Strategies to reverse climate change

Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 sci-fi / cli-fi book The Ministry for the Future as a starting point for discussion

2023 is, as the cartoon goes, the hottest year we’ve ever experienced and maybe the coldest we will experience. Heat waves in more places than ever, record wildfires, the Greenland ice sheet disappearing as predicted. An appropriate time for trying to work out how, if we were to seriously try, we might go about reversing this situation.

Historically, utopian fiction has been used to criticize existing social institutions or to envision how things might be different. Centuries ago, Thomas More’s Utopia used Europe’s limited understanding of Indigenous societies in the Americas to envision a society that had contempt for gold and for greed. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book Looking Backward imagined a socialist society; Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 Ecotopia imagined the technology of a sustainable separatist West Coast (guaranteed by a nuclear deterrent); Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1974 The Dispossessed imagined an anarchist society in a context of scarcity. These days, there are probably 10 dystopias produced for every 1 utopia, and as Kim Stanley Robinson (henceforth KSR) once said in an interview, anyone can write a dystopia by scanning the headlines — certainly a climate dystopia could easily be produced using that method in 2023.

The visionary utopian fictions I mentioned are, at this juncture, less important than another type of utopian fiction, which is strategic utopian fiction. The hardest thinking that needs doing right now isn’t about what a better world would look like, but about how we could get from here to there. And that is the value of KSR’s 2020 book The Ministry for the Future, focused intensely on the question of how the “international community” (led by the West, and specifically by an Irish diplomat working for the United Nations) could lead the planet out of the climate crisis. The definition of being “out of crisis” is that emissions, temperatures, and carbon dioxide parts per million (ppm) are all trending down, towards stable, pre-industrial levels. This is the situation achieved by the end of the book. The book is about how it was done.

To set up the strategic utopia, KSR starts with - and introduces at all major milestones - dystopian climate events. The book starts with a heat wave in Uttar Pradesh, India, that kills millions. There are further heat waves later on in the book in Iran and Pakistan, and another one in the southern US. By the later half of the book, there are more than 100 million climate refugees on the move, and their plight is explored in detail. There is a flood that pretty much destroys Los Angeles. These events all add urgency to the project of the characters and of the titular Ministry.

To fight this, KSR’s characters adopt a portfolio approach. Two decades ago, scientists Pacala and Socolow described such an approach as a series of “stabilization wedges”. No new technology was needed, they argued, to meet the world’s energy needs with technologies current even at that time. The portfolio adopted in the Ministry includes:

• The spraying of aerosols into the sky to reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the earth - this is unilaterally done by India’s Air Force after the heat wave at the start of the book. [And it’s probably not a good idea].

• Pumping water from the ocean surface to the top of the antarctic glacier to forestall sea level rise by re-freezing the glacier.

• Converting petroleum corporations’ pumping infrastructure to infrastructure that pumps frozen carbon back into the ground.

• Using high-tech sail power to do the world’s shipping (sails, but also electric and solar sails).

• Habitat conservation, restoration ecology, regenerative agriculture (all good ideas).

The individual technological and geoengineering pieces are there to be critiqued, and KSR does a good job of referring to projects and ideas by their searchable names. For a fiction book, this is pretty good citation practice.

Beyond the speculations about climate events and technologies, Ministry also has its own geopolitical world view, its own - to use a favorite KSR phrase - structure of feeling about the world order and the powers that contend within it. This structure of feeling is where I have some divergences from KSR and where I would counter-propose some alternative analyses and strategic thoughts.

In Ministry’s geopolitics, India is central and Kerala in particular is central to India. As a huge democracy, India throws off BJP (and Congress) rule and points the way for a democratic and decentralized transition to a carbon-neutral economy for all. The US is so omni-present that it is invisible: US officials don’t sabotage the Ministry, the US military and police don’t green themselves or abolish themselves - it’s as if they never really existed in the first place. China is disliked - described by one of the point-of-view characters as “debt-laden, opaque, oligarchic, authoritarian.” Russia is largely irrelevant, a country of mafias, poisoning, assassination, and some high-tech weaponry that they make available for terrorists (including climate terrorists). Europe has some sort of occupy movement that doesn’t come to much; Europe’s struggles with taking on Global South climate refugees, and its functioning headquarters of the Ministry in Zurich, anchor the story - Europe is mostly benevolent and mostly functional, trying to help the world as much as possible.

So much of what happens in Ministry is based on these geopolitics that the events in the book couldn’t work, the strategies wouldn’t apply, if the world didn’t work the way KSR describes. Which is unfortunate, because the world doesn’t work this way: The geopolitics of Ministry are inadequate.

Ministry gets a state for Kurdistan, carved out of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria; but the Palestinians are unaddressed. The US and UN sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, the other 1/3 or so of humanity under sanction - unaddressed. US wars, coups and occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Haiti, Guantanamo, Puerto Rico, Hawaii — unaddressed. A student debt revolt leads to the nationalization of US banks - but there is no specific struggle by Black America nor do Indigenous struggles for Land Back play a role. Ministry is socialist, but shows a dislike for existing socialist countries (China especially, but also Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK). Ultimately Ministry puts its faith in liberal international institutions, elections, non-governmental organizations, and decentralization of power. It is unfavorable towards centralized states, central planning, and organized armed struggle.

The point about armed struggle is an important one because in Ministry, the international agreements and economic pacts are guaranteed by decentralized terrorism by a group based in India called the Children of Kali. These children crash all commercial airlines with drones on a day called Crash Day, killing 7,000 civilians; they assassinate all major corporate executives, again using drones; they kidnap all the dignitaries at the World Economic Forum at Davos for a week (and show them video lectures to try to deprogram them, without success); and they use swarming missiles to blow up container ships. This level of violence cannot be organized by decentralized terrorism, but only by organized states which would lead quickly to world war. Thus, the Children of Kali are a geopolitical hand-wave, a type of magic that achieves a global monopoly of violence without state power.

The other major hand-wave is that in Ministry, economic planning is substituted with “carbon quantitative easing”, whereby the Central Banks of China, Europe, and the US agree to spend “carbon coins” into the global economy for any projects that reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere (or prevent it from going into the atmosphere). There are other economic tools in Ministry besides the carbon coin, including carbon taxes, incentives for specific projects, etc., but the mainstay is the carbon coin. In practice, the carbon coin would mean de-dollarization, which in our world is being led by China and Russia, who appear to be signing up much of the Global South for the plan. Whether this is going to lead to world war remains an open question. But in Ministry, neither Europe nor the US fight hard to maintain a global system where they get trillions in value each year drained from the Global South (see, as I always find myself saying, Zak Cope, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, or Jason Hickel for more about this drain). In our world, they are fighting hard to maintain this global system and it is this fight - of neocolonialism imposed on the global south - that will determine what happens with the climate and therefore with human civilization.

To take the strategy presented in Ministry forward, we will sadly have to revise its attitude towards India (which shows no sign of throwing off fascism any time soon), China (which unlike the West is making non-apocalyptic plans on the basis that civilization will indeed continue to exist for centuries to come), the US and indeed the whole West (which isn’t neutral but a formidable and actively hostile opponent of climate action) centralization, states, and planning.

References:

Cory Doctorow has one and another excellent threads about this book.

I presented most of this critique in a podcast recording I made with Stan Cox for our In Real Time series.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about why Five Year Plans were a better model for resolving the climate crisis than Green New Deals were.