Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded.

government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. “These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e.

They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. “It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. Also sky living in skyvillages that used the drowned cities as mooring towers and festival exchange points containerclippers and townships as floating islands art-not-work, the city regarded as a giant collaborative artwork blue greens, amphibiguity, heterogeneticity, horizontalization, deoligarchification also free open universities, free trade schools, and free art schools.”

Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson