The Deluge, page 109
Next up, The Pastor announced his intent to run again, money from the Carbon Majors already bursting his coffers. The business community was lining up behind him. Images of the Carolina coast played over our faces, and it made me feel like I was living in a hallucination. Or witnessing a premonition.
* * *
They borrowed a name Kate Morris first devised to shut down gas stations and political offices: the Seventh Day Protests, though they had little to do with the seventh of each month. A group of students, community leaders, and activists in Richmond, California, appeared to have been the first. They drove out to the Chevron refinery that had long lorded its influence over the city with little more than tents, sleeping bags, and sunscreen. Soon others joined. The tactics worked, failed, were amended, and spread, mostly via the swarm algorithms designed by my old friend Liza. Soon encampments had sprouted in eleven locations across six states. A blockade began at the Selma facility less than forty minutes from us.
Mo and I rented a box truck, filled it with food, water, jackets, hats, long johns, whatever else we could pick up. Police were standing down. In fact, they weren’t trying to stop anyone from joining, and we drove right into this bizarre festival that had risen around the gates of the refinery. We found the intake team, told them what we’d brought, and they helped us offload our supplies. Looking around, I could see the organization of tents into neighborhoods, a library, a kitchen, solar generators and batteries distributing power, and pop-up classes with all the kids’ attention directed toward a young teacher. Most noticeably there was a banner unfurled across an oil storage tank: WE ARE THE DELUGE.
Kate’s face was everywhere on signs and T-shirts, and of course it was the picture I’d taken of her in Wyoming twenty-two years ago when we had our second date on the Paintbrush-Cascade Loop. She looked so young, her hair threaded by the breeze, smiling to herself in that tight, inscrutable way, an inside joke you’d give anything to know. MAKE ME AN OUTLAW, read a woman’s tattoo, inked across her back, as she stood in shorts and a bikini top in the cold sun, off-loading our canned food and bottled water.
“Matt,” Moniza called to me. She stood with a woman holding a tablet. “Come look at this.”
On the screen there was a feed of another encampment, this one surrounding a parliamentary building somewhere, and the occupiers had strung up the same banner. Beneath it were dueling pictures of my former girlfriend and the storm that had wiped half of North Carolina off the map. Scrawled beneath: JUSTICE 4 KATE, JUSTICE 4 KATE.
“That’s Norway,” said the woman. “Breivik is out. The government fell.” She flipped to another screen. “This is Beijing.” A similar scene, hundreds of thousands amassed in Tiananmen Square. She flipped again. “Germany.” Brandenburg Gate surrounded by tents and a similar teeming crowd with blue shirts, armbands, face paint, even their hair dyed a watery blue. Then London, Rio, Cape Town, Moscow—they all looked exactly the same. In Washington, D.C., just a block south of the National Mall, protestors had locked down the street and erected an enormous mural in the middle of traffic—Kate screaming at the armored police vehicle, demanding it run her over, and below:
KATE MORRIS IS ALIVE AND WILD
Over the next two weeks we’d make seven more trips to the Selma oil facility, nearly emptying our savings to supply the blockade. In that time, the heads of every oil major demanded the president respond, that he do something about the illegal encampments. I like to think Hamby’s equivocation was calculated. He did nothing to stop the protests, and governors were equally queasy about trying to dislodge them. This example spread and where force was employed it only seemed to fan the flames of the blockades. Every rubber bullet fired, horror drone launched, sound cannon deployed, only drew more people, more determined. The protests spread, back to the gas stations, back to state capitals, back to Capitol Hill and the corporate headquarters of coal, oil, gas, factory farms, and Wall Street banks. Elyse Duncan-Michaels, daughter of the former CEO of Exxon, made grisly headlines when she showed up to the company’s headquarters and became the latest person to douse herself in gasoline and strike a match. No doubt she will not be the last.
The stock market plunged, and economists feared a renewed crisis, and still the resistance spread. The nation’s college campuses were clogged with student protestors. Classes shut down, tuition bills went unpaid. The nurses followed, coordinating to help deliver care to patients in critical need while maintaining work slowdowns and stoppages. Many of the country’s three million prisoners joined, throwing down their firefighting equipment, their sewing, their headsets in the call centers, and demanding a minimum wage. I saw Holly Pietrus and Rekia Reynolds in interview after interview, explaining that there could be no global set of demands for what was happening, but holistically they were asking for an end to corporate domination, fascism, the murder of refugees, internment camps, the dehumanization, the genocide, but most importantly and concretely, here in the US, the immediate nationalization and rapid shuttering of the entire carbon establishment. The press, the commentariat, the establishment scoffed at this, all but wrote it off, warned of bloodshed if the estimated five million blockaders across all fifty states didn’t stand down. Oil and gas prices had already been well below production since the crisis, and the wave of bankruptcies grew into a tsunami. Perhaps this had been a long time coming, years of tireless, maddening work to destabilize the industry, but it felt shocking and abrupt, as suddenly everything changed.
On February 4, 2040, three months into the new Seventh Day protests and occupations, President Hamby initiated the nationalization of all fossil-fuel infrastructure. It will still be years before these carbon giants can be properly wound down and the economy fully transitioned, but overnight there will be no one to pay the lobbyists, to spread the campaign money, to peddle influence.
* * *
A month later, my daughter, Aliah Stanton Farooki, was born, seven pounds, one ounce. Aliah had the squashed face of an alien when she popped out, which, my mom assured me, is how all babies look. Now on her first birthday, Aliah looks increasingly like her mother, for which I’m grateful.
Of course, every day I wonder what world I’m leaving my daughter. Her life begins at the brink, either of our annihilation or our resurrection.
I try to imagine what she will witness in her lifetime.
In utero, she bobbled along upside down as her parents helped feed, shelter, and hydrate those who disabled and dismantled the infrastructure of carbon civilization. I cradled her head as a newborn while I watched our old ally Tracy Aamanzaihou barnstorm her way to the Democratic nomination and then scratch and claw over Warren Hamby and The Pastor to the presidency. In Aliah’s second year of life, I saw the new president and her allies ram through one of the most radical reorganizations of American economic life in more than a century: expansions of ballot access, public health care, free college education, universal pre-K, the breakups of major media conglomerates and tech giants, a new tax regime for the hyper-wealthy, regulation of corporate data collection, new antitrust legislation, the repeal of Taft-Hartley, and a growing wave of unionization and labor empowerment.
With the thirty biggest carbon producers in the country now owned by the taxpayers, she and Congress created the Climate Mitigation Authority, also known as the Climate Fed, modeled on Roosevelt’s War Production Board and first championed by Dr. Anthony Pietrus in his book One Last Chance. This reorganized a variety of agencies within the federal government to coordinate the rapid drawdown of carbon from both the economy and the atmosphere. Congress was given control of the Climate Authority Auditor-General, a watchdog supervisory board tasked with delivering annual reports on the CMA’s activities and the ability to shut them down if they are deemed illegal under its mandate. In an attempt to insulate it from political pressure, the CMA was created as an eleven-member panel, each member serving a five-year term. Of course, the first chairman of the CMA was Ashir al-Hasan, who initiated nationalizations of electrical utilities, railroads and, more controversially, converted several failed banks that had financed carbon-intensive industries to long-term public ownership. According to progressives, the CMA can be used to shift the global order toward regenerative economics by bringing other damaging environmental practices under its purview. The Aamanzaihou administration used the threat of court-packing to forge ahead on the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which not only overturned the infamous Citizens United decision, but implemented the public financing of all elections and added seventeen-year term limits to the Supreme Court. All this in the war to keep the planet from breaching three degrees.
I can’t help but think back to that summer of meeting Ash for slushies near the Russell Building. I remember him saying, “It would be nice if we could conjure a crisis.” I asked him what he meant by that. He finished slurping a bit of blue raspberry ice and licked his lips. “We will never be able to move fast enough with all these interests and stakeholders dragging their feet. If we could somehow make those interests overplay their hand, I think it’s possible. What I’d prefer is to have the right kind of crisis descend with the right people in the right positions to exploit it. But that obviously is quite difficult to engineer.” Though it seems insane to entertain the notion, I do wonder about how many dimensions of chess Ashir al-Hasan was capable of playing.
Two years into my daughter’s life, one can see the changes everywhere, and far from the socialist dream I think a lot of climate activists envisioned back in the day, this new world rapidly under construction looks like an “entrepreneurial orgasm,” in Moniza’s words. Olivine is the latest gold rush because it reacts with water to capture CO2, so every new house has this dark emerald olivine roofing, and every new public monument is made of it—all to take advantage of a subsidy to use it as a building material. When I drive back to Chapel Hill, I see “solar trees” everywhere on campus, each one gobbling and photosynthesizing some gargantuan amount of CO2. They are sleek and decorative with translucent arms that tentacle to the sky. On the Carolina coast, near where my parents are attempting to rebuild on the smart side of the new CORDA line, aquaponics and seaweed farms are everywhere, menus swamped with oysters, kelp salads, and other aquatic recipes, the American diet undergoing a transformation I never would have believed possible ten years earlier. Moniza wrote a story about scientists arguing, highly hypothetically, what the world would do if it suddenly managed to plunge carbon levels back to 280 ppm—and accidentally risk lowering them further, initiating a new ice age in the process.
“I wouldn’t worry about it anytime soon,” I told her. On a day when CNN’s atmospheric carbon tracker was reporting levels of 452 ppm. Still growing at a steady clip of 1–2 ppm a year.
As methane vents from the Arctic hydrates and permafrost, as the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets continue their disintegration, as the rate of sea level rise reaches 1.19 inches per year, even more enormous changes are brewing. New governments have come to power calling for a radical reimagining of the world order. Civic rebirth where for decades people have stared numbly at screens. Feminist collectives in formerly vicious misogynist societies. Progressive eras in places that have known nothing but totalitarianism. There are no easy historical analogies. When history begins to happen all at once, there rarely are.
The reforms to global capitalism, the regenerative practices spilling across borders, the battle to curtail environmental degradation, a notion of true global citizenship prompting ideas of a “global welfare state” or a “worldwide safety net”—it could be a thrilling time for my daughter to grow up. And when governments’ commitments begin to slip, when they want to turn back the clock to electrified fences and the very tempting carbon deposits, hopefully they’ll be there: the Seventh Day, A Fierce Blue Fire, the Mossville Raiders, Minyun, Filhos da Meia Noite. Whatever they call themselves.
I bathed my daughter in the sink while listening to the news of the nascent electoral system of China producing a shocking break with the past as the Xin Shenghuo Party came to power. Born from the Minyun Movement, its platform has surged into the Western mainstream: It wants torture chambers ripped open, prisons torn down, techno-totalitarian surveillance systems dismantled; climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution reversed; women’s rights championed, racist castes annihilated; education free, healthcare systems expanded; weapons of every stripe, from small arms to nuclear, scrapped and melted down; migrants and refugees offered safe harbor; and a compact of rights between humans, ecosystems, and the species we share our habitats with. A massive system change to bring humanity into ecological peace with its one and only home.
Maybe Aliah will someday run for office on this platform, but until then, she’ll have to listen to her parents argue about what should be done in the here and now. Following Hurricane Kate, a theory emerged that two years of minimal solar radiation management might be creating more powerful storms. Most scientists disagree, but now that the idea is out there it will be difficult to dislodge. Many in the global climate movement howled in protest over albedo modification, and now that tenacity grows. I think it’s crazy to stop the injections, while Moniza can’t believe they started in the first place. Meanwhile, international teams are arriving in Antarctica to begin construction of two of humanity’s greatest engineering efforts to date. With the first, they will tow a nuclear reactor to the violent arctic seas and begin shooting freezing ocean water across the disintegrating West Antarctic Ice Sheet in an effort to buttress the ice and slow sea level rise. Eventually seven reactors will be anchored offshore, pushing eight thousand GT of water onto the ice over a ten-year period. The second project is the construction of wind turbines on the crown of Antarctica to freeze carbon dioxide using liquid nitrogen, which at the peak of its capacity could sequester one gigaton of CO2 per year. The process will eventually require as many turbines as it takes to power Germany. The cost of these projects is astronomical, and already governments are balking at their contributions to the price tag.
These will be just a few of the many political wars waged over biospheric policy in the years to come. Even Ash al-Hasan has admitted that many of the ideas implemented by CORDA are a mess. As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures. Even as American Shores National Park expands its boundaries in different regions, many homeowners, like my parents, return to the coasts or refuse to leave, and the government ends up bailing them out anyway. With the Climate Fed’s hand fully on the lever of pollution, drawing down US emissions faster than anyone once thought possible, we might someday soon solve one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Yet we must still coax the rest of the world to come along, adapt to the biophysical change already locked in, and combat the feedback loops already triggered. Without SRM injections to buy us time, that job will become immensely more difficult.
One of the objecting parties includes the violent revolutionaries who once called themselves 6Degrees. While visiting my old friends Rekia and Tom Levine, Tom still in a wheelchair but his faculties much improved, we learned that Norman Nate, the billionaire who set us down the path of solar management, had been assassinated. It was said he kept instructions to freeze his head upon his death, but there was nothing left to freeze after the bombs went off. “Guess that nixes that plan,” said Tom, his scathing humor almost returned. The Weathermen have dispersed into a “decentralized-variety network structure,” and this has proven even more difficult to stop than their first incarnation. As Coral Sloane made clear, the array of tools law enforcement has at its disposal are unparalleled, and yet it’s not been enough. A few months later, Quinn Worthington managed to get hold of a spring from a ballpoint pen, to twist and shape it into an effective point, enough to open both her wrists. Unsurprisingly, she has become a potent martyr.
As I return to this document on Aliah’s third birthday, having failed to turn it in to my publisher and with a growing doubt that I ever will, I’m jealous as always of her mother’s rich storytelling. Moniza recently journeyed to Nunavut, the Canadian territory in the Arctic Circle where melting ice and tundra are exposing massive deposits of copper, diamonds, gold, uranium, and zinc. The Legislative Assembly of the Inuit, whose ancestors date back to the first arrival of Homo sapiens on the North American continent, implemented a radical new policy, flummoxing every culture’s xenophobes: A program of assisted migration brings refugees from every corner of the planet to work the mines but also uses that newfound mineral wealth to build homes, schools, and grant small-business loans to displaced peoples. Free housing, health care, and language school for all new arrivals. Children receive an education in the history of the Inuit people and how they’ve survived for millennia in one of the most inhospitable climates humans have ever known.
“In just a few short years,” my wife wrote, “Iqaluit has transformed from a sleepy capital village to a bustling hub of global trade and prosperity with a Little Haiti, Little Cambodia, Little Bangladesh, Somalitown, Manilatown, even a Little California. Other Arctic Canadian provinces are now looking to follow suit, and one can imagine Whitehorse and Yellowknife and Eagle Plains becoming, if not the new cradle of civilization, then at least places where the weariest of peoples can renew their lives, where lavish government funds will give them the opportunity to start over while holding on to whatever memory of their vanishing homes they can manage to keep alive. Maybe this is what hope looks like as a great wandering of nations begins, a mass movement of human beings that will not end for centuries.”
