The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Your concentration is one part per billion. Actually - one part you, per eight billion parts everyone else. Some poisons are effective at around that concentration. For instance, botulinum neurotoxin, botox, is lethal for a 75-kg human at ninety parts per billion. Botox’s lethality stems from its specificity, biocompatibility with the animal nervous system, binding to a nerve cell and preventing it from communicating. It is a paralyzing agent. Abstracting the components to focus on the mechanism, if you could paralyze the carbon-chugging global system in an analogous way, then maybe you could stop climate change. That is the idea behind Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, The Ministry for the Future.
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the greatest sci-fi writers alive today. He is most famous for The Mars Trilogy, where a group of a hundred or so earthlings battle against time to terraform Mars. In The Ministry for the Future he swivels his telescope to another planet, Earth in the very near future. Specifically, to summer 2025, also known as four years from now. Things have not changed much, geopolitically speaking. Gas is still as cheap as Diet Coke, carbon emissions continue to climb, and no country is on track to meet their 2015 Paris Agreement targets. Climatologically speaking, the Sun has continued to irradiate the earth, exciting particles in the atmosphere, and changing continental pressure systems. A belt across India, Pakistan, and the North China Plain reaches a temperature no longer compatible with living -- a 95 degree Fahrenheit wet bulb temperature in Northern India -- killing more than twenty million people. Frank May, a young American working in an NGO, leaves his office after the AC sputters out after the generator gets stolen after the electric grid fails. He goes to the river. He jumps in. Suspended in the Ganges with hundreds of dead and dying Indian men, women, and children, he gets poached like a soft boiled egg. For whatever reason - luck, hydration, or body mass privilege - Frank survives, a lone white guy in a river of corpses.
Harrowed by guilt and heat-triggered PTSD, Frank wanders an ambivalent planet, from Glasgow, to Antartica, to Zurich, facing the challenges encountered by every messiah and conspiracy theorist. He needs people to believe, to feel it in their bones as he does, that not enough is happening, that survival is on the line.
What should he do next? He is just one in eight billion.
Geoengineering
One way to have an outsized individual impact on the climate is to assume the political changes necessary to address the root cause -- carbon emissions -- won’t take place or won’t take place fast enough, and take the reins yourself.
First, a cute story. I learned from a friend involved that the US military must a) spend 2 million dollars, and b) submit to a two-year EPA permitting process to remove a tiny grove of trees on Midway Island in the Pacific. They are doing this so they can retire the woman whom they currently employ as a human scarecrow, to keep birds out of the grove, to keep the nearby runway clear of bird droppings. Given this inertia on environmental projects, it may surprise you that atmospheric geoengineering is - for all legal, practical, and social purposes - totally unregulated. That is, until you remember the absence of such constraints on what can be shot into the atmosphere is how we ended up in this hothouse in the first place.
If you don’t believe me, then you can just ask Russ George, the billionaire who dumped 100 tons of iron ore off the coast of British Columbia, to ‘fertilize the ocean’ and bring the salmon run back to the Haida Nation. He faced the Canadian equivalent of a strongly worded letter.
Atmospheric geoengineering - euphemistically phrased ‘sunlight management’ - ranges from thinning wooly cirrus clouds, to micro-bubbling the surface of the sea, to changing the color of roofs, to ‘sending a giant mirror into orbit.’ But the most comprehensive sunlight management project is dissipating aerosols of calcium carbonate and sulfates into the upper layers of the stratosphere. These white and yellow aerosol particles provide a thick vapor with a reflective enough albedo (color) to repel sunlight back into space.
This process mimics what occurs after a volcanic eruption, and could, in the limit, lower the global average temperature about one degree Celsius. Incidentally, these stinky aerosol particles will scatter sunlight of a greater variety of wavelengths, not just the short wavelengths, and is catching negative PR for changing the sky from blue to white, everywhere. The ocean will remain blue, because it is not strictly a reflection of the sky. That is, unless we decide to dye it yellow to reflect more sunlight.
Side effects include guaranteed acid rain, potential droughts, and a potential apocalypse thanks to unknown unknowns. As of late February 2021, a team at Harvard has applied to launch the first tests of sunlight management above lapland in Sweden.
The intervention would be relatively cheap - between two and ten billion USD - and additionally requires one to possess a fleet of jets to ferry the aerosols up 10 km above the surface. Other than those constraints, it works as a unilateral temporary solution to a limited amount of warming. Because it addresses none of the underlying issues causing the warming, it would need to be continued, maybe forever.
But what else can be done? Can one person change the political system?
Terrorism
Popular climate books and articles tend to cluster along three modes when it comes to messaging strategy. First, there are the doomers, millenarian environmentalists who don’t know much about central banking or cement manufacture, but who heavily imply that human civilization in its current form will and should die out, probably. David Wallace-Wells is a big fan (no turbine pun intended) of this sentiment: “We are only just entering our brave new world, one that collapses below us as soon as we set foot on it.”Next there are blamers, who appear to think that the primary issue with climate change is that it was caused by conspiratorial fossil fuel companies and rich countries. (Even before reviewing the evidence, I have no doubt that this is true).
Synthesizing these first two messaging strategies used in the current media landscape, Kim Stanley Robinson supposes a future characterized by ecoterrorism as a method of personal expression. In The Ministry for the Future, a mythical day, Crash Day, happens where a group of Indian terrorists brings down every plane in the sky with a pack of drones, making flying on planes a lot less palatable. (It should be noted here that Kim has a penchant for steampunk technology, and that dirigibles and blimps figure prominently, using every sense of the word, in the plot) . Shipping tankers are also sunk by submarines. Capitalism doesn’t fall but it certainly sputters as the heads of fossil fuel companies are systematically assassinated.
To critique this section of the book, one is hard-pressed to find predictions on the efficacy of these types of actions. That is, unless one is familiar with today’s most pernicious ecoterrorists: Catholic nuns. The most applicable cases come from the apostolates of Catholic nuns against BlackRock investment, nuclear power plants, and oil pipelines. In 2015, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ successfully blocked a pipeline across their land. Less successfully in 2014 an 82 year old nun broke into the Fort Knox of nuclear weapons material near Oak Ridge National lab to attempt to smear blood on the warheads. Exactly nothing happened politically, she and her co-conspirators got five years prison time, likely 100% of the rest of their lives, for their troubles.
The people alive today, particularly the ones concerned about climate change, are the least religious and least violent group of humans since people bothered to stop disemboweling one another long enough to start keeping records. It seems optimistic (pessimistic?) to assume that we could just turn around and start shooting innocents out of the sky en-masse. Some other option has to be taken - one that is better suited to our talents.
Additionally, it's not clear that we could blast, strike, or otherwise terrorize our way out of the most pressing problems, the ones contributing the most emissions. Consulting Bill Gate’s handy cheatsheet for climate emissions, plane travel, for instance, is not one of the heavy hitters. All of transportation, humans and goods, via land, sea, or plane, accounts for just 16% of global emissions.
This brings us to by far my favorite section of The Ministry for the Future, where eco-libertardians such as myself are forced into a crash course on central banking, exotic financial instruments, and, worst of all, distributed ledgers.
Financial Engineering
Mary, the hot, 60 year old, Irish authorial surrogate is kidnapped by Frank. Her position in the fictional, bureaucratic, UN-associated Ministry for the Future means that she has to listen. She needs to do more, he says. She believes him because he reminds her of her dead husband. She authorizes a black wing of the ministry for the future. She releases a fleet of climate lawsuits on behalf of the unborn. However, most impactfully, she consults an AI specialist named Jaenis Athena who introduces her to banking and ... the blockchain.
Zooming back to our world, blockchain technologies, bitcoin in particular, are the latest persona non grata in the climate change battle, at least on Twitter. Bitcoin mining is so energy intensive that it has erased the gains of 30 years of solar power. Bitcoin mining today is responsible for 1% of global emissions. Let it be known that this is still dwarfed by the emissions of farting and belching cattle - 4%. Given this, I was surprised at the outsized role a fictional blockchain technology, Carboncoin played in the Ministry for the Future’s plan for saving the planet. It is actually not fictional, and it does exist. Carboncoin is a currency that you can ‘mine’ by reducing carbon emissions. Plant a bunch of trees - 1 Carboncoin. Replace a coal plant with a dam - 12 Carboncoins. (For this ratio, you would have had to have planted A LOT of trees) The magic of the currency in the Ministry for the Future is that Mary, using her feminine wiles, convinces all eight central banks to back the currency. This means that they certify the Carboncoins as a legal tender, thus guaranteeing that at any point you can take it to a bank and exchange it for another currency like gold or something. It is carbon quantitative easing. A carrot to the stick of a carbon tax.
The reason you need the blockchain for this is that people lie and you cannot trust them. Carbon offset markets, where people trade amounts of carbon sequestered, have existed for a long time, since the Kyoto Protocol. However, they have a significant free-rider problem. Under the Kyoto Protocol something like 0.6 billion metric tons of carbon offsets were misallocated, meaning they were given to people who did not actually prevent carbon from getting into the atmosphere. Blockchain uses a secure consensus mechanism to synchronize bookkeeping among parties that do not trust each other, so bad actors cannot ‘cook the books’.
Arguments in favor of carbon quantitative easing accounted for on a distributed ledger? Well, first the magic of money itself is that it is ‘a social construct.’ Fiat currency is widely accepted because of the state monopoly on violence, and before fiat currency, gold was accepted because it was soft and pretty. Central banks have accumulated US$20 trillion in total assets, indicating that they have the reserves to purchase carbon offsets from petrostates like Saudi Arabia. Blockchain based solutions are already being used to create an ethical diamond market, or rather to price diamonds’ origin into the market. At each point in the supply chain, mining, refining, export, data must be verified on the ledger. (source)
The big argument against Carboncoin is that central banks simply won’t do it because it involves taking on significant amounts of risk politically and financially. Some might say that doing nothing to combat climate change is also taking a risk. This solution is out of reach for most people trying to maximally impact the climate system, but, going back to the botox, it provides insight into what is analogous to a nervous system in our world -- the market.
Ultimately, the most important features of The Ministry for the Future’s imagined planetary decarbonization were not included in the book. They were the unnamed innovations, construction projects, and ventures unleashed and funded by Carboncoin. The book provides an example of a policy level decision sufficient to enable coordinated efficacy at the local level, but perhaps it is not necessary.
Something Boring: Nuclear Plants, Green Concrete, and Wheat Semi-Dwarves
Bill Gates has recently refocused the oculus of his intellect from global development to the climate and has released a plan. The book, ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’ is deeply motivational, particularly because it avoids doomsday scenarios, and because it reveals that Bill Gates is not too old for fart jokes. The tone of the book is kind of like if climate scientists were trapped in a case interview by a consulting firm. The upshot is that an individual or organization can have an enormous impact on our adaptation to climate change, particularly if you diddle some wheat or corn genomes or consider the particulars of cement.
Also unique to his climate proposal is a modicum of concern for the world’s poor and a belief that they deserve all the benefits of growth. Electricity, cheap power, is central to increasing productivity, which is key/is economic development. He reiterates throughout that any solution developed must be cheap enough for middle income countries to afford.
To reach his goal of reducing the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere every year from 51 billion tons now to 0 by 2050, we need to address the top five sources of emission. They are manufacturing things (31%), the electrical grid (27%), growing food and food for our food (19%), transportation (16%), and HVAC (7%). Greening the grid is the single highest impact item, because with cheap, clean electricity, we can cut the emissions of all other categories, provided they are electrified (itself is no small task).
GIven the critical place it holds in the solution to climate change, it is no surprise that the electrical grid is the most controversial section of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. We already have a greener electric grid than I expected. 50% of the UK's electricity is produced by water, wind, or solar. On a good day, 80% of California's is. The problem is a stupid boring problem, and it is that the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, and that we do not have city-sized batteries just lying around that we can fill to keep for a cloudy day. Battery technology, according to Bill, will probably not improve that much on the Lithium Ion battery that is in the scooters and Teslas. It seems to me like you could just roll a large boulder up a hill and call that your battery, but in these engineering calculations, the details of efficiency, not ‘in the limit’ behavior is what counts. Lacking storage variable energy sources like wind and solar are buffered by a run-in a CO2-emitting standby mode called spinning reserve. Spinning reserve could be a coal or natural gas plant, or, as suggested by Bill - a nuclear plant.
There was a time, the 1990s, when the FDA approved an electronic brain implant with a 5 year lifetime for Parkenson’s patients that was powered by a tiny nuclear power source. It was very safe, it was only discontinued after some unfortunate incidents with corpse handling (Cremation! What a disaster). Public opinion has obviously turned on nuclear power, and the big counterpoint to How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is Professor Mark Jacobson, who in “100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything” (2020) calculates that every country on Earth could afford to get to 80% renewable energy by 2030, that the cost of solar energy has fallen so much that we are 100 years ahead of price projections, and that battery technology prices have fallen along a similar curve. Even very cheap batteries will not meet the needs of large cities. New York City would require a 12 Gigawatt mega battery, and I will need to read the rest of Jacobson’s very detailed textbook to get a better picture of his proposal for spinning reserve for a city.
It also seems like maybe they could just turn the power off for non-essential uses during peak demand. Just saying.
Even if we green the grid, there are very large problems to be solved when considering the manufacturing sector. Concrete, the best building material, requires cement, which in turn requires calcium from limestone. Producing a ton of cement produces a ton of carbon dioxide, not from any energy-consuming heating or cooling process but rather from its synthesis. Steel similarly has a very difficult to fix synthesis. Plastic might soon become a net carbon sink.
Climate change was mostly created in just one generation. Half of all emissions have occurred since the first episode of Seinfeld aired. In setting out to write this review, I didn't expect to get a clear answer on what one person should be doing to combat climate change, but I did. In the Ministry for the Future, Frank should have stayed in Denver and worked on the Bessemer process. Or maybe he should have gone to Rhode Island and built more offshore wind farms. He might have also gone to Florida to save the oranges from greening disease (say goodbye to orange juice, friends). In the future, all jobs will likely become implicated in solving climate change, whether you like it or not.