38C Wet Bulb Temperature

 “The Ministry For the Future,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020

This is a ‘fun’ book if you enjoy reading about the coming environmental apocalypse.  It’s got everything in the style of ‘speculative fiction’ – narratives of technocrats, geo-engineering scientists and environmental ‘terrorists’ working on the issue.  It’s got explanatory chapters about different issues – the Gini co-efficient, Antarctic glaciers, PTSD, ideology, the Jevon’s Paradox and wet bulb death. It’s got talking photons, code, the market, carbon dioxide and a sun. It’s got anonymous migrants and scientists and a weird romance.  It’s got a seminal horrifying event – the mass death in India due to a killer heat wave that baked or cooked 20 million humans.    

The real impression is that the narrative is not so speculative, even though it’s supposedly set in the 2030s and 2040s.  For Robinson, not much progressed from today to the 2030s – the world still has the same economy, political structure and social nature.  The capitalist system has motored on with nice words and no real switch regarding climate change.  The biggest advance is the activism of India, which threw out the right-wing nationalist BJP after the deadly heat wave, and has become a leader in environmental mitigation, especially in democratic Kerala and the communist organic farmers of Sikkim.  India ignores international law and does a geo-engineering attempt at dulling sunlight – which works for awhile.  China is mentioned, but basically ignored until its central bank is needed.

The FUTURE COMETH

The key character is an Irish technocrat at the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, Mary Murphy.  The MftF is an organization created by the Paris Agreement to try to save the planet.  She and the Ministry are trying to ‘fix’ this overwhelming problem, partly by giving legal rights to the humans and environment of the future.  Mary is battered by a kidnapping, surprised by a black ops’ group in her own Ministry and ignored by the bankers of the world.  She does not see the proletariat as a reasonable source of power or a solution.  Revolution is not in the cards to her, except maybe through the violent and partial acts of the Children of Kali or the African Union.  She is a pacifist, as she’s seen how violence went in Ireland.

And yet, LA is flooded by monsoon rains.  Planes get blown out of the sky by drone swarms, then cargo ships sink by torpedo, as the Children of Kali attack.  Environmental destroyers die in their beds.  The Davos men are kidnapped for a time. Shrimp slaves rebel.  Water is pumped from under glaciers.  A world-wide environmental digital currency is proposed, Keynes’ dream. Migrants are lodged in camps, and some are normalized.  Taps run dry.  A purely public internet is created and maybe a world shadow government. More Parisian yellow-vests follow the examples of the Paris Commune and May-June 1968.  Cooperatives like Mondragon pop up while Wall Street melts down.  Dirigible airships are being built and photo-voltaic sails appear on smaller cargo ships.  Secret Swiss bank accounts get compromised.  38 degree heat waves in the Southern U.S. and 200,000 die.  The world economy melts down in 2048 and a massive unrest happens.  Rewilding of half the earth.  Will capital survive?

Los Angeles Flooded - only safety is on the overpasses

FINANCE Saves the DAY?

The crucial event for the Ministry of the Future is getting the world’s central bankers to agree to ‘go long on the environment’ and back a digital currency that would be created to sequester or limit carbon with a guaranteed bottom price, backed by 100-year bonds issued by the central bankers.  The idea is to buy out the fossil fuel companies first of all.  The Chinese back the proposal; then they all do.  But the neo-liberal plan fails at first, with the Ministry and Murphy now in the cross-hairs of either new environmental guerrillas or petro-states.

Reading the book is a compendium of environmental conundrums and proposed solutions that we know all too well.  The point of reading it is to see what solution Robinson comes up with – if there is one or many.  The book verbally leans to ‘post-capitalism’ in its slant, praising Vandana Shiva, regenerative agriculture, the “euthanasia of the rentier class,” internationalism and the violent nationalization of mines worked by slaves, turning them into worker cooperatives. Someone even advocates 'democratic communism.' But really a world-wide social-democratic solution is its axis.  It gives credence to geo-engineering, market solutions, MMT, pure tech fixes, central bankers and doom.  It seems the bankers will save us!

 In a way, this is one long semi-left-wing, semi-fictive think piece, but it reads quickly for the most part, even though its almost 600 pages.  I will not tell you the ending, so buy the book!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Catastrophism,” "Ecological Revolution," "The Monkey Wrench Gang," "Planet of the Humans," "The Robbery of Nature," "A Redder Shade of Green," "Stop Tar Sands Oil," "Green is the New Red” "This Changes Everything – Capitalism Versus the Climate"(Klein), “The Sixth Extinction,” "Seaspiracy" or the word ‘environmentalism.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 18, 2021