But two could play at those games, indeed everyone could play those games— not just the 195 nations that had signed the Paris Agreement, but all the various kinds of non-state actors, right down to individuals.
And so came a time of troubles.
7
He was having panic attacks whenever he got hot, and then the panic attacks made him hotter still. Feedback loop for sure. When he was stabilized enough to move him, we flew him to Glasgow. He had spent a year abroad there, he said, and we thought that familiarity might help. He didn’t want to go home to the States. So we took him to Glasgow and kept him cool, and took walks with him around the neighborhood at night. It was October and so the usual rain and raw sea air. That seemed to comfort him.
One night I was out there walking the streets with him, letting him take the lead. He hardly ever said a word, and I let him be. On this night he was a little more talkative. He pointed out to me where he had gone to school, theaters he had frequented. Apparently he had taken an interest in theater, done some work backstage with lighting and sets and costumes. Then when we found ourselves on Clyde Street, he wanted to walk out onto the pedestrian bridge that ran out over the river to the south bank.
Out there in the dark the city looked foursquare and massive. It’s low for a city, not much different than it must have appeared a century or two ago. A little uncanny somehow, like a city in some dark fantasy. He stood there and looked down at the black water, elbows on the railing.
We talked about various things. At one point I asked him again if he would be going home.
No, he said sharply. I’m never going back there. It was the blackest look I ever saw on him. Never, he said.
I let it go. I didn’t want to ask. We stood there leaning against the railing. It looked like the city was slowly floating in toward the hills.
So why did I survive? he said all of a sudden. Why just me, out of all those people?
I didn’t know what to say. You just did, I said. Probably you were the healthiest person there. Maybe one of the biggest, I don’t know. You aren’t that big, but maybe bigger than most Indians.
He shrugged. Not really.
Even a bit more body mass would help. You have to keep your core temperature under about 104. A few pounds could help with that. And a lifetime of better food and medical care. And you’re a runner, right?
I was a swimmer.
That probably helped. Stronger heart, thinner blood. That sort of thing. Ultimately I think it just means you were the strongest person there, and only the strongest survived.
I don’t think I was the strongest person there.
Well, maybe you were better hydrated? Or you stayed in the water more? They said they found you by the lake.
Yes, he said. Something I said had troubled him. He said, I did stay submerged as much as I could. Just my face up there to breathe, all night long. But a lot of people were doing that.
It added up to survival, I said. You made it. You were lucky.
Don’t say that.
I don’t mean lucky. It was chance. I mean there’s always an element of chance.
He looked at the dark low city, spangled with its night lights. It’s just fate, he said. He put his forehead on the railing.
I put a hand on his shoulder. Fate, I agreed.
8
Humans are burning about 40 gigatons (a gigaton is a billion tons) of fossil carbon per year. Scientists have calculated that we can burn about 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon before we push the average global temperature over 2 degrees Celsius higher than it was when the industrial revolution began; this is as high as we can push it, they calculate, before really dangerous effects will follow for most of Earth’s bioregions, meaning also food production for people.
Some used to question how dangerous the effects would be. But already more of the sun’s energy stays in the Earth system than leaves it by about 0.7 of a watt per square meter of the Earth’s surface. This means an inexorable rise in average temperatures. And a wet-bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans, even if unclothed and sitting in the shade; the combination of heat and humidity prevents sweating from dissipating heat, and death by hyperthermia soon results. And wet-bulb temperatures of 34 have been recorded since the year 1990, once in Chicago. So the danger seems evident enough.
Thus, 500 gigatons; but meanwhile, the fossil fuels industry has already located at least 3,000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground. All these concentrations of carbon are listed as assets by the corporations that have located them, and they are regarded as national resources by the nation-states in which they have been found. Only about a quarter of this carbon is owned by private companies; the rest is in the possession of various nation-states. The notional value of the 2,500 gigatons of carbon that should be left in the ground, calculated by using the current price of oil, is on the order of 1,500 trillion US dollars.
It seems quite possible that these 2,500 gigatons of carbon might eventually come to be regarded as a kind of stranded asset, but in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of it they own or control, while they still can. Just enough to make a trillion or two, they’ll be saying to themselves— not the crucial portion, not the burn that pushes us over the edge, just one last little taking. People need it.
The nineteen largest organizations doing this will be, in order of size from biggest to smallest: Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Pemex, Petróleos de Venezuela, PetroChina, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, Iraq National Oil Company, Total SA, Sonatrach, BHP Billiton, and Petrobras.
Executive decisions for these organizations’ actions will be made by about five hundred people. They will be good people. Patriotic politicians, concerned for the fate of their beloved nation’s citizens; conscientious hard-working corporate executives, fulfilling their obligations to their board and their shareholders. Men, for the most part; family men for the most part: well-educated, well-meaning. Pillars of the community. Givers to charity. When they go to the concert hall of an evening, their hearts will stir at the somber majesty of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. They will want the best for their children.
9
Down in Zurich’s Niederdorf, the old medieval district bordering the east side of the Limmat under the tower of the Grossmünster, Zwingli’s austere warehouse of a cathedral, there were still some little bars tucked here and there, too stodgy to attract many tourists. Not that Zurich got many tourists in November. Rain was turning into sleet, and the old black cobbles in their pattern of overlapping fans were getting slippery. Mary Murphy glanced down a broader street that led to the river; there stood the construction crane that wasn’t really a construction crane but rather a work of art, a sculptor’s joke at the ubiquity of cranes in Zurich. The city was always rebuilding itself.
In one of the smallest bars she sat down with Badim Bahadur, her chief of staff, who was hunched over a whisky reading his phone. He nodded at her in a morose greeting, pushed the ice around in his glass.
“What’s the word from Delhi?” she said as she sat across from him.
“It’s to start tomorrow.”
She nodded at the waiter, pointed at Badim’s drink. Another whisky. “What’s the reaction?”