“That’s a helluva mixture of metaphors,” Freiberg said, grinning despite himself.
“Never mind the syntax. I don’t trust Humphries. I do trust you.”
“Dan, my opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing here. You might as well ask George, or your cook.”
Hunching forward over the table, Dan said, “You can talk the talk, Zack. You can contact the experts that Humphries has used and sound them out. You can talk to other people, the real specialists in these areas, and see what they think. They’d talk to you, Zack, and you’d understand what they’re saying. You can —”
“Dan,” Freiberg said icily, “I’m working twenty-six hours a day already.”
“I know,” Dan said. “I know.”
Freiberg had thrown himself totally into the global effort to cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions given off by the world’s fossil-fueled power-generating stations, factories, and vehicles.
Faced with disastrous shifts in climate due to the greenhouse warming, the nations of the world were belatedly, begrudgingly, attempting to remedy the cataclysm. Led by the Global Economic Council, manufacturers around the world were desperately trying to convert automobiles and other vehicles to electrical motors. But that meant trebling the global electricity-generating capacity, and fossil-fueled power plants were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear plants. There was still plenty of petroleum available, and the world’s resources of coal dwarfed the petroleum reserves. Fission-based power plants were still anathema because of the public’s fear of nuclear power. The new fusion generators were costly, complex, and also hindered by stubborn public resistance to anything nuclear.
So more and more fossil-fueled power plants were being built, especially in the rising industrial nations such as China and South Africa. The GEC insisted that new plants sequester their carbon dioxide emissions, capture the dangerous greenhouse gas and pump it safely deep underground.
Zachary Freiberg had devoted his life to the effort to mitigate the greenhouse disaster. He had taken an indefinite leave of absence from his position as chief scientist of Astro Manufacturing and criss-crossed the world, directing massive construction projects. His wife had left him, he had not seen his children in more than a year, his personal life was in tatters, but he was driven to do what he could, what he had to do, to help slow the greenhouse warming.
“So how’s it going?” Dan asked him.
Freiberg shook his head. “We’re shoveling shit against the tide. There’s just no way we can reduce greenhouse emissions enough to make a difference.”
“But I thought-”
“We’ve been working our butts off for… how long has it been? Ten years? Not even a dent. When we started, fossil fuel burning pumped six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year. Know how much we’re putting out now?”
Dan shook his head.
“Five point three billion tons,” Freiberg said, almost angrily.
Dan grunted.
Pointing through the van’s window to the massive trucks rumbling by, Freiberg grumbled, “Yamagata’s trying to convert their whole fleet of trucks to electricity, but the Chinese are still using diesels. Some people just don’t give a damn! The Russians are starting to talk about cultivating what they call the Virgin lands’ in Siberia, where the permafrost is melting. They think they can turn the region into a new grain belt, like the Ukraine.”
“So something good might come out of all this,” Dan murmured.
“My ass,” Freiberg snapped. “The oceans are still warming up, Dan. The clathrates are going to break down if we can’t stop the ocean temperature rise. Once they start releasing the methane that’s frozen in them…”
Dan opened his mouth to reply, but Freiberg kept right on agonizing. “You know how much methane is locked up in the clathrates? Two limes ten to the sixteenth tons. Twenty quadrillion tons! Enough to produce a greenhouse that’ll melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Every glacier in the world. We’ll all drown.”
“All the more reason,” Dan said, “for pushing out to the Asteroid Belt. We can bring in all the metals and minerals the Earth needs, Zack! We can move the world’s industrial operations into space, where they won’t screw up the Earth’s environment.”
Freiberg gave Dan a disbelieving look.
“We can do it!” Dan insisted. “If this fusion rocket can be made to work. That’s the key to the whole damned thing: efficient propulsion can bring the cost of asteroid mining down to where it’s economically viable.”