Termination Shock

“We would have to make a pile of carbon the size of Mount Rainier. About thirty cubic miles. Imagine a cube a mile on a side, full of this stuff.” He rested his hand a little more gently on the carbon jar. “And now imagine thirty of those. To get that done in any reasonable amount of time—let’s say fifty years—you have to imagine a 747 cargo freighter loaded with pure elemental carbon dumping it onto the pile every nine seconds for fifty years, 24/7/365,” T.R. said. “Now, maybe someone will make that happen. But they gotta be a whole lot richer and more powerful than everyone sitting around this table put together.”

“We all live in technocratic societies,” Saskia said, “and we naturally think in terms of a certain style of doing things. A giant atmosphere processor that sucks in air and removes the carbon through a chemical process and loads it onto the 747s every nine seconds. But I am preparing, psychologically, to go home and talk about this with my daughter—whom you might think of as a proxy for millions of Greens. The question from them will be . . .”

“Why not plant a shitload of trees?” T.R. finished the sentence for her. “Or make algae bloom over big patches of ocean? Get plants to do the work for us.”

“Exactly. Is it just that plants can’t sequester enough carbon, fast enough?”

“Partly,” T.R. nodded.

“If I may,” said the lord mayor, “we have looked at this. Oh, England’s not big enough. Canada maybe. The scale of the program would be spectacularly enormous, and it would by its very nature have to be distributed over a significant part of the earth’s surface. Many jurisdictional boundaries crossed. Many nations would have to cooperate just so. And once the plants have grown and stored up all that biomass, you can’t allow the carbon to find its way back into the atmosphere, or else what’s the point? You basically have to chop down the forests, stack up the wood somewhere safe, make sure it never catches fire, and then start growing a whole new forest.”

“I saw a video of some very angry chaps in Pakistan literally uprooting, with their bare hands, a new forest that had been planted in their district,” Daia said. “Some sort of dispute over who owned the land.”

Sylvester had been trying to get everyone to pay attention to Eshma. Heads turned in her direction. “There’s another angle that tends not to get mentioned,” Eshma said. “This one might be a bit tricky to explain to your daughter, Your Majesty.”

“Let’s have it!” Saskia said.

“What is the big question mark surrounding solar geoengineering?” Eshma asked, rhetorically.

“In other words, what T.R. is proposing to do,” Sylvester footnoted.

“It’s the fact that it will impact the climate differently in different parts of the world,” Eshma said. “When I return to Singapore, my duty will be to organize the running of massive simulations to get some idea of the ramifications of what Dr. Schmidt is proposing.”

“I ain’t just proposing,” T.R. muttered under his breath; but Eshma was at the far end of the table and didn’t hear. She continued, “The thing is that growing a lot of trees, or algae, or what have you, would also have such knock-on effects. These of course can be simulated by the same computer models. And they would unquestionably be different since it is a different scheme from Dr. Schmidt’s. But there is absolutely no basis for supposing that they would be globally better.”

“Planting huge forests, or making algae bloom in the ocean, would create a drought, or catastrophic flooding, somewhere,” Saskia said.

“It has to,” T.R. said, “it can’t not.”

“The Greens,” Saskia said, “idolize nature and will want to say that if drought or deluge happens in Mali or Nebraska or Uttar Pradesh because of their carbon-sequestering forest, why, that is nature’s decree. Gaia’s just verdict. We must bow to it. But try telling that to the victims.”

“Or those whose land was expropriated to plant the new forests,” Daia added.

Saskia sighed.

“Should make for one festive conversation with Princess Charlotte,” T.R. remarked.

“It makes me tired just thinking of it,” Saskia said. “Or perhaps I am simply tired. It has been quite a day.”

That was the signal for everyone else at the table to say all sorts of complimentary things about the hospitality that the Schmidts had bestowed on them. The dinner broke up. A few night owls showed interest in smoking cigars and drinking single malt in the Tree Car, which had openable windows that made it quite breezy. But Saskia was suddenly feeling knackered, and very much not of a disposition to get laid even if any clear opportunity were to present itself. Which it did not. For Willem intercepted her on the way down the aisle to brief her on the day’s events in the Netherlands, and to let her know that a jet was flying over tomorrow afternoon to take her and her entourage directly back to Schiphol the morning after that.

HIMACHAL PRADESH