Forty Signs of Rain (18 page)

“I must have been drunk to tell you that, and it wasn’t really sex anyway. I couldn’t even move.”

Roy laughed his raucous laugh. “Since when does that make it not sex? You had sex with Joe in a backpack asleep on your back, so you sure as hell can talk to the President’s science advisor that way. Doctor Strangelove isn’t going to care.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“So? They’re all jerks over there but the President, and he is too but he’s a nice guy. And he’s the
family
President, right? He would approve on principle, you can tell Strengloft that. You can say that if the President were there he would love it. He would autograph Joe’s head like a baseball.”

“Yeah right.”

“Charlie, this is your bill!”

“Okay okay okay!” It was true. “I’ll go give it a try.”

So, by the time Charlie got Joe back on his back (the child was twice as heavy when asleep) and walked across the Mall and the Ellipse, Roy had made the calls and they were expecting him at the west entry to the White House. Joe was passed through security with a light-fingered shakedown that was especially squeamish around his diaper. Then they were through, and quickly escorted into a conference room.

The room was brightly lit, and empty. Charlie had never been in it before, though he had visited the White House several times. Joe weighed on his shoulders.

Dr. Zacharius Strengloft, the President’s science advisor, entered the room. He and Charlie had sparred by proxy several times before, Charlie whispering killer questions into Phil’s ear while Strengloft testified before Phil’s committee, but the two of them had never spoken one-on-one. Now they shook hands, Strengloft peering curiously over Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie explained Joe’s presence as briefly as he could, and Strengloft received the explanation with precisely the kind of frosty faux benevolence that Charlie had been expecting. Strengloft in Charlie’s opinion was a pompous ex-academic of the worst kind, hauled out of the depths of a second-rate conservative think tank when the administration’s first science advisor had been sent packing for saying that global warming might be real and not only that, amenable to human mitigations. That went too far for this administration. Their line was that no one knew for sure and it would be much too expensive to do anything about even if they were certain it was coming—everything would have to change, the power generation system, cars, a shift from hydrocarbons to helium or something, they didn’t know, and they didn’t own patents or already existing infrastructure for that kind of new thing, so they were going to punt and let the next generation solve their own problems in their own time. In other words, the hell with them. Easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit.

All this had become quite blatant since Strengloft’s appointment. He had taken over the candidate lists for most of the federal government’s science-advisory panels, and very quickly candidates were being routinely asked who they had voted for in the last election, and what they thought of stem-cell research and abortion and evolution. This had recently culminated in a lead industry defense witness being appointed to the panel for setting safety standards for lead in children’s blood, and immediately declaring that seventy micrograms per deciliter would be harmless to children, though the EPA’s maximum was ten. When his views were publicized and criticized, Strengloft had commented, “You need a diversity of opinions to get good advice.” Mentioning his name was enough to make Anna hiss.

Be that as it may, here he was standing before Charlie; he had to be dealt with, and in the flesh he seemed friendly.

They had just gotten through their introductory pleasantries when the President himself entered the room. Strengloft nodded complacently, as if he were often joined in his crucial work by the happy man.

“Oh, hello Mr. President,” Charlie said helplessly.

“Hello, Charles,” the President said, and came over and shook his hand.

This was bad. Not unprecedented, or even terribly surprising; the President had become known for wandering into meetings like this, apparently by accident but perhaps not. It had become part of his legendarily informal style.

Now he saw Joe sacked out on Charlie’s back, and stepped around Charlie to get a better view. “What’s this, Charles, you got your kid with you?”

“Yes sir, I was called in on short notice when Dr. Strengloft asked for a meeting with Phil and Wade, they’re both out of town.”

The President found this amusing. “Ha! Well, good for you. That’s sweet. Find me a marker pen and I’ll sign his little head.” This was another signature move, so to speak. “Is he a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. Joe Quibler.”

“Well that’s great. Saving the world before bedtime, that’s your story, eh Charles?” He smiled to himself and moved restlessly over to the chair at the window end of the table. One of his people was standing in the door, watching them without expression.

The President’s face was smaller than it appeared on TV, Charlie found. The size of an ordinary human face, no doubt, looking small precisely because of all the TV images. On the other hand it had a tremendous solidity and three-dimensionality to it. It gleamed with reality.

His eyes were slightly close-set, as was often remarked, but apart from that he looked like an aging movie star or catalog model. A successful businessman who had retired to get into public service. His features, as many observers had observed, mixed qualities of several recent presidents into one blandly familiar and reassuring face, with a little dash of Ross Perot to give him a piquant antiquity and edgy charm.

Now his amused look was like that of everyone’s favorite uncle. “So they reeled you in for this on the fly.” Then, holding a hand up to stop all of them, he nearly whispered: “Sorry—should I whisper?”

“No sir, no need for that,” Charlie assured him in his ordinary speaking voice. “He’s out for the duration. Pay no attention to that man behind the shoulder.”

The President smiled. “Got a wizard on your back, eh?”

Charlie nodded, smiling quickly to conceal his surprise. It was a pastime in some circles to judge just how much of a dimwit the President was, how much of a performing puppet for the people manipulating him; but facing him in person, Charlie felt instantly confirmed in his minority position that the man had such a huge amount of low cunning that it amounted to a kind of genius. The President was no fool. And hip to at least the most obvious of movie trivia. Charlie couldn’t help feeling a bit reassured.

Now the President said, “That’s nice, Charles, let’s get to it then, shall we? I heard from Dr. S. here about the meeting this morning, and I wanted to check in on it in person, because I like Phil Chase. And I understand that Phil now wants us to join in with the actions of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, to the point of introducing a bill mandating our participation in whatever action they recommend, no matter what it is. And this is a UN panel.”

“Well,” Charlie said, shifting gears into ultradiplomatic mode, not just for the President but for the absent Phil, who was going to be upset with him no matter what he said, since only Phil should actually be talking to the President about this stuff. “That isn’t exactly how I would put it, Mr. President. You know the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a number of hearings this year, and Phil’s conclusion after all that testimony was that the global climate situation is quite real. And serious to the point of being already almost too late.”

The President shot a glance at Strengloft. “Would you agree with that, Dr. S.?”

“We’ve agreed that there is general agreement that the observed warming is real.”

The President looked to Charlie, who said, “That’s good as far as it goes, certainly. It’s what follows from that that matters—you know, in the sense of us trying to do something about it.”

Charlie swiftly rehearsed the situation, known to all: average temperatures up by six degrees Fahrenheit already, CO
₂
levels in the atmosphere topping six hundred parts per million, from a start before the industrial revolution of 280, and predicted to hit a thousand ppm within a decade, which would be higher than it had been at any time in the past seventy million years. Two and a half billion metric tons of CO
₂
added to the atmosphere by American industry every year, some 150 percent more than the Kyoto agreement would have allowed if they had signed it, and rising fast. Also long-term persistence of greenhouse gases, on the order of thousands of years.

Charlie also spoke briefly of the death of all coral reefs, which would lead to even more severe consequences for oceanic ecosystems. “The thing is, Mr. President, the world’s climate can shift very rapidly. There are scenarios in which the general warming causes parts of the Northern Hemisphere to get quite cold, especially in Europe. If that were to happen, Europe could become something like the Yukon of Asia.”

“Really!” the President said. “Are we sure that would be a bad thing? Just kidding of course.”

“Of course sir, ha ha.”

The President fixed him with a look of mock displeasure. “Well, Charles, all that may be true, but we don’t know for sure if any of that is the result of human activity. Isn’t that a fact?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘know for sure,’ ” Charlie said doggedly. “Two and a half billion tons of carbon per year, that’s got to make a difference, it’s just plain physics. You could say it isn’t for sure that the sun will come up tomorrow morning, and in a limited sense you’d be right, but I’ll bet you the sun will come up.”

“Don’t be tempting me to gamble now.”

“And besides, Mr. President, there’s also what they call the precautionary principle, meaning you don’t delay acting on crucial matters when you have a disaster that might happen, just because you can’t be one hundred percent sure that it will happen. Because you can never be one hundred percent sure of anything, and some of these matters are too important to wait on.”

The President frowned at this, and Strengloft interjected, “Charlie, you know the precautionary principle is an imitation of actuarial insurance that has no real resemblance to it, because the risk and the premium paid can’t be calculated. That’s why we refused to hear any precautionary principle language in the discussions we attended at the UN. We said we wouldn’t even attend if they talked about precautionary principles or ecological footprints, and we had very good reasons for those exclusions, because those concepts are not good science.”

The President nodded his “So That Is That” nod, familiar to Charlie from many a press conference. He added, “I always thought a footprint was kind of a simplistic measurement for something this complex anyway.”

Charlie countered, “It’s just a name for a good economic index, Mr. President, calculating use of resources in terms of how much land it would take to provide them. It’s pretty educational, really,” and he launched into a quick description of the way it worked. “It’s a good thing
to know, like balancing your checkbook, and what it shows is that America is consuming the resources of ten times the acreage it actually occupies. So that if everyone on Earth tried to live as we do, given the greater population densities in much of the world, it would take fourteen Earths to support us all.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Dr. Strengloft objected. “Next you’ll be wanting us to use Bhutan’s Gross Domestic Happiness, for goodness’ sake. But we can’t use little countries’ indexes, they don’t do the job. We’re the hyperpower. And really, the anticarbon-dioxide crowd is a special interest lobby in itself. You’ve fallen prey to their arguments, but it’s not like CO
₂
is some toxic pollutant. It’s a gas that is natural in our air, and it’s essential for plants, even good for them. The last time there was a significant rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, human agricultural productivity boomed. The Norse settled Greenland during that period, and there were generally rising lifespans.”

“The end of the Black Death might account for that,” Charlie pointed out.

“Well, maybe rising CO
₂
levels ended the Black Death.”

Charlie felt his jaw gape.

“It’s the bubbly in my club soda,” the President told him gently.

“Yes.” Charlie rallied. “But a greenhouse gas nevertheless. It holds in heat that would otherwise escape back into space. And we’re putting more than two billion tons of it into the atmosphere every year. It’s like putting a plug in your exhaust pipe, sir. The car is bound to warm up. There’s general agreement from the scientific community that it causes
really significant warming.”

“Our models show the recent temperature changes to be within the range of natural fluctuation,” Dr. Strengloft replied. “In fact, temperatures in the stratosphere have gone down. It’s complex, and we’re studying it, and we’re going to make the best and most cost-effective response to it, because we’re taking the time to do that. Meanwhile, we’re already taking effective precautions. The President has asked American businesses to keep to a new national goal of limiting the growth of carbon dioxide emissions to one-third of the economy’s rate of growth.”

“But that’s the same ratio of emissions to growth that we have already.”

“Yes, but the President has gone further, by asking American businesses to try to reduce that ratio over the next decade by eighteen percent. It’s a growth-based approach that will accelerate new technologies, and the partnerships that we’ll need with the developing world on climate change.”

As the President looked to Charlie to see what he would reply to this errant nonsense, Charlie felt Joe stir on his back. This was unfortunate, as things were already complicated enough. The President and his science advisor were not only ignoring the specifics of Phil’s bill, they were actively attacking its underlying concepts. Any hope Charlie had had that the President had come to throw his weight behind some real dickering was gone.

And Joe was definitely stirring. His face was burrowed sideways into the back of Charlie’s neck, as usual, and now he began doing something that he sometimes did when napping: he latched onto the right tendon at the back of Charlie’s neck and began sucking it rhythmically, like a pacifier. Always before Charlie had found this a sweet thing, one of the most momlike moments of his Mr. Momhood. Now he had to steel himself to it and forge on.