BOOK REPORT: THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE by KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

 

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.

 

 

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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.