Peering down I made out a row of structures, vast but skeletal, floating on pontoons on the surface of the ocean. Each was an upright hoop within which long windmill blades turned in the wind off the sea: each a hundred meters tall, they looked like vast egg whisks. As the plane dipped over the turbines, I saw that a pale mist, like a bank of fog, lingered around the machines. Close up, the sheer scale of these lacy engines was stunning, and their shadows, cast by the setting sun, were long and graceful.
“Spray turbines,” Makaay said. “Another of our simpler ideas. You just spray seawater into the air, to make clouds.”
“Why?” Shelley asked. “To trigger rain?”
“Actually the opposite,” he said. “The purpose is to stimulate the production of the clouds themselves, and so to make them more reflective. . . .” Water droplets formed in a cloud when vapor gathered around seed particles, “dust condensation nuclei” in Makaay’s terms. The idea was to load so many nuclei into a cloud that the droplets multiplied, but none got big enough to fall as rain. So the cloud got whiter, and kept out the sunlight.
Leaving the spindly spray turbines behind we returned to the coast and flew inland, heading for EI’s headquarters in the Mojave Desert.
The geoengineering solutions promoted by Earth Inc. could be vast in scale, Makaay said, but were based on two simple principles. Earth intercepted heat from the sun; and an excess of carbon dioxide in the air trapped too much of that heat. So EI solutions were based either on reducing the amount of solar energy the planet soaked up in the first place, by making the Earth, or its atmosphere, more reflective—“albedo manipulation,” Makaay called it—or reducing the amount of heat trapped by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air, “carbon sequestration.”
“And here, in one glance, you can see two of our solutions at work, on a demonstration scale anyhow. This is why we do our best to bring people out here in person. There is nothing like seeing things with one’s own eyes to make an impression.”
Shelley eyed me. “Primate politics,” she said. “I told you.” She turned on Makaay. “Even you. You’re a great big tall man in a suit. Even now, all the guys at the top are just like you. When I started my working life I got a crick in my neck from looking up at my bosses all the time. It was like being in a forest.” She seemed a little out of tune to me, a touch over-aggressive, even rude. But she had never been very tolerant of managers, bureaucrats, and marketeers.
Anyhow I knew what she meant. Makaay was a tall, bulky man, his sheer physical presence impressive, and his broad, heavily boned face seemed to ooze control. He was like my brother, John, or my father—one of the competent-looking big men who make serious waves in the world. Not me, though. I somehow always knew I wouldn’t turn out that way.
Makaay didn’t seem insulted; he even seemed amused. “Ms. Magwood, I know very well I’m a walking cliché. But you have to understand I spent half my working life inside the Beltway, or in the UN and Stewardship complexes in New York or Geneva. And there, believe me, you have to wear a uniform like this”—he indicated his body—“to be taken halfway seriously. By looking like I work for IBM, I’ve won half the argument already.
“It also helps that I’m Dutch, by the way. We Dutch have been geoengineers since the Middle Ages, ever since we reclaimed half our own country from the sea, and we’ve been exporting our expertise for as long. These days we’re somewhat in demand, to help bail out drowning countries from the Pacific Islands to Bangladesh.”
We were silent for a moment. It helped his moral authority, of course, that in our lifetimes Holland itself had given up its own centuries-long battle against the sea, and the Dutch had become a nation of exiles.
“You’re quite a package, Mr. Makaay,” Shelley said dryly.
“But, you know, it’s not me who’s the throwback,” he said mischievously. “It’s the pols and bureaucrats I have to deal with who have some serious evolving to do.”
Even Shelley smiled at that.
Once we were over the Mojave we flew a circuitous route that took us over more of EI’s pet projects, set up on a demonstration scale across the face of the desert. There were windmill-like factories lined up in a row; Makaay said these were designed to strip the wind of carbon dioxide by passing it over absorbing chemicals, such as calcium hydroxide. Then, following the line of a canal, an arrow-straight lane of blue cut into the desert, we flew over patches of green fields and forests, all neatly squared off and contained. I learned later that this was a land-based analog of the plankton bloom we’d seen in the ocean; these virulently green grasses, shrubs, and trees were gen-enged to soak up a lot more carbon dioxide than their wild, unmodified ancestors. The key, it seemed, was to enhance the lignin content.
The most impressive constructions were domes, each coated in a filmy coat of geodesic silver, sitting in patient rows like vast golf balls. More carbon sequestration, Makaay said. The principle here was simple: just to freeze carbon dioxide out of the air, thousands of tons at a time, and then coat it in an insulating cladding—and, well, just leave it sitting there in the desert. “Hardly attractive, but it works,” he said.
Shelley argued with VR Makaay about the practicalities. Running a vast refrigeration plant to freeze down all that carbon dioxide was itself going to inject more heat into the atmosphere, wasn’t it? Yes, but if you took a longer view, over a decade or more, the net effect was a reduction of the atmosphere’s heat load through removal of the greenhouse gas. And then, no matter how efficient your insulation there would always be some leakage, wouldn’t there? So in the end you weren’t actually removing the carbon from the air but just adding a time lag. Yes, admitted Makaay, but this was a simple method to apply large-scale, and at least you were buying some time while you figured out a better solution. . . .
I switched out of the conversation. As we dipped over one of those domes I could see the plane’s reflection, a moth that slid across a curving face of sky blue.
We had all fallen into a skeptical habit of mind, I thought, even Shelley, perhaps even myself. Geoengineering solutions always tended to brush over the complexity of the real world, notably the tangled intricacy of the biosphere—and so it was easier to do nothing than to do something big and risk making things worse. But Shelley and I were here to ask for help with some macro-engineering of our own, on a scale that would make these silver-clad golf balls look like toys.
Before it began its landing approach the plane banked, to head into the wind from the coast. Briefly we left the EI facility behind, and looped over an arid landscape populated by nothing but scrub and Joshua trees.
And suddenly the ground blazed with reflected light. I made out cars, neatly parked, a carpet of glass and brightly painted metal. They looked perfect, intact and unmarked, row upon row of them.
After the Amin policy announcements that had effectively robbed the gasoline automobile industry of its future, there had been years of adjustment and bailout. In Detroit and other motor cities the assembly lines had continued to roll like a tap nobody could turn off, pumping out vehicles for which there was no longer a market. The federal government had simply bought up the excess stock and shipped them to such places as this. And here these exquisitely engineered vehicles sat, rust-free in the dry air, as if in expectation that the great smog-choked days of the twentieth century might somehow return once more. Some of the later models were very smart, I knew, smart enough to be self-aware. I wondered if they knew where they were, if they were waiting like abandoned pets for owners that never came.
We emerged from the plane into a flat blistering heat; it was worse than Seville. I was even more impressed that EI had managed to turn bits of this desert green.
Ruud Makaay met us in person at the foot of the airplane steps. He seemed oddly bigger than his VR representation, and his handshake was firm.
EI’s buildings, at the edge of the smart tarmac of the small airfield’s runway, were just boxy white blocks, unimpressive. They were air-conditioned, though, and we stepped indoors with relief. Makaay led us through what looked like a regular office environment, an open-plan clutter of partitions and desks and people working at softscreens and terminals of various kinds. Most of them seemed to be here in the flesh, though one or two had the fake sheen of VRs.
“Your place is smaller than I expected,” I ventured.
“Well, this is only the head office,” Makaay said. “Corporate HQ. We have design facilities, labs, manufacturing plants all over the country—all over the world, in fact. And we kept this place low-key by design. We didn’t want to make the mistake of having our visitors distracted by the place itself, by fountains and pot-plants and statues of the founder. Have you even been to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London? The tomb of Wren, the architect, has a Latin epitaph: ‘Visitor, if you seek my monument, look around you.’ Something like that. It’s the same with us. We want to make sure that what’s out the window is more interesting than what’s in here.”
He brought us to a small office. We sat; Makaay poured us both coffee.
“So,” I said, “do you think you’ll be able to help us?”
“Too early to say. Your proposal’s a little thin right now,” he said dryly. “But we’ll get to that. However, now you’ve seen something of us, what do
you
think—do we look as if we can make your project fly?”
I thought that over. “You’re certainly bigger than I expected. Wealthier.”
“Actually I wouldn’t say so.” He frowned. “We’re not rich yet, not given the size of the operation we run. It’s just that we play big. Everybody is surprised we have achieved any success at all, however. I think we have all got locked into a mind-set that says there is no way to make money in this contracting world of ours.
“Look at it from the point of view of an industrialist in, say, 2020. The shift to hydrogen, the need for new power generation systems, the dislocation of getting rid of the automobile—even if you could get your head around such vast changes, you didn’t have the infrastructure in place, the raw materials, the patents to exploit them; you didn’t have things sewn up the way your daddy used to. So it was better to resist change, to keep your head down, hoping it would all go away, or at least hope the storm wouldn’t break until you had finished your own career.
“It was Amin’s administration that changed all that.” He smiled fondly. “I was in business school at the time, at Harvard. Amin’s policies laid the foundation of new growth industries, in bio-infrastructure, compensation, environmental mitigation. There was money to be made in saving the world! When people realized that you saw a flurry of patents to protect technologies that were going to be key in the new political, legislative, and economic environment. At Harvard our instructors told us we were privileged to be living through a shifting in the economic paradigm, perhaps the most profound since the Industrial Revolution. And people started to get rich.”
“Like EI,” Shelley said.
“Look, this company has greened an area of the Sahara the size of Texas. You only need to siphon off a little of the proceeds from such an enterprise to bring in some major sums. But it’s nothing to what we could be achieving, I believe.”
There was a still skepticism about EI’s work, he said. The carbon-sequestration projects had generally proven more readily acceptable because it was relatively easy to make money out of them, by earning carbon credits, or reducing your liability to carbon taxes. But, he said, the schemes appealed because they were essentially passive. “You are fixing, not
changing.
Of course it’s true that the risks of changing things are more unknowable, and therefore greater.”
Shelley said, “Such as Cephalonia.”
Makaay leaned forward, passion showing in his pale eyes. “I was on the clean-up team. I haven’t forgotten. We are engineers, the three of us; you understand.
Things go wrong.
We learn from mistakes. We fix them. Nothing like Cephalonia has happened again, or will. And it mustn’t stop us from trying again.
“But we do need to reassure people, I accept that. Our lawyers are trying to agree to a code of conduct for geoengineers at UNESCO. A kind of Hippocratic oath, if you will, a pledge that we will use our powers responsibly. If that is accepted perhaps we can start to build trust once and for all. And then we can really get on with the job.”
Shelley said, “OK. But do you think we’ve a chance of getting the support we need for the hydrate-stabilization project?”
He sat back. “It’s not impossible. It’s a question of how you sell it. Your project is vast in scale, and that will instinctively repel a lot of people. But it’s essentially passive, like our carbon-sequestration programs. You aren’t meddling; you’re simply trying to maintain an equilibrium, to prevent a loss. So perhaps we can avoid a few philosophical obstacles on the way. We have a lobbying firm we use in Washington; they’ll be able to advise.”
At his use of the word
lobbying
I quailed; the world of high politics was not one where I would feel comfortable.
Shelley noticed this and smiled. “We have to do this, kiddo. We’re talking about a major international effort here—billions of dollars of investment. We have to deal with the big boys.”
Makaay’s expression was friendly, engaged, but reserved, consummately professional. “I can’t say yet if we’ll support you. Our board has to make the decision. It’s a big task for us. But I do believe that your project is exactly what EI was founded to do in the first place.” He stood and paced around the little office. “I see an opportunity, for all of us. We need a success. And once we have shrugged off our anxiety about ‘meddling,’ the opportunities are vast.
“Look—call me a progressive. I want to build a world with room for as many happy, well-fed, and healthy people as we can cram in. What’s wrong with that? But obviously I also want to do it without wrecking the environment in the process.” The two levers of geoengineering, he said, carbon sequestration and albedo control, were actually independent of each other. “Now, an increase in carbon dioxide has some beneficial effects: plant growth is stimulated, for example. So suppose we let the carbon levels rise, but kept the temperature under control with albedo modification?
That
might be the way to advance our civilization to a new optimum, while protecting the planet.