January 2, 2025 • 31 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.
Explore further:
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Past episode with Kim Stanley Robinson about climate utopias and optopias
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Past episode with outgoing White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi about what the next four years will hold
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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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati this week imagining Utopia
in twenty twenty five. I love reading science fiction, and
(00:22):
one of 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
(00:44):
York twenty 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
(01:06):
it was 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 a new department called the Ministry for
(01:27):
the Future, 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,
(01:50):
as 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 Yuan.
(02:15):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Thank you, Aukshott. It's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
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,
(02:43):
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 his journey,
and I thought it might be interesting to just revisit
(03:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
How are you feeling well? 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.
(03:40):
And that was already true in 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 stay. You'll be speeding up, and I
(04:01):
mean by this, both bad things and good things. And
I suppose I should address what looks to be the
big reversal, which is the unexpected reelection 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
(04:22):
was written during Trump years. I was very angry then,
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 and narcissistic child in the background,
(04:44):
being dragged along into the adult world of reality. 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
(05:07):
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 project rather than a
dirty project, then it will get done. So some guardrails
(05:31):
have changed a little. The I rebuild that the Biaden
administration got pasted was very important because it shows that
it's not just a matter of carbon quantitative easying of
the central banks and the government's 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
(05:56):
private businesses in their nation, states that good things can
happen and that they multiply.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
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,
(06:22):
it is a good framework to start from. The climate
problem is a problem created of 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
(06:44):
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 imagine. And you've been a regular listener of
this show, and I'm guessing you've followed the coverage of
(07:06):
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 (07:15):
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 years
in a way that the world pays attention to. So
(07:38):
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
(08:02):
than the promises made at COP and their 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
(08:23):
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 appointing an Envoy for the Future.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So well, you know that 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 (08:57):
Yes, they tell me that it did 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 promises where all
(09:20):
the nation states go to talk to each other without
any power in particular of its own. The UN has
a lot of consensus, 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 the world by
(09:40):
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
(10:01):
member states nation states becoming member states in 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 (10:18):
And fiction does have real consequences. We talked about some
of them in our last conversation. Another one that happened
is that Oxford University launched the Ministry for the Future
at Hartford College. There's supposed to be some real life
efforts being put underneath that. What do you hope those
(10:38):
can accomplish well?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's a wonderful thing for me to see because Oxford
is a very powerful collection of smart and energetic people
who are very devoted to the cause of trying to
help the world. So an Oxford Ministry for the Future
is kind of a gathering space. It's not quite a
research center, not quite a think tank, series of public events,
(11:01):
and what I hope is that it will workshop ideas
for how to create a new political economy that's adequate
to coping with climate change. So they want it to
be a place of public outreach, of changing hearts and minds,
of explaining the story, of organizing the narrative and repeating
it and over and over again. It's not exactly a collaboration,
(11:24):
but I am a sort of senior advisor, instant le emeritus.
I'm hoping to a push to make sure that we
make it something that is of interest to the audiences
who come to it or hear about it.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So, as a science nerd, I have always seen technology
growth as a way to imagine futures, 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,
(11:57):
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
(12:18):
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 (12:29):
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 punch us
in the nose, kill one out of every thousand persons,
and that's a success because it could have been far worse.
But we organize quickly to make up these vaccines. Climate
(12:53):
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
(13:14):
feel like attention to that in the twenty twenties is
such that the farther futures are and this is finally
getting to answer in 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
(13:35):
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 it.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
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 starting off
(14:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (14:19):
What could it 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
(14:41):
be a kind 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 in which we help each other
(15:01):
out in daily life, transcend fools at the top shouting
and trying to wreck 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
(15:22):
can in a positive direction. Everybody's stressed out, everybody's in
the precariat. The last thing you need is for the
soap app that the 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
(15:44):
society 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
(16:06):
still votes, 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
(16:27):
that the 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. Yet.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
We've sort of talked about some of the things that
are big in front of our minds and 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
(17:13):
and gas, 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 has signed
up to the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty. We had
Minister Susanna Muhammad, who has the Environment Ministry under her
(17:35):
talk on this podcast. 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 anew to move away from the
old stuff because the old stuff just can't continue at
(17:56):
current pace, how do you think that happened?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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.
(18:23):
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
(18:45):
a framework that if a nation like Columbia, who 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
(19:05):
Special 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
(19:27):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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 in other places,
other venues, other people in places of power, including the UN,
and I have to say it usually gets a cool
(20:57):
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
nation states that have governments that are responsible to their people,
(21:18):
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
of thin air, because the mechanisms involved are complicated, but
(21:39):
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 Maynard Keynes 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 (22:05):
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. Well. There is a
(22:26):
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 have a
(22:47):
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 for the past
(23:08):
where none of these good things existed.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:56):
going to end up falling apart somehow and dying. 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 saved me now twice.
(24:19):
I'm very grateful. I'm very cognizant that science is a
force for good, is a Utaon'tian 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
(24:39):
not a nostalgia, but a denial of reality that there's
this collective force in the world, a group of people
following a method that is enormously 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 (24:55):
As somebody who trained in the sciences, I find it
are that most woments 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,
(25:19):
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 (25:34):
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 rich by being lucky,
and then they think they're smart. And so that crowd
in power is dangerous because they can be nice people.
(25:58):
It's suspicious how well 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
(26:21):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:05):
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.
(27:26):
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 a more collective thing. Really.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
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, a policy change,
diplomatic breakthrough, societal change, whatever. What would you ask for
in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Wow, I mean this is so hard. This is I
would ask for three more wishes to come true. 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 it intensely
(28:18):
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 states
(28:39):
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, and
(29:02):
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,
(29:23):
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
(29:47):
the top over the next couple of years, and then
maybe that would be like the last flaring 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
(30:09):
a chance to be solved by us.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Well, I didn't see it coming that. You want the
G twenty to be a real power. Thank you Stam,
Thank you Akshat.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Thank you for listening to zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the sound of the trailer
of a nineteen eighty three film called Endgame, which takes
(30:51):
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 Lee Rao
(31:12):
Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Saige Bauman, and Head of
Talk is Brendan nunim Our. Theme music is composed by
Wonder Lee. Special thanks to Schwan Wagner, Shan Chan, Ethan Steinberg,
and Jessica beck I, am Aksha Thrati back So
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati this week imagining Utopia
in twenty twenty five. I love reading science fiction, and
(00:22):
one of 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
(00:44):
York twenty 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
(01:06):
it was 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 a new department called the Ministry for
(01:27):
the Future, 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,
(01:50):
as 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 Yuan.
(02:15):
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Thank you, Aukshott. It's good to be back.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
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,
(02:43):
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 his journey,
and I thought it might be interesting to just revisit
(03:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
How are you feeling well? 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.
(03:40):
And that was already true in 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 stay. You'll be speeding up, and I
(04:01):
mean by this, both bad things and good things. And
I suppose I should address what looks to be the
big reversal, which is the unexpected reelection 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
(04:22):
was written during Trump years. I was very angry then,
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 and narcissistic child in the background,
(04:44):
being dragged along into the adult world of reality. 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
(05:07):
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 project rather than a
dirty project, then it will get done. So some guardrails
(05:31):
have changed a little. The I rebuild that the Biaden
administration got pasted was very important because it shows that
it's not just a matter of carbon quantitative easying of
the central banks and the government's 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
(05:56):
private businesses in their nation, states that good things can
happen and that they multiply.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
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,
(06:22):
it is a good framework to start from. The climate
problem is a problem created of 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
(06:44):
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 imagine. And you've been a regular listener of
this show, and I'm guessing you've followed the coverage of
(07:06):
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 (07:15):
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 years
in a way that the world pays attention to. So
(07:38):
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
(08:02):
than the promises made at COP and their 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
(08:23):
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 appointing an Envoy for the Future.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
So well, you know that 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 (08:57):
Yes, they tell me that it did 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 promises where all
(09:20):
the nation states go to talk to each other without
any power in particular of its own. The UN has
a lot of consensus, 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 the world by
(09:40):
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
(10:01):
member states nation states becoming member states in 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 (10:18):
And fiction does have real consequences. We talked about some
of them in our last conversation. Another one that happened
is that Oxford University launched the Ministry for the Future
at Hartford College. There's supposed to be some real life
efforts being put underneath that. What do you hope those
(10:38):
can accomplish well?
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's a wonderful thing for me to see because Oxford
is a very powerful collection of smart and energetic people
who are very devoted to the cause of trying to
help the world. So an Oxford Ministry for the Future
is kind of a gathering space. It's not quite a
research center, not quite a think tank, series of public events,
(11:01):
and what I hope is that it will workshop ideas
for how to create a new political economy that's adequate
to coping with climate change. So they want it to
be a place of public outreach, of changing hearts and minds,
of explaining the story, of organizing the narrative and repeating
it and over and over again. It's not exactly a collaboration,
(11:24):
but I am a sort of senior advisor, instant le emeritus.
I'm hoping to a push to make sure that we
make it something that is of interest to the audiences
who come to it or hear about it.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So, as a science nerd, I have always seen technology
growth as a way to imagine futures, 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,
(11:57):
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
(12:18):
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 (12:29):
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 punch us
in the nose, kill one out of every thousand persons,
and that's a success because it could have been far worse.
But we organize quickly to make up these vaccines. Climate
(12:53):
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
(13:14):
feel like attention to that in the twenty twenties is
such that the farther futures are and this is finally
getting to answer in 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
(13:35):
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 it.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
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 starting off
(14:09):
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?
Speaker 2 (14:19):
What could it 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
(14:41):
be a kind 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 in which we help each other
(15:01):
out in daily life, transcend fools at the top shouting
and trying to wreck 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
(15:22):
can in a positive direction. Everybody's stressed out, everybody's in
the precariat. The last thing you need is for the
soap app that the 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
(15:44):
society 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
(16:06):
still votes, 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
(16:27):
that the 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. Yet.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
We've sort of talked about some of the things that
are big in front of our minds and 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
(17:13):
and gas, 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 has signed
up to the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty. We had
Minister Susanna Muhammad, who has the Environment Ministry under her
(17:35):
talk on this podcast. 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 anew to move away from the
old stuff because the old stuff just can't continue at
(17:56):
current pace, how do you think that happened?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
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.
(18:23):
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
(18:45):
a framework that if a nation like Columbia, who 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
(19:05):
Special 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
(19:27):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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
(20:33):
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 in other places,
other venues, other people in places of power, including the UN,
and I have to say it usually gets a cool
(20:57):
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
nation states that have governments that are responsible to their people,
(21:18):
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
of thin air, because the mechanisms involved are complicated, but
(21:39):
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 Maynard Keynes 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 (22:05):
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. Well. There is a
(22:26):
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 have a
(22:47):
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 for the past
(23:08):
where none of these good things existed.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
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
(23:33):
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
(23:56):
going to end up falling apart somehow and dying. 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 saved me now twice.
(24:19):
I'm very grateful. I'm very cognizant that science is a
force for good, is a Utaon'tian 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
(24:39):
not a nostalgia, but a denial of reality that there's
this collective force in the world, a group of people
following a method that is enormously 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 (24:55):
As somebody who trained in the sciences, I find it
are that most woments 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,
(25:19):
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 (25:34):
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 rich by being lucky,
and then they think they're smart. And so that crowd
in power is dangerous because they can be nice people.
(25:58):
It's suspicious how well 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
(26:21):
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
(26:45):
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
(27:05):
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.
(27:26):
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 a more collective thing. Really.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
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, a policy change,
diplomatic breakthrough, societal change, whatever. What would you ask for
in twenty twenty five?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Wow, I mean this is so hard. This is I
would ask for three more wishes to come true. 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 it intensely
(28:18):
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 states
(28:39):
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, and
(29:02):
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,
(29:23):
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
(29:47):
the top over the next couple of years, and then
maybe that would be like the last flaring 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
(30:09):
a chance to be solved by us.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Well, I didn't see it coming that. You want the
G twenty to be a real power. Thank you Stam,
Thank you Akshat.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Thank you for listening to zero. And now for the
sound of the week. That's the sound of the trailer
of a nineteen eighty three film called Endgame, which takes
(30:51):
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 Lee Rao
(31:12):
Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Saige Bauman, and Head of
Talk is Brendan nunim Our. Theme music is composed by
Wonder Lee. Special thanks to Schwan Wagner, Shan Chan, Ethan Steinberg,
and Jessica beck I, am Aksha Thrati back So
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