The Deluge, page 19
“I bought her a ticket.”
She blasted air through her lips. “Great incentive system, Dad. She drops out, you buy her a cross-country flight.”
“You’ve made your point,” he said, hitting the note of gentle sternness that Holly sometimes needed to end the conversation. “The three of us haven’t all been together since the summer. It’ll be good.”
Holly was only two and a half hours by train to New York, so they saw each other frequently. They’d pick a museum or a sightseeing activity, get lunch, and spend the afternoon together. He flew to California once every three months to see Catherine. During the summer the three of them often visited Corey’s place in Florida, and though the guy’s entire engagement with reality consisted of memorizing Fox talking points, Corey had made considerable effort to stay in the girls’ lives after Gail passed. Begrudgingly, Tony did want to honor that.
Holly looked off-screen and said, “Hey. Yeah. Talking to my dad. He’s at the Burning Man for billionaires. Say hi.”
Dean’s grinning, mop-topped head edged in from the right side of the frame. “Tony! How’s it going? Here, make room, babe—” He brought a stool swiveling around and perched beside Holly, who scooted left. “I was telling my friends you were at Davos, and they were asking me if you were an international playboy or something. How is it? Is it so cool? Who’ve you glad-handed with?”
“Glad-handing’s not so much my thing. Not sure if you could tell.”
Dean laughed far too hard. When Holly first introduced Dean, Tony thought the guy was mocking him, but it turned out, no, that was just Dean, an eager beaver. He was a slender Korean kid with a wispy hipster mustache that made him look like he’d just figured out puberty. Tony was certain he’d never like any of the idiots his daughters dated, but Dean wasn’t so bad. The first time Holly brought him to dinner, he excitedly debriefed Tony, with genuine interest, about ice sheet flow rates. For whatever reason, the kid could not get enough of Tony, and this seemed to make Holly happy. Dean injected new flavor.
“We’re going to watch your panel tomorrow, Dad. You can livestream all of them on Slapdish.”
“People sit in virtual reality to watch Davos panels?”
“Tony, man, people sit in VR to watch flies land on countertops,” Dean said. “Now you gotta give these people all the shit, man. Who else is on your panel?”
“Randall,” said Holly.
“Randall? Like Mary Randall!” His eyebrows shot up as he looked between Holly and the laptop camera. “Tony, she could be president.”
“She’s not going to be president,” said Holly. “She won’t even get the nomination.”
“No,” Dean clapped his hands, “I read this thing about how the RNC is changing all the nominating rules in Iowa and New Hampshire to avoid getting themselves another lunatic Twitter-troll game-show host! They’re clearing the way for her. Tony—holy hell—get her autograph, man.”
“I thought you wanted me to give her shit?”
“Yeah! Get her autograph then give her shit! That’ll be badass.”
He stayed on the line for another hour talking to Holly and Dean. When he closed his laptop, he had that feeling he got when he’d had a particularly good conversation with one of his daughters. Satisfaction colliding with melancholy. Missing them.
He put his shoes and jacket back on and went down to the lobby, where he bought a pack of cigarettes with a gruesome picture of gum cancer. He’d picked up the habit in undergrad and had been a pack a day chain-smoker through grad school and his PhD when the nicotine let him burn through work, feverish. At Gail’s insistence, he’d given it up when Holly was born, and other than the errant loosy here and there, remained quit of it until he moved back to Connecticut. When Catherine didn’t follow him to New Haven, he’d bought his first pack in over twenty years.
Davos Klosters was the perfect place for a smoke. He stood outside the hotel and took a drag. The temperature had dropped to a properly frigid position on the thermostat, and the day’s slush had frozen solid. Trucks went by spewing sand and salt on the steel-hard ice. The smoke warmed his lungs. The lights of the city glowed gold, and the air had streaks of pale blue and purple lingering from the fallen sun. Beyond the city, he could see the outlines of the mountains. Dark and slumbering behemoths.
* * *
As one of the emissaries of Davos guided him to his seat on the stage, his dream from the previous night was still fresh. He’d been swimming or on a boat—somehow in the ocean—trying to navigate a storm overhead that looked like a dark gray city turned upside down in the sky, monolithic, with jets of black billowing from the edges. Multiple tornadoes descended and whipsawed in the surf. Red lightning flickered across the horizon, and descending from this cloud, like alien spacecraft, were deep-sea drilling rigs. They crashed into the water in a perfect row, impossibly immense, city-sized themselves, and as they fixed into place, they got to work. The tubes siphoned a briny liquid from the depths, and in that liquid were naked bodies, one after another. The machinery hummed until he had to cover his ears.
Not too difficult to interpret that one, at least.
He would share the stage with the former head of the World Bank, a Japanese American banking mogul with a bad comb-over; the Nigerian finance minister, a large woman in brightly colored African dress who would supposedly represent the developing world in the conversation; the spokeswoman for a laughable organization of fossil-fuel players called the Sustainable Future Coalition, which claimed it wanted to see action on climate; and finally, the New York governor herself. Randall had hooded, sleepy eyes that nevertheless crackled with confidence and cunning. She was attractive, like a gracefully aging movie star, and her hair was styled smooth with bangs nearly falling into her eyes. The political-gossip rags all loved talking about her hair, and maybe it was his imagination, but the room did feel whispery and electric with her presence. Here she was, the Republican Party’s resurrection, its woke rebirth after a decade of Trumpism.
The stage was what he imagined one of those old single-camera sitcom sets would be like. They sat in a semicircle in front of a wall with repeating logos for the World Economic Forum. He clutched six note cards he’d never look at. This had been Gail’s suggestion about his public-speaking skills. “You need something to do with your hands. You’re fidgety,” she’d chided. Had she lived to see the publication of his book, he doubted she would have seen much improvement.
The lights bore down so the audience was nothing but indistinct shadows, but he could feel perspiration struggling free on his brow. He sipped the glass of water on the table beside him, from which the wire microphone sprouted. The moderator, an unsettlingly young, pretty British journalist whose name he immediately spaced on, began by introducing their panel on the climate crisis and the transition to a zero-emissions economy. Of course, she had to tally the carnage first.
“The typhoon that devastated the southern coast of South Korea this past year,” the reporter began. “The persistent droughts in Australia, the Middle East, Pakistan, South Africa, and the American Southwest—some of which have required major investment in emissions-heavy desalinization efforts, the flooding last spring that inundated parts of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany. We have the paradoxical effect of a warming Arctic creating more intense blizzards in northern latitudes. The so-called Come to Jesus Storm a little over a year ago was only the latest example, breaking every regional snowfall record in Canada and the United States while killing nearly a hundred people. These increasingly destructive events are becoming more frequent, more expensive, and more deadly. We are deep into the new normal and our panel will discuss how we navigate a changing global climate.”
He found himself tuning in and out as the reporter began with softballs. He kept thinking of the rigs descending from the storm. The inky steel backlit by the wicked scarlet cast of the lightning.
The former head of the World Bank spoke of the ongoing fight to decouple greenhouse gas emissions from growth while cautioning that the world was still recovering from the residual effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and would need to continue to grow the economy to bring people out of poverty. The finance minister described the flooding hammering the Nigerian coast, the saltwater intrusion destroying the livelihoods of farmers, who then went to Lagos to find work as the megacity exploded. Amazingly, the reporter did not ask the minister if her country planned to stop selling its petroleum anytime soon.
The woman from the Sustainable Future Coalition, Emii Li Song, projected an air of practiced reasonableness. Though her organization’s members were among the worst polluters in the history of humanity, she had a solution. “We need a carbon pricing mechanism, it’s that simple. And frankly, we also have to be concerned about the spate of attacks by eco-terrorists. We believe that Congress has to act on both fronts—on climate but also on the security of our energy systems.”
Finally, the belle of the ball got her close-up.
“In my state of New York, we’re planning to install nearly thirteen hundred megawatts of new solar capacity before the end of my first year in office,” said Mary Randall, and he could almost feel the audience perch forward. “We’ve only intensified our efforts, bringing down emissions and saving consumers money. It’s true that some carbon interests and utility companies have worked to pass laws to slow the progress of renewables—this just happened in Ohio where the state government extended the life of three of its dinosaur coal plants again—but the market will win this in the end.”
The reporter changed the subject. “There are rumors that you’re considering a run for president. Given the track record of the Republican Party on the climate issue, particularly under Donald Trump, do you feel as though people can trust your seriousness on the matter of climate change?”
“I’m committed to turning the page,” Randall said with the confidence of Cleopatra. Her voice was low, breathy, and seemed to curl in the air like smoke. “What’s done is done, but I believe in the threat of climate change. If I were to run, it would be because I understand market mechanisms are the best solution, my campaign has no ties to Russian intelligence, and I don’t even have a Twitter account.”
The crowd burst into knee-slapping laughter at this deflecting, canned response.
Tony tried not to make his opening remarks too prickly, but he could already feel the edge in his voice as he ran through his spiel: He’d published a book on what it would take to save the world from calamity almost ten years ago, and he’d called it One Last Chance for a reason—because if the world waited much longer, there would be no chance. Since then, global emissions had continued to rise, on their way to 600 to 700 ppm by the end of the century. If the world didn’t move to a war footing, there would be no way to draw down emissions or remediate carbon quickly enough to avoid cataclysm. “I may admire certain things that the esteemed members of the panel are saying here,” he said, feeling himself slipping into his preferred mumble. Then Gail’s voice popped into his head and he cleared his throat and spoke up. “But they’re still trapped in a paradigm of thinking that, frankly, we should have abandoned by 2008. We don’t have time for anything but the equivalent of a planetary wartime mobilization. Otherwise, it’s Welcome to Hobbes.”
“Hobbes?” asked the reporter.
“As in Thomas. As I wrote in my book, these feedbacks are tombstone dominoes. We’ve documented the first of the methane hydrates beginning to melt as the ocean warms, but we have no idea how sensitive this feedback loop might be. Along with the permafrost, it’s the other slow-rolling time bomb, and it’s starting to go off.” He thought he had more to say, but he petered out.
The reporter asked the former head of the World Bank to respond.
“At the same time, as we recognize that this is a very serious issue, we can’t allow a singular focus on emissions to throw the world into economic uncertainty or deny opportunity to those trying to climb out of poverty. I’d also add that some of the more extreme scenarios proposed by the IPCC and others may be overwrought.”
Tony became more annoyed from there.
You understand chemistry, math, physics, Gail said when he told her he wanted to write a book and truly engage this issue politically, but you have near-zero intelligence about people. You want the world to be this place of rational actors, but no one’s rational, Tony. We’re all guided by our crazy.
He’d never managed to take this to heart. People devised all sorts of ways of putting their heads in the sand even when they should’ve known better. When the evidence of their own illogic stared them right in the face. His irritation finally bubbled over at the person who added the final piece of straw to the camel.
“I do not buy this idea that we need to impose state controls,” said Governor Randall. “I think that’s been the fear from conservatives for a while, but it’s not a necessary fear. We can solve this problem utilizing the brilliance of the market.” She gestured to Li Song. “If the next administration passes even a basic price, it will set off a whole series of tipping points, and in a decade we’ll be running most of America on renewable energy. So this idea that we need a quote-unquote war mobilization is totally hysterical when you take into account the progress we can make with a very unintrusive, inexpensive policy.”
Tony’s hand shot up like he was an undergrad, and the reporter said, “Yes, you’d like to respond.”
“I would.” Tony had to adjust the wire microphone so he could lean across the others to address Randall. Her face never changed. She held her knee and watched him with those intense, sleepy eyes.
“Here’s the bad news for all of you: We’ve reached the end of growth. Raising people out of poverty and maintaining Western standards of consumption are simply no longer possible. That’s why I didn’t want to come to this bullshit charade. Frankly, you people are exactly the reason real action on our ecological situation cannot move forward, because the only real way to do it is to not have lone wealthy individuals consuming the resources of small nations, which as far as I can tell is the premise of this entire gathering. Look at the list of attendees you have here, how many of them come from companies that suck hydrocarbons out of the ground? No offense, but those are the dues-paying members of Davos and the Sustainable Future Coalition, and that’s a joke, and you all are a joke. Tomorrow there’s a panel called the Future of Extractives, which I guess is yet another joke since there can be no future for extractives, at least not if we want to survive this. Davos brings in a pop star or teenager every year to yell at them, but the market is still more real to the people here than nature. Furthermore, to gird our infrastructure and pay for an aging population in China and the West, we’ll need a drastic reallocation of financial resources. There’s simply no other way, and yes, it will come at the cost of growth. You people are living in a bell jar if you think differently. So, you can keep convening your panels and trotting out your woke women POC candidates and all the diversity hires of the corporate carbon establishment, and you can tell yourselves that everything’s going to be A-OK, but I can assure you, it is not. And I pray there’s somebody watching this video in about twenty years because all four of you are going to look very, very fucking stupid.”
* * *
On the flight back from Zurich to Kennedy, Tony woke to turbulence.
He’d picked up a copy of Vanity Fair in the airport after he spotted the cover, Kate Morris: The Rottweiler of the Climate Crisis. When Holly had taken the position at the Brooklyn office of the climate organization that summer they’d joked about her getting into the family business. Still, Tony had never really believed this incarnation of young people chanting tired slogans and setting papier-mâché Earths on fire would be any different. Activists, for all their passion, usually knew less about earth systems than the oil men. Holly had pestered him to check out this Morris woman, but it sounded more like Holly had a bit of a hero crush than anything else. Reading this piece of hagiography, he could grant that the Morris kid didn’t sound like a total idiot, but if she thought scaring a few Democrats was going to change people’s calculations, she was Pollyanna. Green New Deal politics, the Sunrise Movement, the half-measures of the Biden and Hogan years—it had all been so much hand-waving while the guts of the carbon economy chugged along. When he read Governor Randall’s name he smirked, thinking of the withering look she’d assessed him with as they left the stage. Wow. Even for you, that was something else, Rathbone had texted him.
When he fell asleep on the plane, there was another dream. A dark space, like a Gothic church built into the side of a hill, and he could just see outside, the blue sky and sunlight beyond the buried shadows. Then he woke with a jolt.
The woman beside him was gripping the armrests, white-knuckled. The plane took another abrupt dip before righting itself. There were gasps from the rows ahead. He pulled his seat belt taut. The plane bounced violently again. The pilot came on to say they should all be buckled in at this point, as if he needed to tell them that. Tony knew the odds of a plane going down were insignificant, but that was cold comfort as it lurched side to side and a bag rattled in the overhead compartment, trying to make a prison break.
“I don’t know how you slept that long,” said the woman beside him. Well-heeled, clutching an expensive silk scarf, she looked green. “It’s been like this for twenty minutes.”
“Clear-air turbulence,” said Tony. “The jet stream is getting stronger.”
“What?” she said.
“At high altitudes the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics is growing. I mean, on the ground it’s been shrinking, but at these high altitudes, it’s getting bigger. Eventually, a plane will fall out of the sky when it gets bad enough.”
The woman turned her head to the window and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the flight. When the skies calmed down, Tony fell back asleep.
