Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [107]
“I see. I’m glad she did. I think it’s worked out for the best.”
Frank thought about it.
“Don’t you?”
“Well, yes. I don’t know. I guess I’m still finding out.”
She smiled her little smile again, and he discovered he liked to see it. He liked to cause it.
The train moved again, and soon pulled into Penn Station. Up on the streets of Manhattan they walked through the immense slots created by the skyscrapers, across midtown to the UN building, Frank goggling at the views with an ex-window-washer’s awe.
The day’s work at the UN was interesting. Frank got to see another side of Diane, perhaps a glimpse of her true métier, as some kind of international diplomat or technocrat. She knew all these people already, and in the meetings she got up from her seat from time to time to look over their shoulders at their screens, putting a hand to a shoulder while pointing and asking a question. They all had met many times before, clearly; there was even a pause wherein the Secretary General himself dropped by to say hi to her, thanking her lavishly for “all she was doing.” Back in the discussions, she was always driving the issue, always pushing for action, occasionally joking about the fact that she was a representative of the United States and yet still promoting a vigorous array of environmental actions. She didn’t overplay this, but her message seemed to be that although the U.S. historically had been part of the problem in global warming, from rejecting Kyoto to pumping more carbon than any other country into the atmosphere, that was all about to change. As for the past, Diane and her allies had nothing to be ashamed of just because they had not prevailed politically. In one conversation she made the point that polls showed that a majority of American citizens were interested in protecting the environment, and wanted their government to do something about climate change, so that it was not a matter of being outnumbered so much as denied, as part of a more general breakdown of democratic systems in the U.S. Diane shrugged as she said this; no cause for outrage—the fight against greed was never going to end—meanwhile, she served as an ambassador for all the elements of American society who wanted to engage the climate problem. Now they might be in a position to prevail.
Mostly all this was implicit in her manner: cheerful, unapologetic, intent on the present, and on future results. She pushed relentlessly all day, discussing plan after plan, typing memos into her laptop and then without further ado moving on to the next matter, sometimes with a changed cast facing her, other times abruptly with the same people, with nothing more than an: “Okay, what about this?”
Late in the day they met with representatives of the European carbon emissions trading group and futures market; there was a futures market in carbon credits, as there was for everything else, and Diane felt its calculations could be tweaked to make it more accurate and useful. The carbon treaty talks scheduled for the following year were almost certain to make emissions much more expensive, and this was the kind of prospect that often gave a huge push to a futures market, as people tried to buy while the commodity was still cheap. (Frank followed this discussion very closely, thinking about his own commodity status.) That kind of investment could generate a big fund in advance of the need for it in payouts, and that could be used to prime the pump for various mitigation projects. Calculations using the Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy, DICE-99, showed that a carbon tax as low as ten cents a gallon of gas at the pump could have built up a hedge fund large enough to fund almost any mitigation they could conceive, if they had pegged the tax to inflation and started it some years before; they had missed that precautionary opportunity as they had so many others, but in many ways it still existed, and most nations were instituting some version of a carbon exchange and a carbon tax.
After that they met with delegations from China,