Friday Reads: The Future and Everything After

I went to the redwoods around Eureka with my family in July. We walked under trees hundreds of years old, survivors of fires, flood, and disaster. It was shady and cool and green as we made our way through the forest.

While I was doing that, the rest of the world suffered under a heat wave that raised temperatures to their highest points on record. July was the hottest month ever recorded. People choked under smoke from Canadian wildfires that burned millions of acres of trees and “obliterated” previous records for pollution. The ocean around Florida became a hot tub.

We posed for a tourist pic by a tree that was a sapling when Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire. It’s just barely possible for me to conceive of time on that scale, stretching into the past.

And it’s possible we’re going to see the end of life as we know it in a few decades.

I know that sounds alarmist. I know it seems like doomsday talk, and I am skeptical of end times and revelations.

But every day, we get another headline right in line with what the climate scientists have been telling us for decades. The capital of Alaska floods because of a melting glacier. Maui bursts into flame after years of hotter, dryer weather. Arctic sea ice is vanishing in the summer, and will not come back. The Atlantic currents, which help regulate worldwide temperatures, may collapse entirely. Coral reefs are dying as the ocean warms. Insurance companies are now pulling out of whole states, refusing to cover climate-related losses in Florida and California.1 The Colorado River is running dry and America is draining groundwater everywhere.

A week ago, I prepped for a hurricane in Los Angeles. Ordinarily, Los Angeles never gets tropical storms — the cold water of the Pacific slows them down before they ever make landfall. But the water isn’t as cool anymore, thanks to global warming.

It’s entirely possible it won’t get as bad as the worst-case scenarios in the models and projections. But the fact that we’ve entered a world where those scenarios exist is a red alert flashing in our faces.

There are two responses to this kind of bad news, both a different flavor of denial. The first is the most common, which is to say, “It can’t possibly be that bad,” and go on doing what we’re doing.

This is understandable. This is human. It’s hard to imagine changes on the scale of the planet, especially when your local conditions are bearable. This past year, even though our house was inundated by heavy rains and California was soaked with flooding, the weather in our little microclimate was… pretty nice, actually. We’ve had one of the mildest summers I can remember. I needed a sweater while we were in Eureka.

Meanwhile, the city where I grew up, far to the north of me, is seeing more 100-degree days than ever. Phoenix, where I lived for a while, has become even hotter. People are dying in heat waves all over the world. Every year is now one of the hottest ever.

None of this is normal. None of this is the weather our parents and grandparents faced. It’s not even the weather I knew as a kid. Every record we break, every tipping point we pass, every warning sign we put in the rearview mirror, is another mile into unknown territory for humanity.

As the world heats up, the effects become cumulative. The northern permafrost melts, releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to more ice caps melting, reducing the planet’s reflectivity, which means more sunlight is absorbed by the earth, making the planet even hotter.

The Paris Agreement was an effort to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s pretty much impossible now, scientists say. We’re going to blow past that goal, maybe in as little as five years.

I am not particularly interested in debating this. I’ve read the IPCC reports, the arguments of climate skeptics, and the predictions of climate scientists. I’ve been doing this since college. I am not a genius scientist, but I have read the work of the people who are, and they are all remarkably consistent. The weather is changing because the climate is changing, and the climate is changing because we’ve spent the last century or so pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases. Sea levels will rise. Heat waves will get worse. Weather will get more extreme.

This leads to the next flavor of denial, which is to say, “It’s too late to change anything.”

I confess I fall into that kind of despair all the time.

David Mitchell brought it home for me like this in The Bone Clocks: I remember the first time I heard the Talking Heads. That was 40 years ago now. In that same amount of time, large chunks of the planet may not be fit for humans. Forty years in either direction. An old song on one side, global catastrophe on the other. Forty years once seemed like an eternity to me. Now it seems like an eyeblink: not nearly enough time to save the world.

This is not a problem that can be solved by people recycling, or turning off their A/C, or driving an EV. You can’t shame people into reusing enough grocery bags to undo everything that’s been done. It is fundamentally unfair to expect individuals to save the world when it has taken more than a century of collective economic and governmental policy to get us here.2 

Faced with all that, it seems pretty rational to say, “Well, we’re fucked.”

But I have kids. My friend John, who is pretty firmly in the “we’re fucked” climate camp, once told me that, “If you’re a parent, you’re required to be an optimist.” You have to believe in the future because you’ve brought someone into the world who will have to live there.

This is where we come to Kim Stanley Robinson’s massive, challenging, and wholly remarkable book, The Ministry for the Future. If it’s possible to write a thriller about bureaucracy, science, engineering, and economics, this is that book. My copy was 563 pages, and they all flew by.

The novel begins with a massive heat wave that kills 20 million people in India in 2025. People realize how bad things can get. In response, the UN establishes an independent, international commission called the Ministry for the Future to advocate for future generations. It’s meant to be another toothless panel that doesn’t actually do anything. Instead, it changes the world, because there is no alternative.

Following his characters across roughly 25 years, Robinson presents a handbook of solutions for the climate crisis and games them out.

• In response to its massive death toll, India pumps sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, refracting the sun’s rays and lowering the temperature.

• Fossil fuel companies currently have a vested interest in pulling carbon from the ground. Robinson suggests paying them off to keep it there, and paying everyone else to get it out of the atmosphere. Giant carbon-sucking engines are built all over the world, while small farmers are rewarded for regenerative agriculture and planting forests. The money comes from a carbon coin, a currency backed by the world’s central banks and traded on the global financial markets. A lot of people get rich off helping the planet breathe again.

• Melting ice sheets in the Antarctic are sliding into the ocean, causing sea level rise. Scientists create a system to pump water out from under the ice, putting the sheets back down on the bedrock, applying the brakes and saving thousands of coastal cities from drowning.

These are all real-world solutions that have been offered by engineers and scientists and economists. Nobody knows exactly how they will work in real life. But they all seem better than doing what we’re doing now. And if they don’t work, we can try other ideas, other plans.

It has taken all of human history to get us to this point. It will require massive investment and massive cooperation to change it. And the longer we wait, the uglier that struggle will be.

Although the novel doesn’t dwell on them, there are moments of terrorism and open warfare in The Ministry for the Future. An eco-terrorist group sees that air travel contributes more CO2 to the atmosphere than any other form of transportation. They attack planes with drone swarms, killing thousands in a single day. Out of fear, people stop flying, and out of necessity, climate-friendly air travel is invented. Welcome to the new age of blimps.

But 7,000 people who did nothing more than get on a plane one morning are still dead.

The novel also depends on the belief that people will stop being selfish assholes once they see how bad things can get.

In this, Robinson is a little more realistic. Another group of eco-terrorists takes the entire Davos conference hostage and forces the billionaire attendees into a re-education seminar on the true cost of their lifestyles. The attendees laugh it off. They emerge with a good story to tell their friends back home, and go right back to their lives. They only start paying attention when eco-terrorists start targeting them individually, when their private jets start falling out of the sky.

I would rather we don’t get to that point.3 I don’t want this to become us vs. them or a war of all against all. We’re already seeing the effects of the climate-driven refugee crisis. People are beginning to migrate from one area to another even in the United States.

Eventually, there will be no place else to go. We only have the one planet. This is the existential struggle of our time.

Shortly after the Covid quarantine, my kids told me they were not looking forward to the future because there was no point. If they weren’t trapped inside because of a new virus, they were looking at a world where the oceans were going to swallow the beaches where they’d played as toddlers, where people were going to starve because of crop failures, where things could only get worse.4

This broke my heart. When I was a kid, I believed in a future of space stations, lunar colonies, and jetpacks. I believed our lives could get better.

I still believe that. Like Robinson, I believe in our capacity for invention. We hammered the world into this shape. We must be able to change it again for the better.

Amid all the bad news of disasters and flooding and heat waves, there was one bright spot that could have come right out of Robinson’s novel: In Montana, a judge ruled that the state had to consider the effects of climate change on future generations under the state’s constitution. The ruling said, in effect, that we must preserve our world for the children who will inherit it.

This is one small step to that better future we have to deliver for our children, a future they can believe in. The Ministry for the Future is a blueprint. We need to start building.

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