Termination Shock

The G and the L apparently stood for “Geotechnisch Liga” or “Geotechnical” (a synonym for geoengineering?) League. Kind of a weird name in Dutch. “Liga” came from Spanish and was normally used in a football context. But naming oddities aside, ZGL was a real organization apparently. And it had been around for a while. The founder had a brief but plausible-seeming Wikipedia entry stating that he’d been born in 1937 and had founded the organization after the 1953 disaster as a community service group to shore up dikes and aid people in disaster planning. Since then he’d passed away, but the charter of the ZGL was worded in such a way that it would support not just dike-building but any other “geotechnisch” measures that might help protect Zeeland from the ravages of the North Sea. What that added up to, in today’s milieu, was that they were pro-geoengineering and—according to posts and updates from the last week—quite fond of T.R.’s Pina2bo project.

> The twat is up!

said a text from Remi.

Willem turned his attention to the video stream and saw that Martijn Van Dyck was getting into position to be interviewed by one of the networks. He changed the channel on his television until he found the right one.

There were two parties of any real significance that could be called truly far right in the sense of being quite open about their disdain for immigrants as well as espousing certain other positions that were well outside the Overton window of the politics of the day. One of these was older, headed by a senior politician who’d had a long career as a gadfly in Parliament. Then there was the party of Martijn, who was younger, more polished. He presented much the same ideas in a more palatable guise and was considered a man to watch.

The first thing Willem noticed about him was that he was sporting a ZGL button in his lapel. It was adorned with the heraldry of Zeeland: a lion emerging from waves representing the sea.

His surprise over that detail distracted him, at first, from what Martijn was actually saying. Which on any other day wouldn’t have been much of an issue, since his statements were utterly predictable. People mostly watched him for his wit and style. And Willem was tired of Martijn’s wit and style. He drifted back to reading about the ZGL as Martijn started talking. The group’s website included some nice old black-and-white photos of the members in the 1950s repairing dikes, and of the founder giving a speech in front of a Parliamentary committee.

> !!!

came in from Remi and so Willem turned his attention back to Martijn and turned up the volume.

“Yes,” Martijn was insisting to the shocked TV journalist, “our stance on this has in fact changed. We are in the middle of redrafting the party platform.” He paused, took a deep breath, and showed emotion that even the interviewer knew better than to interrupt. “I lost a friend at Scheveningen the other day,” he announced. “At his funeral, his mother came up to me and implored me to step back and re-examine my party’s position on the klimaat nood.”

Climate emergency. Martijn Van Dyck, until this moment, had never allowed the phrase to pass his lips, and he openly mocked those who used it.

“Recent research has made it undeniable that man-made climate change is real and that it poses the greatest threat to our country since Hitler.”

Willem laughed out loud and slapped his desk. This was like hearing the leader of the Greens come out in favor of clubbing baby seals.

The interviewer couldn’t believe her ears. “That is stunning news,” she said. “Does this mean you’ll be joining up with the Greens?”

Martijn looked quizzical, verging on offended. “The Greens!? Oh, no. We need real solutions to this problem. Effective solutions. Vague promises to cut back on carbon emissions at some point in the distant future are too little, too late. ‘Decarbonization’ is nothing more than a 1940-style capitulation. No, the only way out of this emergency is geoengineering. Such as what we are seeing at the Pina2bo site in Texas. I stand with Her Majesty the Queen in supporting such realistic, hardheaded practical solutions.”

“Fuuuuuck!” Willem shouted.

“The queen?” asked the interviewer.

“Yes. As we just saw from the throne.”

“The queen said the opposite.”

“Ah, in the official text—which she, of course, didn’t write—that’s what it claims. But you have to read between the lines in these things. The way she hesitated—the look on her face as she rattled off those lines that were put in her mouth by the prime minister—there’s no mistaking what it all means.”

“But the words are what they are!” insisted the interviewer, who, to her credit, was having none of it.