Termination Shock

Prince Fahd did have some skill at public speaking. Not for nothing had he earned degrees at Oxford and at Yale. “Some of us live in places that are too low,” he said, with a gesture of respect to Saskia, and a nod to the Marshall Islanders, “but I live in a place that is too hot. Perhaps we can work together. Those of us who have reaped great rewards making the situation worse”—this with a glance at the Norwegians—“are sensible that we might have a role to play in setting things right. One who could not be here today has amazed the world by taking aggressive action to shield our world from an angry sun. Later we’ll go up to the top of the mountain to see another such facility launch its first projectile into the Albanian stratosphere. As the veil spreads downwind it will, I hope, provide a measure of relief to our brothers and sisters in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Other such projects are being contemplated in places farther to the south, where we hope they will benefit my home country as well as helping to combat rising sea levels all over Netherworld.” This the first, albeit oblique, public acknowledgment of something Saskia had got wind of from the Venetians, namely that the Saudis had been busy with a little project of their own.

“Many are the voices who will say—who have already said, quite vocally—that this is at best nothing more than a stopgap solution. I’m sure our friends from the Maldives, the Laccadives, and the Marshall Islands would take a different view! But of course the detractors have a point. It is absolutely the case that we cannot long survive on a program that consists exclusively of bouncing back the sun’s radiation using a thin veil of gas. We must take advantage of the brief respite that such interventions give us to remove carbon from our atmosphere.” This the big lectern-thumping applause line. “And we must do it,” he continued, raising his voice over the clapping, “on a scale that matches—no, even exceeds—the scope of the coal and petroleum industries’ global operations during the last hundred and fifty years. They had a century and a half to put carbon into the atmosphere; we have only decades to take it back out. It will be expensive. But we have money. Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, said, ‘Yet, if God wills that the Civil War continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword . . . so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ If, at the end of all this, the pensioners of oil-rich countries are once again only being supported by the proceeds of modern clean industries, then we will truly know that the money has been well looked after.”

Strong words. Saskia smiled, nodded, and applauded at all the right moments. She really couldn’t tell whether Fahd bin Talal was full of shit. He might sincerely believe every word he said, and he might not. If he was sincere, he might be completely delusional. It could be that tomorrow he’d fly back to Riyadh and never be seen or heard from again. But a big part of her job had always been signaling agreement with people who were some combination of delusional or disingenuous, so, for the moment, it didn’t matter to her. He was proposing to spend a lot of money to fix the atmosphere. How could she find fault with that?

It was a sufficiently effective keynote speech to make the remainder of the conference seem almost superfluous. Prince Bjorn moderated a panel of experts discussing the pros and cons of various carbon capture schemes. A questioner from the City of London poured cold water over it by pointing out there was no way to pay for any of this. They watched an expensively produced presentation about a proposal to carpet a large part of the Sahara with photovoltaic panels. Another speaker talked about the notion that everything T.R. was doing could one day be replaced by a cloud of giant mirrors between the earth and the sun.