Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [47]
Anna said, “Maybe we could hire an advertising firm to design a series of voluntary simplicity ads, to be aired on certain cable channels.”
Edgardo grinned. “Yes, I would enjoy to see that, but there is a ten-trillion-a-year economy that also wants more consumption. It’s like we’re working within the body of a cancerous tumor. It’s hopeless, really. We will simply charge over the cliff like lemmings.”
“Real lemmings don’t actually run off cliffs,” Anna quibbled. “People might change. People change all the time. It just depends on what they want.”
She had been looking into this matter, which she jokingly called macrobioinformatics: researching, refining, and even inventing various rubrics by which people could evaluate their consumption levels quantitatively, with the idea that if they saw exactly what they were wasting, they would cut back and save money. The best known of these rubrics, as she explained, were the various “ecological footprint” measurements. These had been originally designed for towns and countries, but Anna had worked out methods for households as well, and now she passed around a chart illustrating one method, with a statistical table that illustrated her earlier point that since Americans were the only ones in the world living at American consumption levels, any reduction here would disproportionately shrink the total world footprint.
“The whole thing should be translated into money values at every step,” Edgardo said. “Put it in the best way everyone in this culture can understand, the cost in dollars and cents. Forget the acreage stuff. People don’t know what an acre is anymore, or what you can expect to extract from it.”
“Education, good,” Diane said. “That’s already part of our task as defined. And it will help to get the kids into it.”
Edgardo cackled. “Okay, maybe they will go for it, but also the economists should be trying to invent an honest accounting system that doesn’t keep exteriorizing costs. When you exteriorize costs onto future generations you can make any damn thing profitable, but it isn’t really true. I warn you, this will be one of the hardest things we might try. Economics is incorrigible. They call it the dismal science but actually it’s the happy religion.”
Frank tended to agree with Edgardo’s skepticism about these kinds of social interventions; and his own interests lay elsewhere, in the category Diane had labeled “Mitigation Projects.” Now she took back the PowerPoint from Anna and clicked to a list which included several of the suggestions Frank had made to her earlier:
1. establishing one or more national institutes for the study of abrupt climate change and its mitigation, analogous to Germany’s Max Planck Institutes.
2. establishing grants and competitions designed to identify and fund mitigation work judged crucial by NSF.
3. reviewing the already existing federal agencies to find potentially helpful projects they had undertaken or proposed, and coordinate them.
All good projects, but it was the next slide, REMEDIAL ACTION NOW, that was the most interesting to Frank. One of the obvious places to start here was with the thermohaline circulation stall. Diane had gotten a complete report from Kenzo and his colleagues at NOAA, and her tentative conclusion was that the great world current, though huge, was sensitive in a nonlinear way to small perturbations. Which meant it might respond sensitively to small interventions if they could be directed well.
So, Diane concluded, this had to be investigated. How big a sea surface was critical to downwelling? How precisely could they pinpoint potential downwelling sites? How big a volume of water were they talking about? If they needed to make it saltier in order to force it to start sinking again, how much salt were they talking about? Could they start new downwellings in the north where they used to