The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

It does not take an intellect capable of navigating higher order differential equations to understand that these firms are not in the business of creating economic value. I had no interest in joining a hedge fund. It seemed too easy.

There are certain activities we pursue to attain a state of concentration, and those states of concentration are often more deeply enjoyable than the activities we’re indoctrinated to view as enjoyable.

supply to make way for settler capitalism. Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.”

DECEMBER 13, 2026 For those who’ve attempted to look away from the global cataclysm unfolding before their eyes, reality is finally descending. The news of the past year has been so grim, so terrifying, that it saturates the headlines and deadens the will. From apocalyptic western wildfires that incinerate entire sleeping towns before an alarm so much as sounds to Hurricane Alberto wiping Virginia Beach off the map to the Come to Jesus Storm killing dozens and plunging millions into cold and darkness across the Midwest, it is difficult not to despair. In that context Kate Morris’s demeanor can feel offensively incongruous to the moment.

“I don’t necessarily endorse every last policy prescription from those folks,” Randall told CBS’s Face the Nation. “But we have a wide array of tools available within our free-market system to cut emissions and arrest the climate crisis. True conservatives have already left denialism in the dustbin of history because they see the enormous economic opportunities presented by the zero-emissions revolution. It’s already begun. Now it’s just a matter of how quickly we move and who is going to capitalize on it.”

that has the climate policy world buzzing. “The central problem of climate action of the 2020s is that emissions have not fallen,” says Sloane. “Even as renewables have become cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous, the Carbon Majors are still reaping huge profits. Carbon pricing got a bad rap as a half measure, but it’s only a half measure if it’s weak.”

Morris, Sloane, and their cheerleaders envision an economy-wide tax on carbon pollution, no exemptions, with 100 percent of the revenues returned to citizens in quarterly rebate checks that will dwarf any rise in energy prices, similar to Canadian policy. The tax will begin at $50 a ton but be tied to emissions reductions, so it increases if emissions goals are not met. It will also include a border adjustment tariff to link carbon policy globally.

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She gives a quick lesson in the basic physics and chemistry of greenhouse gas emissions, “simple enough that when Svante Arrhenius made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations in 1896, he predicted that if smokestacks continued to belch CO2, the planet would eventually warm by three to six degrees centigrade. This remains exactly in line with what the most sophisticated computer models still say today. “What most scientists have been wrong about,” Morris continues, “is how quickly our planet’s systems could unravel given this additional heat. The chaos we’re seeing is from just a 1.2-degree temperature rise. Now we have feedback loops to fear.”

‘They’ are the Carbon Majors, the one hundred companies responsible for over seventy percent of emissions since the eighties. Their own scientists knew what would happen. They knew if they kept burning their reserves they would threaten the future of the human race. They knew, and they built their oil rigs to account for higher sea levels and more intense storms. They knew, and they told us to focus on our consumer behavior while they locked us all into structures of hyper-consumption. They knew, and they waged a propaganda war of denial and delay. They knew, and they’re still doing it! There is no other way to put it, they are committing the greatest atrocity in human history and they knew. They knew, and they told us to worry about our fucking carbon footprints.”

Maybe our notions of liberty and democracy are fictions built on exploitation, and we just happen to have lucked into the moment of the greatest plunder and consumption and called it freedom. But I really do believe what we have here…” She searches for the words. “We have the two most consequential experiments in the history of humankind. The first is the uncontrolled dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We know how that ends. But the second is an experiment in human community. In democracy and organization and compassion and our willingness and ability to confront this emergency, arm in arm, together.”

The woman from the Sustainable Future Coalition, Emii Li Song, projected an air of practiced reasonableness. Though her organization’s members were among the worst polluters in the history of humanity, she had a solution. “We need a carbon pricing mechanism, it’s that simple. And frankly, we also have to be concerned about the spate of attacks by eco-terrorists. We believe that Congress has to act on both fronts—on climate but also on the security of our energy systems.”

The reporter changed the subject. “There are rumors that you’re considering a run for president. Given the track record of the Republican Party on the climate issue, particularly under Donald Trump, do you feel as though people can trust your seriousness on the matter of climate change?” “I’m committed to turning the page,” Randall said with the confidence of Cleopatra. Her voice was low, breathy, and seemed to curl in the air like smoke. “What’s done is done, but I believe in the threat of climate change. If I were to run, it would be because I understand market mechanisms are the best solution, my campaign has no ties to Russian intelligence, and I don’t even have a Twitter account.”

“But they’re still trapped in a paradigm of thinking that, frankly, we should have abandoned by 2008. We don’t have time for anything but the equivalent of a planetary wartime mobilization. Otherwise, it’s Welcome to Hobbes.” “Hobbes?” asked the reporter. “As in Thomas. As I wrote in my book, these feedbacks are tombstone dominoes. We’ve documented the first of the methane hydrates beginning to melt as the ocean warms, but we have no idea how sensitive this feedback loop might be.

Tony became more annoyed from there. You understand chemistry, math, physics, Gail said when he told her he wanted to write a book and truly engage this issue politically, but you have near-zero intelligence about people. You want the world to be this place of rational actors, but no one’s rational, Tony. We’re all guided by our crazy.

“Here’s the bad news for all of you: We’ve reached the end of growth. Raising people out of poverty and maintaining Western standards of consumption are simply no longer possible. That’s why I didn’t want to come to this bullshit charade. Frankly, you people are exactly the reason real action on our ecological situation cannot move forward, because the only real way to do it is to not have lone wealthy individuals consuming the resources of small nations, which as far as I can tell is the premise of this entire gathering. Look at the list of attendees you have here, how many of them come from companies that suck hydrocarbons out of the ground? No offense, but those are the dues-paying members of Davos and the Sustainable Future Coalition, and that’s a joke, and you all are a joke. Tomorrow there’s a panel called the Future of Extractives, which I guess is yet another joke since there can be no future for extractives, at least not if we want to survive this. Davos brings in a pop star or teenager every year to yell at them, but the market is still more real to the people here than nature.

to gird our infrastructure and pay for an aging population in China and the West, we’ll need a drastic reallocation of financial resources. There’s simply no other way, and yes, it will come at the cost of growth. You people are living in a bell jar if you think differently. So, you can keep convening your panels and trotting out your woke women POC candidates and all the diversity hires of the corporate carbon establishment, and you can tell yourselves that everything’s going to be A-OK, but I can assure you, it is not. And I pray there’s somebody watching this video in about twenty years because all four of you are going to look very, very fucking stupid.”

Earths on fire would be any different. Activists, for all their passion, usually knew less about earth systems than the oil men.

To say there was ever any return to normality isn’t quite right, but there was an acquiescence, a decision that a certain amount of chaos would be tolerated in order to let the world grind on, and within the context of the climate crisis, this was very bad news indeed.

We live on this incredible, joyful, one-in-a-trillion blue marble in the depths of cold black infinite space! We can either be another feeble assemblage of do-gooders patting themselves on the back or we can get rowdy. We set off a riot in the American political system and give all sides of the spectrum unshirted hell.”

I don’t work for the Democratic Party, I work for the American goddamn people, fucking lunatics though they may be.

The trajectories of the two major political parties shaped much of our lobbying experience, the Republicans in wounded disarray, trying to rebuild their party while frequently staving off primary challenges from suburban neo-Nazis, the Democrats playing a perpetual game of three-card monte, releasing aspirational platforms and progressive wish lists while mostly doing the bidding of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the military–national security–industrial complex.

“These fossil-fuel companies are creating the conditions for mass planetary extinction and then funding a political force to stall action on it. Our grandchildren will look at Chevron and Exxon ads the way you and I look at swastikas.” Colbert began objecting to that, but Kate talked over him, practically snatching the entire show for herself. “No, no—see, this is why you should go back to the Comedy Central days and forget this ‘reasonable shill for the center-left’ persona.”

Now this industry, oil and gas, has been going state by state for a decade, passing laws essentially making resistance to their operations illegal. They’re codifying the illegality of our speech, assembly, and dissent. So, what shows like yours and sports leagues that claim to care about Black lives and any other powerful person can do is stop accepting money for their propaganda. And if they want to keep passing laws to make our speech and assembly and resistance illegal—then fuck it, man. Make me an outlaw.”

Her pique at another insipid sham election in which one corporate-backed ticket defeated another while a fascist movement thrashed in its chains dissolved back to dread. It wasn’t hard to see how all those fantasies of the chattering class would play out in the end.

“Yeah, and more tax cuts for the oligarchs and more detention centers.” She sat on his bed, paging through a book he was reading. The Last of the Wild. Free of the wig, her scalp still itched. “And a fully militarized border.”

Back in her car, she grabbed the order pad from her apron and found the paperback copy of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower stuffed beneath the seat. It took her ten minutes to decode the message, and after that, she had to sit for a while, flooded with a new dread unrelated to the burning orange sky over the lake and trees.

It didn’t matter if she’d gone to college and read Barbara Ehrenreich, after a few years as a single mom, this sensation tunneled into her. She marveled at how much contempt she could sometimes feel for herself.

record-setting floods, heat waves, and hurricanes. A decade of extreme heat, drought, and voracious wildfires have tormented California and the Southwest, destroying homes, farms, and lives while rattling the insurance industry and real estate market. In the African Sahel, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia, water scarcity is killing people by the thousands each month and sparking further refugee flows to Europe. Climate refugees will continue to surge into Western countries in numbers that will make accommodation increasingly difficult. The effects on food security and disease vectors are also frightening. Tropical diseases now thrive in regions where no doctor had ever before seen a case in her lifetime. Having fought back the scourge of Covid-19, the world waits with anxiety as each year new pathogens emerge while the epidemiology of known diseases mutates. Scientists have no clear playbook for when one of these new mass killers may break loose, but Covid-19 may simply be a harbinger of things to come.

What would that action look like? At the very least, it should include a zero-carbon electricity standard to finish electrifying the power sector as quickly as possible; the shuttering of all coal plants within three years and a ban on mining to follow; a zero-emissions vehicle mandate for 2035, including trucking, and a cash-for-combustion-engine policy to electrify the transportation sector; standards for heavy industry to begin switching to clean fuels, banning certain refrigerants, eradicating methane leaks, and lowering process emissions; investment in building retrofit and new codes to electrify building stock; targets for increasing aviation efficiency and mandating sustainably produced “drop-in” biofuels, which can work in existing aircraft. Just Transition funds should be targeted at workers in the carbon economy and those people and regions most hurt by polluting practices, which will require major investments in clean electricity deployment, adaptation measures, and afforestation and land management projects. Money must flow to those most affected by the clean energy transition and climate damage.

The “shock collar” is, at its core, a carbon price with 100 percent of the money rebated to taxpayers in the form of a climate dividend. Starting at $50 a ton, it will have the effect of not only making emissions more expensive but will give every American a quarterly check that will invest them in the process of decarbonization. The “justice” element of this plan should not be overlooked. As research has shown, putting money in people’s pockets will allow a strapped populace financial breathing room while also stimulating the economy. The innovative element of the shock collar is that the price is tied directly to emissions. The price to burn a ton of carbon will rise steadily at 3 percent per year plus inflation unless emissions do not decrease, in which case the price jumps by 7 percent the next year. If emissions decrease but miss the target, the tax will increase 5 percent. This addresses the concern that a tax might not necessarily lower emissions. With this policy we can quickly ramp up emissions reductions to meet the 10–15 percent per year target we must hit in order to avert catastrophe.

Crucially, the policy will levy a border adjustment tariff on goods coming from countries that fail to apply a similarly ambitious carbon price. This will keep heavy industry from fleeing the US and allow us to decarbonize without outsourcing our polluting practices (known as “leakage”). It offers an enormous incentive for recalcitrant countries to pursue deep decarbonization. If we can link carbon price policy with just China and the EU, it will effectively create a World Carbon Price, and the rest of the global economy will have little choice but to embark on its own accelerated timeline.

A proposal to levy a global tax on corporations to create a strict and sustainable funding source should be considered. To pay for mitigation and adaptation investments, high-income earners and concentrated wealth must finally pay its fair share. Tax justice is climate justice.

include a carbon-pricing scheme. Kaye Martine, the Democratic staff director for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was concerned with the public relations optics of the final legislation. At under five feet, she is always the smallest person in the room and yet the high pitch of her voice allows her to override the conversation whenever she pleases: “Your party’s leader—the fucking president—wants a carbon price. That’s her idea.”

“Yes, but the legislation has to actually work.”

No offense, Senator Fitzpatrick and Congresswoman LaFray, but of the 535 members of the US Congress, those who have a sophisticated understanding of climate and energy policy would not fill an NBA roster. People luxuriate in the comforts bestowed by science without any interest in the empirical mechanisms that make those comforts possible. This leaves much of the lobbying to the likes of Tom Levine, representing the gadfly climate organization A Fierce Blue Fire, who felt entitled to interrupt next:

“The primary thing the bill has to do immediately is shut down coal forever.”

“Any policy designed to achieve the goal of lowering emissions will necessarily inflict some economic pain, and therefore the policy must also alleviate that pain. We can simply run those numbers and decide what’s best, empirically speaking. To spend our time dawdling about political constituencies seems to me rather fruitless.”

It has become internalized in the climate activist culture that in order to alleviate destructive hurricanes and wildfires, certain social policies must be enacted, many of which have virtually nothing to do with greenhouse gas reduction. In other words, universal healthcare schemes are a dangerous distraction, though activists keep demanding they be attached to any bill. To point this out, however, has become heretical.

betray Seth’s confidence here only because I think it’s vital for you to understand that the granular details of the bill matter almost nothing until we have a better understanding of what’s going on within the unreported, unchecked halls of the influence peddlers behind the façade of the state. At heart, though, I remain a mathematician, and when I look at passage of this bill I see simple math: In the Democratic-controlled House, 35 percent of the prospective yes votes will come from New York, California, Oregon, and Washington, low-carbon states that stand to lose little economically from the legislation.

“No, look, I support anything at this point. But in the past five years alone IT infrastructure, like data centers storing VR worldes, has eaten the gains of the IRA. Global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. That’s why we liked the shock collar or even Randall’s Green Trident. Price signals got a bad name because they were often badly designed, but without a stick, these companies can keep finding ways to bring their carbon to market. They win by stalling. Red states erect non-economic barriers, which has led to this uneven buildout of clean energy, and even as we bring down fossil fuel use, they just get cheaper, which keeps the market healthy. Carbon will always be useful, so unless you make it expensive or illegal to burn, those interests will find a way to do so.” Peter was staring at her with his mouth slightly agape.

“Right. Because politicians are always interested in sober evidence. Congress is just another neon-lit whorehouse.”

“And guess what, the biosphere doesn’t give a shit about the craven vicissitudes of the American political system. You’re pushing modest standards, which can all be eviscerated if the administration changes, when we need a two hundred dollar per metric ton tax rising twenty dollars a year, every year, at minimum. We need to phase out coal in the next two years. That means beginning to shut down plants by fiat and have the government nationalize all coal stocks.

of India and China until they’re on board. The bottom line is no one really has any idea how rapidly we can decarbonize the global economy at this point, but we’re going to have to find out.”

“My assessment? You’ve got no carbon price, a toothless set of standards for buildings, vehicles, and the utility sector that, best case, will let business-as-usual roll on another ten years, money to ill-advisedly arm coastal real estate, and on top of it all, a tax cut? No one involved in this legislation appears to understand the gravity of the situation. If we’d enacted this forty years ago, yeah, sure, maybe the economy would have moved toward a less carbon-intensive path. But it’s too late for that. We’re going to be at two degrees by the end of the next decade, on our way to at least four and maybe even six. We need all hands on deck. We need to go to war. And this? This is a joke. So my assessment is that this plan falls under the category of Don’t Even Fucking Bother.”

Without a carbon tariff, it will have little effect on global emissions and many carbon-intensive industries will relocate to other countries. A range of economic impacts could emerge. The models foresee carbon concentration rising to 550 ppm by midcentury with a range of adverse climatic effects possible, including but not limited to a sea level rise of seven to fifteen feet by 2100.

Democrats have basically convinced themselves that they will lose seats if they vote for any kind of price on carbon. Alana Afzel You’re specifically talking about the shock collar? Kate Morris Yeah, that’s right. The Dems want to spend money but they’re nervous about trying to actually keep carbon in the ground. They don’t want to use the best tools because they view those tools as making them politically vulnerable. So, what was being proposed in Congress was middling investments in renewables and frontline communities, but as we’ve seen, that doesn’t get the job done with decarbonization, so we had to make it clear that this was not acceptable.

The shock collar’s rebate checks create a political constituency for decarbonization that will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to dislodge. Then there’s the global element. We’ve f—ed around with these nonbinding international accords like Paris for too long.

That’s horse——. This is a frontal assault on chronic inequality. Folks are trying to hold climate policy hostage to single-payer health care and jobs guarantees and slavery reparations and police reform and other forms of social policy while our planet collapses. It’s all backward. They’re trying to put Band-Aids on a gunshot wound before we go in and get the bullet out. That’s the climate crisis. Folks keep touting these reparations proposals that are deficit-financed conscience-laundering for affluent white liberals, and it pisses me off when those same people scoff at the tax-and-dividend plan. We are literally taking money from rich polluters and putting it in the pockets of working people as a foundational piece of a reparative project. It doesn’t just offer the fiction of “Hey, here’s a few bucks so you can build generational wealth, even though yours is the last generation to enjoy a functioning atmosphere.” That would be a funny joke by white people, I guess.

We are committed to taking capital, and therefore political power, out of the hands of a fossil-fuel oligarchy. That is the global recipe to attack a primary source of misogyny, racism, and endemic inequality. Distributed systems of energy will redistribute political and economic power faster and more decisively than any other action, period.

Alana Afzel And your embrace of nuclear energy? Which is also in this bill? How’s that for “distributed systems of power”? Kate Morris I embrace nuclear energy because I can do math. The coal-fired power plants set to come online in India and China alone—it’s apocalypse. But those countries also need energy, particularly air-conditioning, because they’re facing land temperatures that are killing people by the tens of thousands every year. Renewables won’t provide that quickly enough, and the only way to square the circle is nuclear. Do we need to pay attention to the trade-offs involved? Absolutely. We can’t put our heads in the sand even about the impacts of solar power and wind on ecosystems or mining waste. Trade-offs are inevitable because we are in deeply uncharted territory now.