The boot room

In Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is invited to the North Pole.

The party would comprise twenty artists and scientists concerned with climate change...There were no lecturing duties—Beard's presence would be sufficient—and the foundation would bear all his expenses, while the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions would be offset by planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.
    ...
    It turned out that Beard was the only scientist among a committed band of artists. The entire world and all its follies, one of which was to warm up the planet, was to their south, which seemed to be in every direction....
    ...
    From the second day, the disorder in the boot room was noticeable, even to Beard. [pp. 46, 47, 62, 75]

This boot room, which McEwan introduces so innocently, so unremarkably, attracts more of a Nobel Prize winner's attention than we might expect:

    He suspected that he never wore the same boots on consecutive days. Even though he wrapped his goggles...in his inner balaclava on the third day, they were gone by the fourth, and the balaclava was on the floor, soaking up water...He was not a communally spirited person, but there were certain decencies he took for granted—in himself, and therefore in others. He always put his stuff on and below the same peg, number seventeen, and was disappointed to note that others had trouble observing such simple procedures. Gloves were a particular problem, for it was impossible to go outside without them. As a precaution, he stuffed his inside his boots, along with the glove liners. The next day the boots were gone. [p. 75]

    And the week long Beard observes the artists' idealistic

demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances...fashioned to deflect the course of catastrophe.
  Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall we had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing, along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time...Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs.

Then McEwan reveals his hand, why the boot room has been such a focus, to serve as a symbol:

Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly; everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in "discovering" his or her missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth—assuming it needed saving, which he doubted—when it was so much larger than the boot room? [emphasis mine, pp. 79, 80]