The other side of sunshine

When the oil finally ran out, many of the world’s nations were caught with their pants down

NOTE: I don’t often write fiction, but this was a little experiment in world-building, taking an idea that has once again found its way into mainstream science press – that of covering the Sahara with solar plants to feed power to Europe – and extrapolating it and a few other notions into a future what-if scenario. It was first published in The Times on November 8, 2008 – Matt

IN CAIRO, the wind blows warm, but not unpleasantly so. It’s late afternoon, and the day is unwinding. Street traders along the sun road begin packing up their stalls, loading wares onto already overladen mopeds and bicycles.

A water man loads an empty drum onto the back of a grumpy mule.

“It’s been a good day,” he tells me. “The sun shines, the sea is calm and the power flows. We will do well this season, insha’Allah. Egypt is happy.”

He looks around, casually scanning the crowd for anyone paying too much attention, before disappearing a bundle of carbon credits into one of the many pouches on his canvas bandolier.

A happy water man in Cairo means that the world is working on this day. It’s been a few weeks since any of the Mediterranean cables were attacked and three months since a line was lost.

Good days in Cairo mean the desert wardens are keeping sun pirates out of the catchment areas and keeping leakage to Morocco down to a trickle.

They won’t have stopped the leaks altogether — while it wouldn’t do to let such things grow into arrogance, the sunlight economy’s black market does grease the wheels of backroom diplomacy and keeps the city states south of the Sahara happy — or, I should s ay , not unhappy enough to put aside their feuds long enough to threaten the desert.

To the north, there’s Europe. Sun-hungry Europe. When the power from the desert crosses the sea freely, wealth from the north pours back to Egypt, and trickles down the continent, all the way to the wastelands of the south and beyond. Sometimes even as far as Johannesburg, if it finds a way through the Wall. When the world’s nations agreed to switch over to the carbon economy, geopolitics took a sharp turn. While still very much First World against Third, where once East vied with West in a cold war, the North now lords it over the South in a battle for the sun. What was once the Middle East is now just squarely in the middle, bridging the divide — as ever.

Saudi Arabia’s oil ran out in 2009. It had been stockpiling for decades so it didn’t feel the need to tell anyone about it until 2014. By which time the sheikhs had poached enough Egyptian engineers to build for them the kinds of solar-thermal encampments that had proved so resilient along the Sahara, and are now maintaining fortunes selling to China and the Georgian Union.

When the end of oil came, it scared everyone senseless and there were riots across the world. But by then the sunlight economy was already operating in parallel in parts of Europe, and the switch wasn’t as traumatic as elsewhere.

In the new world, North America might have closed off its borders, and still claims to be running an oil economy, but the talk is that they’ve already run out, or are about to.

Their infrastructure crumbled years ago anyway when they decommisioned their nuclear plants, and had to start rationing fuel and breeding more horses.

A few years ago, Al Jazeera somehow managed to get a hold of satellite grabs showing North American Alliance forces clearing out swathes of southern border settlements to make way for exactly the sort of solar catchments that have lined the sun road out of Cairo and into the desert since they were built in the first dozen years or so of this 21st century.

There are many jokes about Americans trying to flee across the border to find a better life in Mexico. But we’re told few make it, so the jokes are perhaps not so funny after all.

Even if they build up energy somehow, it doesn’t look good for the Americans. Too little, too late.

Egypt began selling electricity to Europe before the oil ran out. Before the economies of Greece, Italy and Spain even had a chance to fail, like they did in Canada and Japan and so many other places.

France and England bought in pretty quickly after the wells dried up, and even Germany and Switzerland gave up their private photovoltaic policies once the Tunisian and Algerian cables came online, and power became as cheap as water. Which is still not cheap, exactly, but atleast affordable in times of plenty.

And in Cairo, the mule has no reason to be grumpy. The water is selling very well indeed.