I READ AN
INTERESTING “CLI-FI” OR CLIMATE FICTION NOVEL last week called The Ministry for
the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. The story begins in the present day and
ranges over the next forty years or so, as it describes the growing impacts of
climate change and how a small UN bureaucracy leverages its authority to
promote broad-based initiatives to mitigate damages wrought by a destabilizing
climate system, as well as initiating efforts to repair the biosphere that has
been so badly damaged during what’s come to be known as the “Anthropocene” epoch. The “Ministry” is actually a more blandly-named organization
established by the United Nations following the 2015 Paris Accords climate
summit and is led by a determined Irishwoman, Mary Murphy. As its titular name
suggests, it was formed essentially to “make the case” for the future, in a
quasi-legal sense, and to “represent” the interests of future generations by
arguing for policies and initiatives, and laws that would benefit, rather than disadvantage,
those who will follow us. 
BEGUN as little more than a public relations lobby
promoting “green” technologies and sustainable environmental practices, the
Ministry began making inroads into securing the future environment by getting
certain language placed into international agreements and national laws, trade
agreements, etc. requiring there be changes in, for example, energy generation,
transportation, land development, the use of solar and wind power, etc.
Some progress is made, but not enough….
THEN IN
202_ IN INDIA, there is a period of higher-than-average temperatures combined with
high humidity, that produce a deadly “wet bulb” * effect killing millions
within a matter of days. Following this tragedy, the Indian government took the
drastic (and controversial) step of launching a “geoengineering” project to seed
the upper atmosphere with reflective particles, similar to material that
would be ejected from a volcano, with the hope that a certain percentage of
light from the sun would be reflected back out to space, temporarily cooling
global temperatures. The scheme worked, but the horrific loss of life shocked
the world and galvanized Murphy and her team at the Ministry to develop their
own radical strategies to pull humanity back from the brink of climate
catastrophe.
While
public opinion changed in favour of addressing the climate emergency
more rigorously, vested interests, as well as inertia, prevented systemic and
comprehensive measures from being adopted. The adage of trying to change
the course of an ocean liner comes to mind, and if that ship is the Titanic,
well…. [Sounds familiar. Ed.]
 |
| The "Cone of Silence" from Get Smart, 1968 |
WHAT THE
MINISTRY DID next was develop a “covert” wing, a sort of "black ops" agency into which
money was secretly funnelled. One clandestine operation was the creation of a powerful
“drone force” that began downing private jets.1 THEN AN
AIRLINER OR TWO. Soon the message was clear: Flying private jets was verboten
and jet airliners (which by 2050 are predicted to emit 5% of global
GHGs) needed to become yesterday’s news. Air travel ground to a halt until
non-GHG emitting dirigibles (“airships”) were rapidly developed as
a replacement. The drone squadron’s next target was ocean going vessels,
including fishing trawlers, whose heavy, bunker oil burning propulsion systems account
for 3% of global GHG emissions. Then, the Ministry’s covert wing
attacked the livestock industry (21% of globally GHG annually) using drones to inoculate
herds of cattle with bio-engineered mad cow disease, causing populations
throughout the world to turn to vegetarianism.
ONE HUGE PROJECT to mitigate the
effects of climate change was to slow the melting of polar ice sheets by (get
this!) stopping the slide of key glacier fields. They accomplished this huge
engineering feat by drilling thousands of bore holes in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland, then pumping out
hundreds of millions of tonnes of melt water (which acts like a lubricant) from underneath the ice sheets
until the massive glaciers once more settled onto
bedrock, slowing their movement to the sea, thus delaying the sea level rise that
would otherwise occur. To power the pumps, solar energy installations
were built, as well as utilizing aircraft carriers' nuclear
power plants (which is a far more productive use, one should think, for those colossal, floating money pits!)
TARGETED
assassinations of intransigent or sociopathic industry executives
and wealthy elites made the news fairly regularly during this time, as greater segments of the
earth’s population came on board to help turn the ship around and away from the climate iceberg dead ahead. Massive investments in solar and wind plants, Co2 air scrubber installations, and changes to economic
systems—digital currencies and the like—made financial profiteering and fossil fuel production more problematic (and hazardous) career choices. Billionaires became less popular with
the general public during this time.
ANOTHER
HUGE PROJECT the ministry promoted was a massive re-wilding and re-forestation
of the planet. Taking a cue from E. O. Wilson’s 2016 book, Half-Life
which proposes to set aside half the earth for rewilding,
Robinson, who mentions Wilson in his novel, chronicles the relocation of
hundreds of millions of people, leaving huge swaths of the planet uninhabited. And along with changes in transportation,
energy production and agriculture practices, for example organic farming with
its potential for significant carbon sequestration, this process of rewilding was to slow the rise of Co2
gases in the atmosphere by mid-century and then see their gradual decline.
ALL-IN-ALL,
ROBINSON PROVIDES an optimistic, if utopian, vision of a future, one
that involves much in the way of top-down, world-government-level planning and
administration. Written in 2020, his vision of governments around the world
uniting in common purpose to combat an “enemy” that is not among their number,
namely climate change, seems a far more distant goal than it did just a few years
ago. In addition, the Ministry’s “black-ops” section, a seemingly necessary evil to "do what needs to be done", involving, as it does, the killing of hundreds if not thousands
of people in drone strikes and assassinations,2 is problematic on any number
of levels.3 Though it must be said that bankers hanging from lampposts is a tradition found in many cultures.
Robinson provides scenarios of the emerging climate crisis that could just as easily be drawn from the headlines of today’s
newspapers, along with technologies and mitigation policies that are part of the contemporary debate. His climate fiction is
classified as “hard sci-fi” because the science he uses is real-world and
technically accurate. No benevolent alien races will land on earth to save its
teeming masses: only hard, decades-long work by governments acting in accord with the vast majority of their populations will begin to address the looming crisis.
TODAY
(July 8/22), Robinson’s utopian scenario of a revitalized United Nations, a cooperative network of national governments, NGOs and businesses all joining together in
the coming years to "do what needs to be done" seems a remote dream to me as I read news of the war in
Ukraine, and how so many politicians in the collective West are seemingly incapable
of thinking about anything other than manufacturing venues for conflict
rather than seeking their resolution....
AND GLOBAL TEMPERATURES keep rising,
glaciers keep melting, species die off faster every day, and the world we have
known for so long inexorably changes into something else.
On the
other hand, I LOVED 💗 THE SCENES in the novel when Ministry head Mary Murphy
journeys to meetings and conferences aboard clipper ships and dirigibles. What
a breath of fresh air it would be to use those modes of transportation
again!
Cheers, Jake.
_____________________________________________
GHG=
Green House Gas
*Heat
waves are not uncommon, of course. A 2003 heatwave in France killed upwards of 60,000,
mostly the elderly, and in Russia in 2010 over 10,000 died from high
temperatures and higher than average humidity. As the globe’s climate system
becomes unstable, weather patterns in various regions may more often develop
“wet bulb” temperature events. In general, greater levels of mortality can be
expected with steadily rising global temperatures.
1. On my bucket
list is flying to Davos and strafe/bombing all those expensive
private jets and helicopters parked outside the WEF (World Economic Forum)
conference centre; the explosions and screams would be music to my ears! Make
the SOBs take the bus home!
2. One might have thought that intelligence
agencies world-wide would have been working OT to discover the “secret drone”
headquarters (hint: it's in Switzerland.)
3. I’m
reminded of the robot, Gort, left behind by the
alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still to ensure mankind doesn't “extend its violence” beyond Earth. Or maybe Robocop. The Ministry's black-ops corps could become the ultimate global police force, and that would be okay because nice people are running it. What could go wrong?
Robinson, Stanley Kim. The Ministry for the
Future: A Novel. Orbit Books. Hachette Book Group
USA. New York. 2020.
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