Wonkette Book Club Part 6: A Future Up In The Air
We wrap up our reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.
This week we finish up our reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 climate change epic The Ministry for the Future , and we close out our visit to a possible world where humanity manages, just barely, to save itself from the climate change disaster it created. Or at least that's the case, as the song says, for the people who are still alive.
Since the start of the novel, with Chapter 1's horrific heat wave in India, untold hundreds of millions of humans have died in the climate-related disasters and economic shocks resulting from 40 to 50 years of continued warming, although near the end of the novel atmospheric carbon has not only stopped increasing, but is finally beginning to decline. Of course, there's still no guarantee that humanity still won't find wonderful new ways to wipe itself out.
Cagey bastard writer that he is, Robinson begins Chapter 89 with the confirmation that yes, CO2 in the atmosphere is really declining, and has been for several years, so it's clearly not a seasonal or economic blip. He immediately follows that with the assassination of Tatiana, the tough Russian member of the Ministry team, whose death (we never find out who did it) is devastating to Mary Murphy, who throws herself into work, as she does.
That all leads up to the international COP (Committee of the Parties) meeting in Zurich in Chapter 94, which includes a "global stocktake" of progress on climate, and what still needs to be done. Fun fact: Out here in reality, this year's COP28, to be held in December in Dubai, will include the conclusion of the first global stocktake, a two-year process that started at 2021's COP26 in Glasgow.
In a turn that should only happen in fiction, COP28 will be presided over by the head of an oil company. Sigh.
Unlike the mostly-celebratory COP58 in the novel, this year's delegates will be reporting that we're far behind where we should be to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting warming since 1880 to below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), let alone the goal of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), which will still be quite bad enough. On average, the world is already at 1.1 degrees (1.9 degrees F) above 1880, and carbon emissions keep rising. That said, the rate of increase appears to finally be slowing as methane ("natural") gas power generation increasingly replaces coal and as more renewables come online, so as David Wallace-Wells wrote last fall (NYT gift link), the worst-case scenarios projected just a few years ago are actually looking less likely.
But back to the novel: At COP58 (it's an annual meeting, so the book is now up to 2053), there's lots of good news to report, particularly that big banner showing a leveling off and decline in the Keeling Curve, the zigzag measurement of atmospheric carbon that today is still only going up, from preindustrial levels of 280 to 300 parts per million.
In case you were wondering, today's reading is 422.97 ppm. The year I was born, it was 318.43 ppm. You can look up your birth year up here . The highest level mentioned in Ministry for the Future is 475.
In the closing chapters we read this week, Frank is diagnosed with a brain tumor, and Mary visits him as often as possible in hospice, even working from his hospital room as he quickly declines and eventually dies. (I'm listening to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" while writing this, because it's always good to write to. Mary is right.) Climate refugees are released from camps and given the opportunity to relocate anywhere, with the costs being shared by the rich nations, and that's some real science fiction there, I fear. But then, the world's economy has been rearranged to make that more possible.
Mary eventually retires, nominating Badim as acting head of the Ministry, and she travels around the world with Captain Art Nolan, an airship pilot who ushers tour groups around to see the animals that are returning to newly depopulated parts of the world. Mary is ready for romance, but they don't quite take the plunge.
Semi-spontaneously, the world Zeitgeists a new holiday, Gaia Day, into existence, so Badim's dream of an environmentalism-based religion may have seen its first spark. Mary and Badim have a guarded conversation about the things his "black wing" of the Ministry did, and didn't do. And Sky Captain Art returns for the last chapter, a literally carnivalesque Zurich festival celebrating the end of winter.
And in contrast to the novel's first words, "It was getting hotter," that's no longer the case, except seasonally — there is no such thing as fate.
So let's talk about this sucker! As always, these discussion questions are just a few of the things that occurred to me, but don't feel limited to these. The other usual disclaimer: If you're behind on the reading, or haven't read the book at all, no problem, we're not grading any of this. The conversation about climate is every bit as important. Also, no worries about spoilers, because hey, this is our last meeting!
1)How has the dynamic between Mary and Frank evolved over the course of the novel (if it has), and how does it relate to the book's overall themes? Is Frank Mary's Greek chorus or Jiminy Cricket, or something else?
2)After Badim meets with representatives of the Children of Kali to tell them that it's time for the violence to stop (Chapter 78), terrorism does seem to largely vanish, at least from the plot of the novel, apart from reminders that the threat of being torpedoed has led shipping companies to retrofit container ships to run on solar, figuring the slower speed into their business model; by the time Mary takes her airship tour, most cargo ships are fully robotic, too. Again, I'm not sure that even effective, coordinated terrorism would have that effect, and the disappearance of the Kali groups from the final 30 or so chapters seems like a loose thread. Your thoughts?
3)Remember that terrific Wired profile of Jamie Beard, who's doing everything she possibly can to get oil drilling companies to shift their expertise to enhanced geothermal? (We linked to it in Part 4 of the book club ) My favorite climate-n-energy nerd David Roberts recently interviewed her on his Volts podcast, and she is exactly as brilliant, witty, and OMG even optimistic about the energy potential of geothermal as you'd expect from the profile. (If you're not a podcast person, there's also a transcript)
Why yes, this was more of a comment than a question. But it says a hell of a lot that Ministry doesn't say much at all about using Earth's own heat as an energy source, not because Robinson dropped the ball while researching the book, but because in the two and a half years since it was published, interest and investment in geothermal has accelerated to the point that it's likely to be a huge part of the clean energy transition. As it happens, the very same month Ministry was published, October 2020, Roberts wrote that geothermal was "poised for a big breakout." (He and Beard talk about that piece in the podcast, since it really did help shape much of the interest in geothermal.) The technology's prospects are even more exciting now, with pilot projects in the works — another area Beard is helping with via a newly launched nonprofit,Project InnerSpace .
OK, fine, I'll just embed Beard's TED Talk too. It's Saturday, so we can be a bit sprawling.
4)I really want to talk about how we can be optimistic about climate. Not in any Pollyannaish "Oh, they'll figure it out" sense, but in the way I think Ministry for the Future encourages: very much aware of the challenges, and always on the lookout for ways to leverage existing systems to make significant advances. (One obvious example: the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is already remaking American industrial and energy policy. We need a lot more like it, but combined with other Biden policies, it's really very freaking impressive! How did Ministry for the Future — or our discussions of it here — affect your overall sense of what we can do about climate?
That's plenty to start with, and please, add other questions and ideas as we discuss! I plan to come back to the discussion all weekend, too.
The one rule I am going to enforcestrictlyfor this post is that, to keep the conversation focused, I will remove any off topic comments and ask you to move 'em to the open threads, either the Top Ten from this morning, or the late-afternoon Open thread later. I'd honestly like to keep the book & climate conversation going all weekend, and if you wanna come back and say more, please do so!
Here are our previous installments:
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I HATED The Turn of the Screw, but I found MftF to be an OK read, once I got used to the style variations. I think the basic issue is that MftF wasn't really meant to be a novel, with a story arc and such. It's more of a description of moves that could be made to fix things, set in almost-a-novel form.
I know I do. It's been a weird epoch.