Sixty Days and Counting (20 page)

Frank sighed. Possibly he could construct an algorithm that would make this decision for him, by indicating the most robust course of action. Some kind of aid. Because it was a decision that he could not avoid; it was his call only. And doing nothing was a decision too. But possibly the wrong one. So he had to decide, he had to consciously decide. Possibly it was the most important decision he had before him right now.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try that.”

B
ACK AT WORK, FRANK TRIED
to concentrate. He simply couldn’t do it. Or he concentrated, but it was on the word
hematoma
.
Chronic subdural hematoma.
There’s pressure on my brain. He thought, I can concentrate just fine, I can do it for hours at a time. I just can’t decide.

He closed his eyes, poked at his Things To Do list with a pen. That was what it had come to. Well, actually he had bundled three things to do in a military category, and now he realized he should have poked the GO TO THE PENTAGON item on the list, because Diane had told him to and he had made appointments, and today was the day. So there hadn’t been any choice to be made. Check the calendar first to avoid such tortures.

1)
Navy,
2)
Air Force,
3)
Army Corps of Engineers,
the list said. Secretary of the Navy’s office first: chief nuclear officer, happy to meet with the president’s science advisor’s advisor, Diane had said. Lunch at the Pentagon.

The Pentagon had its own Metro stop, just west of the Potomac. Frank came up out of the ground and walked the short distance to the steps leading up to the big doors of the place. These faced the river. From them it was impossible to see how big the Pentagon was; it looked like any plain concrete building, wide but not tall.

Inside there was a waiting room. He went through a metal detector, as at an airport, was nodded onward by a military policeman. At the desk beyond another MP took his driver’s license and checked his name against a list on his computer, then used a little spherical camera on top of the computer to take a picture of him. The MP took the photo from a printer and affixed it to a new ID badge, under a bar code, Frank’s name, and his host’s name. Frank took the badge from the man and clipped it to his shirt, waited in the waiting room. There was a table with promotional brochures, touting each of the services and its missions, also the last two wars.

The Navy’s chief nuclear officer was a Captain Ernest Gamble. He had been a physics professor at Annapolis. Cool and professional in style.

They walked down a very long hallway. Gamble took him up some stairs to an interior window, where the pentagonal inner park stood in the sunlight. Then it was onward, down another very long hallway. “They used to have little golf carts for the halls,” Gamble explained, “but people kept running them into things. It takes a long time to get repairs done here. The joke is, it took eighteen months to build the Pentagon, and ten years to remodel it.”

They passed a small shopping mall, which Frank was surprised to see there inside the Pentagon itself, and finally came to a restaurant, likewise deep inside the building. Sat down, ordered, went to a salad bar and loaded up. As they ate, they discussed the Navy’s nuclear energy capabilities. Ever since Admiral Hyman Rickover had taken over the nuclear fleet in the 1950s, the Navy’s nuclear program had been held to the highest possible safety standards, and had a spotless record, with not a single (unclassified) accident releasing more than fifty rads.

“What about classified accidents?”

“I wouldn’t know about those,” Gamble deadpanned.

In any case, the Navy had had no reactor accidents, and a half-century’s experience with design and operation. They discussed whether the Navy could lead the way in designing, maybe even overseeing, a number of federally funded “National Security Nuclear Plants.” That might avoid the cost-cutting disasters that free-market nuclear energy inevitably led to. It would also excuse the new power plants from those environmental regulations the military already had exemptions from. Overall those exemptions were a bad idea, but in this case, maybe not.

In effect, pursuing this plan would nationalize part of the country’s energy supply, Gamble pointed out. A bit of a Hugo Chavez move, he suggested, which would enrage the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page and its ilk. Between that and the environmental objections, there would be no lack of opponents to such a plan.

But the Navy, Frank suggested, had no reason to fear critics of any stripe. They did what Congress and the president asked them to do.

Gamble concurred. Then, without saying so outright, he conveyed to Frank the impression that the Navy brain trust might be happy to be tasked with some of the nation’s energy security. These days, global military strategy and technology had combined in a way that made navies indispensable but unglamorous; they functioned like giant water taxis for the other services. Ambition to do more was common in the secretary’s office, and over at Annapolis.

“Great,” Frank said. While listening to this artful description, vague but suggestive, something had occurred to him: “When there are blackouts, could the nuclear fleet serve as emergency generators?”

“Well, yes, if I understand you. They’ve done things like that before, doing emergency relief in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hook into the grid and power a town or a district.”

“How big a town?”

“The ships range from a few to several megawatt range. I think a Roosevelt-class aircraft carrier could power a town of a hundred thousand, maybe more.”

“I’d like to get the totals on that.”

Then lunch was over and it was time for 2)
Air Force.
A new aide appeared and escorted him around two bends of the Pentagon, to the Air Force hall. The walls here were decorated with giant oil paintings of various kinds of aircraft. Many of the gleaming planes were portrayed engaged in aerial dogfights, the enemy planes going down under curved pillars of smoke and flames. It was like being in a war-crazed teenager’s bedroom.

The Air Force’s chief scientist was an academic, appointed for a two-year stint. Frank asked him about the possibility of the Air Force getting involved in space-based solar power, and the rapid deployment thereof. The chief scientist was optimistic about this. Solar collectors doing photovoltaic in orbit, beaming the power down in microwaves to Earth, there to be captured by power plants, which became capture-and-transfer centers, rather than generating plants per se. Have to avoid frying too many birds and bees with the microwaves, not unlike the wind turbine problem in that regard, otherwise pretty straightforward, technically, and with the potential to be exceptionally, almost amazingly, clean.

But?

“You would need a big honking booster to lift all that hardware into space,” the chief scientist said. Maybe something that had horizontal takeoffs and landings both, some kind of ramjet thing. In any case a major new booster, like the old Saturn rocket, so foolishly canceled at the end of Apollo, but modernized by all that a half-century’s improvements in materials and design could give it. A good booster could make the shuttle look like the weird and dangerous contraption it had always been.

“Much progress on that, then?” Frank asked.

The matter had been studied, and some starts made, but it could not be said to be going full speed yet. Even though it was a crucial part of a full clean energy solution.

“What have people been thinking this last decade or two?” Frank wondered once. “Why not do the obvious things?”

The chief scientist shrugged; a rhetorical question, obviously. Only Edgardo would bother to shout out
Because we are stupid!

Frank said, “Could the Air Force itself commission a big booster, as a defense priority?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be NASA’s thing. And there’s lots of people nervous about what they call militarizing space.”

“Can NASA do it?”

Another shrug, very expressive. NASA was tricky, small, often very messed up. Maybe the Air Force could partner with them, try to help without being too intrusive.

“Even fund it,” Frank suggested.

But of course that brought up the problem of “reprogrammed funds,” as General Wracke had described to him the year before. Really something like that could only be Congress’s call. Again. But the Air Force would be willing to advocate such a thing to Congress, sure. They would serve as called on.

So. Frank thanked the man and was escorted around to the Army hall, for his 3)
Army Corps of Engineers
meeting.

But here it turned out General Wracke had been called away unexpectedly, so his escort led him back to the waiting room, the only place where he could exit the building.

Back onto the Metro (and who had built that?), he tried to work it out. Navy helps Energy, Air Force helps NASA, Army Corps of Engineers helps all the land-based infrastructure, including carbon sequestration and shoreline stabilization. Together with all the other mitigation efforts, they would be terraforming the Earth. It was, after all, a matter of national defense. Defense of all the nations, but never mind. Republic in danger; the military should be involved. Especially given their budget. A military as big as all the other militaries on the planet, working for a country that had explicitly renounced any imperial ambitions or world police responsibilities, which it wanted to cede over to the UN as a globalized world project. That meant there was now a gigantic budget and productive capacity, extending into the private sector in the form of the military’s many contractors, that did not have all that much to do. It was an instantaneous investment overhang. Maybe it could be devoted to the mitigation project. The Swiss Army did work like that. Frank wondered if the FCCSET program could be used to coordinate all these federal efforts, perhaps out of the OMB. Construct an overarching mission architecture.

He wondered if the FBI could be sicced on black-black programs that had taken off on their own and hidden within the greater intelligence and security morass.

It was hard to imagine how all this would work, but Frank felt that here he was baffled not by his own cognitive problems, but by the sheer size and complexity of the federal government, and of the problem. In any case one thing was clear: there was serious money being disbursed out of the Pentagon. If they were interested in trying to help with this, it could be an incredible resource.

In the private sphere, meanwhile, it was time to find and talk to big pools of accumulated capital. As, for instance, the reinsurance companies, with total assets in the ten-trillion-dollar range. Next item on the list. If he could only keep this busy, there would be no need to decide anything. Or to wonder where Caroline was and why she hadn’t contacted him yet.

The reinsurance companies had underwritten most of the previous year’s North Atlantic salt fleet, so they were already acquainted with the huge costs of such projects, but also were the world’s experts in the even bigger costs of ignoring problems. They had been the one who ultimately had paid for the long winter, and they had their cost-benefit algorithms. And they were already well acquainted with the concept of robust decision making—something very desirable to them, as being less destructive to their business over the long haul.

Diane had invited representatives of the four big reinsurance companies to meet with her global-warming task force. About twenty people filled the conference room in the Old Executive Offices, including Anna, over for the day from NSF.

After Diane welcomed them, she got to the point in her usual style, and invited Kenzo to share what was known about the situation in the North Atlantic and more globally. Kenzo waved at his PowerPoint slides like a pops orchestra conductor. Then one of the reinsurance nat cat (natural catastrophe) guys from Swiss Re gave a talk which made it clear that in insurance terms, sea-level rise was the worst impact of all. A quarter of humanity lived on the coastlines of the world. About a fifth of the total human infrastructure was at risk, he said, if sea level rose even two meters; and this was the current best guess as to what might happen in the coming decade. And if the breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet went all the way, they were facing a rise of seven meters.

It was something you could be aware of without quite comprehending. They sat around the table pondering it.

Frank seized his pen, squeezed it as if it were his recalcitrant brain. “I’ve been looking at some numbers,” he said haltingly. “Postulating, for a second, that we have developed really significant clean energy generation, then, observe, the amount of water displaced by the detached Antarctic ice so far is on the order of forty thousand cubic kilometers. Now, there are a number of these basins in the Sahara Desert and all across central Asia, and in the basin and range country of North America. Also in southern Africa. In effect, the current position of the continents and the trade wind patterns have desiccated all land surfaces around the thirtieth latitudes north and south, and in the south that doesn’t mean much, but in the north it means a huge land area dried out. All those basins together have a theoretical capacity of about sixty thousand cubic kilometers.”

He looked up from his laptop briefly, and it was as he had expected; they were looking at him like he was a bug. He shrugged and looked back at the PowerPoint, and forged on:

“So, you could pump a lot of the excess sea water into these empty basins in the thirties, and perhaps stabilize the ocean’s sea level proper.”

“Holy moly,” Kenzo said in the silence after it was clear Frank was done. “You’d alter the climate in those regions tremendously if you did that.”

“No doubt,” Frank said. “But you know, since the climate is going haywire anyway, it’s kind of like, so what? In the context of everything else, will we even be able to distinguish what this would do from all the rest?”

Kenzo laughed.

“Well,” Frank said defensively to the silent room, “I thought I’d at least run the numbers.”