He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We have grown rather attached to the practice of selling energy for piles and piles of money, and we intend to continue it long after we have run out of oil. To be blunt, we will install enough photovoltaics to alter the climate.”
She nodded. “Those panels are going to keep a hell of a lot of CO2 out of the atmosphere!”
“Yes, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh?”
“The desert has high albedo for the most part—sunlight bounces back from the light-colored soil and returns to outer space where it cannot warm the planet. Solar panels, on the other hand, are dark. The whole point of them is to absorb, not reflect, sunlight. They get hot. Hotter than the light sand that they are covering. Convection grows more powerful as hotter air rises with greater force. This changes the weather directly.”
“Have you modeled it?”
“No, but those guys have.” Fahd gestured toward a row of unmarked mobile office trailers huddling in a narrow strip of shade along the north wall of the huge hangar. What few windows they had were covered with mirrored film. Rooftop air conditioners shot plumes of heat into the air.
“Who are ‘those guys’？”
“Israelis.”
And so what she was expecting—completely illogically—was that the hangar would turn out to be full of racks stuffed with computers, all chugging away on climate simulations.
But no. The Israelis didn’t need to do that here. The hangar turned out to be occupied by a single enormous airplane. A type she had never seen before. It was complete, just in the sense that two wings and a tail were attached to its fuselage, but it was imprisoned in a web of scaffolding. Workers in hard hats and high-vis vests were busy here and there. Not a lot of workers and not super busy. This was not some mid-twentieth-century assembly-line operation. It felt more like one of those facilities where space rockets were meticulously pieced together.
And yet the overall lines of the giant airplane were not at all rakish or science fictiony. It looked like a child’s model, scaled up. The wings, which were extraordinarily long, stuck straight out from the sides. Nothing was swept back, nothing optimized for amazing speed or maneuverability. It really looked like a sailplane—a glider. But it had engines.
A hard-hatted man with an East African look about him was waiting behind the wheel of a golf cart. Saskia was a bit sick of being whisked around from place to place in vehicles controlled by others. She was a pilot for a reason. In the Netherlands, in front of cameras, she’d have made a point of walking. But . . . when in Rome. After donning the inevitable pair of safety glasses, she and Fahd were treated to a slow pass down one side of the plane and up the other.
“If you were anyone else, I would give you a laborious explanation of what this is,” said Fahd, as the golf cart swung wide around the slender, exquisitely sculpted tip of one wing. “But since it’s you . . .”
“It’s modeled after a U-2 spy plane,” Saskia said. “Those, in turn, were modeled after gliders. It is designed to operate at extremely high altitudes—seventy or eighty thousand feet. The thin air makes it tricky to design and even trickier to fly. It’s probably not even stable unless there are computers in the control loop.”
“Very good,” said Fahd. “And the cargo?”
“The fuselage will be full of tanks, with baffles to control sloshing and weight distribution. The tanks will be full of sulfur dioxide when it takes off, empty when it lands. Because the whole purpose of it is to inject SO2 directly into the stratosphere.”
“Clearly my presence here as tour guide is superfluous!” said the prince, allowing his usual mask of stony dignity to be cracked open with a grin.
The compliment was appreciated, but she knew flattery when she heard it. People had been talking about making a plane like this for decades. She’d seen CGI renderings. Not of this exact plane, of course, but of ones very like it, in PowerPoints and videos envisioning how solar geoengineering might change the climate for better or worse. Depending on how you felt about the idea, you could soundtrack the animation with scary war drums or with soaring anthemic strains and make it seem like the end of the world or the dawn of a new era. In any case, she’d have to have been pretty ill-informed not to know this for exactly what it was.
“You had the airframe designed by . . . someone who knows what they’re doing,” she continued. “Composite wings made by people who do wind turbine blades. I recognize the engines—but you’ve had them modified for high altitude. The airframe is built, but that’s the easy part. Now the fancy systems are being integrated into it by contractors from around the world.” The coveralls worn by various teams were blazoned with corporate logos, most of which she’d seen before. But it was all pretty understated and you had to get up close to make them out. Americans, Germans, Israelis, Japanese were working on different subsystems, many using AR goggles to gesture at figments in the air.