Novel: Sixty Days and Counting

Overview
Sixty Days and Counting (2007) concludes the Science in the Capital trilogy with an urgent, close-up account of society responding to accelerating climate collapse. The narrative follows a circle of scientists, civil servants, journalists, and activists as they confront rapidly worsening weather, food shortages, and political paralysis while trying to move from analysis to action. The book combines policy detail, grassroots energy, and the moral complexity of large-scale technological fixes.

Plot and Structure
The action compresses into a period of intensive decision-making and improvisation, where emergency measures and experiments are proposed, debated, and sometimes enacted under pressure. The plot interleaves kitchen-table conversations and high-level meetings, moving between the intimate human consequences of climate impacts and the institutional mechanics of law, science, and diplomacy. Scenes shift from Washington to regional communities, showing how local initiatives can both complement and complicate national responses.

Key Figures and Roles
A core group of scientists provides the technical backbone for policy proposals and urgent interventions, while activists and journalists push for transparency, accountability, and speed. Elected officials and bureaucrats wrestle with legal authority, public acceptability, and geopolitical ramifications. The cast is less about heroic individuals than about the networks and relationships that enable collective action: mentors, political allies, skeptical colleagues, and citizens whose lives are directly threatened by changing climate patterns.

Policy, Activism, and Experimentation
Policy innovation is central, including pragmatic attempts to redesign regulatory frameworks, create economy-wide incentives, and pilot experimental responses. Grassroots activism supplies both moral pressure and practical labor, organizing relief, communicating science to the public, and sometimes taking direct action when official channels lag. The book pays close attention to how good ideas founder on institutional friction, how experiments must be designed to be both effective and ethically defensible, and how the pace of crisis reshapes what is politically possible.

Geoengineering and Moral Quandaries
A persistent moral tension revolves around large-scale intervention: whether to accept the risks of geoengineering that might blunt warming in the short term, or to resist technological fixes that could create new dependencies and injustices. The book stages these dilemmas vividly, showing scientists who dread unintended consequences but feel morally compelled to act when communities are suffering now. Debates about risk, consent, and global equity are personal as well as intellectual, forcing characters to balance professional caution against humanitarian urgency.

Style and Tone
Writing combines clear expository passages about climate science and governance with humane scenes that render the social texture of change: family conversations, community meetings, and the quiet labor of activists. The prose is deliberate and engaged, often blending reportage-like detail with empathetic portrayal of character dilemmas. Humor and frustration coexist, grounding the high stakes in recognizable human behaviors and institutional foibles.

Questions and Resonance
Sixty Days and Counting asks whether democratic societies can marshal knowledge, institutions, and popular will quickly enough when risk becomes immediate. It probes the ethics of emergency governance, the role of expertise in public life, and the possibility that small-scale civic efforts can catalyze larger transformations. The conclusion offers neither facile optimism nor total despair, leaving readers with a sober sense of how hard collective problem-solving is and how vital political imagination and moral courage become when the climate system itself is out of balance.