Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [196]
That wouldn’t have been good for any of us. I know there’s a fringe in the response columns saying that the worse things went for the Chinese the better off we would be, but it doesn’t work that way. The carbon and particulates that they were putting into the air were going everywhere on Earth, even if China took the brunt of them. And in any case they were desperate enough to be in need of our aid, and to ask us for it—so we were obliged to help, just as fellow human beings. The fact that it gave us bargaining leverage that we hadn’t had before with them was just the silver lining on a very big black cloud.
So, we all had an interest in helping the Chinese to escape what was really looking to the Chinese and American scientific communities like an imminent regional acute extinction event. The Chinese Academy of Sciences contacted our National Science Foundation with the relevant data and analysis, and NSF came to me and made the situation clear. We needed to help and the situation was so urgent that ordinary procedures weren’t going to do it. So I talked to President Hu (and yes, he was on first, and yes, we cut to the Chase), and our diplomatic teams hammered out a deal in record time—a deal that the Senate immediately approved 71 to 29, because it was that good a deal.
At the invitation of the Chinese government, we docked some sixty ships of our nuclear fleet in Chinese ports, and provided them with almost five hundred megawatts of power for essential services. This helped them to shut down their dirtiest coal plants in the affected watersheds, and replace them with new clean plants built at high speed, sometimes in two weeks. We also helped to pay for these plants. We agreed also to give China all the scientific and technological help we could, everything our environmental science community has learned, from integrated pest management and organic agriculture to toxic waste removal from streams and soil. Americans from our Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture went there to consult, and our teams that were already helping with their drought problems and their Salton Sea projects continued with their aid. We’ll also be sending over a crack team of security experts to help keep track of expenditures and such, so that we don’t have any of the contract corruption that occurred under some lax previous administrations. My recent reorganization of our nation’s intelligence services (see previous post) has created some redundancies that give us the personnel to fulfill some of these crucial Chinese-American cooperative security responsibilities, both in Beijing and on-site in the drought-affected areas themselves.
So we’re doing a lot for them, and yes, they’re doing a lot for us, and everyone is benefiting. What are they doing for us? They’ve agreed to a cap on their carbon emissions that is impressively low, making them buyers in the carbon trading market, at least for a while longer. They will be challenging the rest of the Asia Pacific Six, which is us, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and India, to match their low cap, and are committed to helping achieve that reduction by investing in clean renewables in the other five countries in the group. As part of that effort they will be building a full set of their clean coal-burning plants for us in the United States, to be built on federal land and run by the Department of Energy. Quickly clean renewables will become part of the public trust.
The Chinese have