The smuggler was expensive, so much so that only those who had some considerable savings would be able to leave by using one. Most of my townspeople were stuck. But we could afford it. So I met my friend one night at our usual café, and he had a man with him. The man was polite but distant. Professional. He asked to see my money, asked about my family, when I could be ready, that sort of thing. He said he could get us into Turkey and then Bulgaria, and after that Switzerland or Germany. I went to the bank and withdrew the money, then went home and told my wife, and we told the children to pack one suitcase each, that we were going on a trip. That night at midnight a car pulled up to our apartment curb and we went downstairs and put our suitcases in the trunk and piled in the back of the car. As we drove off I looked out the car window at our apartment and realized I would never see it again. All that was over. I had had my routines, I liked to go down to the café after work or late at night when it had cooled, drink coffee and play backgammon and talk to friends. My wife and I got together with a few couples, made meals and watched their kids. We knew the people who ran the grocery and the local stores. We had all that, just like anyone. I remember what it was like. But just barely.
15
Taking notes for Badim on regular Monday meeting of ministry executive group. I’ll clean these up later to give to him.
Mary Murphy, convening her leadership team in seminar room next to her office, Hochstrasse. I should have gone to the bathroom.
Badim on Mary’s left, then thirteen division heads seated around the table, the rest of us behind them against the walls. George is going to fall asleep.
Tatiana V., legal. Just heard this morning World Court declined to take up her Indian case. Not happy.
Imbeni Halle. Infrastructure. Poached from Namcor.
Jurgen Atzgen. Zurcher. Gets to commute from his house down lake. Insurance and re-insurance. Swiss Re vet.
Bob Wharton, nat cat. American ecologist. Mitigation and adaptation.
Climate lead Adele Elia. French, coordinating our climate science. Started as a glaciologist, hates meetings like this. Once said so right in meeting. Lived eight years on glaciers, she said. Wants back there. As for world cryosphere, it’s still melting.
Huo Kaming, ecologist, Hong Kong. Biosphere studies, habitat restoration, refugia creation, animal protection, rewilding, biologically based carbon drawdown, watershed governance, groundwater recharge, the commons, the Half Earth campaign. She can do it all.
Estevan Escobar. Chilean. Oceans. Prone to despair.
Elena Quintero, agriculture. Buenos Aires. She and Estevan joke about Argentina-Chile rivalry. She cheers him up very skillfully.
Indra Dalit, Jakarta. Geoengineering. Works with Bob and Jurgen.
Dick Bosworth, Australian, economist. A card. Taxes and political economy. Our reality check.
Janus Athena, AI, internet, all things digital. Very digital themself.
Esmeri Zayed. Third of the E gals. Jordanian Palestinian. Refugees, liaison to UNHCR.
Rebecca Tallhorse, Canada. Indigenous peoples’ rep and outreach.
Mary starts meeting by asking for new developments.
Imbeni: Looking into plans to redirect fossil fuel companies to do decarbonization projects. Capabilities strangely appropriate. Extraction and injection both use same tech, just reversed. People, capital, facilities, capacities, all these can be used to “collect and inject,” either by way of cooperation or legal coercion. Keeps oil companies in business but doing good things.
Tatiana looks interested. Rest of group looking skeptical. Carbon capture and reinsertion into empty oil wells are both dubious as a reality.
Mary: Look into it more. We’ve got to have it, from what the calculations say about how much the natural methods can grab.
Jurgen: Insurance companies in a panic at last year’s reports. Pay-outs at about one hundred billion USD a year now, going higher fast, as in hockey stick graph. Insurance companies insured by re-insurance. These now holding short end of stick (tall end of stick?). Can’t charge premiums high enough to cover pay-outs, nor could anyone afford to pay that much. Lack of predictability means re-insurance companies simply refusing to cover environmental catastrophes, the way they don’t insure war or political unrest etc. So, end of insurance, basically. Everyone hanging out there uninsured. Governments therefore payer of last resort, but most governments already deep in debt to finance, meaning also re-insurance companies. Nothing left to give without endangering belief in money. Entire system therefore on brink of collapse.
Mary: What mean collapse?
Jurgen: Mean, money no longer working as money.
Silence in room. Jurgen adds, So you can see why re-insurance hoping for some climate mitigation! We can’t afford for world to end! No one laughs.
Bob Wharton: Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, others we can’t. Also, we can’t adapt to some things we are now failing to mitigate. Need to clarify which is which. Mainly need to tell adaptation advocates they’re full of shit. Bunch of economists, humanities professors, they have no idea what talking about. Adaptation just a fantasy.
Mary halts Bob rant very skillfully. Sympathetic squint as she chops air with hand. Preaching to choir, she suggests. Moves along to Adele and the rest.
Adele: You think that’s bad! Joke gets laugh. The big Antarctic glacial basins, mainly Victoria and Totten, hold ice sliding downhill faster and faster. Will soon be depositing many thousands of cubic kilometers of ice into sea. Now looking like could happen in a few decades. Sea level rise two meters for sure, maybe more (six meters!) but two meters enough. Doom for all coastal cities, beaches, marshes, coral reefs, many fisheries. Would displace ten percent of the world’s population, disrupt twenty percent food supply. Like a knock-out punch to dazed fighter. Civilization kaputt.
Jurgen throws up hands. Cost of this cannot be calculated!
Calculate it, Mary orders him.
J. frowns, pondering big picture in his head. A quadrillion. Yes, really. A thousand trillion is not too high. Maybe five quadrillion.
Dick: So just call it infinity.
Adele: Number of species threatened with extinction now at Permian levels. (Piling on here?) Permian the worst extinction ever. Now on course to match it.
Kaming: Ninety-nine percent of all meat alive is made of humans and their domestic beasts. Cattle, pigs, sheep, goats. Wild creatures one percent of meat alive. And suffering. Many species gone soon.
M: Soon?
K: Like thirty years.
Estevan: Only twenty percent of the fish now in oceans are wild fish.
Mary ends discussion, chop chop. Regards team. Speaks slowly.
MftF has budget 60B USD/year. Big. But world GDP 100 trillion/year. Half that GWP is so-called consumer spending by prosperous people, means non-essential buying of things that degrade biosphere. Ship going down. Parasite killing host. Even the productive half of GWP, food and health and housing, burning up world. In short: fucked.
Team watches her.
So. Have to find ways to spend our sixty billion that strike at leverage points.
Dick: Our money not enough to matter. Have to change laws— that’s our leverage point. Spend our money on changing laws.
Tatiana likes this.
Imbeni: Critical infrastructure needs funding.
Elena: Ag improvements.
Mary chops discussion. Chop chop chop! Stop. We need to lever change, and fast. However we can. By whatever means necessary.