The Future of the Future
The HOT GLOBE Interview with "Sci-Fi" Author Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ukraine War as Climate War, Geoengineering, Optimism, Literature and, Yes, Whale Poop
HOT GLOBE: First question, Stan, as the author of the massive bestseller Ministry for the Future, are you optimistic about--The Future?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: If you can be optimistic and terrified at the same time, then I think I could agree. I’ve been following The Weekly Anthropocene on Substack--just parenthetically, I feel like if you choose correctly, you could get an excellent college education on Substack for, you know, a couple of hundred dollars a year--and his Substack is in the business of collecting and disseminating good news. His wrap-up for 2023 had a lot of reasons to celebrate and even rejoice. But on the other hand, the CO2 emissions continue to be very high. There's still a really entrenched opposition to doing the right things, and there's obviously a lot of political conflict over resources that sometimes include energy. It's a mess. So I'm watching a race where both sides are speeding up.
The bad things are speeding up in their intensity and severity, and the good things are speeding up in their consequential effects. You want the good side to win. Is that being optimistic? Well, maybe so.
HOT GLOBE: What was your take on COP28 if you followed it?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I did, with interest.
The question becomes is microscopic, incremental progress on curbing emissions and getting control of global warming good enough? And the answer is really, No. So the COP system is good. It’s important. It's even kind of powerful. But it's set up to fail by its consensus model.
[COP] is like a gigantic group marriage. You can get divorced the next day.
And so fossil fuels will be mentioned for the first time in the COP statements, which is an achievement in itself, an acknowledgment that it's a problem. But the idea that we will phase out fossil fuels as a statement--that was never going to happen at this one.
recently wrote that COP is not the game. COP is the scorecard. That's not quite right. It's better to keep the analogy of a marriage that we are making promises to each other, and then we later often break those promises.HOT GLOBE: I like that, a group marriage. The last Hot Globe was “Dubai or Die”—
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Oh, my—
HOT GLOBE: I went for the rhyme. Stan, it's just amazing how you can bring abstract, abstruse, technical information into literature.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: Well, that is my job. It's a craft that involves things like rhetorical smoothness to make it easy to read without getting confused or balked by things you don't understand. One lucky thing for me as an English major is if I can understand it myself, then I can convey it to other people at my level of understanding by using my own language, and then the craft of putting science into fiction, which is what science fiction sometimes does, not always, involves having scientists as characters. When they get in an argument, an issue can be explicated in ways that are dramatic as well as interesting. They're arguing who's right, who's wrong, and meanwhile you're getting information about their topic. You can have things change in the real world as a result of scientific advancements or failures. So plots matter. And ultimately, what you're doing is for the novel. And the novel is very capacious. It can include a lot of technical information. Sometimes it's dangerous to do that because it can quickly get boring or obscure. But that's the game of it.
In Ministry, I employed any number of formal tricks to try to make it interesting, even though the subject matter is pretty dire and humorless.
So adding humor somehow, adding some zip and some movement, some quickness to something that is kind of slow and global, making sure that there are characters that you care about that are at the center of the story. These are all ordinary novelistic desires on the part of writer and reader. And then when you apply it to that material, you do have special problems.
HOT GLOBE: As a character, Mary Murphy in the book jumps out and one thinks of Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, who took on Sultan Al-Jaber and the oil interests at COP.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I knew more about her than I knew about Christiana Figueres or Laurence Tubiana, who were two powerful women who helped to craft the Paris Agreement and so those two are more like my Mary Murphy than Mary Robinson in terms of Mary Robinson's career. I was making a joke when I wrote the first draft. The character was called Mary Robinson, a joke on my own name, and my editor pointed out I couldn't just call her Mary Robinson, that this would look too intrusive. I've met the real Mary Robinson since the book came out. She's very impressive, but she's not Mary Murphy. Not even. It's not an attempt at a Roman a clef. I didn't know anything about her. I made up my character. However, I picked an Irish woman on purpose, inspired by what Mary Robinson had done in the international realm. Coming from Ireland, I thought that was worth gesturing toward, as a great thing that she did.
HOT GLOBE: Is it time for science fiction to be called fiction, period? I mean, reality is science fiction now.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I am a patriot of the science fiction community, which is where what I grew up and where I've been published, and I'm proud of it. It's just that the world itself has become a science fiction scenario. It's a big, giant science fiction novel that we're all co-writing together, which I've been saying for about 20 years, but it's more true than ever.
Science fiction is the realism of our time. People need to get used to that.
There's still a huge number of readers-- and this makes me groan in dismay and frustration that will just say to me outright when I tell them what I do—"Oh, I don't read science fiction.” I guess they're thinking about Star Wars and Star Trek. If they're going to read literature at all, they don't want to read about aliens talking to people in English and zipping around the galaxy. Fair enough.
HOT GLOBE: You do have a friendly perspective towards technological change. Is that because you think that's the way to solve climate change problems?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON:
It isn’t going to be machinery that solves our problems. But on the other hand, it is going to be technology because language is a technology. Justice is a technology, law is a technology. They're software. And so any argument against technology misunderstands human beings. We were technological before we were human. We had fire. We had stone tools. We co-evolved with our technologies. And language is the crucial one. And I would agree with those people who say the crucial technologies right now are political economy and finance.
We need to figure out how to pay ourselves to do green work, to do biosphere-positive work. We should no longer be paying ourselves to do biologically destructive work, which is what gets paid for. Now you can make a profit wrecking the biosphere. That should be wrong. It should lose you money. It should be illegal. Make change at the level of our political economy and the machinery will follow.
HOT GLOBE: I would call the geoengineering that's in Ministry of the Future “soft geo-engineering”--
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: My people in Ministry of the Future, after an early experiment in putting ocean water back onto Antarctica to freeze, realized that the quantities are stupendous and that that plan could never work, and they shift over to something that was recommended to me by a glaciologist and just got discussed at a workshop I was at at Stanford last weekend. Can you slow the glaciers down by increasing the drag at their bases? And this is by pumping meltwater out from underneath, or by freezing the bottom of the glacier to the rock, by injecting coolants or using thermo pumps, heat pumps, thermosyphons, or even creating physical obstructions at the bottom of the glaciers. And another thing being discussed at Stanford was putting curtains or webbing offshore to divert warm water from getting underneath the glaciers to make sure that the water under the glaciers is as cold as it has been historically. These are real, and that's a good name, Steve, “soft geo-engineering,” which means localized and reversible and modular.
As for the big stuff, you don't put iron filings in the ocean. You put whale poop, artificially concocted whale poop because the blue whales were eating and pooping high and creating an enormous bio pump.
We killed those whales. We could replace part of their function, and they themselves might come back. And a lot of carbon goes to the bottom of the sea.
And whatever happened in terms of algal blooms would happen. The carbon would drop to the bottom, it wouldn't tend to spread widely. It might be safer than those first plans suggested. And then also for Pinatubo effects. There are certainly arguments to be made by very serious people for putting some sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere or some limestone dust. There are arguments in either direction on what to put up there in the high stratosphere that would deflect some sunlight. People are crazy when they say it would dim the sun. We can't dim the sun, but we can certainly deflect some of its light in the high atmosphere and cool the planet a little bit. I'm not against that. I think that we are in a carbon dioxide overshoot. There's too much carbon dioxide in the air for decades. We're going to be sucking it back down to try to get closer to, what, maybe 350 parts per million, to get back to a biosphere that is healthy. And in that effort,
if we are in those years deflecting a little bit of sunlight away to keep from cooking ourselves and our fellow creatures, I don't see the problem, personally. But here's the point. What I think doesn't matter. What the world thinks matters, and we don't have good governance for this new tech. How would we decide to do it?
And would this also be consensus, where every nation has to agree? At which point could you imagine that never happening? So governance is the big question for geo-engineering.
HOT GLOBE: How worried are you by the hyper-nationalist moment we are in, in terms of getting in the way of climate solutions?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: I see this as absolutely a fundamental battle of our time. The nation-state system is poorly designed for global problems. We have to agree with each other to deal with a global problem, and we don't trust each other. And it's a zero sum game. You win, I lose. So in the nation state system, one thing that some countries can do is say we can't possibly trust other people. We have to raise the drawbridge. We have to save ourselves. To hell with the rest of the world. When you've got climate change, that doesn't work, and enough people are going to point it out that the nationalist response is an ostrich sticking its head in the sand response that isn't going to work. There are going to be people arguing that since you can't trust other people and we and the world are going to hell, we need to raise the drawbridge for our little country. You see it already, right? On the other hand, I recently took a trip over to Europe, and in the three years since Ministry came out, there's more and more power being exerted at the level of the international agencies.
What I mean by that is the World Trade Organization wants to make the trade rules of the world more just and sustainable, and they're going to change the rules and see if their member nations will go for it. The OECD, which is the international organization that administered the Marshall Plan after World War II, they still do stuff. They suddenly passed a regulation that all their nations agreed to, that there can be no more tax havens, that every country has to apply at least a 15% tax to its corporations. This was way out of its lane. And then you have the EU doing green things left, right and center. And the EU is an international body or an agreement of 20 nations to act as one unit. And of course they squabble, but they are acting as one unit. States are realizing we can't solve this or fight with each other over solving this. We need international cooperation. Let's kick it upstairs to the international agencies, which historically have been quite weak and often ignored, and see if they can make us do it. Okay, so yeah, there's things happening. That's part of the part of the struggle right now.
HOT GLOBE: That’s how Ministry is set up, of course. After an intense killing Indian heat event, the formerly powerless world ministries step in to organize climate solutions.. Then it turns violent in part. Stan, how dark might it get before the dawn? Deep in the book, the Kali terrorists start assassinating with swarms of mini-drones the people who are still polluting. Those people then fight back Do you think we'll get to that point as climate change worsens?
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: That's a problem that I can't answer. It depends.
What I mean is that I am frightened. Even something like Russia's brutal war on Ukraine. It's unjustified. But if you try to imagine that Putin is not just crazy, you can imagine him as what’s called “a rational actor.” What were his reasons?