Ultimatum (27 page)

“So it’s a question of degree, not whether this is happening?” said the president after Dr. Richards had finished.

“That was the case last time we met, sir. What we’re seeing now are trends confirming the upper range of the predictions.”

“When will you have a definitive answer?”

“After this summer I believe we’ll be in a strong position to give a narrow range of likely rates. By October, sir, after we analyze the data.”

The president nodded. He looked around the room to see whether anyone had other questions.

“Larry,” he said, “anything from you?”

“No,” said Olsen’s voice out of a speaker. “I’m fine.” He was calling on a secure connection from the Karachi embassy, where it was one thirty in the morning.

“All right,” said Benton. “Dr. Richards, can you show us the impact on China?”

Richards called up a series of maps. Same format as the ones for the U.S.—red showing areas that would be uninhabitable, blue for areas of partial viability, yellow for the rest.

Wu stared at the screen, scanning the maps, utterly absorbed in what he was seeing. Benton glanced at him. With a pointed chin and short black hair that stood up like bristles on a brush, Wu looked too young to know anything about anything, thought Benton. But he was thirty-four, with a doctorate from Harvard and three years of postgraduate work in Beijing before joining the State Department.

“Larry,” said Eales, “we’ll make sure you get to see these later. Suffice to say there’s going to be a whole lot of water down there in the south of China.”

“That’s fine,” replied Olsen. “I don’t need the detail now.”

Dr. Richards went on to the next series, showing the impact on India. “We’ve got the whole subcontinental area here,” she said as the first map came up. “As you can see, there’s not much left of Bangladesh.”

“Is that inundation or storms?” asked Alan Ball.

“At a certain point in that part of the world it becomes the same thing,” said Dr. Richards. “We have more detailed charts showing the distribution, but effectively the flow-off capacity will be so limited that the areas in red will become permanently flooded. At that point the question’s moot.”

There was silence. The northern end of the Bay of Bengal was a red flare on the map. India was almost entirely red-fringed, and there appeared to be a loss of about a quarter of the Sri Lankan land surface.

“Go on to the reduction scenarios, please, Dr. Richards,” said Eales.

Richards had been asked to have her team model the effect of a number of different levels of global emissions, ranging from ten percent reduction over ten years to a thirty percent cut over five years. She talked through the results. Even with the most extreme reduction schedule, the U.S. population requiring relocation would range from twenty to twenty-five million. And even in that scenario, Miami went under.

“Can you give us an estimate of the population at risk in other countries?” asked Eales.

“I believe we can do a country-by-country estimate if that would help. A significant amount of modeling will be required so it may take a little time. A week perhaps. Would that be quick enough?”

“That would be very helpful.”

Richards nodded.

“Can you summarize the qualifications to your presentation, Dr. Richards?” said Benton.

“I believe the only major qualification, Mr. President, is our uncertainty over the level of increase that our data are showing. But if you take the upper case and the lower case for each scenario, the real outcome will almost certainly lie within that range. Other qualifications are the normal ones around mapping, demographic projections, etcetera. I would estimate these amount to no more than a five percent variance, which is not material to the directionality of the projections.”

The president looked around the room. Then at the console. “Larry?”

“I’m fine.”

Benton nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Richards.”

“Is that all, Mr. President?”

“Thank you. You’ll make sure Mr. Eales has this presentation? He’ll be in touch if we need any further analysis at this time.”

“Mr. Eales, I have to get to you the relocation impact of the scenarios on a country-by-country basis.”

Eales nodded.

“Thank you, then.” Richards pulled her drive out of the desk console. Ben Hoffman got up and showed her out.

The sound of the door closing behind her left a hush.

“Jackie?” said the president.

Jackie Rubin got up. She went to the desk console and inserted a drive. She had asked her team to model the economic effects of the same reduction scenarios Dr. Richards had been given.

“These are scary numbers, Mr. President,” she said before she showed any of the slides. “Whatever happens, this throws us into reverse. In the worst case, we have an average nine percent contraction of the economy year-on-year for four years. That’s almost unimaginable, sir.”

“Just take us through the numbers, Jackie,” said Benton quietly.

She projected a series of tables showing growth rates in key economic parameters. All in the early years were negative. The bald columns of numbers belied the misery they foretold for millions of people.

“Is it really that bad?” asked the president. “If we’re relocating people, doesn’t that create jobs? People have to build new places, the reception areas need more teachers, more doctors.”

“But you’ve got the loss of the productive capacity of people during the transition, Mr. President. More importantly, you’ve got the loss of the productive capacity of the assets that are being abandoned. Both of those factors drive down overall productivity. Plus, who pays for the new infrastructure? We accept that a lot of it’s got to be taxpayer funded, but where’s the tax coming from if you have a lower productivity base? And if we borrow to fund it—which is inevitable, at least for a sizable chunk of it—you’re sucking money away that would otherwise be used for consumption or business investment, and you’re driving up interest rates, both of which hit jobs in other ways.”

“But we had a plan to turn our original relocation package into a net economic benefit over the course of the program,” said Ben Hoffman. “That was a central plank of the campaign.”

“Ben, this is a whole different scenario. It’s about timing and scale. The idea with Relocation in the New Foundation package is that we do it systematically, prime the receiving communities with infrastructure ahead of time and as much as possible allow old infrastructure to downgrade naturally so what we’re really doing, effectively, is redirecting resource from renewing infrastructure in affected areas to building new infrastructure where it’s needed. Add to that universal health care, adequate education and job stimulation, and put the whole thing in a reasonable time frame, so you can phase relocation, and that actually gives you growth. This is a whole nother thing. Many more millions of people will be moving over a much shorter period. That means you have much less freedom to phase it, and you’re going to abandon infrastructure you’d still be using. That’s an enormous net loss to our asset base, like what happens in a war. And the relocation is going to be like accepting millions of refugees at the same time. Except it’s a double impact. Those refugees, if you will, aren’t just a burden on our resources, until the day before they were actually producing some of those resources.”

“I won’t have the American people spoken of as a burden on resources,” said the president quietly.

Rubin nodded. “I was speaking as an economist, sir.”

“I’m not sure if I’m missing something here.” It was Larry Olsen’s voice. “I’m just listening to you all and it sounds like you’re making us out to be the bad guys. Every one of our scenarios factors in our relocation plan, right? Even the one with no emissions reduction?”

“I haven’t done one with no emissions reduction,” said Jackie.

“Well, that’s the problem. You need one with no emissions reduction and no relocation plan, and you need to show us how bad that looks when everything finally falls apart. That’s the true comparison. Show people that and
then
ask them what they want us to do.”

Rubin wasn’t sure that would be persuasive. “The pain will be greater, but it’s going to be a lot further away. We’re talking twenty, thirty years. Maybe more.”

“That’s always been the problem,” said the president. “Thirty years ago that’s exactly what people thought, and you know what? That’s why we’re sitting here today. If Kyoto 1 or 2 had been bold enough, we wouldn’t be talking about relocation at all.”

“It’s a political question,” said John Eales. “Not an economic or a social one. Economically, ever since the Stern Review, it’s been a no-brainer. We have no excuse, none of us.”

The president nodded. “Do that scenario, Jackie.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s going to happen to their grandkids,” said Eales, “let’s show them what it’s really going to mean.”

Rubin nodded.

Benton felt they needed more policy thinking around this. How could they maximize the outcome of the action they would have to take? Hoffman suggested a subgroup of the Council of Economic Advisors. Eales liked the idea.

“Pitch it as a blue sky group, Ben,” said Eales. “Radical thinking on carbon emissions control, something like that. They don’t need to know the context.”

Hoffman nodded. “I’ll set up time with Sandy Winter.”

“Set it up for me. We can make it look like some kind of thing I’m doing so it doesn’t look like it’s directly coming from the president.”

Benton looked around the table. “All right, we just have to persuade the American people to take a huge hit for their grandchildren’s sake. Easy. That’s part one. Let’s move on to the second part. Can someone tell me how we get the Chinese to play ball?”

No one volunteered an answer.

“Dr. Wu,” said the president, “you’re up. We’ve had some discussion about how we might handle the Chinese government. I’m not sure if Secretary Olsen has filled you in. On the one hand, we could move hard with a threat of sanctions. On the other hand, we could go slow.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wu. “I understand.”

“Have you seen the papers?”

Wu nodded.

“Do you have a view?”

“On that specific question, Mr. President? On sanctions?”

“On anything,” muttered Ball.

“Do you think President Wen is sitting with a bunch of guys someplace in Beijing having a discussion like this?” asked Benton.

“Perhaps he doesn’t know these facts, sir.”

“Assume he does.”

“When you mean this kind of discussion, Mr. President, you mean what measures he can use to get the United States to drastically cut its emissions?”

“I guess so,” said the president.

“Then no, sir. He is not having this discussion.”

“Is he having any kind of a discussion?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it about?”

Wu was conscious of every eye in the room watching him, conscious that no one in this gathering was going to pull their punches if they thought he was wrong. In particular, Alan Ball.

“It’s about China,” he said.

“How China deals with this?”

“Not exactly. How China benefits from it. The mindset is—China continues. Whatever happens to it, China continues. War, natural disasters, human disasters—China continues. So how does China benefit from this? It’s a zero sum mentality. Which means, for example, if you propose emissions reduction, how does China benefit from this? One simple answer is if it forces you to take more reductions than it does.”