The Three Top Three Climate Ideas from The Ministry for the Future
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson kicks off in 2025 with one of the most vivid natural disaster scenarios you will read anywhere as an unprecedented heat wave hits India. The first few chapters grip you into the realities of the next few decades and the fictional, yet relatable, people living them.
This “anti-dystopian novel,” as described by Bill McKibben, came out at the end of 2020 and sits in a new genre of science fiction: climate fiction (or CliFi for folks who love esoteric abbreviations).
For many of you reading this, you might already work in the climate and environmental space, making this book something that hits close to home, maybe too close. I can relate. After the year that was 2020, the last thing I wanted to do was read a book about the future of our planet when I was at one of my lowest points of being able to digest and process more climate change and environmental information.
I could not be more grateful, though, towards the friends who recommended this book. It has re-invigorated my curiosity in and drive for the field of environmental (and climate) work, and I hope it can do the same for everyone striving towards a better planet and society.
The climate ideas from the book below (and brief explanations) are just a sampling of the myriad possible solutions, reactions, and disasters detailed in the book. The Rolling Stones describes the book as “plausible, chaotic, and hopeful.” It’s this impressive dance between the three that pulls the reader along and gives weight to the climate and socioeconomic ideas that can change our future.
Spoiler Alert: The Ministry for the Future is a work of fiction with a narrative. While the below ideas are discussed in the book, I avoid saying if and to what extent they are actually executed in the book’s world.
If you want to be completely surprised at the novelty of the book, then this isn’t the best article for you. Perhaps, though, the below can inspire you as it inspired me and, maybe, even entice you to read this impeccable book.
Society: Top Three Climate Ideas That Could Change Everyday Life
1. Carbon Neutral Travel
The obvious area here is electric vehicles as EVs will make up 28% of new car sales by 2030 and 58% by 2050 (according to BloombergNEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020). But there’s a whole world of transportation that needs to be adjusted apart from personal vehicles and wonky looking delivery trucks.
Bio-fuel and renewables powered planes. The return of blimps, dirigibles and hot-air balloons. Advanced airships that could be used for global sightseeing and nature cruises. For shipping and boats: electric motors, solar panels, the return to sails, multi-masted sailing cargo ships with advanced fabrics (e.g. photovoltaic), hydrofoils. High speed rail expansion. AI assisted design to create faster and larger ships and aircraft.
This turns the emissions of a long flight into a beautiful, carbon neutral journey enjoying the passing scenery while you work remotely to your final destination. Fulfilling the explorer’s drive in all of us with the realistic need for reliable wifi.
2. Carbon Currency or Carbon Quantitative Easing
Carbon currency builds off two ideas: 1) buying and selling carbon as happens with current regulatory and voluntary carbon markets; and 2) quantitative easing, used after the 2008 financial crisis by central banks through purchases of bonds to inject money back into the economy.
Introduced in the book alongside the research of a real engineer who has popularised the idea, Delton Chen, a carbon currency combines these two ideas into something with the potential for a global carbon market. As the book details, it could be one carbon coin issued for each ton of carbon dioxide equivalent sequestered, backed by 100-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return (or floor pricing) through underwriting from a coalition of central banks.
As Robinson explained the idea to Rolling Stones, “I love anything that looks to me like it’ll be fast and effective…This is why I keep coming back to quantitative easing. You’re going to have to pay off the oil companies. You’re going to have to pay off the petro states. They’ll need compensation, because their fiduciary responsibilities and their national priorities for the power of their own nation states are intensely tied up with these fossil fuels…so you can regard that as blackmail or you can regard that as just business as usual, as a stranded asset that still has a value to us by not being burned. I mean, it’s a real financial value. Saving the world has a financial value that needs to be paid, and so we call it quantitative easing.”
3. Personally Controlled Social Media
What Robinson describes releases the bonds social media has on society as problematic and destabilising tools, especially since 2015 and 2016. This would be an open source social media platform using quantum encryption and blockchain technology that would give individuals control over their own data. People would be able to transfer all of their social media accounts to one single account owned by a co-operative of the users. In essence, it is a public commons good that individuals can make small amounts of money from having the rights to sell their own data.
This is indirectly related to climate, but certainly opens up an entire field of climate friendly opportunities, as well as slowing down social media companies whose practices have enabled anti-climate narratives, practices, and public personalities. One such area the book describes as a possibility is using this platform as a basis for an international credit union. First give people control of their own data, then give them control of their own money. And there are enough stats out there that show how the major financial institutions are not doing enough to move away from fossil fuel financing.
Earth: Top Three Climate Ideas That Could Change the Planet
1. The Half Earth Project
The Half Earth Project is exactly what is sounds like: protecting “half the land and sea in order to manage sufficient habitat to reverse the species extinction crisis and ensure the long-term health of our planet” according to website of the project, led by the biodiversity leader E.O. Wilson.
Most people do not need a reminder that we are in the middle of an unprecedentedly fast mass extinction event of our planet’s animals and plants, from pink dolphins and rare frogs to plants that could potentially lead us to the next world-saving vaccine. The half earth idea comes from the biological theory that protecting half of habitats will allow for the protection of 85% of the world’s remaining species.
As a recent NYT article on ICARUS, a global wildlife tracking platform, explained, details, we are only just beginning to learn now the amount of land animals and plants really need. Scientists have discovered “a wolf that made it from Italy to France; a leopard that moves across three countries in Southern Africa; mule deer that accomplished one of the longest land migrations of any species in North America.” Much farther and much more intricate movements than we ever imagined.
Half Earth starts with habitat corridors connecting major parks and lands that already exist or habitat corridors on small tracts of land.
A Y2Y corridor from Yukon to Yellowstone giving space for animals and plants adjusting to a warming arctic (think of the starving polar bear or the massive migrations of elk) | Y2Y-Cal from Yellowstone to Yosemite (the ongoing return of the majestic bison to its natural habitat, the balance of predator and prey with wolves and other apex predators) | Y2T from Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, “following the great line that forms the spine of both Americas.” | Most of Canada (Eh). | For farmland, hedgerows, native plant strips, and wild animals for pest control. | Small villages being a part of an animal’s habitat again instead of an ever growing island of destruction. | The reforestation and rewilding of Madagascar, Indonesia, Brazil, west Africa, and more of the world’s most biodiverse land areas.
While this would take a great deal of funding and sensitive work negotiating with and relocating some existing townships, landowners, tribes, it would prevent the mass mortality event we keep sliding down, allow us to better understand wildlife navigation and cognition, and provide monetary opportunities for many communities through ecotourism and other biodiversity related activities.
2. Geoengineering
Oh, geoengineering, the forbidden fruit of the climate change world. The elephant in the room not brought up in polite climate conversations. We think we can control it and we know we probably need it, but we also know it could unleash a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences we might not be ready for. The possibilities are endless.
Seawater pumping: pumping the water under glaciers to keep them from sliding and melting into ice melt on top, or pumping the water around glaciers and spraying the quickly freezing water back onto the ice. Aerosols, aka recreating Pinatubo to cool the earth a few degrees, and solar radiation management brought to you by a suite of high flying airplanes dropping stuff into the atmosphere. Dyeing parts of the ocean, especially in the Arctic, with yellow or other decomposing dye colors to increase the albedo of the almost black, frigid waters. Moving ever rising seawater to internal dry basins for new saltwater lakes.
Whatever happens or does not happen, the book walks through these ideas with the realism and skepticism of current conversations in the climate community.
3. The Ministry for the Future
A Ministry for the Future would be created to protect against the tragedy of the time horizon. As the book explains the idea, “the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve.” It’s not tenable for people to continue to expect that the future can protect itself against the present.
A Ministry for the Future, a body tasked with representing the future living beings on the planet, could change this. Nestled under an existing international body or agreement, the organisation could act as lawyer, constituent, and representative for the future of the planet. This is starting to happen already informally through legal systems in different countries or how many indigenous groups have thought about their stewardship for generations. Robinson thinks about how this organisation could exist and what it would be able to do.
Underrated: Top Three Climate Ideas That Exist Today to Support More
1. Regenerative Agriculture
Permaculture, agronomy, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, water smart, whatever definitions and practices people adhere to, it all comes down to agriculture that is more in line with best practices from indigenous land stewards (combined with modern enabling technologies) that has the potential to sequester massive amounts of carbon and reduce myriad environmental and social issues caused by industrial agriculture.
While interest in regenerative agriculture is high across farmers, governments, companies, and investors and entrepreneurs, ongoing questions still need to be answered. Chief among them is how much carbon is actually stored and how to monetise that, which will hopefully be figured out much sooner than the book predicts. Carbon is being stored, though, and regardless sustainable agriculture is also helpful for water retention and usage, water pollution, conservation, biodiversity, more nutritious and delicious foods, reduced chemical exposures, and other benefits.
Robinson does a good job of highlighting the existing work and history of practices globally. From Sikkim, India being a state with fully organic agriculture since 2016 to naming over 200 existing organisations from around the world, most of them working on indigenous and sustainable agriculture. As well as the monetary possibilities soil carbon can play in a global carbon market.
2. 2,000 Watt Society
Introduced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1998, the idea of the 2,000 Watt Society is for people in high emission countries to carry out lifestyles that limit their energy consumption to 2,000 watts a day per person. For comparison’s sake, here is the average per capita usage for a handful of countries: US (12,000), Western Europe (6,000), China (1,500), and India (1,000).
This would take not only individual behavioural changes, such as reduced home energy consumption or less carbon intensive eating habits, but it mostly relies on massive updates to make existing infrastructure more energy efficient. The prioritisation of per capita energy usage at 2,000 watts or less would rely on both government regulations as well as private actors committing to this idea as a foundational element of infrastructure projects.
3. Liberation Theology (or the Mondragon Model)
Liberation theology described a change in mid-20th century Latin America from elite control to control returned to the people. Led by individuals in the Catholic church, this movement saw its industrial counterpart in Mondragon when a Catholic priest began a workers’ co-operative in the Basque region of Spain in 1959.
At some point most graduate students or people focused on socially innovative business are exposed to the famous Mondragon case, or as Robinson describes it, “the jewel in the crown”. Mondragon is now a global federation of over 260 companies and subsidiaries (including banks and insurance companies) with over 75,000 workers and over $14 billion in revenue. The co-operative model allows for all workers to be a part of the business decisions and gain from the success of the companies. From equal rights to vote and ownership to a 6:1 wage ratio, the Mondragon model centers social responsibility within financially profitable businesses.
Robinson posits the possibility of universally scaling the Mondragon model throughout society along with other models: “open admission, democratic organization, the sovereignty of labor, the instrumental and subordinate nature of capital, participatory management, payment solidarity, inter-cooperation, social transformation, universality, and education.” Shifting enough away from capitalism to get out of the predatory and unequal elements of it but staying enough within the structure to not scare away the business world.
To end, one of the miniature chapters from the book, part riddle, part guidance, and part inspiration on our journey forward:
I am a thing. I am alive and I am dead. I am conscious and unconscious. Sentient but not. A multiplicity and a whole. A polity of some sextillions of citizens.
I spiral a god that is not a god, and I am not a god. I am not a mother, though I am many mothers. I keep you alive. I will kill you someday, or I won’t and something else will, and then, either way, I will take you in. Someday soon.
You know what I am. Now find me out.
