skimmed the first page quickly. Under “Most Feasible” she saw a short section on increasing cloud cover, which noted tersely: “Will cool Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. Will not remove greenhouse gases.”
Sure won’t, she thought. Increasing cloud cover would only make it possible to live with higher levels of the gases … in the short run. Carbon dioxide would still be absorbed the by oceans, generating ever more carbonic acid, which killed sea life. This was no theoretical threat: In just the past nine years, vast stretches of ocean in which algae had died and disappeared had grown by 15 percent. Nine years. And every scientist, including Jenna, knew that algae was overwhelmingly important: It was the source of much of the Earth’s oxygen and was the beginning of the food chain for many animals. Far more visible than the loss of algae was the destruction of half the world’s major reef systems, dying from carbonic acid overload. The human species was not likely to survive if life vanished from three-quarters of the planet.
Under a separate “Feasible” category, the vice president’s memo included “underground sequestration of carbon dioxide.” Might work, Jenna agreed, but she knew that it would lower temperatures only slowly. Geologic sequestration, or GS as it was called, entailed injecting huge amounts of CO2 from manufacturing or power plants into rock formations deep within the Earth. Over time, the rock would eventually “wash out” the carbon. But “eventually” meant centuries, and the amount of CO2 being produced even in just the United States was overwhelming. Plus, if this was to work, there would have to be a sea change in attitudes at the EPA because the agency had approved only a few rock formations for sequestration. Meantime, glaciers would continue to melt at record rates. Already, the lives of a hundred million people in South America were threatened by the loss of their chief source of drinking water: low-lying Andean glaciers.
As the author of the most celebrated book on geoengineering, Jenna might have been expected to have been in a celebratory mood as she left the White House: Her time had come, along with a great deal of attention. Clearly, the executive branch had given up on making any additional efforts to try to get people to change how they lived, ate, traveled, and worked. But she felt deeply ambivalent about this surrender. She wondered what would happen if people were given the real, painful reasons—or real incentives—to modify their patterns of production and consumption. Geoengineering, even at this late stage, felt like giving a heart patient quadruple bypass surgery instead of putting him on a low-fat diet. It might save the patient, but it could just as easily kill him.
Jenna no longer wondered why USEI was on board: As long as geoengineering muscled its way to the forefront of climate change efforts, the fossil fuel industry could argue that it was okay to burn every last barrel of crude and bucket of coal.
Exiting the White House, she was escorted to one of a fleet of electric cars that would ferry away the task force. As Jenna climbed into the backseat, she was unable to think of a viable geoengineering technique that did not threaten lethal consequences for humanity. But as the car eased past a regiment of reporters hurling questions that nobody on the task force rolled down their windows to answer, she also knew that political impotence—and widespread public skepticism of global warming—had sent the Earth cartwheeling down a precipitous slope.
The car had no sooner turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House looming in the background, than she realized with a start that geoengineering truly posed the most daunting question ever faced by humankind: Do you embrace a dangerous technique that could save the planet—or, with a single miscalculation, plunge it into a final frozen collapse? Or do you soldier on with potentially safer solutions that lacked political support and had failed to arrest the devastating climate changes taking place on land, in the sea, and, most crucially, in the tender skin of sky that protected us all?
Quadruple bypass surgery, or low-fat diet?
After one meeting of the task force, Jenna knew the White House answer: Welcome to the operating room for planet Earth.
CHAPTER 6
On Capitol Hill, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was holding an emergency meeting with James Crossett, the director of the CIA. His tense visage was matched by the lockjaw expressions on the faces of two assistant directors who flanked him