Sixty Days and Counting,
by Kim Stanley Robinson.
I waited for the release of Kim Stanley Robinson's new book, Sixty Days and Counting, like a computer geek awaiting the release of the PS3: standing outside the door of the store, in the snow, having cleared my calendar for a few days so I could dive right in.
I'm a fan of Robinson's voluminous work because environmental themes usually animate the characters and move the plot. The "Three Californias" trilogy presented "future histories" with different environmental, technical, and social scenarios, while the Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning "Mars" trilogy traced that planet's transformation from science station to corporate colony to autonomous world. Antarctica explored the possible impacts of climate change and eco-terrorism while examining various modes of interacting with the harsh landscape.
Sixty Days and Counting is the final book in the "Capitol Code" trilogy, whose characters are experiencing and trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change in the near future. Charlie Quibler works part-time from home as an environmental policy advisor to Senator Phil Chase while caring for his feisty toddler, Joe, and school-aged Nick. Anna Quibler runs the bioinformatics division at the National Science Foundation, where she works with Frank Vanderwal, a scientist's scientist on loan to NSF from his faculty post at the University of California San Diego.
In Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in the trilogy, Anna befriends four Tibetan refugees who move into office space at NSF. Having fled Chinese human-rights abuses, the Tibetans found quasi-autonomy on the island of Khembalung, but it is threatened by climate change-induced rising sea levels. The Tibetans have come to D.C. to lobby for social and environmental justice.
Senator Chase brushes off the Tibetans and dismantles Charlie's omnibus environmental bill, while Frank becomes disenchanted by NSF's inability to act on any of the obvious climate-protection strategies suggested by scientific research. The possibility of meaningful action emerges when Katrina-style flooding hits D.C. In Fifty Degrees Below, the sense of urgency is enhanced when fresh water dumped into the north Atlantic from the thawing Arctic ice cap causes the Gulf Stream to fail. During the ensuing brutal winter, the National Science Foundation moves forward with aggressive research and mitigation steps, including restarting the Gulf Stream's thermohaline cycle. ("Putting salt in the ocean," one of the Tibetans quips ironically. "Good idea.")
Sixty Days and Counting picks up the story as Senator Chase is elected president. His inaugural address sounds like Al Gore on steroids reading a Kucinich script: "For the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail."
Throughout the series, Robinson seamlessly weaves science, politics, and spirituality into a compelling story whose characters practically come to life. While reading, I heard a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday contend that climate change is too expensive to address. I desperately wanted to call in and quote Frank Vanderwal: "Say it cost a trillion dollars to install clean-energy generators and change out the transport fleet. Weigh that against the financial benefit to civilization of continuing with approximately the [same] sea level, the weather, the biosphere support, etc.; also the difficult-to calculate-in-dollars but undoubtedly huge benefit of avoiding a great deal of human suffering ... Two trillion dollars would not be more than three or four years of the Pentagon's budget ... [we] could shift to clean power and transport so cheaply relative to the total economy." I rarely feel compelled to cite fictional characters on radio call-in shows, but Robinson's writing always gets under my skin this way.
Robinson also manages to actually dramatize sustainable living: the Quiblers in an egalitarian and somewhat nontraditional nuclear family in a suburban home (for now), Frank as a neo-Paleolithic freegan, the Tibetans in community. He even captures mundane moments in the life of an enviro-geek: "Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do ... Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy ... And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen."
In his essay "Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth," Robinson indicates that he sees the series as comic, in that "the discrepancy between what we say and what we do, what we intend and what we achieve, is always partly comic." Sixty Days and Counting isn't quite a comedy of manners, which my old handbook of literature insists "depicts daily life without coming to grips with questions of good and evil." Perhaps it's a new genre -- a comedy of catastrophe that recognizes that how we live our daily lives does bring us to grips with questions of good and evil. And without adding any spoilers, I can say that Sixty Days does satisfyingly end as Robinson predicted in his essay: "with the traditional comic ending -- dancing, singing, marriage, children all happy."
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Comments
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Liara Covert Posted 7:20 pm
05 Apr 2007
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dobermanmacleod Posted 7:47 pm
05 Apr 2007
I beg people to get past the paradigm of cutting mankind's greenhouse gas emissions (it ain't gonna happen in the short run, and they probably will continue to grow-not shrink bigtime-in the medium term), to the real solution of removing the CO2 from the air after it has been emitted.
Nature already does this, but we are overwhelming her. I suggest the biological solution of engineering, constructing, and releasing into the ocean a GMO.
I can imagine Senator Chase in "Sixty Days and Counting" trying to convince the citizens of the US to cut greenhouse gas emissions after they are experiencing the effects of global warming. An economy harmed by rapid climate change, in demand of more energy for powering climate control, trying switch to a low emissions economy rapidly (when the effects of emitting less greenhouse gas won't be felt for a lifetime). Yeah, that's the ticket!
Instead, after designing a GMO and seeding it into the ocean, the CO2 is removed cost free. Nature already removes about half of mankind's CO2 emissions, but that is expected to reduce 30% by 2030, while mankind's emissions are expected to double around mid-century.
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iridescent cuttlefish Posted 3:27 am
17 Apr 2007
In terms of the political construct with which we're saddled, no effective change can ever come about through policy decisions because such change is in direct opposition to the interests of the system itself, an idea that Jeff Vail explains quite succinctly in his Theory of Market Power, quoted here by our friend Big Gav in his wondrous blog:
The free market will ignore solutions that can't turn a profit. Any firm that fails to follow this simple maxim won't be in business for long. The corollary to this maxim is that the free market will ignore any solution that cannot be controlled, either through property interests (enforceable intellectual property, monopoly licenses, etc.) or because economies of scale demand centralized operation. This means that free market innovation is structurally incompatible with a huge portion of the universe of possible energy solutions.
(For more in this vein, plus a brilliant new and very much related post by Gav and even further incendiary commentary from me, follow this link.)
The point here is quite simple--a world which is grounded on non-polluting, untetherable energy production will not serve the interests of those who now run the show. For those still suffering from the delusion that the Democratic Party is in some way "independent" of corporate control, consider please the role of money in the process of getting elected. But here I digress.
The science. We've become so conditioned to thinking in terms of an energy source that flows through some sort of pipeline that we automatically ask, "What will replace oil?" The first thing we need to do is abandon that construct altogether. The key to a renewable energy infrastructure is...no energy infrastructure. Sound weird? It should, because it's true.
Most of you are doubtless aware of Edwin Black's Internal Combustion. How many, I have to wonder, have really understood the great secret Black was forced to be so circumspect about revealing? True, he details (as no one outside of some conspiracy circles has) the nature & history of the energy cartels' various monopolies, and it's also true that he pays great attention to Edison's 1914 dream that every house be energy self-sufficient, but it's not until he discusses Honda's FCX program (on p. 309!) that he lets the cat out of its ancient bag:
Decentralized Energy Independence & the End of Greenhouse Gases
More than a car, the Honda FCX comes with its own home-based hydrogen energy station that obsoletes gas stations and gasoline - and even cuts the tether to utility bills. About the size of a common home air-conditioning unit, the Honda Home Energy Station will be driven by natural gas, not electricity, and will create enough hydrogen daily to fill one or more FCX vehicles and heat and power an individual home. Honda's Home Energy Station is no pipe dream. Plug Power, an upstate-New York fuel-cell maker with more than six hundred installations worldwide, supplied Honda home power stations for several years before March 16, 2006, when they jointly announced the smallest model yet and most ambitious phase of their partnership: the FCX program.
Now, at this point Black is talking about a system that powers hydrogen fuel cell conversion that runs off natural gas--this concession to the natural gas industry is how they were able to get to the starting gate without being crushed. Now watch what happens:
Honda's Home Energy Station will soon be configured to run on solar, either from panels or perhaps from nanosolar materials embedded in its sleek case or other nearby home surfaces.
Did you catch that? When they reconfigure it to run on solar, they're taking the natural gas out of the equation. Completely. I have read this chapter many times to make sure; this is the secret that Black has stuck his neck out for. Now read the conclusion:
An estimated twenty square yards of nanosolar wrapped around a pole or a building surface could independently power Honda's Home Energy Station. A Plug Power source confirmed that the company's home station can be mass produced for the price of an air conditioner, opening the way to scalable untethered energy. (p. 309)
So, for the price of an air conditioner, using a technology that is already in production, you have all the energy needs for both car & home satisfied without any bloody power plants, greenhouse gases, or wars for hegemony. Now ask yourselves a rhetorical question: If this is all true, why isn't this the news of the day, screaming from every headline, pouring from the mouths of all our dedicated public servants? (See Mr. Vail above.)
As it turns out, there is yet another road to energy self-sufficiency that doesn't really require any technology at all, but rather a radically cheap and simple architectural design. This is where KSR comes back into the picture. While he doesn't actually mention what are known as positive energy coefficient houses (of which there are presently more than 6 different designs), he does talk about the necessity of social justice in order that the planet be saved. The problem is that we have another thought construct that blocks our thinking in this area.
So conditioned are we by Malthus' grievous misunderstanding and by the current racist xenophobia about our southern neighbors "stealing our jobs" (not to mention the prevalence of social Darwinism in our every position), that we are basically unaware that in every single case where the standard of living was sufficiently raised, human populations have either leveled off or actually dropped to a natural equilibrium. This is very, very important: as long as the notion of blowback is discredited by specious "they hate our freedoms" propaganda, we, as a society, will continue to look down at our darker brothers living in apartheid America as ungrateful, shiftless freeloaders. Welfare queens.
Weren't they better off in the Superdome?
There's an outfit called n'Kozi Homes that is making energy & water self-sufficient housing to relieve some of the unconscionable suffering of the people in Africa by proving them with shelter, energy, and water for life. They are also reclaiming the dessicated landscape and growing their own food, thanks to the genius of Joseph Feigelson, the mind behind n'Kozi. This page will explain the benefits of this vision, as my sermon here is getting a bit long. The point that ties all of this together is that KSR understands that the world cannot be fixed until human rights are equal and universal.
Our task is quite simple. We need to dismantle our toxic, socially-stratifying ghettos and McMansions, detoxify the soil, rebuild our cities so as to create communites and replant the great forests. To those who say it'll cost too much, I'd respond by saying that the costs are amazingly low--the entire reinheriting of the planet will pay for itself within 5 years of its completion.
Or, we could just sit back and hoard, as we've always done, and lord it over the rest of humanity while proclaiming our commitment to freedom and democracy.
(I would go into more detail on the architectural side of all this--the fact that the best new designs are fire, storm & flood-proof, but I've already criss-crossed the line of propriety here...not to mention that we still seem to be living in some kind of Superdome of the mind. Thanks for you patience. Really.)
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