Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [95]
Frank said, “We’ve tried some back-of-the-envelope numbers, estimating the capital worth of the major port cities and other coastal development, and got figures like five hundred trillion dollars.”
General Wracke, an active member of Diane’s advisory group, put his hands together reverently. “A half a quadrillion dollars,” he said, grinning. “That’s a lot of construction funding.”
“Yes. On the other hand, for comparison purposes, the infrastructural value of property in the superdry basins of Africa, Asia, and the American basin and range comes to well under ten billion, unless you throw in Salt Lake City, which actually has a legal limit on the books as to how high the Great Salt Lake is allowed to rise, that isn’t much higher than it is now. Anyway, in global terms, statistically, there’s nothing out there in those basins. Statistically insignificant populations to displace, possibility of building new settlements by new water. Local weather deranged, but it is already. So…”
The general nodded and asked about pumping water back up onto the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet, which was very high and stable. Some of the NSF report was devoted to this question. The pumped sea water would freeze and then sit unconformably as a kind of salty ice cap on the fresh ice cap. Every cubic kilometer of sea water placed up there would reduce sea level by that same amount, without the radical changes implied by creating new salt seas all across the thirties north and south. Could only pump half of the year using solar power.
The energy requirements needed to enact the lift and transfer remained a stumbling block; they would have to build many powerful clean energy systems. But they had to do that anyway, as several of them pointed out. The easy oil would soon be gone, and burning the oil and coal that was left would cook the world. So if some combination of sunlight, wind, wave, tide, currents, nuclear, and geothermal power could be harnessed, this would not only replace the burning of fossil fuels, which was imperative anyway, but possibly save sea level as well.
Some there advocated nuclear for the power they needed, others called for fusion. But others held fast for the clean renewables. The advocates of tidal power asserted that new technologies were already available and ready to be ramped up, technologies almost as simple as Archimedes’ screw in concept, relying on turbines and pumps made of glassy metals that would be impervious to sea water corrosion. Anchor these units in place and the ocean would flow through them and power would be generated. It was only a matter of making the necessary investment and they would be there.
“But where’s the money going to come from?” someone asked.
“The military budgets of the world equal about a trillion dollars a year,” Frank noted, “half of that coming from the United States. Maybe we can’t afford to throw that work away anymore. Maybe the money could be reallocated. And we do need a really big manufacturing capacity here. What if the entire military-industrial complex, funded by these enormous budgets, were redirected to the projects we are outlining? How long would it take for the global effects to be measurable?”
Dream on, someone muttered.
Others thought it over, or punched numbers into their handhelds, testing out possibilities. Of course redirecting the military budgets of the world was “unrealistic.” But it was worth bringing it up, Frank judged, to suggest the size of the world’s industrial capacity. What could be done if humanity were not trapped in its own institutions? “To wrest Freedom from the grasp of Necessity,” Frank said. “Who said that?”
People in the meeting were beginning to look at him strangely again. Dream on, oh desperate fool, their looks said. But it wasn’t just him who was desperate.
“You’re beginning to sound like the Khembalis,” Anna said. But she liked that, she was pleased by that. And if Anna approved, Frank felt he must