January 2, 2026 • 39 mins
Kim Stanley Robinson’s life project has been imagining utopias. He’s a science-fiction writer best known in climate circles for writing Ministry For The Future, which depicts a future in which the world gets to grips with climate change following an extreme heat event that kills millions. Robinson joins Akshat Rathi this week on Zero to discuss how to create better futures and whether it’s right to pursue abundance.
Explore more of Kim Stanley Robinson on Zero:
- Kim Stanley Robinson imagines utopia in 2025
- How a utopian sci-fi author writes toward a low-carbon future
Other episode in the Imagine series:
- George Saunders goes inside the mind of a climate denier
- Monira Al Qadiri on building monuments to the end of oil
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Andam, Sharon Chen and Laura Millan. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati this week how to
imagine a better Future? Happy New Year, and welcome to
(00:20):
twenty twenty six. I like starting the new year by
thinking about a better future, and what better way to
do that than to hear from someone whose life project
has been imagining utopias Kim Stanley Robinson. If you're not
already familiar with his work, stan is a sci fi writer,
perhaps best known for his Mars trilogy published in the
(00:42):
nineteen nineties, but for the climate crowd, it is his
twenty twenty book Ministry for the Future that he is
best known for. It is one of the boldest and
most imaginative works of climate fiction. Stan is a big thinker,
and he has a remarkable ability to put the problems
of today and of one hundred years from now into perspective.
(01:03):
He also gives me a sense of realistic optimism and
helps me break out of the here and now. Listening
to him is like an antidote to the new cycle
that occupies my day to day as a journalist. So
it was an absolute pleasure to sit down with him
at COP thirty one in Brazil and to welcome him
back on zero for our very first episode of twenty
(01:23):
twenty six, where we talk about abundance and adequacy, what
will trigger people to take more action, and how to
think about living your life better. Stan, welcome back to
the show.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Thank you, auk Shot, it's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I want to take a big step back because this
is the start of a new year and people will
be thinking about how the year unfolds. What are the
new goals they would like to set, where they would
like their lives to go, where they would like the
planet to go, and maybe take a philosophical step back.
We were to provide your own philosophy of how you
live your life? How do you explain it?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I from my youth have felt that the best description
of life is a form of existentialism. So this comes
out of well, it has a long tradition back to
pascalon before. But really world War two start and Camu
French existentialism was a worldwide moment of awareness, and I
(02:29):
guess I would define it like this. We are biological
creatures with these brains that evolve to what they are,
that have thoughts and memories and projections into the future
in forms of imagination. Meaning is not provided by the universe.
It's a gigantic sequence of accidents. But meaning seems to
(02:52):
be very important to human beings. It is to me,
I think it is to everybody. You want meaning, how
do you get it? You have to create it from
what you see in the world, essentially from scratch, and
what it manifests as is a project. You assign a
meaning to the universe. The meaning for me is my
(03:15):
project as human being, and so we become very project oriented,
and being without a project or without a project that
is meaningful to you is an immediate invitation to borderm
and despair. So projects are crucial to the human mind
because they create meaning. And so that's my working philosophy
(03:36):
and it has been since I was a student.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And that form of existentialism can also go in a
direction of nihilism, where the meaninglessness of the world can
be taken to mean nothing is worth it. And it's
not that I'm raising this as a philosophical point. There
is a strand of nihilism among young people that is growing,
and it's in the face of climate change, it's in
the face of artificial intelligence, and where they would find
(04:01):
themselves in society, whether they would find meaningful jobs. How
do you face up to nihilism in a time where
it's not just the technology trends and the biospheric trends
but also the political trends that tempt you in its direction.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Well, first you have to say that's it's right, that
nihilism is right in this first step of it, which
is to say that the universe does not have an
intrinsic meaning that is given to us to receive, we
have to make it up. So the first step of
nihilism is exactly the same as the first step of existentialism.
(04:43):
But the existentialist says a world without meaning is not
worth living, and Kamu often talks about this the consideration
of suicide, for instance, if I don't have meaning, why
even live at all? And this is the nihilist's position,
But you don't want to get stuck there, because nihilism
leads despair into a kind of an anui where you're
(05:03):
just you don't do anything because nothing means anything. And
you're right to point out the political elements of this.
If you're in the percaryat if you are told you
have to work like a dog your entire life, and
you're never going to be secure anyway, then the situation
looks even more dire. But from that basic self, same
(05:25):
situation of meaninglessness, if you choose a project that gives
your life meaning, then you have They talk about this
quite often. You've basically created a self from the conditions
that exist which are meaningless. You nevertheless have said, for me,
the meaning is this, I'm going to work on this project.
(05:47):
And if the project is not just self actualization, which
is good in and of itself, but is some kind
of a communal project, I do this for others. I
do this for the future generations. I do this, or
the community that I'm in, I do this for my
friends and my family. If it's other directed like that,
then the meaning can take on a real intensity, and
(06:10):
suddenly you do not have the problems of the nihilist anymore.
You have other problems. And it's hard to fight off
a feeling that whatever you do is not enough, because
that's true, but it's also true that one eight billionth
of the effort is not nothing. One eight billionth in
certain chemicals can be quite powerful. And then you need
(06:34):
to join a group, and then you're like one out
of one hundred rather than one out of eight billion,
and so it clumps together in shared projects that create
meaning because they are devoted to the welfare of others,
and then that pleases you as well. So there's a
nice circularity to it.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And it's certainly true that people who work on climate
change have a meaningful project in front of them. Yes,
and for them, the challenge has been more about not
seeing the change that they hope to see, that that
change is not happening at the pace at which they
thought or the theory said it could happen. And for
(07:15):
them it is very much an attempt to try to
stay on track despite the failures that they are seeing left,
right and center these days. Yes, you know, how do
you maintain yourself on the project once you have a project?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Well, it's a very good question, and I think it's
important too, because you want to avoid burnout. There are
two things going on here. You throw yourself into a
project and you are devoted to it with a burning passion,
perhaps you're young, and that goes on for five years
or so, and you begin to get weary of it.
And what's interesting is you can pass it on to
the next wave of enthusiasts that take the cause up
(07:56):
from you and you can relax a little. The other
thing to say is none of us are getting out
of this moment in history alive. Even the youngest of
your listeners are going to be living with this their
entire life. So you have to give up on the
concept of success as a finality. And you don't want
an end to your project anyway. But when it comes
to climate change, taking billions of tons of CO two
(08:20):
out of the atmosphere and sequestering them back on earth,
that's going to take decades no matter how we do it,
because it's so much physical stuff. And during that time,
there's going to be political defeats, there's going to be betrayals,
there's going to be people who don't get it. There's
going to be people who are fighting madly to destroy
the goodness of your project, which is evident to you.
(08:42):
And in all that you just have to say, look,
this is the work I've been I've been handed this
moment in history. I can't escape it. I'm going to
do the work and not worry too much about seeing success.
In my lifetime. The success has often come in the
midst of a gigantic cloud of failures that are more
obvious and yet under the surface churn, some quite successful
(09:07):
things can be happening, and for sure, in our climate
change struggle, some really successful things have been happening.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I want to come to successes because they are real.
But let's stick with the failures and maybe even look
at one other strand of failure, where the attempt from
certain political factions, Donald Trump being one of them, not
the only one, of taking policies, activities, positions that are
(09:36):
irrational from almost every perspective you can see, perhaps the
one self interested perspective maybe, but there is no logical
way in which you can try and combine all the
myriad of things that Donald Trump and many right wing
politicians around the world have done to try and slow
down climate efforts. In the face of that kind of
(09:59):
irrational how do you build on solutions that are meant
and that have to be created on a logical rational basis.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, that's hard. It's hard to understand the irrationality and
explain it. So let's just say that if you are
caught up in your own mortal mind and realize that
you're going to die, there's a certain type of personality
that says, therefore, the rest of the world has to die. Also,
(10:31):
nothing gets to survive me because I'm the only thing
that matters. And this kind of fundamental narcissism. The syndrome
is called the girder Damerung, the twilight of the gods.
The gods know they're going down. This is at the
end of Wagner, but it's very common in storytelling around
the world back into the Palelithic. When the powerful ones
know they're going down, they try to take everything down
(10:53):
with them in an irrational emotional hatred that others might
continue on in their absence. So this is the death drive.
I mean, Freud would call this the thanotropic death drive,
but you can also just say that it's a kind
of a cult behavior where the followers of a leader
want to die with that leader, and there's a lot
(11:14):
of death in that motivation, and that's the only thing
that explains it. Because you're harming your own you harm
your children, you harm the future generations, you don't care
you do it anyway. The malevolence involved is quite ugly.
So you have to admit that that element in the
human mind and the totality of the human subconscious mind
(11:38):
exists to a certain extent. In all of us, but
it's prominent in some pathological cases. If one of them
accidentally happens to become president at a moment where we
really need speed in climate change action, that's bad and
we're in a bad moment. You cannot deny it. But
on the other hand, people come and go and they
(11:58):
are not going to be able to kill the future.
So we had genocide equicide for a while. I was
when Trump became president. I was talking about this attempt
at future side. I'm going to kill the future. You
cannot kill the future. It's coming whether you like it
or not. And the future that is inevitable by the
force of history as it is right now, is in
(12:20):
fact going to be more diverse, more inclusive, more equitable,
because it couldn't get less equitable than it is now,
and a balance and a pendulum swing is going to happen.
It couldn't it possibly get less diverse because of simple
demographics of who's alive on this earth and who's going
to be alive in the times to come. So you
can see the kind of parochial, jealous and vindictive aspect
(12:46):
of this future side. But you can't kill the future.
So eventually the tide will pass these people by. They
will in fact die. The next moment in history will
be struggling still to make a decent civilization that's in
balces with its biosphere.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And this future side idea, I think hasn't been talked
about enough just because of the sheer amount of near
present damage that's being done. But the future side is real.
There are cancelations of satellites, there are cancelations of climate
science programs, there are cancelations of health programs, the cancelations
(13:22):
of economic data that they don't want you to see.
They don't want you to know what the future would
look like, even though we have the ability to at
least get a peak at it and maybe prepare for
what's coming our way.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. It's as if to say,
since we are walking into a minefield, let's poke at
our eyes. Well, this is not the right response. The
better to have knowledge, to have that eyesight to see
how to navigate a dangerous future. So this is a
part of the death cult aspect of it, that there's
(13:58):
a malevolence to this that is destructive in the extreme.
What I point out as being the worst of all
is an attack on medical research, when those very same
people making the attack, the moment they feel the slight
spick sick, they will run to a doctor. They will
run to a scientist and say, please, can you save
my life. So this is a real test. When you
(14:18):
are scared and you fear for your own life, you
run to a scientist. And so that shows what you
truly believe in, no matter what you say, no matter
what politics you espouse. When push comes to shove and
you're scared, you run to science. And then if there
are people attacking science, it's not as if their wealth
is going to buy them out of the situation they're creating,
(14:42):
because you can't buy a cure that doesn't exist. And
so when you kill medical research budgets, you're killing human
lives or you're killing human longevity. I myself would have
been dead twice if it weren't for medical research, and
I'm going to say that's true of almost everybody my age,
because we've extended human lifetime. So I medical research I
(15:04):
once calculated, and believe me, this is completely a heuristic device.
I would love to see the numbers confirmed that every
ten billion dollars spent on medical research extends the lifetime
of everybody alive on Earth, all eight billion of us,
by about one month on average. Just actuarial tables. You
might not get that month, but you might get ten years.
(15:26):
And so this killing of ten billion dollars of medical research,
which is one of the first acts of the Trump administration,
well eight billion months is six hundred and sixty seven
million years of human consciousness that has been knocked on
the head. That's quite a massive crime. And it's disguised
(15:50):
in numbers, it's disguised in budgets. But when you think
about how we really live on this planet as biological beings,
to interfere with our knowledge of how our bodies work
and how the world works is profoundly destructive.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
There has to be an answer to Trump, which is
currently being thought about on the American left among the
Democratic Party. One of the ideas that has taken perhaps
hold among a larger portion of that class of people
is the idea of abundance, This idea that what we
(16:23):
need to do right now, what environmentalists have actually gotten wrong,
is to stop building things, and we have to go
back to building things, and we need to get rid
of regulations that are stopping building things. We need to
bring abundant clean energy, we need to bring abundant housing,
and that it is something that America is capable of doing.
(16:46):
And you just need to sort the system out in
these places, mostly through cutting regulations to get to this future.
For someone who grew up in India who now lives
in the UK, who looks at the world and sees
that the world's richest economy is going through a political
crisis and that the answer is abundance is a bit off.
(17:10):
There is something awfully wrong that you are saying the
richest economy in the world, the solution to the problem
is to actually have more abundance, more resources. How do
you think abundance is an idea works as an antidote
to Trump? And if it isn't the right idea, what
is the right idea?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I don't think it works. I don't like this term abundance.
I think it's a category error or a false categorization.
As you point out, America richest society in all history.
But let's say, what if the word was adequacy, what
if the word was equality? And then there's an old
(17:51):
English saying that I quite love enough is as good
as a feast. You have to remember that it was
hungry people that made up that saying, and enough is adequacy.
If you have food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, which
is requiring also electricity, If you have those at an
(18:12):
adequate level, which can be relatively as modest as the
human body itself, you're okay. You don't need abundance beyond that.
Then you get into excess, luxury, wealth beyond need and
all these crazy areas that is very common in American life.
And also abundance that the idea that we don't have
(18:34):
it because of regulations that environmentalists impose. This is really
a blaming of the victim or a blaming of the
party that is lost. And also to the extent that
environmental regulations have won, we have clean water, we have
soil that isn't poisoned by pesticides. The regulations have been important.
(18:55):
And you know the thing that is used by this
abundance crowd that the Empire State Building was built in
a year, which is really kind of remarkable. It's also
true that about fifty people died in that effort, and
so the lack of regulation there helped to go fast.
But it was dangerous and it killed people. Is that
the kind of abundance we want to go back to.
(19:17):
I don't think so. I don't even think that people
promulgating this notion of abundance they haven't thought it through.
They've thought, oh, if only those regulations were there, we
would have high speed rail. A. It would be first
good to just have decent low speed rail, and B.
Those regulations were often imposed for a reason to reduce
(19:39):
damage to humans, and so it isn't a trivial thing.
There can be redundant or fossilized regulations that are no
longer adequate. There can be too much red tape. There's
always room for clarity and for improvements in system. But
to take that as a primary principle is so niggling
and small minded, and also getting the wrong end of
(20:02):
the stick. What you want is adequacy and also equality.
There should be I've been saying this for years as
part of a utopian project, and it's been enacted in
history a few times before that there should be a
floor that you can't fall under. There should be a
ceiling you can't crash through in terms of human wealth.
(20:24):
So adequacy is the floor. Nobody should be living in
em miserated situations, and right now about a billion to
two billion people are This claim that we've solved the
problem of poverty is the claim of rich people in
cultures that don't look around. So adequate floor and then
the ceiling, Well, it can be kind of high, but
(20:44):
it doesn't have to be too high before it becomes ridiculous.
If what's ten times adequacy, that's ten adequacies. What do
you do with ten adequacies? It's luxury beyond belief. So
the rage ratio should be one that is a floor
of adequacy, and then a maximum of ten times that. Well,
right now the wage ratio in the United States is
(21:07):
one to one thy five hundred, So they're off by
a couple magnitudes of what's really right, what's really just.
And so I revert to this notion that a floor
and a ceiling to the human material wealth is a
good thing. And it would also since we are talking
(21:27):
about climate change, it would be good for the biosphere too,
because it's precisely the people above the ceiling and below
the floor that are hardest on the biosphere, the poor
because they cut down the forest, because they got to
cook the meal that night. It sickens them and it's
bad for the planet, but they have to do it
to stay alive. The rich hyper consumption and burning a
(21:48):
whole lot of carbon just to play around, and they
could get just as much fun out of life. And
I've proved this in my own life, and I'll take
them out to show it by going down to the
very local park and throwing pebbles at a at a
bottle on the other side of the stream, see if
you can hit it or not, or going for a run.
In other words, the very basic physical pleasures of being
an animal on this planet. You don't need millions to
(22:11):
support that. So the people above the ceiling, the people
below the floor are a problem. If we could rectify that,
we would a lot of things would come back into balance.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After the break, I asked Stan why increasing extreme weather
events don't seem to be translating into increased climate action.
If you're enjoying this episode, please take a moment to
rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Recently,
Qualum wrote huge fan of the show. I listen every week.
Keeps my climate anxiety at bay. Thanks Qualum. If we
(23:01):
leave the extremes of the politics aside. Yes, and we
look at the real economy. There are still struggles in
the real economy that have slowed down climate action. People's
wallets are a bit thinner, inflation is higher, the feeling
(23:22):
of security is going away. Yes, and so when you
talk about climate change, which is here and has impacts
around the world today but marginal relative to your everyday living, Yes,
what is it that we need to do to try
and convince people that what they are going to see
in climate action is in their benefit now and in
(23:46):
the future, and that it is worthwhile to act on
it now and thus elect the kind of leaders that
would understand the challenge and the future that we need
to build.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Well, first, you want to say that this is right
that when you're in the precariat paying for that month's rent,
when you're really working paycheck to paycheck, and month month
is so overwriting and consideration that if you're asked to
pay more that you don't have in order to help
(24:21):
the situation a decade from now, you simply can't do it.
So it needs to be a collective response that has
to do with government action, because what you call the
real economy is an artificial construct made by law. The
laws could be changed such that instead of paying the
green premium, you got compensated for doing the right thing
(24:41):
for the climate, to the point where, and marvelously, this
is coming true in semi accidental ways that have to
do with technological advancements. It's cheaper to do the right
thing than to do the wrong thing when it comes to,
for instance, buying energy for yourself. And so this is
a great illustration. The solar powered industries were first subsidized
(25:06):
by governments to do the experimental work, and then rolled
out when it became clear that these worked very, very
well and began to change the world with a startling rapidity.
And this is one of the great signs of our time.
That means that when you come to a cop and
you see all of the broken promises, you're only seeing
(25:27):
part of the story, because you're also seeing a world
in which clean energy is cheaper than new fossil fuel energy.
And so a transformation has happened that is partly structural.
It is in the real economy, but the real economy
being a matter of laws, you tweak the laws, and
if you tweak the ways in which we evaluate success.
(25:48):
In other words, what's profitable. Well, if you include a
ten year definition as part of the baseline evaluation itself,
then you begin to get new forms of accounting in
effect that say that doing the right thing for the
biosphere is actually the most economical thing, because we've made
(26:12):
it that way.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And imagination is a wonderful thing, you know. When the
solar panel was invented, the imagination was, one day we'll
be able to capture the power of the sun and
bring it to the people. That was in nineteen fifty four.
In twenty twenty five, that's reality. But that imagination took
a while to get there, and the imagination was at
(26:35):
least in the near past, to try and create a
form of energy that won't be polluting, that would be
available for free whenever the sun is out. And yet
the benefits that have come from unlocking solar power are
things that people didn't imagine. So if you were in
the path of Hurricane Melissa and you had solar panels
(26:58):
on your roof in Jamaica, you had power after the
storm went away, and you could bring your neighbors to
your home and charge your phones and get the basic
needs sorted. If you are in Pakistan and cannot afford
liquified natural gas because the prices are too high. But
you can buy a sole panelfol your roof in a
(27:20):
country that's heating up too fast and you need air
conditioning right when the sun is on the top of
your head. It provides climate adaptation in a zero carbon way. Yes,
what can you do to help people unlock how to
imagine better futures?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
For me, as a science fiction writer, what I've always
defined that as is finding new stories that come out
of scientific progress. So this is a perpetual fountain of
new stories, and there aren't that many new stories to
be told, given that there's tens and thousands of stories
(27:58):
told every year by all of us. Find a new
story is like a phoenix egg or something. And yet
the sciences are producing all these new developments all the
time that can be turned into stories, And to me,
that's one of the great glories of being a science
fiction writer. So in this situation, and if you add
to that the idea of utopia, which I will just
(28:20):
say is simply a future society that works better than
this one right now, which ought not to be impossible,
then you begin to think, well, if we did this,
say we did progressive taxation, and that the more money
you made, the more in taxes you paid on those
higher amounts. Well, this is actually something out of the
(28:40):
past that if it was brought back again, you might
be able to decrease inequality. In other words, everybody works hard,
and so everybody in society ought to have a certain
amount of security that's paid forth through the public process
of government of the collective. And if everybody felt kind
(29:01):
of secure what I'm describing here as a kind of
social democracy, really, but it could be pushed. That's better
society than now, where everybody feels precarious, and that's their
right to feel precarious, because one health crisis and they
could be bankrupt and out of a job, and that's
not a good feeling to have. So everybody's mildly scared
(29:22):
or completely terrified. But it doesn't have to be that way,
and you can easily see the ways out of it,
and some of them are old ways brought back. Then
they have to be argued for and people have to
be persuaded that it's a good idea in a world
of careless and foolish billionaires. The idea that there shouldn't
be billionaires is not such a radical idea. These are
(29:43):
not geniuses. These are rich people and often making remarkably
heavy carbon footprint and saying foolish things and interfering in
the political process by buying politicians. Maybe progressive taxation would
solve many and many of these problems. And it was
true right after World War two. And these were people
(30:05):
who had seen World War two, they had lived World
War two, and they said, rich people are implicated in
that whole war happening. I ordinary citizen did not cause
that war, but somehow rich people seem to have been
part of the cause, and so we don't want them anymore.
And in the nineteen fifties was a completely different structure
(30:25):
of feeling, and progressive taxation was quite intense, including amongst
in the United States, a Republican or you can just say,
conservative governments would have progressive taxation as much as liberal ones.
So social democracy was kind of a thing, and then
it got a clawed back. Whenever there's a commons, there
is enclosure. So if you could imagine government and the
(30:48):
sharing of a by way of government of what society
creates for itself amongst all the people creating it, if
that's a sort of a commons an abstract comments rather
than a piece of land. There will be enclosure. People
will be cutting away at it, trying to take private
profit out of the public good. And so in the
(31:08):
neoliberal era from nineteen eighty to about what twenty eight
or twenty twenty, about forty years of private over public. Well,
now I think the tide has turned because people have
seen how bad it's gotten. Inequality is terrible, the biosphere
that we rely on is being wrecked for short term
profit taking. All of that needs to change, and people
(31:30):
are ready for new ideas, but sometimes there's old ideas
that are perfectly fit to purpose.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
One trigger for that backlash against the rich was the
World War, which was terrible on so many levels for
people and for the biosphere. Your book Ministry for the
Future starts with something like that as a terrible event
happening in a heat wave in India, killing millions of people,
(31:55):
which leads a lot of people to then act. There
has been this idea that this is what will unlock
climate action because extreme weather events, really bad ones are
here and once people see it, they cannot unsee it,
and that will act. It hasn't translated into reality. Are
we still waiting for a bad one or is there
(32:17):
a different way in which we could trigger action.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I think it has translated into reality. We haven't had
a mass heat death, which is all too possible. I
live in fear of that. We did have COVID eight
million people died. That's one on every thousand people in
this planet. That isn't odds. You would like if you
were in a game of Russian Roulette. There one out
of every thousand persons died. And we were traumatized as
(32:44):
a society, as a global society by twenty twenty through
about twenty twenty three, which is actually years difficult to
remember because they're blurred by the weirdness of it and
the trauma, and there's always repression. But now we're different.
And I would say this having written about climate change
since about nineteen ninety five, and I wrote Ministry for
(33:06):
the Future in twenty nineteen in a state of anger
and inflicted. This fictional mass death is a way to
make people pay attention. Well, in reality, COVID did it
for me, and the attitude towards climate change and biosphere action,
the reality that the biosphere can effect kill people in
rec civilization known to all, and so the reaction has
(33:30):
been strong. People are paying attention, there's strong pulling, there's
strong support for all of us doing more to protect
the biosphere. We've had these thirty by thirty protection acts,
We've had all kinds of things appear that I would
have said were completely utopian just in the year twenty nineteen.
(33:50):
The problem is that there's churn. There's also the failures.
Things are going too slowly compared to what would be optimal,
but they're still so you can't just say, oh my gosh,
we've stuck our head in the sand, especially when the
we is global humanity. I mean, some people are fighting
(34:10):
every day to make a better world. It's their project
to get to a dodgeer mass extinction event and to
create a healthy, long term relationship with the biosphere for
human beings.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
One utopian idea that I want us to imagine is
to think about a world in which distributed energy becomes ubiquitous.
And I am a journalist, so I have an imagination
of a near future because I'm seeing too much of
the reality, and so I can't extend it for our future.
(34:43):
But in the near future, this reality could come to pass,
and it has implications of all sorts. One phrase that
I've heard use is energy is destiny. That countries that
are able to control the dominant form of energy are
able to wield geopolitical power. It's true with coal for
(35:06):
Britain in the nineteenth century, has been true for America
with oil in the twentieth century, and now even in
the twenty first century. But with solar and wind and
hydropower and geothermal, there is an ability to try and
make that energy distributed and democratic. What kind of world
do you think we would have geopolitically if that reality
(35:32):
were to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Well, first, I want to clarify the technological aspect of
this scenario that you describe, because it doesn't have to
be individualized where each person has a solar panel that
is like an umbrella that powers their life. What you
want is that the collective, which is to say, all
of us and as a public good, has access to
(35:57):
electrical power that is cleanly generated and is cheap enough
for the individual that they can power a life that
has the pleasures of modernity. And that's a little bit
less electricity than people are imagining, because a lot of
stuff that really is fulfilling for human beings has nothing
(36:18):
to do with your energy supply, but healthy food, light
at night. It's true that electricity has augmented our paleolithic
minds and bodies in ways that everybody enjoys. It isn't
very much. But if it was owned by all of
us together and then you had to buy, you bought
(36:39):
it at what would effectively be not a subsidized price,
but a fair price that represents how much it costs
to make it parceled out, so that there isn't some
private property a person or party making enormous profits out
of something that everybody needs and does. This is called rent,
I mean the economic everybody knows what rent is for
(37:01):
your apartment, but rent as an economic thing is just
middlemen who take value, sucking it out along the way.
And so when Kaines said there should be the euthanasia
of the rent to your class, he didn't mean landlords
in particular. He meant all of those people who managed
(37:23):
to suck value out of the system without doing anything
except owning it along the way. So here, public over
private is a primary principle. And when it comes to energy,
we now have the technology to create energy that doesn't
burn carbon into the atmosphere. It does a little bit,
but you get so much more electricity back for it
(37:45):
that it becomes what we call clean energy systems, and that,
of course is a more detailed discussion to have. But
once you've got that, then you begin to think, what
are the other necessities that should be equally well distributed?
Democratic housing, food, clean water, sewage systems. All these things
(38:07):
need to be public goods and something that everybody owns
and pays for together, rather than a private individual's sucking
away by way of the fact that you need it,
that you have to have it to have a decent life,
or even to stay alive at all. Well, this needs
(38:28):
to be taken into consideration in the political process, and
so you'll get to again a situation where the public
good takes precedents over private interests.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Thank you Stan, thank you Auckshot, and thank you for
listening to zero. Now for the sound of.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
The week four three two one ignition and lift off
Falcon nine ghost SpaceX goes to analytics b.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
S six B rising, extending nearly four decades of the
precise sea level record from space.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
That is the sound of the European Space Agencies Sentinel
six B satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket
in November. The satellite will continue a decades long mission
to track global sea levels, a key measure of climate change.
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
read and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
(39:36):
This episode was produced by Oscar boyd Our. Theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Samersati, Moses Andem,
Laura Milan, and Sharon chen i'm Akshadrati Back soon.
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati this week how to
imagine a better Future? Happy New Year, and welcome to
(00:20):
twenty twenty six. I like starting the new year by
thinking about a better future, and what better way to
do that than to hear from someone whose life project
has been imagining utopias Kim Stanley Robinson. If you're not
already familiar with his work, stan is a sci fi writer,
perhaps best known for his Mars trilogy published in the
(00:42):
nineteen nineties, but for the climate crowd, it is his
twenty twenty book Ministry for the Future that he is
best known for. It is one of the boldest and
most imaginative works of climate fiction. Stan is a big thinker,
and he has a remarkable ability to put the problems
of today and of one hundred years from now into perspective.
(01:03):
He also gives me a sense of realistic optimism and
helps me break out of the here and now. Listening
to him is like an antidote to the new cycle
that occupies my day to day as a journalist. So
it was an absolute pleasure to sit down with him
at COP thirty one in Brazil and to welcome him
back on zero for our very first episode of twenty
(01:23):
twenty six, where we talk about abundance and adequacy, what
will trigger people to take more action, and how to
think about living your life better. Stan, welcome back to
the show.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Thank you, auk Shot, it's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I want to take a big step back because this
is the start of a new year and people will
be thinking about how the year unfolds. What are the
new goals they would like to set, where they would
like their lives to go, where they would like the
planet to go, and maybe take a philosophical step back.
We were to provide your own philosophy of how you
live your life? How do you explain it?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I from my youth have felt that the best description
of life is a form of existentialism. So this comes
out of well, it has a long tradition back to
pascalon before. But really world War two start and Camu
French existentialism was a worldwide moment of awareness, and I
(02:29):
guess I would define it like this. We are biological
creatures with these brains that evolve to what they are,
that have thoughts and memories and projections into the future
in forms of imagination. Meaning is not provided by the universe.
It's a gigantic sequence of accidents. But meaning seems to
(02:52):
be very important to human beings. It is to me,
I think it is to everybody. You want meaning, how
do you get it? You have to create it from
what you see in the world, essentially from scratch, and
what it manifests as is a project. You assign a
meaning to the universe. The meaning for me is my
(03:15):
project as human being, and so we become very project oriented,
and being without a project or without a project that
is meaningful to you is an immediate invitation to borderm
and despair. So projects are crucial to the human mind
because they create meaning. And so that's my working philosophy
(03:36):
and it has been since I was a student.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And that form of existentialism can also go in a
direction of nihilism, where the meaninglessness of the world can
be taken to mean nothing is worth it. And it's
not that I'm raising this as a philosophical point. There
is a strand of nihilism among young people that is growing,
and it's in the face of climate change, it's in
the face of artificial intelligence, and where they would find
(04:01):
themselves in society, whether they would find meaningful jobs. How
do you face up to nihilism in a time where
it's not just the technology trends and the biospheric trends
but also the political trends that tempt you in its direction.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Well, first you have to say that's it's right, that
nihilism is right in this first step of it, which
is to say that the universe does not have an
intrinsic meaning that is given to us to receive, we
have to make it up. So the first step of
nihilism is exactly the same as the first step of existentialism.
(04:43):
But the existentialist says a world without meaning is not
worth living, and Kamu often talks about this the consideration
of suicide, for instance, if I don't have meaning, why
even live at all? And this is the nihilist's position,
But you don't want to get stuck there, because nihilism
leads despair into a kind of an anui where you're
(05:03):
just you don't do anything because nothing means anything. And
you're right to point out the political elements of this.
If you're in the percaryat if you are told you
have to work like a dog your entire life, and
you're never going to be secure anyway, then the situation
looks even more dire. But from that basic self, same
(05:25):
situation of meaninglessness, if you choose a project that gives
your life meaning, then you have They talk about this
quite often. You've basically created a self from the conditions
that exist which are meaningless. You nevertheless have said, for me,
the meaning is this, I'm going to work on this project.
(05:47):
And if the project is not just self actualization, which
is good in and of itself, but is some kind
of a communal project, I do this for others. I
do this for the future generations. I do this, or
the community that I'm in, I do this for my
friends and my family. If it's other directed like that,
then the meaning can take on a real intensity, and
(06:10):
suddenly you do not have the problems of the nihilist anymore.
You have other problems. And it's hard to fight off
a feeling that whatever you do is not enough, because
that's true, but it's also true that one eight billionth
of the effort is not nothing. One eight billionth in
certain chemicals can be quite powerful. And then you need
(06:34):
to join a group, and then you're like one out
of one hundred rather than one out of eight billion,
and so it clumps together in shared projects that create
meaning because they are devoted to the welfare of others,
and then that pleases you as well. So there's a
nice circularity to it.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And it's certainly true that people who work on climate
change have a meaningful project in front of them. Yes,
and for them, the challenge has been more about not
seeing the change that they hope to see, that that
change is not happening at the pace at which they
thought or the theory said it could happen. And for
(07:15):
them it is very much an attempt to try to
stay on track despite the failures that they are seeing left,
right and center these days. Yes, you know, how do
you maintain yourself on the project once you have a project?
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Well, it's a very good question, and I think it's
important too, because you want to avoid burnout. There are
two things going on here. You throw yourself into a
project and you are devoted to it with a burning passion,
perhaps you're young, and that goes on for five years
or so, and you begin to get weary of it.
And what's interesting is you can pass it on to
the next wave of enthusiasts that take the cause up
(07:56):
from you and you can relax a little. The other
thing to say is none of us are getting out
of this moment in history alive. Even the youngest of
your listeners are going to be living with this their
entire life. So you have to give up on the
concept of success as a finality. And you don't want
an end to your project anyway. But when it comes
to climate change, taking billions of tons of CO two
(08:20):
out of the atmosphere and sequestering them back on earth,
that's going to take decades no matter how we do it,
because it's so much physical stuff. And during that time,
there's going to be political defeats, there's going to be betrayals,
there's going to be people who don't get it. There's
going to be people who are fighting madly to destroy
the goodness of your project, which is evident to you.
(08:42):
And in all that you just have to say, look,
this is the work I've been I've been handed this
moment in history. I can't escape it. I'm going to
do the work and not worry too much about seeing success.
In my lifetime. The success has often come in the
midst of a gigantic cloud of failures that are more
obvious and yet under the surface churn, some quite successful
(09:07):
things can be happening, and for sure, in our climate
change struggle, some really successful things have been happening.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I want to come to successes because they are real.
But let's stick with the failures and maybe even look
at one other strand of failure, where the attempt from
certain political factions, Donald Trump being one of them, not
the only one, of taking policies, activities, positions that are
(09:36):
irrational from almost every perspective you can see, perhaps the
one self interested perspective maybe, but there is no logical
way in which you can try and combine all the
myriad of things that Donald Trump and many right wing
politicians around the world have done to try and slow
down climate efforts. In the face of that kind of
(09:59):
irrational how do you build on solutions that are meant
and that have to be created on a logical rational basis.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Well, that's hard. It's hard to understand the irrationality and
explain it. So let's just say that if you are
caught up in your own mortal mind and realize that
you're going to die, there's a certain type of personality
that says, therefore, the rest of the world has to die. Also,
(10:31):
nothing gets to survive me because I'm the only thing
that matters. And this kind of fundamental narcissism. The syndrome
is called the girder Damerung, the twilight of the gods.
The gods know they're going down. This is at the
end of Wagner, but it's very common in storytelling around
the world back into the Palelithic. When the powerful ones
know they're going down, they try to take everything down
(10:53):
with them in an irrational emotional hatred that others might
continue on in their absence. So this is the death drive.
I mean, Freud would call this the thanotropic death drive,
but you can also just say that it's a kind
of a cult behavior where the followers of a leader
want to die with that leader, and there's a lot
(11:14):
of death in that motivation, and that's the only thing
that explains it. Because you're harming your own you harm
your children, you harm the future generations, you don't care
you do it anyway. The malevolence involved is quite ugly.
So you have to admit that that element in the
human mind and the totality of the human subconscious mind
(11:38):
exists to a certain extent. In all of us, but
it's prominent in some pathological cases. If one of them
accidentally happens to become president at a moment where we
really need speed in climate change action, that's bad and
we're in a bad moment. You cannot deny it. But
on the other hand, people come and go and they
(11:58):
are not going to be able to kill the future.
So we had genocide equicide for a while. I was
when Trump became president. I was talking about this attempt
at future side. I'm going to kill the future. You
cannot kill the future. It's coming whether you like it
or not. And the future that is inevitable by the
force of history as it is right now, is in
(12:20):
fact going to be more diverse, more inclusive, more equitable,
because it couldn't get less equitable than it is now,
and a balance and a pendulum swing is going to happen.
It couldn't it possibly get less diverse because of simple
demographics of who's alive on this earth and who's going
to be alive in the times to come. So you
can see the kind of parochial, jealous and vindictive aspect
(12:46):
of this future side. But you can't kill the future.
So eventually the tide will pass these people by. They
will in fact die. The next moment in history will
be struggling still to make a decent civilization that's in
balces with its biosphere.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And this future side idea, I think hasn't been talked
about enough just because of the sheer amount of near
present damage that's being done. But the future side is real.
There are cancelations of satellites, there are cancelations of climate
science programs, there are cancelations of health programs, the cancelations
(13:22):
of economic data that they don't want you to see.
They don't want you to know what the future would
look like, even though we have the ability to at
least get a peak at it and maybe prepare for
what's coming our way.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. It's as if to say,
since we are walking into a minefield, let's poke at
our eyes. Well, this is not the right response. The
better to have knowledge, to have that eyesight to see
how to navigate a dangerous future. So this is a
part of the death cult aspect of it, that there's
(13:58):
a malevolence to this that is destructive in the extreme.
What I point out as being the worst of all
is an attack on medical research, when those very same
people making the attack, the moment they feel the slight
spick sick, they will run to a doctor. They will
run to a scientist and say, please, can you save
my life. So this is a real test. When you
(14:18):
are scared and you fear for your own life, you
run to a scientist. And so that shows what you
truly believe in, no matter what you say, no matter
what politics you espouse. When push comes to shove and
you're scared, you run to science. And then if there
are people attacking science, it's not as if their wealth
is going to buy them out of the situation they're creating,
(14:42):
because you can't buy a cure that doesn't exist. And
so when you kill medical research budgets, you're killing human
lives or you're killing human longevity. I myself would have
been dead twice if it weren't for medical research, and
I'm going to say that's true of almost everybody my age,
because we've extended human lifetime. So I medical research I
(15:04):
once calculated, and believe me, this is completely a heuristic device.
I would love to see the numbers confirmed that every
ten billion dollars spent on medical research extends the lifetime
of everybody alive on Earth, all eight billion of us,
by about one month on average. Just actuarial tables. You
might not get that month, but you might get ten years.
(15:26):
And so this killing of ten billion dollars of medical research,
which is one of the first acts of the Trump administration,
well eight billion months is six hundred and sixty seven
million years of human consciousness that has been knocked on
the head. That's quite a massive crime. And it's disguised
(15:50):
in numbers, it's disguised in budgets. But when you think
about how we really live on this planet as biological beings,
to interfere with our knowledge of how our bodies work
and how the world works is profoundly destructive.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
There has to be an answer to Trump, which is
currently being thought about on the American left among the
Democratic Party. One of the ideas that has taken perhaps
hold among a larger portion of that class of people
is the idea of abundance, This idea that what we
(16:23):
need to do right now, what environmentalists have actually gotten wrong,
is to stop building things, and we have to go
back to building things, and we need to get rid
of regulations that are stopping building things. We need to
bring abundant clean energy, we need to bring abundant housing,
and that it is something that America is capable of doing.
(16:46):
And you just need to sort the system out in
these places, mostly through cutting regulations to get to this future.
For someone who grew up in India who now lives
in the UK, who looks at the world and sees
that the world's richest economy is going through a political
crisis and that the answer is abundance is a bit off.
(17:10):
There is something awfully wrong that you are saying the
richest economy in the world, the solution to the problem
is to actually have more abundance, more resources. How do
you think abundance is an idea works as an antidote
to Trump? And if it isn't the right idea, what
is the right idea?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
I don't think it works. I don't like this term abundance.
I think it's a category error or a false categorization.
As you point out, America richest society in all history.
But let's say, what if the word was adequacy, what
if the word was equality? And then there's an old
(17:51):
English saying that I quite love enough is as good
as a feast. You have to remember that it was
hungry people that made up that saying, and enough is adequacy.
If you have food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, which
is requiring also electricity, If you have those at an
(18:12):
adequate level, which can be relatively as modest as the
human body itself, you're okay. You don't need abundance beyond that.
Then you get into excess, luxury, wealth beyond need and
all these crazy areas that is very common in American life.
And also abundance that the idea that we don't have
(18:34):
it because of regulations that environmentalists impose. This is really
a blaming of the victim or a blaming of the
party that is lost. And also to the extent that
environmental regulations have won, we have clean water, we have
soil that isn't poisoned by pesticides. The regulations have been important.
(18:55):
And you know the thing that is used by this
abundance crowd that the Empire State Building was built in
a year, which is really kind of remarkable. It's also
true that about fifty people died in that effort, and
so the lack of regulation there helped to go fast.
But it was dangerous and it killed people. Is that
the kind of abundance we want to go back to.
(19:17):
I don't think so. I don't even think that people
promulgating this notion of abundance they haven't thought it through.
They've thought, oh, if only those regulations were there, we
would have high speed rail. A. It would be first
good to just have decent low speed rail, and B.
Those regulations were often imposed for a reason to reduce
(19:39):
damage to humans, and so it isn't a trivial thing.
There can be redundant or fossilized regulations that are no
longer adequate. There can be too much red tape. There's
always room for clarity and for improvements in system. But
to take that as a primary principle is so niggling
and small minded, and also getting the wrong end of
(20:02):
the stick. What you want is adequacy and also equality.
There should be I've been saying this for years as
part of a utopian project, and it's been enacted in
history a few times before that there should be a
floor that you can't fall under. There should be a
ceiling you can't crash through in terms of human wealth.
(20:24):
So adequacy is the floor. Nobody should be living in
em miserated situations, and right now about a billion to
two billion people are This claim that we've solved the
problem of poverty is the claim of rich people in
cultures that don't look around. So adequate floor and then
the ceiling, Well, it can be kind of high, but
(20:44):
it doesn't have to be too high before it becomes ridiculous.
If what's ten times adequacy, that's ten adequacies. What do
you do with ten adequacies? It's luxury beyond belief. So
the rage ratio should be one that is a floor
of adequacy, and then a maximum of ten times that. Well,
right now the wage ratio in the United States is
(21:07):
one to one thy five hundred, So they're off by
a couple magnitudes of what's really right, what's really just.
And so I revert to this notion that a floor
and a ceiling to the human material wealth is a
good thing. And it would also since we are talking
(21:27):
about climate change, it would be good for the biosphere too,
because it's precisely the people above the ceiling and below
the floor that are hardest on the biosphere, the poor
because they cut down the forest, because they got to
cook the meal that night. It sickens them and it's
bad for the planet, but they have to do it
to stay alive. The rich hyper consumption and burning a
(21:48):
whole lot of carbon just to play around, and they
could get just as much fun out of life. And
I've proved this in my own life, and I'll take
them out to show it by going down to the
very local park and throwing pebbles at a at a
bottle on the other side of the stream, see if
you can hit it or not, or going for a run.
In other words, the very basic physical pleasures of being
an animal on this planet. You don't need millions to
(22:11):
support that. So the people above the ceiling, the people
below the floor are a problem. If we could rectify that,
we would a lot of things would come back into balance.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After the break, I asked Stan why increasing extreme weather
events don't seem to be translating into increased climate action.
If you're enjoying this episode, please take a moment to
rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Recently,
Qualum wrote huge fan of the show. I listen every week.
Keeps my climate anxiety at bay. Thanks Qualum. If we
(23:01):
leave the extremes of the politics aside. Yes, and we
look at the real economy. There are still struggles in
the real economy that have slowed down climate action. People's
wallets are a bit thinner, inflation is higher, the feeling
(23:22):
of security is going away. Yes, and so when you
talk about climate change, which is here and has impacts
around the world today but marginal relative to your everyday living, Yes,
what is it that we need to do to try
and convince people that what they are going to see
in climate action is in their benefit now and in
(23:46):
the future, and that it is worthwhile to act on
it now and thus elect the kind of leaders that
would understand the challenge and the future that we need
to build.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Well, first, you want to say that this is right
that when you're in the precariat paying for that month's rent,
when you're really working paycheck to paycheck, and month month
is so overwriting and consideration that if you're asked to
pay more that you don't have in order to help
(24:21):
the situation a decade from now, you simply can't do it.
So it needs to be a collective response that has
to do with government action, because what you call the
real economy is an artificial construct made by law. The
laws could be changed such that instead of paying the
green premium, you got compensated for doing the right thing
(24:41):
for the climate, to the point where, and marvelously, this
is coming true in semi accidental ways that have to
do with technological advancements. It's cheaper to do the right
thing than to do the wrong thing when it comes to,
for instance, buying energy for yourself. And so this is
a great illustration. The solar powered industries were first subsidized
(25:06):
by governments to do the experimental work, and then rolled
out when it became clear that these worked very, very
well and began to change the world with a startling rapidity.
And this is one of the great signs of our time.
That means that when you come to a cop and
you see all of the broken promises, you're only seeing
(25:27):
part of the story, because you're also seeing a world
in which clean energy is cheaper than new fossil fuel energy.
And so a transformation has happened that is partly structural.
It is in the real economy, but the real economy
being a matter of laws, you tweak the laws, and
if you tweak the ways in which we evaluate success.
(25:48):
In other words, what's profitable. Well, if you include a
ten year definition as part of the baseline evaluation itself,
then you begin to get new forms of accounting in
effect that say that doing the right thing for the
biosphere is actually the most economical thing, because we've made
(26:12):
it that way.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
And imagination is a wonderful thing, you know. When the
solar panel was invented, the imagination was, one day we'll
be able to capture the power of the sun and
bring it to the people. That was in nineteen fifty four.
In twenty twenty five, that's reality. But that imagination took
a while to get there, and the imagination was at
(26:35):
least in the near past, to try and create a
form of energy that won't be polluting, that would be
available for free whenever the sun is out. And yet
the benefits that have come from unlocking solar power are
things that people didn't imagine. So if you were in
the path of Hurricane Melissa and you had solar panels
(26:58):
on your roof in Jamaica, you had power after the
storm went away, and you could bring your neighbors to
your home and charge your phones and get the basic
needs sorted. If you are in Pakistan and cannot afford
liquified natural gas because the prices are too high. But
you can buy a sole panelfol your roof in a
(27:20):
country that's heating up too fast and you need air
conditioning right when the sun is on the top of
your head. It provides climate adaptation in a zero carbon way. Yes,
what can you do to help people unlock how to
imagine better futures?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
For me, as a science fiction writer, what I've always
defined that as is finding new stories that come out
of scientific progress. So this is a perpetual fountain of
new stories, and there aren't that many new stories to
be told, given that there's tens and thousands of stories
(27:58):
told every year by all of us. Find a new
story is like a phoenix egg or something. And yet
the sciences are producing all these new developments all the
time that can be turned into stories, And to me,
that's one of the great glories of being a science
fiction writer. So in this situation, and if you add
to that the idea of utopia, which I will just
(28:20):
say is simply a future society that works better than
this one right now, which ought not to be impossible,
then you begin to think, well, if we did this,
say we did progressive taxation, and that the more money
you made, the more in taxes you paid on those
higher amounts. Well, this is actually something out of the
(28:40):
past that if it was brought back again, you might
be able to decrease inequality. In other words, everybody works hard,
and so everybody in society ought to have a certain
amount of security that's paid forth through the public process
of government of the collective. And if everybody felt kind
(29:01):
of secure what I'm describing here as a kind of
social democracy, really, but it could be pushed. That's better
society than now, where everybody feels precarious, and that's their
right to feel precarious, because one health crisis and they
could be bankrupt and out of a job, and that's
not a good feeling to have. So everybody's mildly scared
(29:22):
or completely terrified. But it doesn't have to be that way,
and you can easily see the ways out of it,
and some of them are old ways brought back. Then
they have to be argued for and people have to
be persuaded that it's a good idea in a world
of careless and foolish billionaires. The idea that there shouldn't
be billionaires is not such a radical idea. These are
(29:43):
not geniuses. These are rich people and often making remarkably
heavy carbon footprint and saying foolish things and interfering in
the political process by buying politicians. Maybe progressive taxation would
solve many and many of these problems. And it was
true right after World War two. And these were people
(30:05):
who had seen World War two, they had lived World
War two, and they said, rich people are implicated in
that whole war happening. I ordinary citizen did not cause
that war, but somehow rich people seem to have been
part of the cause, and so we don't want them anymore.
And in the nineteen fifties was a completely different structure
(30:25):
of feeling, and progressive taxation was quite intense, including amongst
in the United States, a Republican or you can just say,
conservative governments would have progressive taxation as much as liberal ones.
So social democracy was kind of a thing, and then
it got a clawed back. Whenever there's a commons, there
is enclosure. So if you could imagine government and the
(30:48):
sharing of a by way of government of what society
creates for itself amongst all the people creating it, if
that's a sort of a commons an abstract comments rather
than a piece of land. There will be enclosure. People
will be cutting away at it, trying to take private
profit out of the public good. And so in the
(31:08):
neoliberal era from nineteen eighty to about what twenty eight
or twenty twenty, about forty years of private over public. Well,
now I think the tide has turned because people have
seen how bad it's gotten. Inequality is terrible, the biosphere
that we rely on is being wrecked for short term
profit taking. All of that needs to change, and people
(31:30):
are ready for new ideas, but sometimes there's old ideas
that are perfectly fit to purpose.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
One trigger for that backlash against the rich was the
World War, which was terrible on so many levels for
people and for the biosphere. Your book Ministry for the
Future starts with something like that as a terrible event
happening in a heat wave in India, killing millions of people,
(31:55):
which leads a lot of people to then act. There
has been this idea that this is what will unlock
climate action because extreme weather events, really bad ones are
here and once people see it, they cannot unsee it,
and that will act. It hasn't translated into reality. Are
we still waiting for a bad one or is there
(32:17):
a different way in which we could trigger action.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
I think it has translated into reality. We haven't had
a mass heat death, which is all too possible. I
live in fear of that. We did have COVID eight
million people died. That's one on every thousand people in
this planet. That isn't odds. You would like if you
were in a game of Russian Roulette. There one out
of every thousand persons died. And we were traumatized as
(32:44):
a society, as a global society by twenty twenty through
about twenty twenty three, which is actually years difficult to
remember because they're blurred by the weirdness of it and
the trauma, and there's always repression. But now we're different.
And I would say this having written about climate change
since about nineteen ninety five, and I wrote Ministry for
(33:06):
the Future in twenty nineteen in a state of anger
and inflicted. This fictional mass death is a way to
make people pay attention. Well, in reality, COVID did it
for me, and the attitude towards climate change and biosphere action,
the reality that the biosphere can effect kill people in
rec civilization known to all, and so the reaction has
(33:30):
been strong. People are paying attention, there's strong pulling, there's
strong support for all of us doing more to protect
the biosphere. We've had these thirty by thirty protection acts,
We've had all kinds of things appear that I would
have said were completely utopian just in the year twenty nineteen.
(33:50):
The problem is that there's churn. There's also the failures.
Things are going too slowly compared to what would be optimal,
but they're still so you can't just say, oh my gosh,
we've stuck our head in the sand, especially when the
we is global humanity. I mean, some people are fighting
(34:10):
every day to make a better world. It's their project
to get to a dodgeer mass extinction event and to
create a healthy, long term relationship with the biosphere for
human beings.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
One utopian idea that I want us to imagine is
to think about a world in which distributed energy becomes ubiquitous.
And I am a journalist, so I have an imagination
of a near future because I'm seeing too much of
the reality, and so I can't extend it for our future.
(34:43):
But in the near future, this reality could come to pass,
and it has implications of all sorts. One phrase that
I've heard use is energy is destiny. That countries that
are able to control the dominant form of energy are
able to wield geopolitical power. It's true with coal for
(35:06):
Britain in the nineteenth century, has been true for America
with oil in the twentieth century, and now even in
the twenty first century. But with solar and wind and
hydropower and geothermal, there is an ability to try and
make that energy distributed and democratic. What kind of world
do you think we would have geopolitically if that reality
(35:32):
were to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Well, first, I want to clarify the technological aspect of
this scenario that you describe, because it doesn't have to
be individualized where each person has a solar panel that
is like an umbrella that powers their life. What you
want is that the collective, which is to say, all
of us and as a public good, has access to
(35:57):
electrical power that is cleanly generated and is cheap enough
for the individual that they can power a life that
has the pleasures of modernity. And that's a little bit
less electricity than people are imagining, because a lot of
stuff that really is fulfilling for human beings has nothing
(36:18):
to do with your energy supply, but healthy food, light
at night. It's true that electricity has augmented our paleolithic
minds and bodies in ways that everybody enjoys. It isn't
very much. But if it was owned by all of
us together and then you had to buy, you bought
(36:39):
it at what would effectively be not a subsidized price,
but a fair price that represents how much it costs
to make it parceled out, so that there isn't some
private property a person or party making enormous profits out
of something that everybody needs and does. This is called rent,
I mean the economic everybody knows what rent is for
(37:01):
your apartment, but rent as an economic thing is just
middlemen who take value, sucking it out along the way.
And so when Kaines said there should be the euthanasia
of the rent to your class, he didn't mean landlords
in particular. He meant all of those people who managed
(37:23):
to suck value out of the system without doing anything
except owning it along the way. So here, public over
private is a primary principle. And when it comes to energy,
we now have the technology to create energy that doesn't
burn carbon into the atmosphere. It does a little bit,
but you get so much more electricity back for it
(37:45):
that it becomes what we call clean energy systems, and that,
of course is a more detailed discussion to have. But
once you've got that, then you begin to think, what
are the other necessities that should be equally well distributed?
Democratic housing, food, clean water, sewage systems. All these things
(38:07):
need to be public goods and something that everybody owns
and pays for together, rather than a private individual's sucking
away by way of the fact that you need it,
that you have to have it to have a decent life,
or even to stay alive at all. Well, this needs
(38:28):
to be taken into consideration in the political process, and
so you'll get to again a situation where the public
good takes precedents over private interests.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Thank you Stan, thank you Auckshot, and thank you for
listening to zero. Now for the sound of.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
The week four three two one ignition and lift off
Falcon nine ghost SpaceX goes to analytics b.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
S six B rising, extending nearly four decades of the
precise sea level record from space.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
That is the sound of the European Space Agencies Sentinel
six B satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket
in November. The satellite will continue a decades long mission
to track global sea levels, a key measure of climate change.
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
read and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
(39:36):
This episode was produced by Oscar boyd Our. Theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to Samersati, Moses Andem,
Laura Milan, and Sharon chen i'm Akshadrati Back soon.
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