Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [127]
Frank had taken his snowshoes and ski poles out of the storage unit in Arlington, and now he cruised over the drifts. In many places the snowshoes were not needed, but they saved him from postholing into taller drifts, so they were worth it.
No need to turn on his miner’s headlamp tonight! It was light you could read by.
He came on a black thing half-buried in snow. He stopped, fearing some child had died of exposure, thinking of Chessman. But when he knelt by the form he saw that it was a wombat. “Ah shit.”
Two, actually. Mother and infant, it looked like. Frank called in the GPS location on his FOG phone, cursing sadly as he did. “God damn it. You poor guys.”
It looked like Nancy was right. They needed to recover the warm weather ferals. “Yeah,” she confirmed when he called her next day, “a lot of them aren’t making it. The shelters are helping, but we really have to bring them back in.”
“I hope we can,” Frank said.
At work Frank continued to hack away at his list of Things To Do, which nevertheless continued to grow at the bottom faster than he removed things at the top. Settling in after a session at Optimodal, his days for a while were mostly concerned with:
1) arranging small business exploratory grants for the photovoltaic programs with the most robust results. These were getting rather excit-ing, actually. Progress in this field was measured by efficiency and cost. Efficiency as the percentage of photonic energy striking the cell transferred to electrical energy, now reaching well above forty percent; and cost, now down to six cents per kilowatt-hour, very competitive with any other form of energy generation. Switching over to solar would be a major expense, but after that the possibilities were somewhat staggering. One of the grantees calculated that it would soon be possible, theoretically, to power the entire country from a ten-mile by ten-mile photovoltaic array located in some sunny desert location in the Southwest.
2) keeping in touch with the people establishing the Max Planck equivalent in San Diego. This was proceeding nicely, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography had pitched in to help, seeing that a federal research center in climate issues would very often require their help, and send funding their way, becoming another component of the already powerful UCSD research complex. The old Torrey Pines Generique facility was being remodeled and equipped, and a lot of hires about to be made. The people involved were already aware of Yann, Marta, and their colleague Eleanor, and were preparing a salary and research funding offer for all three, a really impressive package deal.
3) consulting with the various people in-house trying to deal with the SSEEP melodrama, already a mess. The platform had been released as a National Academy of Sciences study, but the connection to NSF was well-known. Scientific organizations and op-ed pages had weighed in on the matter of a “scientific political platform”—whether it was possible, whether it was a good idea, whether it was dangerous, either to science or society. Some of the usual suspects in the science world had quickly disavowed any knowledge of such a program, attacking it as unscientific and inappropriate; while others had surprised Frank by welcoming the move and suggesting additions and modifications to the platform. Attacks in Congress and the press were common, and sometimes exhibited the kind of spluttering rage indicative of a fear-based response. Phil Chase had immediately embraced the platform as a scientifically backed version of what he had been advocating for many years. As he was emerging as the clear frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination, outraising a tired and undistinguished pack of competitors two-to-one even when all their contributions were combined, this looked to Frank to be an interesting convergence of political forces.
4) Looking into a new analysis of the Sekercioglu study which had claimed that the bird extinctions they were now seeing on every continent, up to