The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

quotas for many countries, and possibly we would have to get on a waiting list for some of them. But we could do that, and the quotas for all the countries put together added up to two hundred percent of the number of people who had been held in refugee camps for over two years, which was the criterion for this world citizenship. Citizenship would

Reduce those six in the ten biggest economies, and you’re hitting eighty-five percent of all emissions. Get the G20 to do it, and it’s essentially everything.”

We were to be given world citizenship, meaning we had the right to live anywhere. We were warned there would be immigration

Ocean health. They could do nothing about ocean acidification, nor the heating of the ocean that was baked in by the previous century’s carbon burn, nor the deoxygenation. Thus die-offs were happening, and presumably extinctions they didn’t even know about, that might have catastrophic cascading results. Ocean health would be an outstanding problem

“Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.” “The six biggest emitters being?” “Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector.” “Cross-sector?” “Everything not in the other five.

People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they’re first learning it, and then when they’ve known it forever. These were the two periods with higher rates of accidents, while the in-between was a stretch of low accidents. So the graph looked like a bathtub. People who fly planes fit that graph really well. Working on glaciers is somewhat the

carbon-based materials created from CO2 sucked out of the air and replacing concrete; thus direct air capture of CO2, a necessary component of the drawdown effort, would provide most construction materials going forward.

And of course some of us had read about the Commune and realized if we didn’t win decisively we would be hunted down and killed, or at best jailed for life.

And yet now I find I am seventy-one years old.