The Deluge, page 93
Meanwhile, states and municipalities will pay a deductible when accessing emergency disaster aid, not as punishment but to ensure they are considering risk in land development decisions, while a new national property tax, levied at a penny per square foot, will go to fill the coffers of the National Climate Hazard Mitigation Fund (NCHMF), which will essentially augment FEMA surge capacity. This will be used for nationally declared disasters ranging from flooding to wildfires to earthquakes to freak lightning storms, the idea being to backstop, for every citizen, the risk of a more volatile climatic regime. This will be supplemented by Secretary Rathbone’s “Get the Fuck Out of the Way” tax on property within fifteen feet of sea level, at an additional penny per square foot, rising another cent for each quarter inch of sea level rise. The Uniform Relocation Act, governing compensation for displaced renters, will be amended with more generous subsidies and incentives for communities to relocate to new public housing in Climate-Resilient Mobilization Cities (CRMCs).
The Coastal Resilience and Defense Authority will undoubtedly be controversial and induce howls from politicians and constituents alike. So be it. There will be accusations that we are abandoning storied cities such as New Orleans, Miami, and Charleston. This is accurate. These cities are no longer defensible given the current rate of sea level rise and attempting to buttress them will only incur greater losses of money, material, and lives. While decommissioning thermoelectric coastal power plants (particularly nuclear facilities), removing hazardous waste, and lining landfills will be a high priority, we must also take care not to collapse regional economies. There’s little point in spending precious resources trying to save a city like New Orleans built on a subsiding delta already below sea level, but building resilient “transition communities” on higher ground could be useful. Similarly, a great deal of port activity must begin a transition away from fragile coastal areas and toward navigable inland waterways, such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Hudson River-Erie Canal link to the Great Lakes, and Baton Rouge, which will absorb much of New Orleans’s waterborne commerce due to its safe elevation. (I’ll spare you the acronyms of all these programs.)
There are, however, structures that are too expensive or contain too much sunk-cost infrastructure to simply walk away from, and those will need to be defended for longer than is ideal. There is danger of the Concorde fallacy, the conviction that it’s less wasteful to throw money at a lost cause simply because you’ve invested so much already, and I fear that may be the case for Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and many other coastal cities, but an immense amount of financing will be spent in their defense with a variety of projects, ranging from fortified seawalls to organic buffering systems in the bays to multibillion-dollar sea gates. New York City’s destiny, for instance, will likely be as the most expensive fortress in human history. The US Army Corps of Engineers will create a federalized coastal fortification defense strategy that builds in ample room for sea level rise. The rest of the American coast, piece by piece and year by year, will be repurposed by the CCC and transformed into the largest national park in our country. The coastline will be returned to public space, to be utilized for the benefit of all. My sister suggested the name “American Shores National Park,” and so far, that is what has stuck.
The question is where will everyone leaving these communities go? This dovetails with our economic crisis. A lack of aggregate demand requires stimulus, and therefore the restructuring of our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems will be supplemented by the largest spending on public works ever. In addition to all the emissions abatement and clean energy programs described above, stimulus will patch holes in state budgets and provide additional funds for hiring teachers, firefighters, policemen, emergency responders, and for shovel-ready infrastructure projects. However, the bill will also harness $100 billion to retrofit existing public housing and vastly expand it in depopulated, deindustrialized municipalities largely across the Great Lakes region. Midsize cities and large towns that have suffered under the impacts of poor policy, poverty, and addiction will become CRMCs with incentives drawing the clean energy and decarbonization industries. Other sizable investments will be made to transition displaced workers from the coal, oil, and gas sectors into carbon removal (the skills are largely similar; one is simply drilling wells to deposit carbon instead of exploiting it), as well as in communities that have borne the brunt of fossil-fuel development, especially Appalachia and the Gulf states. Curricula of new training centers will focus on postsecondary technical education and be grafted onto the existing network of community colleges to allow for rapid instruction in skill sets.
Finally, the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency-Biosphere (ARPA-B) will conduct research into gigaton-scale carbon mitigation techniques and begin steps for deployment of solar radiation management (SRM) aerosols. Though this last point has proved highly controversial, the task force unanimously agreed some form of SRM lies in humanity’s near future. As polluting plants come off-line and their aerosols dissipate, global dimming will abate quickly with the consequences of up to one degree of warming imminent. This cannot be allowed to happen. In total, the stimulus portion of the legislation will total $5 trillion in the first year and an additional $20 trillion over the next fifteen years.
Social policy was of course a heated topic of debate, and typically Secretary Rathbone, Tony, and myself would have been skeptical of attaching ancillary concerns to the immediate issue of carbon abatement. However, the scale of the crisis necessitates more radical measures to address the culprit of inequality. There is an unquestionable economic and environmental advantage to eradicating the structural inequities of our current system. This begins by disciplining out-of-control transnational financial capital and making it work for the purposes of remedying the climate crisis. A financial transaction tax will curb speculation and raise approximately $300 billion per year while the regulation of tax havens will wring out the aimless hot money producing distortionary effects around the globe. A carefully designed estate and consumption tax on extravagant consumer goods: private jets, recreational boats, homes beyond the primary residence, electronics, estates larger than $5 million, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, cosmetics, and finally advertising. Advertising is an insidious form of pollution that has distorted the economy in myriad ways, particularly in the digital age (data brokers in particular will be targeted). Restructuring the income tax to impact the top 10 percent, 2 percent, .5 percent, and .01 percent, respectively, will pay for a host of new programs, including an elimination of student debt, tuition-free university education, universal pre-K, and universal health, vision, and dental care.
Of course, the eco-economic crisis is without borders, and the nation-state system has already demonstrated its crippling limitations. We cannot force any state to decarbonize, democratize, and redistribute at the barrel of a gun, but we can use the imperial power of the United States, its economic muscle, and its impressive propaganda capabilities to galvanize a sense of planetary purpose and equity. I can already hear some of our left-wing critics expostulating on the hegemonic aims presented here. Their critique will be an interesting footnote, steamrolled by the present emergency.
Linking carbon policy across the world will be paramount. This begins with the border adjustment tariff of the shock collar, imposed on the products of all foreign-based exporting firms, forcing free-rider countries to adhere to emissions abatement. There is some question as to whether this duty will be legal under international trade law, which is irrelevant. The United States built the IMF, WTO, and NAFTA, and we can just as easily rebuild them around a new carbon order. The Climate Stabilization and Development Fund (CSDF) will be a multilateral fund that will provide financial support for countries transitioning to clean energy production. Modeled on the Montreal Protocol, we hope to eventually finance it at $150 billion a year to help the developing world deploy zero-carbon energy. We’ve seen the limitations of nonbinding treaties, but with the CSDF and linked carbon policy, we have the beginnings of an international “contract and converge” regime.
Undoubtedly all the great accounts of this historical moment will be written from the Chinese perspective. Awash in internal refugees, its food system buckling, China’s finances are also in crisis as low- and middle-income countries fail to service their debts due to climate disruption. Additionally, the environmental impacts of half a century of unrestrained industrial production are combining to cripple the state. Though many a salivating Maoist has looked with envy at China’s authoritarian government and the speed with which it has implemented limited environmental policy, this was obviously, as Congresswoman Aamanzaihou once said, “a fool’s wish on fool’s gold.” The Communist Party’s only real goal was total control; therefore, it would sacrifice anything for continuous growth, consumption, and the acquiescence of its population. At the first signs of trouble, the party knew only more repression and murder of its people. Authoritarian, kleptocratic, and plutocratic rule across disparate human societies have in common that they are inherently unstable. Because China is undergoing a political convulsion, the temporality and effects of which are impossible for us to know and understand at the moment, we must focus diplomacy and policy action there with a carrot-and-stick package to encourage first, decarbonization, and second, human rights and democratic reform.
After much vigorous debate, it was decided to include refugee policy in the bill. Though refugees have endured a violent othering in a climate-destabilized world, we should look at refugees not as a problem but a solution: This is demographic salvation for the developed world, whose aging populations are becoming an increasing strain. The Refugee and Immigration Authority (RIA) will deliver displaced peoples across the country, find them decent work, provide English lessons, educate their children in public schools, and quickly integrate them into the American social order. We will raise the limits of refugees and asylum seekers to roughly 2.5 million a year. This, I hope, will be the beginning of the difficult project of getting the world’s people to renounce the sanctity of their many identities. Distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion, and national boundary have long been antiquated. In a world of transnational threat, they’ve become exceedingly dangerous, and we must devise additional policy with the intent of mollifying these ancient and pointless hatreds.
Ultimately, the legislation aims to remake American society with a just and inclusive vision. Born from crisis, it will create a sprawling new national park to bind us in restoration of the natural world, a redistribution of prosperity to empower those who’ve long been embattled, exploited, and ignored, and a wave of new immigrants arriving to lay their burdens down and become the next stewards of our country’s vital promise.
* * *
Only in the final days did Ms. Li Song, who’d remained largely silent throughout our debates, make her price clear: “Immunity for my members. Plus a sizable financial package to help the industries transition.”
As expected, Tony, Hani, and Jane exploded at this:
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“That is breathtaking.”
“Out of the question. Absolutely not.”
Essentially the fossil-fuel majors wanted substantial government assistance, reassurances, low-cost loans, and a raft of other financial incentives to transition from their core businesses of burning carbon and dumping the waste CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere. I thought myself, Ms. McCowen, Admiral Dahms, and Secretary Rathbone could convince the others that this was actually in our best interest. After all, what we did not want was further financial panic sparked by the sudden collapse of major energy players, an economic shock from the mass devaluation of the fossil-fuel industry with nothing but the stranded assets of unburnable reserves on their books. These companies were well positioned to transition to the brand-new trillion-dollar industry we were about to create in carbon remediation. They spent generations putting pollution into the atmosphere, and now they’d simply make their business pulling it back out. The tricky part was the security they wanted from legal liability.
Ms. Li Song continued: “Our members have been active participants in a responsible transitioning to a clean economy.”
Tony’s face was purple, and he looked like he might self-combust: “That’s a fucking hoot!”
Haniya, a bit more calmly, explained: “I’m sorry, but what you’re asking for is unconscionable. Their scientists knew what the effects of greenhouse pollution would be as far back as the 1970s. What happened here is a crime, and that very well may require serious restitution.”
Jane added: “She’s right. I won’t put my name on anything that includes immunity. I’m sorry.”
When Tony spoke, the spittle flew: “You’re one sick fucking bitch, Song! Carrying water for the worst people to ever walk the earth. Our civilization is on the precipice of annihilation, and you want to hold us hostage? You’re having fun, huh? Sitting there patiently this whole time waiting to fuck us.”
The onslaught continued, and I admired Emii Li Song’s poise. She sat sedately, dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck. She looked almost like a woman at mosque in a black chador—everything but the headpiece. She kept her hands clasped in front of her and waited for her turn to speak.
“If civilization is on the precipice as you claim, then you should be willing to negotiate the point. I’ll also remind you, that without indemnification, it’s unlikely any legislation will pass Congress.
The room was silent for a moment. Finally, Tony stood. “Fuck this. I’d rather let the world burn.”
Jane also pushed up out of her seat and looked to Rathbone and McCowen.
“She goes or we go.”
Haniya took a bit longer, collecting her notepad, pen, and purse. Without saying anything, she smoothed her skirt and walked out as well.
Secretary Rathbone rubbed his temples. “Un-fucking-believable.”
Ms. Li Song looked remarkably unperturbed. “We knew this part would be difficult.”
* * *
A day of negotiating did not go well.
Secretary Rathbone explained: “The central paradox of any crisis is that what feels unfair and unjust is often exactly what you need to stem the crisis. Old Testament justice feels good but it doesn’t solve anything.”
Jane looked horrified by this. “Marty, you’re asking that no one ever be held responsible.”
Tony: “You can’t believe a goddamn word out of that woman’s mouth. If you leave those companies alive, then you leave them to fight another day. We should wipe them out now.”
Secretary Rathbone said what had gone unspoken through the whole process. “Tony, none of us are voting on anything here. We don’t need you to agree.”
“Oh, you don’t think if I go out there and nuke this thing in the media it has any chance of passing?”
This could have proved an unbrookable divide. This is when I called Congresswoman Aamanzaihou, whom I’d kept abreast of the negotiations. She sounded as though she’d known this impasse was coming. With her status as the leading light of the climate-hawk Left, she had a compromise. When we reconvened, I patched her in by AR hologram from her Rayburn office. She wore a pink T-shirt, which had an image of Bernie Sanders angling his glasses to the sun in order to fry Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags.
She cautioned: “None of us have even stopped to ask, Can this plan survive? We assume the bulk of the American people will stand by it simply because it will arrest the crisis and contains material benefits, but let’s face it, our democracy hasn’t been one for quite a while. As evidenced by this very working group and the enormous influence of one of its members.” Ms. Li Song remained smiling pleasantly. The congresswoman continued: “We need a mechanism to put this to the people, to put it to a vote, while also ensuring that the most important provisions endure. That requires a radical expansion of our democracy.”
The congresswoman’s demands, in return for Li Song’s, were:
Passage of the long-touted chimerical legislation known as the For the People Act, a laundry list of reforms including expanded ballot access, automatic registration, elimination of voting restrictions and overt gerrymandering practices, and tighter controls on political money. It was first proposed by Democrats during the Biden administration following largely successful Republican efforts to rig the voting process in their favor.
A dramatic expansion and modernization of union laws, including a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a requirement for codetermination on corporate boards so that workers are half of those represented, and an expansion of favorable laws governing worker cooperatives.
The admission of Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands as states. Because all six are either majority-minority or island territories with American citizens, they will undoubtedly elect senators with great interest in forestalling sea level rise while acting as a balance to sparsely populated rural states like Oklahoma, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Alaska.
