What better occasion than a summer-long heatwave to read climate fiction by your favorite author ? I read The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson and I absolutely loved it. Here are my thoughts on it.
Published right before COVID, the book starts with a catastrophe of a significant magnitude : 20 million people die in India during a scorching heatwave. As a result, the country starts to seriously think on its energy transition and how it can protect people and Nature. Globally, things start to shift as well.
The book introduces a kaleidoscope of characters, to develop certain ideas. If it lacks in story per se, it develops many a tool or idea that are there to move the story and the solutions forward. Politically charged, the Ministry… has a massive focus on explaining economics. While I totally understand this, I believe it can be a turn off for many this is quite necessary to explain how our world operates and how it could do so much better.
The story develops as a war on climate change and the enemies are heads of petrostates, CEOs of Big Oil and Big Coal… This includes a faction called the Children of Kali that resorts to targeted assassination and sabotage. Now this has enormous ethical implications…
Will we have to come to this violence to actually stop runaway global warming ? And if so, would this be acceptable and accepted socially ? Should we advocate for the death (or removal or imprisonment) of a few hundred people to save billions ? Quite the philosophical question.
Central to this book is the question of whether a global / continental movement(s) start to take global warming as seriously as it should be ? Could it become big enough to shift things… ? When one sees how little people are protesting in Europe or the US against systems that has been out of breath for years if not for decades now, one can be wondering.
One of my main criticism with that the book relies too much on the goodwill of people. Could folks around the world start working together on climate if something major happened ? Would 20 million people dead be “enough” for some people to “get it” and start a global collective to work as one towards ending climate change ? Given how people need drastic change and how little the media and the elected representatives act on climate change, I keep wondering…
I am thinking about the MAGA movement and conservatives and far right in other countries that still to this date deny or minimize climate change (or claim we could adapt ourselves to runaway +3C when we already are struggling with 1.3C). Or would the aforementioned targeted assassinations and large scale sabotage be enough of a risk to reign in “bad actors” ?
The story also relies heavily on geoengineering to cool down the Earth. Coming from an author who wrote a series of books on terraforming or not Mars some 30 years earlier this is not surprising. From cooling down the poles to some references to direct air capture / CCS orspraying chemicals in the atmosphere, there are plenty of doubtful solutions being mentioned. But regenerative agriculture becomes primordial in the later part of the book, and this is an effective set of solutions that actually helps both Humankind and Nature.
Another use of tech is blockchain with a carbon coin. This helped me finally understand how it could be used. The book relies heavily on technosolutionnism when it is clear that we should be focusing on changing people’s habits and ways of living. But I guess “ it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” as Frederic Jameson once stated.
Still later in the book the importance of keeping fossil fuels in the ground becomes quite central to the plot. This leads to everyone finally getting paid to act on climate, even large polluters and oil and gas produces. Could this actually work ? This relies on the good faith of so many shady partners and characters, whether we are talking about Russia, Saudi Arabia… or the United States.
As time goes, the world will face millions of climate refugees. This is not much talked in real life whereas this is a massive topic that will become even bigger as we progress… This reminds me of a study I mentioned all the way back in 2008 and it makes me wonder why all these fascists are denying climate change when millions of refugees from Africa or the Middle East will eventually have to be relocated to places that haven’t suffered as much from climate change.
Not foreseen were the exponential growth of solar, wind, batteries and other electrotech. Or at least, not this fast nor this early. And this is a very welcomed sign in our current reality.
To conclude, I recommend this book if you need Hope, tidbits of wisdom and a roadmap of a sort of how we could deal (or not) with global warming in the coming years and decades.
Acting on climate change means to upend the neoliberal dogma of capitalistic growth at all cost. What the world could look like if we actually started to come to our senses and acted on climate ? This book is totally something I would recommend to my community / tribe from BGI / Pinchot / Presidio / Redlands (and others sustainability minded people).
Five stars for The Ministry for the Future. I look forward to reading more from Kim Stanley Robinson.
We had this summer at least five heatwaves with at least 10,000 dead. My beautiful country faced one of the deadliest days since the end of WWII. We should have been acting decades ago on global warming. So, we need to do so now as tomorrow may be too late. And if the past 20 or 30 years have told us anything is that elected representatives are not the solution. We the People are the ones who need to act. Can we do it ?
Image credits : myself, photo taken in early July in
an already very dry park in Epinal, Northeastern France.
