The best of intentions

The Best of Intentions
By Tim Osborne


The first city to go was San Francisco.  98% mortality in less than an hour.  The terror alert was high that day so the government blamed it on the Christian Liberation Front.  They had threatened to gas the city back in 2012 when the first of the mass gay weddings were held and it wasn’t an idle threat, they’ve tried at least three dozen times since.  To be fair, they did claim responsibility for the destruction almost before the news hit the net.  It wasn’t the Christian terrorists, it wasn’t one of the unreformed Muslim sects, it wasn’t even the Mormon separatists trying to claim the pacific northwest for their holy land again.  This time it was the most widely held public company in the world, and even they didn’t know what was happening.

     You never think of TREES anymore.  Hell, some kids these days think the natural ones, you know the ones with leaves and bark and shit were named after the artificial ones.  Even if you do notice, they are a good thing.  The Terrestrial Recovery Environmental Engineering System, a fancy name with a cutesy acronym thought up by some ad agency in Macau.  You’ve seen them, stainless steel towers seems like they are on every hill.  They go up 200 feet or more bristling with antennas and ‘net repeaters.  At the top are the cones, quietly sucking the CO2 out of the air and piping it down into the ground.  The pipes take it away to collection terminals, the terminals ship it to the dumps.  The towers are just the beginning, every building put up since the 20’s has TREES built in.  Ever since balance was first achieved in 2040 a computer in Omaha has been controlling every TREES in the world sucking exactly as much carbon out of the air as we pump into it every year.  

     It sounds simple, but simple things have a way of getting complicated when you’re not looking, or when money is involved.  TREES isn’t cheap.  The money spent on collection pipes alone could rebuild the entire North American power grid twice with money left over for a few extra reactors.  Money like that always means government and believe me there was plenty of government money involved but the start came from the strangest place.

     Every couple of years the richest men in the world get together and have lunch.  It sounds kind of silly when you say it like that, but it’s true.  I know what you’re thinking, rich guys are always getting together and having lunch and that is perfectly true.  What I mean is the Richest men get together, all of them.  Every top 100 list you’ve ever seen, they all show up for lunch them and the half dozen or so men that are richer still that don’t make it on the lists.  It isn’t a political event like similar meetings that get crowed over by the conspiracy theorists.  It isn’t a celebration of political clout or influence.  What happens is several hundred of the wealthiest and most powerful men that have ever lived on this planet get together and talk.  They talk about money, they talk about power but most of all they talk about the things that could threaten their position in the world.  When you are rich enough to be invited, or I should say summoned one is allowed to decline an invitation, to one of these meetings there are not many things that could threaten your position in the world.  Wars have been started by decisions made at these meetings, famines have been relieved, and presidents have been chosen.  

     Sometime around 2010 the talk at these meetings turned more and more to climate change.  Data was presented, solutions were proposed and debated and the artificial tree was born.  I don’t want to make it sound easy, something this big is never easy but the actual work is always done by underlings.  The will make things happen comes from the top and once that was achieved it was less than five years before TREES made their first appearance on the landscape.  

      The artificial tree had been invented and patented years before, one of the men at the table turned the patent over to a bright young chemist with an MBA along with a little seed money and the rest was history waiting to happen.  The idea was amazingly simple make people, or in this case corporations and governments, pay for their guilt.  Carbon credits became the 21st century papal indulgence and companies lined up to pay for TREES to expiate their environmental sins.  $500 dollars would remove the carbon put into the atmosphere by your car, 250 million dollars would remove the carbon put out by your power plant.  The world would cool, the weather would stabilize and our sins would be forgiven.

     Governments came and went, there were scandals, wars an assassination or two but Terrestrial Engineering LLC continued to grow.  When the Omaha exchange closed yesterday 50% of the people in the world owned at least one share of stock.  It was the biggest market success in history but like most success stories there was a catch.

     The carbon has to go somewhere.  So you bury it deep, buy every tapped out oil well in the world and stuff the dry holes with liquid CO2.  When the oil wells are full you run lines down deep in the ocean, go deep enough and the pressure keeps the gas frozen, locks it up forever.  But nothing is forever.  

     The first ‘burp’ as they came to be called around the table happened in east Africa.  A cattleman in the rift valley went out one morning and found his herd dead.  Next was Wyoming, then a caribou herd in northern Canada.  A few people died but it was mostly animals at first, almost as if something was trying to warn us.  A little town in West Texas called Arnette went next, the burp came at 3am when just about everyone was asleep, no one woke up 1500 people dead.  

     We knew it was us.  We were the only one who knew.  The TREES patiently sucking away at the atmosphere reported every little change in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and TREES are everywhere.  You see the earth wasn’t meant to hold in its gasses and when you stuff her with too much it’s bound to come out somewhere.

     San Francisco was yesterday.  I flew in as soon as the sensors showed it was breathable again.  The city is dead everyone is dead, everything.  We have killed 8 million people.  I have killed 8 million people.  The only thing I can do now is tell the truth.  It will happen again.  This time it was an earthquake sent a bubble of gas 3 miles wide up from the ocean floor.  The next one might be an explosion or a new subway tunnel.  It is going to happen again and more people are going to die.  
I have been summoned to a meeting to discuss the problem and in a few years there will probably be a solution.  When the will exists at the top, the solution will be found.  I’m posting this here so you will all know the truth.  I wish you all the best of luck.