Climate change and the politics of waiting: Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson

 By my calendar, this is the morning of July 17, 2022.  This book came out... um... months ago.  I tend to read Neal Stephenson books relatively soon after they come out, but it's not like there was any emergency, or anything, right?  It's not as if we're facing any pressing crisis, or anything, right?  I could put it off.  Sure.  Like, what's the cost of saying, I already had something else in my queue, and Stephenson books are great fun, but they're tomes, so OK, I'll just read this other thing first.  No harm, right?  And there's no subtext here.

Anyway, it has been an occasional source of surprise for me that we don't have more good sci-fi books on climate change.  The last one I read was a clunker.  Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For The Future, which was such a wretchedly bad book that I actually stopped reading it, and I never put a book down before finishing it.  That book suuuuuuuuuucked.  (Post here.)  Fortunately, Neal Stephenson came along, and even at Stephenson's worst, he'll spew better prose than Robinson could ever hope to dream.  Which brings us to Termination Shock.  I rate this as one of Neal Stephenson's lesser books, but not his worst, which means it is better than damn-near anything anyone else has ever written.  Hi.  I am a Neal Stephenson fanboy.  If you make Snow Crash into a movie/tv show and it sucks as much as I expect, I will... grumble futilely on this blog.  (And then order a pizza.)

So let's do this.  Termination Shock does not, sadly, have the greatest first chapter ever written, as Snow Crash does, nor the greatest first sentence ever written, as Seveneves does.  It is still a pretty damned good book.  Hey, look!  A good science fiction book about climate change!  And... it is actually about climate change.  It is not secretly about race/gender.  Stephenson has not bowed to the industry pressure to turn every book ever written into a social justice screed.  He actually wrote about climate change.  For real.  In fact, he poked occasional, minor fun at wokeness while having an actually inclusive/diverse cast of characters, none of which was the point, because it was about climate change.  Refreshing, in that impending disaster kind of way.

The premise is as follows.  A couple of decades into the future, climate change progresses apace.  Nobody does much of anything until T.R. Schmidt comes along.  Who, you may ask, is T.R. Schmidt?  An absolutely awesome and classic Neal Stephenson character.  He started a few restaurants-- T.R. McHooligan's-- and then branched out into massive highway truck stops, turning himself into a youtube personality, making an absolute ass of himself, but as it turns out, he is actually quite intelligent.  He has a Ph.D., knows a fuckload about chemistry, physics, economics and basically everything.  And based on some combination of his desire to keep the value of his real estate holdings in Houston from losing value as sea levels rise, and actual true caring, he comes up with a plan.

He is looking at rising sea levels.  Just sea levels.  Temperatures are going up, sea levels are going up, and certain locations are kind of fucked.  Houston.  (To say nothing of New Orleans...)  The Netherlands.  Venice.  Singapore.  A few other locations, but basically, TR (and yes, it stands for Teddy Roosevelt, after whom he was named, because that's just perfect for a vaguely environmentally conscious industrialist) gets some representatives from such locations on board for a plan to handle rising sea levels and temperatures.  Worrying only about rising sea levels and temperatures.

So you know how volcanic eruptions result in reductions in global temperature?  It isn't just the ash.  It's the sulfur.  Sulfur has the opposite effect as carbon dioxide.  TR's plan is to counteract atmospheric carbon by launching a bunch of sulfur into the stratosphere.  That will bring down temperatures.  So he starts shooting sulfur into the stratosphere from his compound in Texas.  Which will bring down temperatures.

It will do fuck-all about ocean acidification and a lot of other stuff, it'll fuck with the monsoons, and this isn't even close to a real fix, but if all you care about is reducing temperatures and managing sea levels, there is some mad genius here.

Mad, indeed, though.  It is batshit crazy.  It is the kind of plan that you don't even contemplate unless the climate is already way, way, way fucked, and nobody has given any real thought to a solution because the right doesn't care and the left is busy with the oppression olympics, which is a phrase coined by a Latina feminist named Elizabeth Martinez, cutting through Angela Davis's bullshit.  (Point being, it ain't conservatism.)

So maybe it's not so crazy to contemplate this.

Much of the story is told through Saskia, the Queen of the Netherlands (until she abdicates amid a series of deepfake pranks) and Rufus/"Red," who is yet another Stephenson classic.  A Comanche-and-other army vet, whose post-military life started as an Ahab-quest to kill a wild boar that killed his daughter, until he meets up with Saskia in the craziest airplane crash ever, and then gets hired by Schmidt.  In typical Stephenson style, wackiness and hijinks ensue, along with a cast of side characters, including what first looks like a complete tangent storyline about a Canadian Sikh who heads over to the Punjab practicing the Indian martial art of gatka.  Add in a Chinese spymaster, wild backstories and it's a Neal Stephenson book.

Fuck it.  Let's talk political science.  Go ask a climatologist or an atmospheric chemist how much sulfur one would have to shoot into the atmosphere to do what T.R. Schmidt, and then a few others start doing.  Stephenson usually does his math on this, but I'm going with Wernher von Braun/Tom Lehrer here.  Once the rockets are up, who cares how much sulfur is in them?  That's not my department.

This is the Wile E. Coyote method of solving climate change.  Or rather, there was a Simpsons episode in which Bart killed a bird, and then decided to hatch the eggs, but it turned out the eggs had been replaced by some dangerous, predatory lizards who do a cuckoo thing.  Not "cuckoo" as in crazy, but what actual cuckoos do.  Lay their eggs in another's nest.  So Bart hatches the eggs, and there are these dangerous lizards, which get loose, leading to the question, what is to be done about these lizards?  The resolution is a crazy plan.  Set some Chinese needle snakes loose to catch the lizards.  What then?  You have a snake infestation.  There are some gorillas that will eat the snakes!  Set gorillas loose!  What do you do about the gorillas?  Wait until winter.  The gorillas will freeze to death.  Easy-peasy.

Behold, T.R. Schmidt's plan.  As it is revealed, the sulfur is not a final sol... OK, let's not type that.  It is not a cure-all.  It is just a stopgap.  There would then be a calibration process, and yadda-yadda, but things are so bad that someone needs a stopgap.  Yet once you get to that point, you are at the lizards versus snakes versus gorillas calibration process.  That's... 

Well here's the thing.  The smaller the problem, the easier the fix.  The harder the problem, the more problems you create with the fix.  Consider inflation.  When inflation gets sufficiently high, the cost of stopping it is a recession.  If inflation runs only up to 4% (assuming 2% target), you can bring it down to target without causing a recession.  Can we still?  That is far from clear, which is why there is current speculation of a full percentage point rate hike at the next Fed meeting.  This is almost universally true.  The bigger the problem, the more side-effects you create with the solution, and hence, the more secondary responses you require.

Which is why it is better to respond quickly, when you see the problem coming, and can respond with minimal cost.

But we suck.

In the novel, where this gets both hilarious, and probably even true, is that opposition to Schmidt's plan runs high, even among "Greens."  Just imagine that someone proposes shooting sulfur into the atmosphere.  How do you think your typical enviro will react?

And if you then say, OK, what's your plan?  Um...

So this is the dynamic.  The Greens are the ones opposed to anything real happening, because Schmidt is the one implementing the Wile E. Coyote plan from his West Texas ranch, the Greens say no because it has negative side effects, and they're stuck on reduced emissions and carbon capture without any math or engineering.

Could someone develop carbon capture technology to get us out of this?  Dunno.  But what if that doesn't happen?  What would that do to political coalitions?  Would the Greens still oppose something like Schmidt's plan?  Probably.  That would put the crazy billionaire on the side of the only real plan, and the Greens, paradoxically, against the only actual plan on the table.

Which does not mean, necessarily, that anyone should just wait around for Elon Musk or some similarly cartoonish rich person to save the world.  (There actually was a Musk-inspired character in Seveneves.)  But what's the trajectory?

Then there is the fascinating projection of political alliances.  This is where Stephenson really finds some interesting insight.  Everything has costs and benefits.  Shoot a bunch of sulfur into the atmosphere, alter temperatures and climates, and what happens?  At this point, we enter the realm of wild speculation, but sure, let's go with Neal.  What kinds of coalitions do you create?  Stephenson proposes that one needs to think through the climate models, because some geographic regions-- regions, not necessarily countries-- benefit.  Consider the monsoons.  Here we get into the India/China thing.  India is dependent on the monsoon cycles.  Fuck with that, and India is fucked, with a lot of people getting fucked.  China, according to the climate model in the novel, does better, ramping up tension between the two, and you get a small scale perspective on this from the character of Laks, who heads off to the Line of Actual Control to play silly war games, stick fighting in the Himalayas for the amusement of youtube audiences around the world.  But this scrambles international politics because alliances become dependent on how any given region fares in response to T.R. Wile E. Coyote Schmidt's plan.

Weather and climate patterns, and sea level.  If you benefit, you're in it together in favor.  Otherwise, you're opposed.  The Venetians even come up with the branding, Netherworld, for the lands below the current stochastic sea level, which is the growing alliance of places that don't even necessarily recognize national borders.  Houston, for example.  Venice is trying to secede from both Italy and the EU.  They're in it with the Netherlands, Houston, Singapore... places that need Schmidt's plan, and fuck anyone else, fuck the consequences, because otherwise they're just gone.  Completely underwater.  The real underwater city.

Hence we turn to core questions from political science on the nature of alliances in international relations.  Ideology, pragmatism or some specific combination?  Well, as usual, it depends, but the more pressing the practical need, the more that shifts the balance.  Once upon a time, the Soviet Union was on the same side as the United States.  Remember why Putin's go-to lie is "de-nazification."

When your city is going to disappear, and you care about your city-- as, for example, Venice-- about what else do you give a shit?

Then contrast that with the fact that Stephenson throws in an Ayaan Hirsi Ali character, because one of his POV characters is the Queen of the Netherlands.  She doesn't give a shit about the climate (nor your woke bullshit).  Why not?  Because in places like Somalia, look at what happens to women.  That's her concern.  Bother her about the climate after that's solved.  The Venetians don't care about Somalian women, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali character doesn't give a shit if Venice sinks for good.  So all of the alliances get scrambled as prioritizations get scrambled.

So here's a question.  A real question, posed by Termination Shock.  A good novel should pose a real question.  How stable are existing international political alliances?  We have seen so much crack or shatter over the last few years, or even just months.  Temperatures in the UK right now are... a little weird.  Gee.  Um.  I wonder.  Has anyone been predicting this?  Are there any consequences?

We are not well-served when an infantile fool says that all human life will die out in 10 years, or whatever some dipshit on the extreme left might say.  One need not exaggerate on climate change when the data are as scary as they are.  Droughts, floods and other extreme weather events, rising sea levels... this is not good.  It will affect food production, livable land, and a lot of people will get fucked.  All human life dies out?  No, but an idiot using exaggerated/inflammatory rhetoric should not be justification for the other form of extremism.  Alas, it has been, so here we are, and there we shall go.  What is the cost?  The cost increases.

The cost of inaction always increases the cost of action on a foreseeable problem, or a growing problem.  Yet that is hardly a new observation, even if I think it might be an ever-so-slightly-clever turn of phrase.  What a novel can add... let me amend... what a good novel can add (take note, Kim) is some depth of understanding to the nature of the costs.  It is not merely that costs are not borne equally, for no costs are ever born equally (and in the social justice virtue-signaling era, even that word is getting annoying).  More interesting is the question of how such costs might be distributed, and what the effect may be of any such distribution.  What will that do to political alliances?  To ideology?  Stephenson probably has it wrong, of course.  Anyone trying to think through the politics and technology of anything decades into the future will usually get it wrong, but then again, we're now talking about the "metaverse," and, um... go read Snow Crash.

Anyway, a good book, and food for thought, which is a good thing to have, although if food production is disrupted by climate change, that may be cold comfort, and if temperatures go up, that particular form of comfort may also be in short supply.

Alas, youtube did not have Pierre Dørge's "Stormy Weather Over The North Sea," which would have been most appropriate, given the focus on the Netherlands.  I then thought, OK, Sonny Landreth's "Bad Weather," since there is a lot of material on the Gulf Coast, but I used that one on my Kim Stanley Robinson post.  So fine, here's a famous one.  SRV, "Couldn't Stand the Weather."  TR Schmidt would approve.