Natural Law - Chapter 1 of comedy novel about future climate lawyers
My reasons for scowling at the sun were threefold: firstly, of course, the brightness; secondly, unfamiliarity (I was one of many students who had grown painfully housebound as I hammered out the final chapters of my PhD thesis); and thirdly, contempt.
Over the course of my studies, I had learnt virtually every fact that was to know about the destructive impact the sun's radiation has had upon this planet. Of course, the sun wasn't doing anything wrong; rather the polluters who had ravaged this planet over the early decades of this century were responsible. Eventually I'd have to let go of my stellar grudge.
The biggest polluter was North Sea Oil, a company which had been founded in 1920 as Dogger Drilling, before wisely rebranding, albeit as late as 1973. Around the time of this rebrand, the world's scientific community was rapidly discovering just how damaging it was to burn fossil fuels to generate energy. Despite advocating a transition away from fossil fuels, and despite the vast development of renewable energy alternatives, North Sea Oil and others knowingly continued to pollute, leading to a mass build-up of greenhouse gasses, a rise in global temperature, the melting of the polar ice caps, widespread flooding, mass extinction, climate death, endless pandemics, refugee crises, hundreds of millions of human casualties, tens of billions of non-human animal deaths and economic damage in the trillions of dollars.
All told, it seems like they should have acted sooner.
By the 2040s, the climate crisis had reached such extremes that every government was united in committing resources to becoming carbon neutral and halting the rise in global temporature. A few nations held out, but found themselves ostracised and their anti-environmentalist governments were ousted by their citizens, with new, science-led assemblies elected in their place. With climate denialism becoming as unpopular as scary clowns, stubbed toes and those people who listen to music in public without headphones, electoral strategies around the world soon revolved around global co-operation on environmental matters.
When the planet's rise in temperature finally plateaued, the next question on everyone's lips was: how do we reverse it? The big goal had been achieved, but the effects of the climate catastrophe remained. However, solutions appeared quickly in this new world where science received more funding than war. Machines were built which used convection currents to turn patches of Arctic and Antarctic water into small icebergs. Microbes were bred which consumed plastic and other waste and deposited it as a protective layer on the sea bed. Schemes to regrow forests meant that CO2 levels in the environment would soon be declining.
It would take centuries, but climate change could be undone, eventually.
But who was to pay for it? Once these proposals had been brought before the UN, everyone agreed they seemed to be a good idea, but nobody was prepared to foot the bill. At first, people suggested that each of the roughly 200 sovereign states paid 0.5% of the cost of the so-called Cool Fix. This made a great deal of sense to those who had quit studying mathematics at the age of 10, but San Marino protested (with good reason) that what was a trifling payment to some nations was more than the entire Sanmarinese economy.
Okay, then, how about everybody pays per capita? A country with a billion citizens surely ought to pay a thousand times as much as a country with a million people? This is known as 13-year-old maths, and once again, those who had continued to develop their numerousy well into adulthood pointed out that not every country was equally responsible for the pollution, so it didn't make sense to proportion the payment as such. After all, if a country benefitted economically from fossil fuels while others were taking great pains to end climate change early, shouldn't the former being footing most of the bill?
Who was that, then? China had been one of the biggest polluters at the start of the 21st century, but soon took the greatest pains to cut emissions. Scandinavian nations had gone carbon neutral early on, but then they had far more wealth and resources to begin with, certainly in contrast to developing nations with almost no infrastructure. What about countries with civil wars? Did they have a convenient opt-out, since they had higher priorities than going green, or were they even more guilty, since they had prioritised killing each other over saving the planet?
Some people would argue that those responsible for the greatest damage - namely the businesses, politicians and businesses which destroyed the environment for the sake of profit - ought to pay for the cleanup. People arguing that case included me, in a lengthy PhD thesis I submitted just a few months ago and which already seemed outdated.
The concept of outdatedness was an iffy one to any law student: on the one hand, the law was updated not only every time a new piece of legislation was passed, but every time a new case set a precedent which could be followed by all future cases; on the other hand, this meant that any research required an in-depth look into the annals to see what comparable cases had previously been fought. The relationship between a law student or lawyer and the present day could be best described as 'it's complicated'.
Seven years of studying the entire history of the British legal system necessitated that I felt myself slipping out of time. Indeed, there was a day recently when I was so engrossed in analysis of Victorian corn laws that, upon stepping out to grab my first coffee that hadn't been made using my own, tired cafetiere, I jumped at the sight of a car. The modernness of the technology actually gave me the jittered. Hypercafienation possibly played a role too, but the point stands.
My PhD research looked incredibly promising, until it was all seemingly undermined by the decision to prosecute the CEO and executive board of North Sea Oil for their roles in contributing to the climate crisis.
'Don't worry about it impacting your work,' my supervisor assured me. 'If anything, this strengthens your argument.'
That one case triggered the beginning of the climate trials, which pursued those responsible for mass environmental catastrophe, in a manner reminiscent of the Nuremberg trials of Germans in the 1940s or the Russian and Belarussian politicians put on trial in the Odesa trials of the 2030s. I was, of course, hopeful that this would open up new doors and that my education would provide the key. The feedback from job interviews so far, however, indicates that the doors might need a rattle and the key might be a bit rusty.
For now, I rejoiced in my final moments on campus. It was a gorgeous day, with every graduate, parent, academic and tulip turning to sun themselves. All the stops had been pulled out, and I was in the intriguing position of both thanking the lecturers and tutors who had advised and being thanked by the undergraduates I'd taught. I hoped this was a mark of respecting owing to my intellectual pursuits and not my age, but I could never be certain when the BA, BSc and LLC graduates were mostly four decades younger than me.
I looked across and saw the smug face of Xiomara, smiling in that fake-humble as though sunshine and flowers blooming were something she could personally take credit for but was politely choosing not to. She was my non-solar grudge of the day, and indeed of the past three years: far from being a vulgar nuisance, she delivered every word which left her mouth with a sickly, patronising glaze, never really holding any convictions beyond what could propel her along the desired path. Most of the words she ever said to me were reactionary, and emerged on the few occasions in which I spoke up in seminars - in each instance, I had thoroughly researched a topic before daring to speak publicly about it; Xiomara, meanwhile, would always have some airy put-down, such as, 'I think the issue is a little more complex than you're letting on.'
Without fail, there would be a number of students who nodded and murmured along with this. The fact of the matter is: I would never dare express a view on a complex topic unless I were very well informed of it, certainly not in front of one of the many leading experts who taught us. Thankfully, these tutors were, of course, more informed than my peers and had the decency to ask for Xiomara's clarification. Her response when put on the spot was invariably that the law could be 'rather complex sometimes'.
As I say, she could hardly be described as malicious, but there was something somehow crueller in her reluctance to tell you how she really felt. None of what she really thought could be deduced from speaking to her, and while I had been a fastidious campaigner on environmental matters (it's down to my emailing and several very dull meetings that the university adjusted its street lighting to remove infrared rays, lest they dampen the reproductive rates of rice weevils, an integral part of the local ecosystem), Xiomara had waited until the final months of her studies to pick up a picket and megaphone to start telling everyone about the dangers of a now-resolved crisis.
Despite her name, neither she nor any of her relatives were Spanish. As soon as she popped out, her British parents declared how the baby 'clearly had an air of EspaΓ±a about her' and declared she needed a name to match. When saying her own name (something she was wont to do), she always emphasised the foreignness of it, correcting everyone's Zee-oh-mar-ah with a tut and a closed-eyes HHHHE-ho-MHAHR-hair, exaggerating the breathiness of it. In her final year, I swear she added the occasional SHHH or THHH where she felt appropriate. No matter how she pronounced it, she was always met with confused looks from Spanish speakers.
She 'graciously' shook hands with a few people from local newspapers (notably ignoring the one which had the lowest readership, later claiming it was owing to an unexplained 'political-editorial disagreement'). I was happy for her to be occupied with these matters, but she nonetheless snuck up on me when she knew I was distracted.
'Tammy, darling, how are you?'
'Oh, I'm well thanks. Need a good rest after the past three years.'
'Aw, do you?' She looked away from me, gazing out across the concourse. 'I'm straight onto the next thing. That's just how I operate.'
'Huh. And what is your "next thing"? Got any clients lined up?'
She took a deep breath and sighed, reaching out her arms to indicate everything around her. 'Mother Nature. I'm representing the environment against those nasty fellows who used to pump out all that smog.'
I was dumbstruck. So bewildered was I that I didn't even bother to point out that smog is a compound of smoke and fog, not something that comes directly from a plant. How had she managed to swindle that one? Her PhD focused on food law, not strictly the environment. I supposed she'd worked hard in recent months to cultivate the echo-conscious image. Several of the newspapers she'd been talking to moments ago had previously written features on Xiomara's 'activism'. Presumably she'd used the media coverage to spin herself as the next big lawyer in this field. Presentation is everything. Particularly when skill is absent.
I know I sound jealous, and I definitely am, but I'm more concerned. With Xiomara on the green side, there was a chance the oil barons could win.
'Do you think you're ready to take on North Sea Oil?'
'Oh no, it's not them,' she laughed, as though I was somehow stupid for thinking she might be leading one of the main battles. Perhaps I was.
