The Tasiilaq Experiment

President for Life, JR Lotbot: "We need to save the planet, of course, but do all these billions of monkeys deserve to live? Less monkeys, less strain on land and air. What do they do for Dollaria? To save ourselves we need to divest resources by annihilating all the socialist territories. Why should we support the expensive UN initiative in Greenland when a final solution will be so much easier?"

The Secretary General of the United Nations: "Well, at least we agree on something: the need to fight climate change. I note that in comparing the four political blocks, it is Dollaria that is per capita the biggest consumer of resources. So in all logic you are the ones the planet can least tolerate. Of course, we reject genocide of any group or in any form. We are having success with the one child policy, the move against lone occupant housing, the economic disincentives for energy using climate controls in buildings, the taxation of non-perambulatory travel, and with a host of other initiatives. It is invariably Dollaria that makes least effort in these directions. To cap it all, it is a great pity that we can't outlaw the unregulated use of energy by military forces. But then, above all others, it is Dollaria that is ruled by the gun, the one block that is pursuing further militarisation. Socialism and responsible social capitalism demonstrate all the sustainable paths. It is your Dollarian greed for energy, you irresponsible drive for capitalist profit, which is most responsible for driving us so deep into the forth mass extinction. I am here to ask your exchequer to financially support the Greenland endeavour, at least to the tune of the commitment of the other blocks."

JR Lotbot: "Are you threatening us, this is intolerable. This is a blatant attack on our rights. It is long past the time your commie forum should have been closed down. If you don't retract your insults we will have your building surrounded and all your political agitators shot. Give me any logical reason for your outrageous demand that we contribute to the Tasiilaq Experiment when it isn't our territorial concern, yet anyway? Why should the Dollaria help finance your crazy plan for Greenland?"

Secretary General: "Because carbon capture really could save the little that is left of northern ice, and begin a reversal. Just think how much stronger your geographical borders against Greater Russia will be, both to North-East and North-West, if the ice of the 20th century can be reborn. With judicious and fair distribution of resources we can sustain ten billion humans. Already numbers have stabilised and all but Dollaria has accepted the challenge of running society with a continuous unbalance between old and young in the next hundred years. You would sabotage that with your capitalist need to have cheap young labour, and young conscripted soldiers. Why can you not see that the old are not so compromised in the work force as traditionally assumed. As for your huge military, that is used more as an internal police force, protecting the gated communities and government-controlled areas, than as a legitimate force for international security.

"Life for any of us depends in stopping the desertification of the previously temperate zones, by sustainable farming. We need to build on early progress demonstrated by geological sciences and projects like the long running carbon-capture, Vesta project. We need to go big scale, work on the proven success of the spreading of olivine on the most energetic sea beaches, which has already balanced a year's global CO2 emissions and started to counteract ocean acidification. We must use the controllable thermal risers from below Greenland to bring many square kilometres of olivine rich material up from the mantle so that we can push the process of carbon capture on a whole new scale."

JR Lotbot: "You idiots think your heathen environmental science can save the world. There is a much easier way, that is getting rid of the subhuman monkeys. Why waste scare resources on inferior humans?"

Secretary General: "You are doing your best to destabilise the UN, to drive a wedge into the world community. But we will ignore your threats and all your insulting and inflammatory language. We care about the ordinary people, even the majority in your own police states. Denmark, and so collectively Europe, has the right to act. Greenland, despite your best efforts is not controlled by Dollaria. The New Republic Movement is still a minority force in Europe, thanks to the balancing power of the Russian block. You may control the British Isles, Spain and Germany, but the voice of the UN is still respected even in the wider the European Union, let alone in the rest of the world. Project Tasiilaq is and will continue and prosper. Using thermal power, we will cover the Arctic with an ever-growing depth of manufactured dry ice: so reflecting back heat off the planet, cooling the environment and capturing vast quantities of carbon."

JR Lotbot: "Fat chance. At the flick of my finger, I can have Greenland obliterated. Then we will bring plague on the heathen hoards that threaten our ever-expanding homelands."

Secretary General: "We know your plans, but if you go ahead we have the power to reengineer your viruses to side-step your domestic anti-viral programme, and have our own antivirals coming on line. We have sleeper cells in your territories ready to go into action, and we will make sure that the population of Washington will be the very first to suffer from the failure of your anti-viral inoculations. Do you think we are stupid, that we would not see through your so-called anti-malaria vaccination programme?"

JR Lotbot: "What do you think we don't know. We are way ahead of you. You insult our intelligence."

Secretary General: "But you won't move to destroy the Tasiilaq project, will you, for one reason if no other. The best chance of saving yourselves is for carbon dioxide to be stripped from the atmosphere, tied into the olivine sands and filters, stored under the weight of the sea, and turned into a northern pole of dry ice. Our pilot plants are using thermal energy to capture carbon as we speak. Atmospheric air is being drawn through chemical and ground rock filters. We then heat the CO2 saturated filters with CO2 to around 100 °C. The CO2 is then released from the filter and collected as concentrated CO2 gas. CO2-free air is released back into the atmosphere. The filters are reused hundreds and hundreds of times. The captured carbon can, for example, be pressured into dry-ice and stored under the sea, as permanent carbon capture. It will also provide a fuel resource for the future, when possibly we experience a natural, volcanically triggered ice age. Half of the dry ice will be used to cover the remaining natural ice, in hopefully an ever-deeper layer, to rebuild the Arctic. What we can't use in these ways can be absorbed in olivine sands, from exuding solidifying rock material vented from thermal risers from the mantle. The 'lava' flow from the natural fissures in the Earth's crust will provide the low-cost energy required for all the processes, and the huge quantities of olivine we need. Literally, the Tasiilaq Project can save all of us on Earth. So there isn't even a 'mathematical' justification for a genocide to save the few; even assuming your fundamentalist religious bull carries a veneer of truth, that the Westies really are the chosen of God. Through this project we have a perfect scientific solution which to allow us to rebalance nature for a new heaven on Earth. We can rebuild our beautiful planet for all mankind and the diversity of nature. Yes, it is necessary to vastly reduce our numbers, but this can be done by humanitarian, truly spiritually acceptable programmes."

JR Lotbot: "You expect us to listen to your mad science. We will not accept your lies. We will do what is required for the homeland, for our nation, for the chosen. You are already out of time, monkey man, my soldiers already have the UN surrounded, and soon we will have our armed forces landing in Greenland, Praise be to the New Republican Movement and praise be to God. The final solution has begun, and you comrade are among the first to go."

As the now terrified diplomat stands and turns towards the door a bullet slams into the heart of the symbolic eagle on the door, followed by a spray of flesh and bone.

(A century on from WWII, the third had started, like the first, sparked by the discharge of a single gun. It would be ended by the death of ninety-nine percent of all the creatures on Earth. Ironically, a predictable enough nuclear winter was soon to be just a blip in geological time. Now, without the heating activity of ten billion advanced industrialised consumers a new, overdue, million-year ice-age would extend the scientifically predicted decade-long freeze for a million years.)

Richard Bunning © 2019, (1500 words)