combat the feedback loops already triggered. Without SRM injections to buy us time, that job will become immensely more difficult.
One of the objecting parties includes the violent revolutionaries who once called themselves 6Degrees. While visiting my old friends Rekia and Tom Levine, Tom still in a wheelchair but his faculties much improved, we learned that Norman Nate, the billionaire who set us down the path of solar management, had been assassinated. It was said he kept instructions to freeze his head upon his death, but there was nothing left to freeze after the bombs went off. “Guess that nixes that plan,” said Tom, his scathing humor almost returned. The Weathermen have dispersed into a “decentralized-variety network structure,” and this has proven even more difficult to stop than their first incarnation. As Coral Sloane made clear, the array of tools law enforcement has at its disposal are unparalleled, and yet it’s not been enough. A few months later, Quinn Worthington managed to get hold of a spring from a ballpoint pen, to twist and shape it into an effective point, enough to open both her wrists. Unsurprisingly, she has become a potent martyr.