Smog: The Carbon Dividend

Santiago no longer remembers the color of the sky. The smog covers everything: the lungs, the clothes, the memories of a city that once smelled of wet earth and fresh bread. In that unbreathable air, an alumni reunion for their faculty's centennial brings together a group of old friends — professionals scattered by life — who, between nostalgia and conversation, dare to ask the forbidden question: what if we could clean it? From that café musing a colossal project is born: nanotechnological conversion towers capable of drawing in the smog and chemically breaking it down, returning clean air to the city — and producing, as a byproduct, one of the most coveted materials on the planet: graphene. But between the AutoCAD blueprints and the steel silhouettes stands a barrier denser than the pollution itself: bureaucracy, financial skepticism, capital vultures who see only a graphene monopoly, and the political cynicism traded in the corridors of La Moneda. Smog: The Carbon Dividend is a novel of climate fiction and technological hope: the story of a handful of restless minds who take on economic and political power to prove that clean air is not an irrelevant byproduct — and that the true dividend is not measured on the stock exchange, but in the depth of every citizen's breath when the mountains come back into view.