The world is approaching the “zombie years” of natural disasters and rapidly warming temperatures as imagined by my lunch date, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future struck a chord with the climate anxious, just as his bestselling epics from the 1990s and 2000s, in which humans colonise the Moon and other solar systems, spoke to a more optimistic era of government-led space exploration.
At the opening of The Ministry for the Future, 20mn people die in a 2025 heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, India. One of the closest real-life equivalents to this disaster was when early monsoon floods, swollen by glacier melt, swept through Pakistan last year. “One-third of the country’s [districts] underwater and everybody displaced. That [was] apocalyptic,” Robinson says. “Now I’m meeting policymakers and powerful people who are terrified and want to act. That’s new in my experience.”
Like many of Robinson’s more than 20 novels, including Pacific Edge and Red Mars, The Ministry for the Future is mostly a tale of people scrambling for financial, political and scientific solutions to civilisational breakdown. And people are hungry for solutions right now. (...)
“What people find encouraging in the book is that we could repeatedly fuck up and have a lot of humans fighting vigorously to wreck the world and wreck our plans, and we could still get to a good result,” Robinson tells me. This message can replace “feelings of futility or despair” with “relatively justifiable hope”, he adds. “People grab this book like it’s a life raft or a life ring out in the ocean.” (...)
Scientists and politicians, not businesspeople, are the heroes of Robinson’s books. He claims that The Ministry for the Future gave a much broader platform to the concept of the fatal heat stress known as “wet bulb temperature” — a way of saying that “if things get hot and humid enough, humans will die automatically”. While the theoretical limit to human tolerance for heat and humidity was already known, in part thanks to a 2010 paper, policymakers had not properly thought through its consequences as a result of climate change. “Ministry is like the first mass-market, general cultural publication of this idea that is quite obvious.”
Robinson says science fiction is more of a “modelling exercise” than a “prediction”, serving to draw public attention to under-discussed scientific theories. “You tell the story in an attempt to forestall it by informing people in advance.”
His next novel is likely to be set in the Arctic, where scientists are debating controversial ideas for manipulating the climate in a bid to stop the region’s self-fulfilling feedback loop of ice melt and warming waters. The techniques, which could be implemented in polar regions and elsewhere, range from injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to underwater curtains that shield glaciers from warm water, or seeding massive algae blooms that can sink carbon to the seafloor.
Some of these suggestions have alarmed certain groups of scientists who see hubris and the potential for distraction where Robinson sees noble desperation. “I see immense resistance to geoengineering that is ignorant and reflexive and comes out of a moral calculus of, like, 1990,” he says. The moral hazard associated with continuing to burn fossil fuels because of the existence of an escape clause is “not relevant”, he adds. “We know we have to decarbonise. We know we’re not. It’s desperate.” (...)
His key message is that “in a practical sense . . . if the world fails, business fails.” Insurers, for example, could find it impossible to hike premiums enough to finance the global cost of payouts linked to natural disasters and rising temperatures. “The backstop [provided by the insurance sector to the world] will fail,” is what Robinson told staff at Swiss Re, one of the world’s biggest providers of cover for insurance groups.
Perhaps because of his desire to engage with change-makers in the real world, business leaders sometimes confuse him for a futurist, which he describes as “a bullshit industry” and “a scam”. Science fiction is more subtle, he says. “It really is trying to speculate about futures that might happen. But it’s also a metaphor for how things are now.” (...)
Robinson advocates targeted non-violent protest, which could mean anything from showing up for debates at local council meetings to slashing tyres of the most highly polluting SUVs. “If you have a big honking car in London, its tyres should be flat every time you come back out to it [so that] you [have to] get yourself a little Mini,” he says.
by Kenza Bryan, Financial Times | Read more:
Image: Hachette Group
[ed. Curretly reading Ministry For the Future, which in some ways can be viewed as the political/scientific/bureaucratic cli-fi alternative to Neal Stephenson's recent Termination Shock (which imagines a swashbuckling rogue billionaire taking matters into his own hands). In both cases geoengineering takes center stage, as it's becoming painfully obvious society will fail to mitigate climate change disasters by voluntarily reducing CO2 emissions. It's an excellent book, despite jumping back and forth between gripping narratives and info dumps nearly every other chapter (although, even the info dumps are interesting). It should also send a shiver down the spines of - maybe just several hundred people - with the most influence to prevent climate change but are actively not doing so, and therefore become targets of so-called black wing political and terrorist groups that exist simply to assassinate each over time as planning and opportunity allow - a more direct form of lobbying). Highly recommended. See also: A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’ (NYT); and, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson review – how to solve the climate crisis (Guardian).]
