Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [77]
“Those are some very dry countries,” Diane said after perusing Frank’s map. “Dry and poor. I can imagine, if they were offered compensation to take the water and make new lakes, some of them might decide to roll the dice and take the environmental risk, because net effects might end up being positive. It might make opportunities for them that aren’t there now. There’s not much going on in the Takla Makan these days, that I know of.”
The Swiss Re executive returned to Anna’s comment, suggesting that the system might be able go through proof of concept in Antarctica, after which, if it worked, countries signing on would have a better idea of what they were in for. Antarctic operations would incur extra costs, to keep pumps and pipelines heated; on the other hand, the environmental impacts were likely to be minimal, and population relocation not an issue at all. Maybe they could even relocate the excess ocean water entirely on the Antarctic polar cap. That would mean shifting water that floated away from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet up to the top of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet.
“Of course if we’re going to talk about stupendous amounts of new free energy,” Anna pointed out, “you could do all sorts of things. You could desalinate the sea water at the pumps or at their outlets, and make them fresh water lakes in the thirties, so you wouldn’t have Salton Sea problems. You’d have reservoirs of drinking and irrigation water, you could replenish groundwater, and build with salt bricks, and so on.”
Diane nodded. “True.”
“But we don’t have stupendous new sources of clean energy,” Anna said.
Good photovoltaics existed, Frank reminded her doggedly. Also a good Stirling engine; good wind power; and extremely promising ocean energy-to-electricity systems.
That was all very well, Diane agreed. That was promising. But there remained the capital investment problem, and the other transitional costs associated with changing over to any of these clean renewables. Who was going to pay for it?
It was the trillion-dollar question.
Here the reinsurance people took center stage. They had paid for the salting of the North Atlantic by using their reserves, then upping their premiums. Their reserves were huge, as they had to be to meet their obligations to the many insurance companies paying them for reinsurance. But swapping out the power generation system was two magnitudes larger a problem, more or less, than the salt fleet had been, and it was impossible to front that kind of money—almost impossible to imagine collecting it in any way.
“Well, but it’s only four years of the American military budget,” Frank pointed out.
People shrugged, as if to say, but still—that was a lot.
“It’s going to take legislation,” Diane said. “Private investment can’t do it. Can’t or won’t.”
General agreement, although the reinsurance guys looked unhappy. “It would be good if it made sense in market terms,” the Swiss Re executive said.
This led them to a discussion of macroeconomics, but even there, they kept coming back to the idea of major public works. No matter what kind of economic ideology you brought to the table, the world they had set up was resolutely Keynesian—meaning a mixed economy in which government and business existed in an uneasy interaction. Public works projects were sometimes crucial to the process, especially in emergencies, but that meant legislating economic activity, and so they needed to have the political understanding and support it would take to do that. If so, they could legislate investment, and then in effect print the money to pay for it. That was standard Keynesian practice, a kind of pump-priming used by governments ever since the third New Deal of 1938, as Diane told them now, with World War II itself an even bigger example.
Other economic stimuli might