He is said to have predicted the rise of the metaverse. Like a lottery ticket subscriber, American author Neal Stephenson has certainly written enough science fiction novels to be right at least once. Will his imagined solution to the coming climate crisis be another winning ticket?
Terminal shock is Neal Stephenson’s latest novel. Published in English in the fall of 2021, it has just been translated into French and then published in two volumes by Éditions Albin Michel. Critics speak of his most ambitious and daring book. It is also perhaps his most accessible work, the most likely to attract a not too geeky readership.
As usual, he tackles a burning issue with the same approach as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: by breaking the codes, even if it means repairing the damage afterwards. It makes you think. Literally as well as figuratively. But the subject this time is universal.
Terminal shock foreshadows a world where the solution to climate change will come from the same place as the problem itself: from the oil companies. Don’t laugh: we live in a world where such a scenario could well happen.
When elected officials are green with happiness at the idea of hosting yet another elite motor racing series, when a prime minister recites his pro-environment speech to alongside a Hummer, when a repentant environmental activist becomes the defender of oil drilling in marine refuges, we say to ourselves that no fiction can exceed reality.
That’s the most worrying thing.
Pinatubo 2.0
The fiction that projects us into a more or less distant future has already addressed the question of geo-engineering more than once. In summary, this term includes all the real and imaginary techniques by which humans could voluntarily modify the earth’s climate or nature.
The key word here is “voluntarily”. Whether it’s tampering with the composition of the oceans, the atmosphere or even the space separating the Earth from the Sun to reflect away from our overheated planet part of the solar rays, everything is on the table. Including sending a constellation of satellites into more or less low orbit which would act as a gigantic blind hung on the earth’s window which we would close from time to time to lower the temperature of the globe to something more optimal than this expected by 2100.
Geo-engineering is inspired by large-scale natural events. For example, in 1991, the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines released 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air. It was the largest volcanic eruption in 100 years. This was enough to lower the average Earth temperature by half a degree Celsius (0.5 ˚C) in the space of a few years.
Needless to say, it makes more than one scientist dream in search of a miracle solution to better smooth out the climatic turbulence that is beginning these days. To plant trees ? Economic decline? Nay. Let’s send tons of sulfuric gas into the atmosphere instead. Unsurprisingly, the author does not dare to imagine how its combination with nitrogen oxide could cause acid rain. Sulfuric acid, ammonium nitrate and other pollutants that could result from such a gesture would harm the scenario.
That said, acid rain was, on school benches during the 1980s, a very good horror story.
Climate geopolitics 101
Some will say that there are no coincidences in life. In Terminal shockthe Dutch royal family, Arab princes, the Norwegian government and a Texan billionaire cowboy enough to look like his own caricature embody divergent interests united by a common cause: to avoid having their overheated countries drowned by an accelerated flooding of the oceans.
The solution: cooling the climate. The method: projectiles filled with sulfur swung at high altitude. The side effect: the climate knows no borders, but states do. And not all governments are as accommodating as, say, a minority Liberal government.
If it is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause a hurricane elsewhere on the planet, here, a salvo of sulphurous launches in the heart of Texas will have an unsuspected effect on the “line of actual control”, a very imprecise 740 kilometers disputed by India and China.
China was already manipulating the clouds in the 1960s. Nothing therefore prevents Neal Stephenson from imagining the Middle Kingdom taking advantage of an uncertain climate to advance its pawns on the world chessboard.
Because climate inaction does not rhyme with inaction at all. Geoengineering has been the stuff of fiction for decades. Climate geopolitics will likely do so for decades to come. Neal Stephenson is probably right about that.