Windfall
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For a moment, Myhrvold seemed to channel the American Enterprise Institute, questioning whether money spent cutting emissions was being put to the best use. The emissions-only approach was “particularly rude to the poor people on Earth,” he said. “We’re a wealthy country, so we could afford to do a bunch of stuff. Poor people can’t—or they won’t. In Asia, in China, they want their industrial development, and I don’t know how you can stop them.” In Africa, the logic was starker. “Those people live right on the edge,” he explained. “Now there are people who say: ‘Ah, climate change will hit them worse.’ True. But if you’re starving to death already, or you’re dying of malaria or a bunch of other diseases that could be alleviated with tiny amounts of money compared with what the rich world might spend on climate change, there’s an interesting moral issue: How much should we spend?”
He offered what he said was a “deeply politically incorrect” analogy for climate politics. “This is very much like what happened when some religious groups found HIV/AIDS,” he said. “It was like, ‘Look, we’ve wanted people to not be gay, to not have homosexual sex for a long time. Here is a heaven-sent opportunity—God’s punishment against gay people or drug users or the promiscuous.’” Some environmentalists’ ideological response to geoengineering proposals, he said, was “very much like the pope’s position on HIV. The pope said that condoms are not the answer. Well, with all due respect to his infallibility in matters of faith, empirically, he’s just flat out wrong. Preaching abstinence as a remedy for HIV is ineffective. The fact is abstinence doesn’t work. We all do things that we know are in our own long-term worst interest.”
If people “won’t stop having unsafe sex” and “won’t stop eating ourselves to death,” he wondered, how could they tackle climate emissions? “I’m afraid that preaching abstinence with energy is like preaching abstinence with Krispy Kremes or abstinence with sex,” he continued. “It’s a message that says, ‘Yes, forty years from now or a hundred years from now, in 2100, things will be really bad—that’s why you shouldn’t use your energy today.’ If people won’t get that if they have unprotected sex today and it’ll kill you in a few years, why should this other message get across any better? It’s morally bankrupt for the pope to say abstinence only for people to fight HIV—it kills people to say that—and I think that’s a worse sin than fucking.
“I don’t think the world is ready to do anything about climate change,” he said. “I could be wrong, but I say that right now you can sort the world’s countries into two categories: Countries that say climate change is a top priority yet have done absolutely nothing. And countries that say, fuck it, we’re not doing anything. So what have we done? Nothing! Zero! Europe has a little bit of carbon trading, but nobody will tell you it’s done anything—it’s all been window-dressing bullshit. Now, you tell me, where’s the optimism?” He took a swig of his Coke Zero. “We got interested in geoengineering,” he said, “because once all is said and done, more is said than done.”
Without prompting, Myhrvold answered the question I had after the meeting with Tegreene: If IV was researching geoengineering for the good of the world, why the patents? “It’s a little bit of a crazy area,” he began, “because we invent for, uh, money. We’re a company; we’re a for-profit organization. And it’s very hard to see how you actually make money from any of these schemes. Someone could go do it in some other country, and it’s unclear we could go ask them for anything for our patent. It’s not like this is something you sell a million copies of. We decided to actually file patents in part because we file patents—it’s what we do—and in part because we thought this may give us a seat at the table in deciding whether and when the technology is used.” It sounded perfectly reasonable. I still didn’t know whether to believe him.
In time, IV would suffer another media controversy. A report by the radio program This American Life exposed how a company that made a point of telling journalists that it didn’t file lawsuits apparently saw to it that its patents were used to file lawsuits. It sold them to affiliated companies, the program reported, on the condition that it get a large share of any profits they might earn—and it was the shell companies that sued. The reporters visited an IV-affiliated shell company, Oasis Research, in twenty-four-thousand-person Marshall, Texas, finding an empty office in a two-story building filled with other empty offices also involved in patent lawsuits, and slowly the back-end arrangement was uncovered. The report was incriminating but perhaps liberating, too. By 2011, IV was filing patent-infringement suits openly, under its own name, trying to shake money from no lesser targets than Motorola, Symantec, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard.
The geoengineering invention sessions eventually stopped; IV had dreamed up what it could, the patents were pending, and now it seemed to be up to the world what happened next. “In general, global warming is about the worst possible problem for our society to deal with,” Myhrvold told me. “Almost the worst-case problem for our psychology. We deal best with ecological problems that are severe and localized in space and time. When you have something like that or the Exxon Valdez spill or Love Canal, when the impact is immediate, local, and extreme, then it’s pretty easy. This is also true of forest fires. It’s like, ‘Oh, God, we’ve got to fix this!’” He paused. “The problem with global warming,” he said, “is that it’s not localized in space—it’s global. And it’s not localized in time, either. We’re just not set up to deal with it.” Myhrvold didn’t need to make the case that geoengineering was desirable. He made it seem inevitable; we wouldn’t manage to do anything else.
I felt myself succumbing to the logic. It didn’t matter, I realized, whether or not IV was secretly hoping to turn a profit—whether or not its assertions that it did not “expect or intend” to make money off geoengineering were as misleading as its assertions about patent lawsuits. If one of Myhrvold’s inventions could save the planet, it was beside the point that he might get richer in the process.
• • •
I DID NOT fully understand what might be saved by geoengineering until one January afternoon in Seattle, on a day that was warmer than average, but not abnormally so, and rainier than average, but not abnormally so, and a climate scientist named Alan Robock led a seminar at the University of Washington. A bald and bearded Rutgers professor with a brooding look and one too many buttons unbuttoned on a striped shirt, Robock focused on a geoengineering problem that went largely unmentioned by AEI, unmentioned by Myhrvold: Fix the temperature, and you don’t necessarily fix the rain. Use SRM to reverse global warming and get back to “normal,” and you cannot be sure that precipitation patterns will follow course. Supercomputer climate models suggested that there would be a trade-off: If geoengineers wanted a certain temperature, they might twist the planetary thermostat in one direction; in some cases, for some regions, if they wanted a certain amount of rainfall, they might twist the dial further, or twist it in the other direction.
Geoengineering advocates claimed that volcanoes were proof of concept, Robock said—that they showed that there could be cooling from sulfur aerosols and that it was relatively innocuous. “But I’ve studied volcanoes my entire career,” he said, “and I can tell you that they’re not innocuous.” Pinatubo had reduced rainfall in the Amazon and disrupted the Indian and African monsoons, according to a 2007 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, leading to local droughts. Later research by the Met Office in the U.K. showed that between 1900 and 2010, three of the four driest summers in Africa’s Sahel had followed on the heels of a major volcanic eruption in the Northern Hemisphere. In the seminar, Robock presented anecdotal evidence that after the 1783 Icelandic eruptions that had so impressed Benjamin Franklin, collapsing monsoons might have led to drought and famine in India, China, and, most dramatically, Egypt, where a sixth of the country’s population either died or fled within two years as the Nile ran dry. “Soon after the end of November, the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as th
e plague,” wrote a French visitor at the time. “The streets, which before were full of beggars, now afforded not a single one: all had perished or deserted the city.”
Robock flipped through his presentation, landing on a map of the world. The slide showed what resulted from running a version of the yarmulke method—an Arctic-only shield of sulfur not entirely unlike the one proposed by Intellectual Ventures—through his supercomputer models. It was just a model run, he cautioned, just one possible scenario. But as a vision of the future, it was instructive. SRM appeared to create a belt of abnormal precipitation patterns in the poorest parts of the world. According to the model, deploying something like a StratoShield would cut rainfall in the South Pacific, drying up island nations that might otherwise be drowned by sea-level rise. It would destroy the Asian monsoon, dumping extra water on Bangladesh, saddling India with permanent drought. It would destroy the African monsoon, turning Senegal and much of the Sahel into a band of brown, achieving through carbon emissions plus geoengineering what might otherwise be achieved through emissions alone.
But SRM, in this model, also promised to restore preindustrial temperatures and rainfall in most of North America, most of Europe, most of Russia, most of South America, and most of Australia. It would even improve the sunsets, Robock admitted. My eyes locked on Seattle and the American West: my home, my wife’s home, our families’ homes. Home to Bill Gates, his wife, his kids. Home to Nathan Myhrvold, his wife, his kids. It appeared that our corner of the planet could look just as it always has: normal temperature, normal precipitation. It’s true that it rains a lot around here, but in the summertime the sun comes out. Everything is green. It’s shockingly green. There are mountains to the east and mountains to the west, and there’s water in every direction. In the summertime, there’s nowhere in the world I would rather be.
I could guess which way the two Washingtons’ geoengineers would twist the dial. It was then that I knew for sure that everything, for some of us, would be just fine.
EPILOGUE
MAGICAL THINKING
The year 2012, which ended as I sat down to write this epilogue, bound to forever be in my mind as the year my son was born, was otherwise apocalyptic. There was a tornado that hit Michigan on a seventy-five-degree day in March—I rode my bike to see its wake, passing prematurely blooming flowers that would die in the next freeze—and a drought that engulfed 61 percent of the United States, causing food prices to soar and saddling taxpayers with a $16 billion crop insurance bill. The Mississippi River ran to such record lows that barges either carried lighter loads or risked running aground. The Rockies got so dry that two states, Colorado and New Mexico, had the worst fire seasons in memory, and flames lingered in the mountains at ten thousand feet, where there would normally be snow. In thirty-eight states, especially drought-addled Texas, a record outbreak of mosquito-borne West Nile virus infected more than 1,118 people and killed 41. In Miami-Dade County, a woman contracted the first locally acquired case of dengue fever.
A third of America’s population lived through at least ten 100-degree days in 2012. At weather stations across the country, there were 362 all-time record highs. There were zero all-time record lows. There were 2,559 monthly record highs—higher local temperatures recorded in January or June or November than in any previous January or June or November. There were 194 monthly record lows. There were 34,008 daily record highs—higher local temperatures recorded on an April 19 or August 24 or December 14 than on any previous April 19 or August 24 or December 14. There were 6,664 daily record lows. Grand Rapids, Galveston, Greenville, Albany, Billings, Boston, Madison, Nashville, Louisville, Chicago, Trenton, Richmond, and hundreds of other cities had hotter days than ever before. For the contiguous United States as a whole, the average temperature in 2012 was 55.3 degrees, 3.2 degrees warmer than the average day in the twentieth century. The average annual temperature was a full degree warmer than the previous record.
In the Arctic, 97 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet was observed melting on a single day. Sea ice shrank to a dramatic new low, surpassing the record 2007 melt by another 300,000 square miles, another Texas. A record forty-seven cargo ships traversed the Northern Sea Route—a twelvefold increase since 2010. A floating, 644-foot-long gated community, billed as “the largest privately owned residential yacht on earth,” transited the once treacherous Northwest Passage. Another yacht was soon impounded after its Australian owner served alcohol to a fifteen-year-old Nunavut girl, who dove partly clothed into the ice-free Beaufort Sea, and Mounties seized from it $40,000 worth of liquor and $15,000 worth of illegal fireworks. Global emissions had just jumped 3.1 percent, the price of carbon in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme was about to hit a record low below 5 euros a ton, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was soon to hit a milestone four hundred parts per million, and another round of aimless UN climate talks was slated for Qatar, which has the highest per capita emissions in the world—but it was a party.
Then, Sandy: the $60 billion hurricane that flooded the mid-Atlantic and gave New Yorkers a hunger for seawalls, gave President Obama’s reelection a Bloomberg endorsement and arguably an electoral landslide, and gave climate change a prominent place in Obama’s second term. Where Deutsche Bank’s jungle tent once stood at South Street Seaport, there was a twelve-foot storm surge, followed by a stubborn rebuilding. Again we believe in climate change. Which raises a question: So what?
In psychology, magical thinking is the fallacy that thoughts correspond to actions—that to think is to do, to believe is to act. Perhaps the most magical assumption of the moment is that our growing belief in climate change will lead to a real effort to stop it. But as I discovered in Canada and Greenland and Sudan and Seattle and all over the globe, that is not automatically true. We are noticing that in this new world, there is new oil to find. There is new cropland to farm. There are new machines to be built. From what I have seen in six years of reporting this book, the climate is changing faster than we are.
• • •
I SPENT PART of the summer of 2012 in the Inupiat village of Point Hope, alongside the Chukchi Sea. It is an old place, older than almost any other on the continent. Its mayor, accurately or not, likes to say it’s the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America. In his black Ford SUV, he drives visitors to a sandy spit being washed away by relentless waves, to a partly caved-in sod house propped up by whalebones, where his grandmother once lived. The first Europeans appeared in Point Hope in the 1840s, he explains, to hunt the bowhead whales once so numerous that elders claimed you could skip from one to the next, spout to spout, across the shallow Chukchi. Whalers were the original oilmen, magicians of a sort, for they rendered the bowheads into something the Inupiats had scarcely imagined: fuel. The first who came recorded the vitality of Point Hope in their journals—the many women, dwellings, and dogs they spotted from their ships. But in a few short years, the whalers’ harpoons had killed most of the bowheads and thereby killed most of the people who depended on them. The homes were emptied and the few survivors gaunt, and all the dogs were gone; they had been eaten.
A century later, Edward Teller, fresh from nuclear-test triumph in the Marshall Islands, still years from proposing to geoengineer the climate, arrived in Point Hope. He was determined to find a civilian purpose for the atomic bomb, and he had decided that a site twenty miles south of the village could be turned into the Alaskan Arctic’s first deepwater port with a series of nuclear blasts. He called it Project Chariot. Other scientists soon calculated that the village would be decimated by fallout. But only after Point Hope became the focus of a national environmental campaign could the project’s momentum be stopped.
Now the mayor was awaiting Royal Dutch Shell’s refurbished armada of drill ships. A dozen of the most expensive oil blocks in Lease Sale 193 were offshore in the ice-free Chukchi, and the Obama administration, in its “all of the above” efforts to ramp up domestic energy production, had finall
y given Shell a green light. The company had by then spent $4.5 billion on Arctic leases and infrastructure, and the project seemed unstoppable.
When the Kulluk and another drill ship left Seattle’s Puget Sound for Alaska after a series of upgrades, I had watched them go, the former’s towering hulk towed by a massive, purpose-built tug, both rigs escorted by a security detail of coast guard vessels. There would be nearly twenty ships in the Shell fleet, three layers of spill-response capability, and thousands of workers and hangars and aircraft stationed across northern Alaska. I had my concerns about what Shell was doing, but I never doubted that a company so adept at planning—as collectively brilliant as was Teller individually—could pull it off.
Less than six months later, in the very last hours of 2012, the flagship Arctic rig of the world’s most future-oriented oil company was beached on a rocky shoreline near Alaska’s Kodiak Island. Its photograph was soon on the front page of newspapers around the world. The Kulluk had been on its way back to Seattle after a season riddled with missteps—dragged anchors, failed sea trials, EPA infractions—but had nevertheless drilled the start of the American Arctic’s first offshore wells since the melt began in earnest. Its Louisiana-based crew towed it into a 960-millibar cyclone that Kodiak residents told me would have sent experienced Alaskan captains scurrying for safe harbor. The towline snapped in forty-foot seas, and over the next four days, through attempted rescues and emergency tows, it snapped four more times until the massive ship was finally grounded, waves slamming over its deck. Shell’s $4.5 billion Arctic gamble was on the rocks, and having been honestly impressed with the company’s brainpower, I was as shocked as anyone.