August 28, 2025 • 30 mins
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson imagines the future for a living. And the future is very much upon us. Robinson’s seminal 2020 novel Ministry for the Future opens in the year 2025. Robinson tells Akshat Rathi about how our real-life climate politics stack up against what he imagined for this era. They also discuss the dangers of science-fiction thinking in politics and why, for all his admiration of science and technology, Robinson remains so enamored with the unglamorous workings of a body like the United Nations.
This episode was originally broadcast in January 2025.
Explore further:
-
Past episode with Kim Stanley Robinson about climate utopias and optopias
-
Past episode with outgoing White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi about what the next four years will hold
-
Past episode with Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad about the country’s commitment to fossil fuel nonproliferation
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Sharon Chen, Siobhan Wagner, Ethan Steinberg, and Jessica Beck. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, it's Akua. I'm off for a summer break, and
so we're bringing you one of my favorite conversations from
the archive. It's with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson,
who wrote the Marsh trilogy and the climate thriller Ministry
for the Future. We talked earlier in the year about
how twenty twenty five might play out stand and get
everything right, but he got a lot more right than wrong,
(00:24):
and our conversation remains as relevant today as it was then,
perhaps even more so. I hope you're having a great summer,
and we'll be back with new episodes soon. Welcome to Zero.
I am Aksha Trati this week imagining Utopia in twenty
twenty five. I love reading science fiction, and one of
(00:56):
the sci fi writers who has had an impact on
me in recent years is Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan is
perhaps best known for his Mars trilogy, published in the
nineteen nineties, but Zero listeners are likely to know him
for his writings over the past decade on what climate
futures here on Earth might look like. Be it the
underwater metropolis he imagined in his novel New York twenty
(01:19):
one forty, or how a United Nations agency and its
dark wing of eco terrorists tackle the climate crisis in
his book The Ministry for the Future. Stan has been
a guest on Zero before, but I wanted to speak
with him again because that book, The Ministry for the
Future has been on my mind recently. Although it was
(01:41):
published in twenty twenty, the story in the book kicks
off in the year twenty twenty five, and well, here
we are. The book opens just after a fictional COP
twenty nine summit, as a deadly heat wave hits India.
The plot follows the choices faced by United Nations officials
in the new department called the Ministry for the Future
(02:02):
as they try to cope with the spiraling impacts of
a warming planet. With twenty twenty five upon us, I
wanted to see how Stan was feeling about the book's
version of this timeline and find out what he thought
about the unpredictable direction real life events have taken since
he wrote it. We talked about the value of science
fiction as a way to see into the future, as
(02:24):
well as sci fi's dangers, and why a writer who
admires science and technology so much still remains enamored with
the unglamorous work of a body like the Evan Welcome
(02:50):
to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Thank you, Aukshott, It's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So I listened to our conversation from a couple of
years ago, and I have to say you sounded optimistic,
and in twenty twenty three there were good reasons to
be optimistic. We talked about how after the Paris Agreement,
when the world was headed towards maybe four or five
degrees celsius of warming, we had these forces come together,
including the US turning around and having a climate law passed,
(03:17):
and there was a general sense of coherence in the
world trying to do something about climate change at a scale. Finally,
so now here we are sitting at the start of
twenty twenty five, the exact time period when the Ministry
for the Future sort of gets started on its journey,
and I thought it might be interesting to just revisit
(03:40):
and update our outlooks of where we are, sort of
a check in. We are in the future you were
imagining today it is here. How are you feeling well?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I want to say first that you're in a better
position to judge the situation than I am, given your work,
and that you're talking to everybody and I'd be very
interested to hear your impressions. As for me here in Davis, California,
just looking out at the world, I have this sense
that everything is accelerating, and that was already true in
(04:16):
twenty twenty two. I had realized that the dates that
I had put in Ministry for the Future were all wrong,
and that I had set things out happening in the
far future of a few decades from now that were
going to happen one way or another in the twenty
twenty So the acceleration seems to still be speeding up.
And I mean by this both bad things and good things.
(04:39):
And I suppose I should address what looks to be
the big reversal, which is the unexpected re election of
Donald Trump. At least it wasn't expected by me. I
had it called exactly backwards, and I'm still shocked and dismayed.
But I'll point out that my novel Ministry for the
Future was written during Trump years. I was very angry then,
(05:00):
and it postulated a world in which the United States
was not a major player in dealing with climate change.
It was really the other nations of the world driving
the process out of necessity, and the United States being
a somewhat big rich kid, a narcissistic child in the
background being dragged along into the adult world of reality.
(05:21):
And maybe that's again a little bit true. But a
lot of things happened between twenty twenty and twenty twenty
four that are now path dependent in their own good way.
The good things have been speeding up as well as
the bad things. It's simply cheaper to build new clean
(05:42):
energy than old dirty energy, and this is crucial in
a capitalist world that every source of investment that isn't
government is looking for some kind of highest rate of return,
and if there is a higher rate of return that
can come to doing a green pride rather than a
dirty project, then it will get done. So some guardrails
(06:06):
have changed a little. The I rebuild that the bioden
Administration got passed was very important because it shows that
it's not just a matter of carbon quantitative easing of
the central banks and the governments cooking up new money,
which I think is important and really needs to happen,
but also simply legislation that legislators of the world, when
they vote in climate action, economic activities, and investments in
(06:30):
private businesses in their nation states that good things can
happen and that they multiply.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I think you're right in that, Yes, clean energy has
become cheaper than dirty energy, and that fact has sunk in.
But there are ways in which dirty energy is made
cheaper artificially to keep its life going, and we're going
to see a lot more of that. But I just
wanted to come back to the ministry because to me,
(06:56):
it is a good framework to start from. The CLA
problem is a problem created off inequality, and there is
no way to solve it without bringing more equality to
bear on the planet. That is in the form of
wealth transfer, in technology transfer, in creating a carbon space
(07:18):
for developing countries to use. And COP meetings are the
place where that conversation around inequality comes to bear, and
the Ministry for the Future is created through the COP
framework as you imagined it. And you've been a regular
listener of this show, and I'm guessing you've followed the
(07:39):
coverage of what happened at COP twenty nine. How do
you think this year's cop stacks up against what you
imagine cops to be doing.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well, it's pretty in line with the previous cops and
with what I portrayed in my book, which is a
process that is you might call necessary but not sufficient,
or a set of public promises in a society of
the spectacle, where at least it gets discussed every yours
in a way that the world pays attention to. So
(08:11):
I still think the COP process is crucial, but it's
not enough because it's built on a consensus model, so
it's necessarily glacially slow. So necessary but not sufficient. And
the other things have to happen that we're all doing
in individual nation states and in the internationally, just in
terms of trade and international relations that are more tangible
(08:35):
than the promises made at COP, and there good things
can happen. Now, I want to point out that in
my Ministry for the Future, it starts as a tiny,
little functionary agency that is trying to rally year round
support to get COP promises adhere to. And in a way,
it's kind of an invention that creates a point of
(08:57):
view for a novel that is legible in that there's
characters with a plot. But at the same time, last September,
the UN out of the Secretary General's Office issued a
Pact for the Future during their summit of the Future,
which was their name for Climate Week last September, and
they're planning on appointing an Envoy for the Future.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
That sounds a lot like the Ministry for the Future
run by the UN in your book. So did the
book inspire this pact?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, they tell me that it did. They read it,
they thought, oh, what a good idea. And I have
to say that the UN's story is weirdly, you know,
in some senses the secret masters of the universe in
their black helicopters and ultra powerful and then also at
the same time and maybe more accurately, another place of
(09:51):
promises where all the nations states go to talk to
each other without any power in particular of its own.
The UN has a lot of consent, but it also
has the post World War two structure that means that
it is not a gigantically effective agency. So a novel
that says, oh my gosh, we got something done in
(10:12):
the world by something coming out of the UN. Naturally,
my novel is popular there amongst those young diplomats, and
they're feeling like the world is spinning out of their control,
like all of us, feel they're doing the best that
they can, and they think this is maybe one tool
to focus on the future, to focus on the narrative
of the member states nation states becoming member states in
(10:37):
something larger that manages to cope successfully with climate change.
So yes, by telling that story from that point of view,
I have inspired that particular group of people.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So as a science nerd, I have always seen technology
growth as a way to imagine future, not just near futures,
but long futures. And that's why I love reading science fiction.
That's why I love reading the work you've put out
over the years. But there is a side of me,
(11:10):
as a journalist who sort of focused on the now,
who is to think about the near future because that's
my job that I'm noticing. Maybe it is politics, Maybe
it is social media, Maybe it is the way we
consume media in general. That we as a people are
imagining the future less and less, or we are imagining
(11:32):
the future much nearer, that our horizons are not as
far as they used to be. Is that a perception
that is accurate or is it just in my mind?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
I think climate change since the pandemic is at least
ten times more prominent in everybody's minds the world mind
than it was before. If a pandemic. Can punsch us
in the nose kill one out of every thousand per
and that's a success because it could have been far worse.
But we organize quickly to make up these vaccines. Climate
(12:07):
change could do that and make it even worse. It's
the poly crisis, as Adam Tooz calls it, all of
the crises of pollution, of pandemics coming out of the
natural world, and then also the various political complications of
our own making. So there's a poly crisis. Well, I
(12:28):
feel like attention to that in the twenty twenties is
such that the farther futures are and this is finally
getting to answer your questions. You don't think about, oh,
what will happen when we go to the stars, which
is always impossible. You don't even think about, oh, what
about the greatness that will happen when we all live
two hundred and fifty years and it's the year twenty
(12:49):
four hundred. Who can think that when we are having
trouble thinking our way through the twenty first century. So
science fiction has collapsed to near future science fiction is
one way to call.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It, And that difficulty of having sort of the world
mind or so many pieces of information held together to
try and make sense of the moment, often collapses for
individuals in sort of the vibe, the emotion that is
driving you, and one that I think can be classed
as the emotion of twenty twenty five is we are
(13:22):
starting off on a bleak note. So is there a
way if I were to force you to imagine a utopia,
because I know you do that sometimes for twenty twenty five,
what could it.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Be an interesting question? And I think it's possible there
will be a realization that you can't count on the
leadership of the United States, and I mean by that
the leadership of the United States in the world, but
also the leadership of the United States in terms of
the incoming administration, which is looking to be a kind
(13:56):
of clown show. What would be the utopian story is
how there's always been idiots at the top of the
system and the governments of the world, the bureaucrats, the technocrats,
the scientists, the teachers. Society is resilient, civil society is real.
The ways in which we help each other out in
(14:16):
daily life transcend fools at the top shouting and trying
to erect the system. So we have a soap opera,
But is the soap opera actually wreaking the damage that
it pretends that it wants to wreak. Everybody actually wants
their daily life to continue as best it can in
(14:37):
a positive direction. Everybody's stressed out, everybody's in the precariat.
The last thing you need is for the soap app
that they talk to actually be meaningful. And if life
goes on for everybody in their ordinary daily existence substantially
the same. Because of the path dependencies of all of
our systems and the kind of resiliency of civil society,
(14:59):
that in itself will be a victory. And I'm not
saying it's a sure thing by any means. This is
sort of an experiment. And how strong is the American
system If there is a group at the top trying
to wreck it, deliberately trying to wreck it, we'll see
we are in a corrupt political system and there's huge
challenges to democracy. On the other hand, votes are still votes,
(15:20):
and it's not entirely possible to buy them. So it's
a mix, right, It's a you can't actually give up.
You can't actually start celebrating. The twenty twenties were always
going to be a kind of crux in human history,
and they still are, and it might be that the
(15:42):
crux goes on for a decade longer than that. It's
not at all inevitable that things are going to be
all right, given the tendency of the forces of disordered rising.
But the situation is not impossible either, And I guess
you know is that the utopian statement, the good result
is not impossible.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
We've sort of talked about some of the things that
are big in front of our minds on the front
pages of headlines, but they're also smaller things that could
become big that I would like to touch on. So
one that I know both you and I have been
interested in is Colombia's efforts to try and move away
from fossil fuels. Now, Columbia extracts coal and oil and gas,
(16:26):
and its economy has been dependent on it for quite
some time. But it is the first sort of big
and it's not very big, but it's still a big
ish producer of fossil fuels that as signed up to
the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty. We had Minister Susanna Muhammad,
who has the Environment Ministry under her talk on this podcast,
(16:48):
And I know you've been thinking about how this is
going to play out, you wrote to me after listening
to that episode. So when you try and imagine a
future where a country has to build its entire economy
annewn to move away from the old stuff because the
old stoves just can't continue at current pace, how do
(17:10):
you think that happens?
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, thank you for that. I'm really interested in it.
The Petro States, those nations that depend on more than
fifty percent of their income on selling their fossil fuels,
they have also signed the Paris Agreement, and so they're
in a double bind. They are, on the one hand
promising to stop selling fossil fuels. On the other hand,
that will bankrupt them and they could become failed states.
(17:34):
And we're talking about well more than a billion people
these Petro states. What happens then we can't afford in
social senses to have failed states left right and center.
They need help. How could it come. Well, there's the
Loss and Damage Fund, there's a Paris Agreement itself, and
this Fossil Fuel's Non Proliferation Treaty is really important as
(17:57):
a framework that if a nation like Columbia is a
great example because they're the fifth biggest coal producer on Earth.
If they say we want to stop, help us, help
needs to come. So at that point you need a
system that is arranged sort of like the cop processes
lost in damage or like the International Monetary Fund's Special
(18:18):
Drawing Rights, which is a mechanism to help countries that
are in trouble in paying their debts to get them
the money that they need. And so this system would
have to have these aspects of it that I've considered
and I throw it out there for others to consider.
It would need to be a discounted compensation. They can't
be paid as much as they would be for fossil
(18:38):
fuels as they stand on the market now that's like
one six hundred trillion dollars. What you would need is
a discounted system. They take a haircut. Also, it would
have to be amortized so that they get paid out
over a century like it would have been if the
fossil fuels had been burned, and then every country that
signs on would be getting a steady payment that would
(19:01):
also be entailed. You'd be signing something like the extractive
Industry's Transparency Initiative EIITI that already exists, just like the
Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty and the IMF Special Drawing
Rights and the cop Loss and Damage Fund that three
hundred billion dollars was just promised into. When a nation
(19:23):
signed on that line, they would then have an income
stream that they had promised to keep from being corrupted,
and that it would be devoted to green projects and
the clean transition. And that way there would be a
a financial inducement for signing the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation
Treaty and then also the physical and financial help to
(19:45):
make that transition possible and save these countries from falling
into dysfunction by way of bankruptcy and social disorder. It
seems to me it has to happen. And I've talked
to people about it at OECD and another place, other venues,
other people in places of power, including the UN, and
(20:05):
I have to say, it usually gets a cool response
or a visible shutter of oh my god. You know.
The Saudi's suggested something like that, even though they're rich
as creases, et cetera. Well, none of the past is
really relevant now in this respect We've got seventy five
percent of the fossil fuels on this earth owned by
(20:25):
nation states that have governments that are responsible to their people,
and accommodation simply must be made. And when the question
then follows, oh, well, where could that much money come from,
you just answer quantitative easing. You point to two thousand
and eight, you point to twenty twenty at the start
of the pandemic, trillions were generated. I'm gonna say out
(20:47):
of thin air because the mechanisms involved are complicated, But
in fact, federal governments, central banks make up new money
all the time. The money can be made. And I'll
end with this, John Maynar and Kane really the most
important economists for our current moment. I would say, anything
that we have to do, we can afford to do.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
After the break, more of my conversation with sci fi
writer Kim Stanley Robinson. And by the way, if you've
been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate
and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It
helps other listeners find the show.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
There is a yearning in the politics today of the past,
of a period where I don't know, gender, racial, wealth,
hierarchies were enforced, and it feels contradictory to me, because
you know, if I were to be born anytime in history,
and I had the choice, I would be born today,
because it's a pretty good time to be born. You
(21:59):
have a whole set of diseases that we know how
to defeat. You have the ability to be able to
travel across continents, You have the ability to be able
to speak to anybody in any corner of the world
for almost free, and yet there is this yearning for
the past. How do you make sense of this yearning
(22:19):
for the past where none of these good things existed.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, it's a kind of a mistake. It's nostalgia, the
ache of the lost home. Nostalgia in Greek. Nostalgia is
a very powerful feeling. I feel it myself, but it's
almost always a category error. What are you regretting your youth?
Your childhood? The world itself was just as messed up then,
and as you point out, it was often in many
(22:45):
material ways, much worse than now. But you don't know that.
Your lived experience is when you were younger, you were healthier,
Your life lay before you as a set of open
possibilities or a struggle to be had. But in any case,
nostalgia for the past is always a kind of delusion
that one has because the future is scary. Individually, you're
(23:08):
going to end up falling apart somehow and dying, so
the future never looks particularly good for the individual. For
the collective, you can imagine that things will go on
for our descendants and that they will be in a
better world, and that's the solace of being human. I
myself am very much in love with science right now.
I should be dead at this point. Medical science has
(23:29):
saved me now twice. I'm very grateful. I'm very cognizant
that science is a force for good. Is utn't be
an effort in the world that is making us all
of our necessities and all of our toys, And that
when people are anti science, when they speak against it,
when they get sick, they'll run to a scientist. So
it isn't real. It's another not a nostalgia, but a
(23:52):
denial of reality that there's this collective force in the world,
a group of people following a method that is enormous
productive and is saving our lives and keeping us going,
and who knows what it might accomplish in the future
as a collective effort.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
As somebody who trained in the sciences. I find it
or that most governments around the world do not have
more people with training in the sciences in the cabinet
of the highest level. But we might see some of
that coming through in the White House this time. There's
a bunch of Silicon Valley people who are yes, investors,
(24:31):
but have science trainings, who want to come in with
ideas that may seem quite dangerous and are there dangers
of sci fi thinking that you could articulate.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Well, you've got to destrand that. There's scientists and there's engineers.
So Silicon Valley is not a bunch of scientists. It's
a bunch of computer programmers. They're engineers, and they've read
science fiction and they have often become by being lucky,
and then they think they're smart. And so that crowd
in power is dangerous because they can be nice people.
(25:10):
It's suspicious as hell that ninety five percent of them
are men. That's a sign that something's wrong in that
whole social world. But in any case, that crowd is
not to be trusted because often politically and philosophically they're
intensely naive. They seize on one idea and then that
explains everything, and because they're rich, they think they know
it all. Now, I am overgeneralizing here, and in my
(25:33):
own personal acquaintanceships with billionaires, because I am near Silicon
Valley and I am a science fiction writer, I've met
a few. They are very often nice guys. They are
very often meaning well. They are very often Democrats rather
than Republicans. So you have to go to soap opera
land to get a kind of a unicorn figure like
(25:56):
Elon Musk, who is particularly wealthy but particularly volatile and unhelpful,
you might say in his narcissism. Not all of the
Silicon Valley computer billionaires who go to Washington are going
to be narcissists. A lot of them are going to
be solid citizens, saying I've got more money than I need,
why don't we have progressive taxation? And also, why don't
(26:17):
you try plan A, B and C that we have
carefully tested and it might work. So again, the technocrats,
the billionaires, none of them can be trusted to be
the solution. In a way, It's like saying AI will
solve a problems. These are artificial intelligences. These individual humans.
(26:37):
They're natural, but they're artificial in the sense of why
are they so wealthy? The solution always comes from elsewhere,
But actually it's some more collective thing. Really.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Now, last question, fun question. If there was a wish
that could be granted to you, It could be anything,
a climate fake, some investment, a particular technology. Does he change,
diplomatic breakthrough, societal change, whatever? What would you ask for
in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Wow, I mean this is so hard, this is this
is I would ask for three more wishes to come true.
Only yeah, I'll go back to the just the political
economy level, because really this is Bloomberg Green, and I
want to say again, thanks to Bloomberg Green. I followed
(27:28):
it intensely through the last COP twenty nine by far
the best reporting of COP twenty nine that I'm aware of,
and just keeping people aware of the world of politics
and economy, of business and government in interaction with each other.
It's it's really crucial stuff. So at that level, I
would say the European Union shows what happens when nation
(27:50):
states become member states, and so the European Union is
powerful even though it includes many little countries that are
in economic trouble, but they're part of a larger hole.
They hang together. It's fractious, it's difficult, it's hard to
work it, but it's a change of consciousness in that
when you're a member state, you have a different financial, legal,
(28:14):
and emotional set of circumstances that guide you. If something
like the UN or the WTO or the OECD taken
seriously as if those organizations had teeth and you had
to do what was agreed there because you were a
member in good standing, well that would make a huge difference. Now,
(28:34):
who's most likely to ignore and flaunt that forever? The
United States of America. The US has this slim majority
that lives in a fantasy of, oh, we can go
it all alone. We're the best, not the best, can't
go it alone. These fantasies hopefully will lose at the
ballot box after the probably spectacularly stupid political events at
(28:59):
the top over the next couple of years, and then
maybe that would be like the last flirting out of
some resentful minority that's losing its power to the world majority.
Who knows, But here's my wish that every nation state
took its membership in the larger organizations dead seriously as
a guide to action, and then climate change would have
(29:21):
a chance to be solved by us.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, I didn't see it coming that. You want the
G twenty to be a real power. Thank you, Sam,
Thank you Akshatt.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the sound of the trailer
of a n teen eighty three film called Endgame, which
(30:03):
takes place in a fictional twenty twenty five, but of
course it sounds a lot like nineteen eighty three, and
clearly no one imagined electric vehicles would be a thing.
If you liked this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
works for the United Nations. Zero's producer is Mighty le Rao.
(30:24):
Bloomberg's head of podcast is Sage Bauman, and head of
Talk is Brendan nunim Our. Theme music is composed by
wonder Lee. Special thanks to Shuan Wagner, Shan chan, Ethan Steinberg,
and Jessica beck I, am Aksha Thrati back So
Hi, it's Akua. I'm off for a summer break, and
so we're bringing you one of my favorite conversations from
the archive. It's with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson,
who wrote the Marsh trilogy and the climate thriller Ministry
for the Future. We talked earlier in the year about
how twenty twenty five might play out stand and get
everything right, but he got a lot more right than wrong,
(00:24):
and our conversation remains as relevant today as it was then,
perhaps even more so. I hope you're having a great summer,
and we'll be back with new episodes soon. Welcome to Zero.
I am Aksha Trati this week imagining Utopia in twenty
twenty five. I love reading science fiction, and one of
(00:56):
the sci fi writers who has had an impact on
me in recent years is Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan is
perhaps best known for his Mars trilogy, published in the
nineteen nineties, but Zero listeners are likely to know him
for his writings over the past decade on what climate
futures here on Earth might look like. Be it the
underwater metropolis he imagined in his novel New York twenty
(01:19):
one forty, or how a United Nations agency and its
dark wing of eco terrorists tackle the climate crisis in
his book The Ministry for the Future. Stan has been
a guest on Zero before, but I wanted to speak
with him again because that book, The Ministry for the
Future has been on my mind recently. Although it was
(01:41):
published in twenty twenty, the story in the book kicks
off in the year twenty twenty five, and well, here
we are. The book opens just after a fictional COP
twenty nine summit, as a deadly heat wave hits India.
The plot follows the choices faced by United Nations officials
in the new department called the Ministry for the Future
(02:02):
as they try to cope with the spiraling impacts of
a warming planet. With twenty twenty five upon us, I
wanted to see how Stan was feeling about the book's
version of this timeline and find out what he thought
about the unpredictable direction real life events have taken since
he wrote it. We talked about the value of science
fiction as a way to see into the future, as
(02:24):
well as sci fi's dangers, and why a writer who
admires science and technology so much still remains enamored with
the unglamorous work of a body like the Evan Welcome
(02:50):
to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Thank you, Aukshott, It's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So I listened to our conversation from a couple of
years ago, and I have to say you sounded optimistic,
and in twenty twenty three there were good reasons to
be optimistic. We talked about how after the Paris Agreement,
when the world was headed towards maybe four or five
degrees celsius of warming, we had these forces come together,
including the US turning around and having a climate law passed,
(03:17):
and there was a general sense of coherence in the
world trying to do something about climate change at a scale. Finally,
so now here we are sitting at the start of
twenty twenty five, the exact time period when the Ministry
for the Future sort of gets started on its journey,
and I thought it might be interesting to just revisit
(03:40):
and update our outlooks of where we are, sort of
a check in. We are in the future you were
imagining today it is here. How are you feeling well?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I want to say first that you're in a better
position to judge the situation than I am, given your work,
and that you're talking to everybody and I'd be very
interested to hear your impressions. As for me here in Davis, California,
just looking out at the world, I have this sense
that everything is accelerating, and that was already true in
(04:16):
twenty twenty two. I had realized that the dates that
I had put in Ministry for the Future were all wrong,
and that I had set things out happening in the
far future of a few decades from now that were
going to happen one way or another in the twenty
twenty So the acceleration seems to still be speeding up.
And I mean by this both bad things and good things.
(04:39):
And I suppose I should address what looks to be
the big reversal, which is the unexpected re election of
Donald Trump. At least it wasn't expected by me. I
had it called exactly backwards, and I'm still shocked and dismayed.
But I'll point out that my novel Ministry for the
Future was written during Trump years. I was very angry then,
(05:00):
and it postulated a world in which the United States
was not a major player in dealing with climate change.
It was really the other nations of the world driving
the process out of necessity, and the United States being
a somewhat big rich kid, a narcissistic child in the
background being dragged along into the adult world of reality.
(05:21):
And maybe that's again a little bit true. But a
lot of things happened between twenty twenty and twenty twenty
four that are now path dependent in their own good way.
The good things have been speeding up as well as
the bad things. It's simply cheaper to build new clean
(05:42):
energy than old dirty energy, and this is crucial in
a capitalist world that every source of investment that isn't
government is looking for some kind of highest rate of return,
and if there is a higher rate of return that
can come to doing a green pride rather than a
dirty project, then it will get done. So some guardrails
(06:06):
have changed a little. The I rebuild that the bioden
Administration got passed was very important because it shows that
it's not just a matter of carbon quantitative easing of
the central banks and the governments cooking up new money,
which I think is important and really needs to happen,
but also simply legislation that legislators of the world, when
they vote in climate action, economic activities, and investments in
(06:30):
private businesses in their nation states that good things can
happen and that they multiply.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I think you're right in that, Yes, clean energy has
become cheaper than dirty energy, and that fact has sunk in.
But there are ways in which dirty energy is made
cheaper artificially to keep its life going, and we're going
to see a lot more of that. But I just
wanted to come back to the ministry because to me,
(06:56):
it is a good framework to start from. The CLA
problem is a problem created off inequality, and there is
no way to solve it without bringing more equality to
bear on the planet. That is in the form of
wealth transfer, in technology transfer, in creating a carbon space
(07:18):
for developing countries to use. And COP meetings are the
place where that conversation around inequality comes to bear, and
the Ministry for the Future is created through the COP
framework as you imagined it. And you've been a regular
listener of this show, and I'm guessing you've followed the
(07:39):
coverage of what happened at COP twenty nine. How do
you think this year's cop stacks up against what you
imagine cops to be doing.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well, it's pretty in line with the previous cops and
with what I portrayed in my book, which is a
process that is you might call necessary but not sufficient,
or a set of public promises in a society of
the spectacle, where at least it gets discussed every yours
in a way that the world pays attention to. So
(08:11):
I still think the COP process is crucial, but it's
not enough because it's built on a consensus model, so
it's necessarily glacially slow. So necessary but not sufficient. And
the other things have to happen that we're all doing
in individual nation states and in the internationally, just in
terms of trade and international relations that are more tangible
(08:35):
than the promises made at COP, and there good things
can happen. Now, I want to point out that in
my Ministry for the Future, it starts as a tiny,
little functionary agency that is trying to rally year round
support to get COP promises adhere to. And in a way,
it's kind of an invention that creates a point of
(08:57):
view for a novel that is legible in that there's
characters with a plot. But at the same time, last September,
the UN out of the Secretary General's Office issued a
Pact for the Future during their summit of the Future,
which was their name for Climate Week last September, and
they're planning on appointing an Envoy for the Future.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
That sounds a lot like the Ministry for the Future
run by the UN in your book. So did the
book inspire this pact?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yes, they tell me that it did. They read it,
they thought, oh, what a good idea. And I have
to say that the UN's story is weirdly, you know,
in some senses the secret masters of the universe in
their black helicopters and ultra powerful and then also at
the same time and maybe more accurately, another place of
(09:51):
promises where all the nations states go to talk to
each other without any power in particular of its own.
The UN has a lot of consent, but it also
has the post World War two structure that means that
it is not a gigantically effective agency. So a novel
that says, oh my gosh, we got something done in
(10:12):
the world by something coming out of the UN. Naturally,
my novel is popular there amongst those young diplomats, and
they're feeling like the world is spinning out of their control,
like all of us, feel they're doing the best that
they can, and they think this is maybe one tool
to focus on the future, to focus on the narrative
of the member states nation states becoming member states in
(10:37):
something larger that manages to cope successfully with climate change.
So yes, by telling that story from that point of view,
I have inspired that particular group of people.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So as a science nerd, I have always seen technology
growth as a way to imagine future, not just near futures,
but long futures. And that's why I love reading science fiction.
That's why I love reading the work you've put out
over the years. But there is a side of me,
(11:10):
as a journalist who sort of focused on the now,
who is to think about the near future because that's
my job that I'm noticing. Maybe it is politics, Maybe
it is social media, Maybe it is the way we
consume media in general. That we as a people are
imagining the future less and less, or we are imagining
(11:32):
the future much nearer, that our horizons are not as
far as they used to be. Is that a perception
that is accurate or is it just in my mind?
Speaker 2 (11:43):
I think climate change since the pandemic is at least
ten times more prominent in everybody's minds the world mind
than it was before. If a pandemic. Can punsch us
in the nose kill one out of every thousand per
and that's a success because it could have been far worse.
But we organize quickly to make up these vaccines. Climate
(12:07):
change could do that and make it even worse. It's
the poly crisis, as Adam Tooz calls it, all of
the crises of pollution, of pandemics coming out of the
natural world, and then also the various political complications of
our own making. So there's a poly crisis. Well, I
(12:28):
feel like attention to that in the twenty twenties is
such that the farther futures are and this is finally
getting to answer your questions. You don't think about, oh,
what will happen when we go to the stars, which
is always impossible. You don't even think about, oh, what
about the greatness that will happen when we all live
two hundred and fifty years and it's the year twenty
(12:49):
four hundred. Who can think that when we are having
trouble thinking our way through the twenty first century. So
science fiction has collapsed to near future science fiction is
one way to call.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It, And that difficulty of having sort of the world
mind or so many pieces of information held together to
try and make sense of the moment, often collapses for
individuals in sort of the vibe, the emotion that is
driving you, and one that I think can be classed
as the emotion of twenty twenty five is we are
(13:22):
starting off on a bleak note. So is there a
way if I were to force you to imagine a utopia,
because I know you do that sometimes for twenty twenty five,
what could it.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Be an interesting question? And I think it's possible there
will be a realization that you can't count on the
leadership of the United States, and I mean by that
the leadership of the United States in the world, but
also the leadership of the United States in terms of
the incoming administration, which is looking to be a kind
(13:56):
of clown show. What would be the utopian story is
how there's always been idiots at the top of the
system and the governments of the world, the bureaucrats, the technocrats,
the scientists, the teachers. Society is resilient, civil society is real.
The ways in which we help each other out in
(14:16):
daily life transcend fools at the top shouting and trying
to erect the system. So we have a soap opera,
But is the soap opera actually wreaking the damage that
it pretends that it wants to wreak. Everybody actually wants
their daily life to continue as best it can in
(14:37):
a positive direction. Everybody's stressed out, everybody's in the precariat.
The last thing you need is for the soap app
that they talk to actually be meaningful. And if life
goes on for everybody in their ordinary daily existence substantially
the same. Because of the path dependencies of all of
our systems and the kind of resiliency of civil society,
(14:59):
that in itself will be a victory. And I'm not
saying it's a sure thing by any means. This is
sort of an experiment. And how strong is the American
system If there is a group at the top trying
to wreck it, deliberately trying to wreck it, we'll see
we are in a corrupt political system and there's huge
challenges to democracy. On the other hand, votes are still votes,
(15:20):
and it's not entirely possible to buy them. So it's
a mix, right, It's a you can't actually give up.
You can't actually start celebrating. The twenty twenties were always
going to be a kind of crux in human history,
and they still are, and it might be that the
(15:42):
crux goes on for a decade longer than that. It's
not at all inevitable that things are going to be
all right, given the tendency of the forces of disordered rising.
But the situation is not impossible either, And I guess
you know is that the utopian statement, the good result
is not impossible.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
We've sort of talked about some of the things that
are big in front of our minds on the front
pages of headlines, but they're also smaller things that could
become big that I would like to touch on. So
one that I know both you and I have been
interested in is Colombia's efforts to try and move away
from fossil fuels. Now, Columbia extracts coal and oil and gas,
(16:26):
and its economy has been dependent on it for quite
some time. But it is the first sort of big
and it's not very big, but it's still a big
ish producer of fossil fuels that as signed up to
the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty. We had Minister Susanna Muhammad,
who has the Environment Ministry under her talk on this podcast,
(16:48):
And I know you've been thinking about how this is
going to play out, you wrote to me after listening
to that episode. So when you try and imagine a
future where a country has to build its entire economy
annewn to move away from the old stuff because the
old stoves just can't continue at current pace, how do
(17:10):
you think that happens?
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Well, thank you for that. I'm really interested in it.
The Petro States, those nations that depend on more than
fifty percent of their income on selling their fossil fuels,
they have also signed the Paris Agreement, and so they're
in a double bind. They are, on the one hand
promising to stop selling fossil fuels. On the other hand,
that will bankrupt them and they could become failed states.
(17:34):
And we're talking about well more than a billion people
these Petro states. What happens then we can't afford in
social senses to have failed states left right and center.
They need help. How could it come. Well, there's the
Loss and Damage Fund, there's a Paris Agreement itself, and
this Fossil Fuel's Non Proliferation Treaty is really important as
(17:57):
a framework that if a nation like Columbia is a
great example because they're the fifth biggest coal producer on Earth.
If they say we want to stop, help us, help
needs to come. So at that point you need a
system that is arranged sort of like the cop processes
lost in damage or like the International Monetary Fund's Special
(18:18):
Drawing Rights, which is a mechanism to help countries that
are in trouble in paying their debts to get them
the money that they need. And so this system would
have to have these aspects of it that I've considered
and I throw it out there for others to consider.
It would need to be a discounted compensation. They can't
be paid as much as they would be for fossil
(18:38):
fuels as they stand on the market now that's like
one six hundred trillion dollars. What you would need is
a discounted system. They take a haircut. Also, it would
have to be amortized so that they get paid out
over a century like it would have been if the
fossil fuels had been burned, and then every country that
signs on would be getting a steady payment that would
(19:01):
also be entailed. You'd be signing something like the extractive
Industry's Transparency Initiative EIITI that already exists, just like the
Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty and the IMF Special Drawing
Rights and the cop Loss and Damage Fund that three
hundred billion dollars was just promised into. When a nation
(19:23):
signed on that line, they would then have an income
stream that they had promised to keep from being corrupted,
and that it would be devoted to green projects and
the clean transition. And that way there would be a
a financial inducement for signing the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation
Treaty and then also the physical and financial help to
(19:45):
make that transition possible and save these countries from falling
into dysfunction by way of bankruptcy and social disorder. It
seems to me it has to happen. And I've talked
to people about it at OECD and another place, other venues,
other people in places of power, including the UN, and
(20:05):
I have to say, it usually gets a cool response
or a visible shutter of oh my god. You know.
The Saudi's suggested something like that, even though they're rich
as creases, et cetera. Well, none of the past is
really relevant now in this respect We've got seventy five
percent of the fossil fuels on this earth owned by
(20:25):
nation states that have governments that are responsible to their people,
and accommodation simply must be made. And when the question
then follows, oh, well, where could that much money come from,
you just answer quantitative easing. You point to two thousand
and eight, you point to twenty twenty at the start
of the pandemic, trillions were generated. I'm gonna say out
(20:47):
of thin air because the mechanisms involved are complicated, But
in fact, federal governments, central banks make up new money
all the time. The money can be made. And I'll
end with this, John Maynar and Kane really the most
important economists for our current moment. I would say, anything
that we have to do, we can afford to do.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
After the break, more of my conversation with sci fi
writer Kim Stanley Robinson. And by the way, if you've
been enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate
and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It
helps other listeners find the show.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
There is a yearning in the politics today of the past,
of a period where I don't know, gender, racial, wealth,
hierarchies were enforced, and it feels contradictory to me, because
you know, if I were to be born anytime in history,
and I had the choice, I would be born today,
because it's a pretty good time to be born. You
(21:59):
have a whole set of diseases that we know how
to defeat. You have the ability to be able to
travel across continents, You have the ability to be able
to speak to anybody in any corner of the world
for almost free, and yet there is this yearning for
the past. How do you make sense of this yearning
(22:19):
for the past where none of these good things existed.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, it's a kind of a mistake. It's nostalgia, the
ache of the lost home. Nostalgia in Greek. Nostalgia is
a very powerful feeling. I feel it myself, but it's
almost always a category error. What are you regretting your youth?
Your childhood? The world itself was just as messed up then,
and as you point out, it was often in many
(22:45):
material ways, much worse than now. But you don't know that.
Your lived experience is when you were younger, you were healthier,
Your life lay before you as a set of open
possibilities or a struggle to be had. But in any case,
nostalgia for the past is always a kind of delusion
that one has because the future is scary. Individually, you're
(23:08):
going to end up falling apart somehow and dying, so
the future never looks particularly good for the individual. For
the collective, you can imagine that things will go on
for our descendants and that they will be in a
better world, and that's the solace of being human. I
myself am very much in love with science right now.
I should be dead at this point. Medical science has
(23:29):
saved me now twice. I'm very grateful. I'm very cognizant
that science is a force for good. Is utn't be
an effort in the world that is making us all
of our necessities and all of our toys, And that
when people are anti science, when they speak against it,
when they get sick, they'll run to a scientist. So
it isn't real. It's another not a nostalgia, but a
(23:52):
denial of reality that there's this collective force in the world,
a group of people following a method that is enormous
productive and is saving our lives and keeping us going,
and who knows what it might accomplish in the future
as a collective effort.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
As somebody who trained in the sciences. I find it
or that most governments around the world do not have
more people with training in the sciences in the cabinet
of the highest level. But we might see some of
that coming through in the White House this time. There's
a bunch of Silicon Valley people who are yes, investors,
(24:31):
but have science trainings, who want to come in with
ideas that may seem quite dangerous and are there dangers
of sci fi thinking that you could articulate.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Well, you've got to destrand that. There's scientists and there's engineers.
So Silicon Valley is not a bunch of scientists. It's
a bunch of computer programmers. They're engineers, and they've read
science fiction and they have often become by being lucky,
and then they think they're smart. And so that crowd
in power is dangerous because they can be nice people.
(25:10):
It's suspicious as hell that ninety five percent of them
are men. That's a sign that something's wrong in that
whole social world. But in any case, that crowd is
not to be trusted because often politically and philosophically they're
intensely naive. They seize on one idea and then that
explains everything, and because they're rich, they think they know
it all. Now, I am overgeneralizing here, and in my
(25:33):
own personal acquaintanceships with billionaires, because I am near Silicon
Valley and I am a science fiction writer, I've met
a few. They are very often nice guys. They are
very often meaning well. They are very often Democrats rather
than Republicans. So you have to go to soap opera
land to get a kind of a unicorn figure like
(25:56):
Elon Musk, who is particularly wealthy but particularly volatile and unhelpful,
you might say in his narcissism. Not all of the
Silicon Valley computer billionaires who go to Washington are going
to be narcissists. A lot of them are going to
be solid citizens, saying I've got more money than I need,
why don't we have progressive taxation? And also, why don't
(26:17):
you try plan A, B and C that we have
carefully tested and it might work. So again, the technocrats,
the billionaires, none of them can be trusted to be
the solution. In a way, It's like saying AI will
solve a problems. These are artificial intelligences. These individual humans.
(26:37):
They're natural, but they're artificial in the sense of why
are they so wealthy? The solution always comes from elsewhere,
But actually it's some more collective thing. Really.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Now, last question, fun question. If there was a wish
that could be granted to you, It could be anything,
a climate fake, some investment, a particular technology. Does he change,
diplomatic breakthrough, societal change, whatever? What would you ask for
in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Wow, I mean this is so hard, this is this
is I would ask for three more wishes to come true.
Only yeah, I'll go back to the just the political
economy level, because really this is Bloomberg Green, and I
want to say again, thanks to Bloomberg Green. I followed
(27:28):
it intensely through the last COP twenty nine by far
the best reporting of COP twenty nine that I'm aware of,
and just keeping people aware of the world of politics
and economy, of business and government in interaction with each other.
It's it's really crucial stuff. So at that level, I
would say the European Union shows what happens when nation
(27:50):
states become member states, and so the European Union is
powerful even though it includes many little countries that are
in economic trouble, but they're part of a larger hole.
They hang together. It's fractious, it's difficult, it's hard to
work it, but it's a change of consciousness in that
when you're a member state, you have a different financial, legal,
(28:14):
and emotional set of circumstances that guide you. If something
like the UN or the WTO or the OECD taken
seriously as if those organizations had teeth and you had
to do what was agreed there because you were a
member in good standing, well that would make a huge difference. Now,
(28:34):
who's most likely to ignore and flaunt that forever? The
United States of America. The US has this slim majority
that lives in a fantasy of, oh, we can go
it all alone. We're the best, not the best, can't
go it alone. These fantasies hopefully will lose at the
ballot box after the probably spectacularly stupid political events at
(28:59):
the top over the next couple of years, and then
maybe that would be like the last flirting out of
some resentful minority that's losing its power to the world majority.
Who knows, But here's my wish that every nation state
took its membership in the larger organizations dead seriously as
a guide to action, and then climate change would have
(29:21):
a chance to be solved by us.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, I didn't see it coming that. You want the
G twenty to be a real power. Thank you, Sam,
Thank you Akshatt.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Thank you for listening to Zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the sound of the trailer
of a n teen eighty three film called Endgame, which
(30:03):
takes place in a fictional twenty twenty five, but of
course it sounds a lot like nineteen eighty three, and
clearly no one imagined electric vehicles would be a thing.
If you liked this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
works for the United Nations. Zero's producer is Mighty le Rao.
(30:24):
Bloomberg's head of podcast is Sage Bauman, and head of
Talk is Brendan nunim Our. Theme music is composed by
wonder Lee. Special thanks to Shuan Wagner, Shan chan, Ethan Steinberg,
and Jessica beck I, am Aksha Thrati back So
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