This book would be a good companion read either with Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, or with Robinson’s other books Red Moon and New York 2140.
The story, written in 2020, begins in 2025. Climate change has progressed to the point that heat domes in the Global South reach deadly wet bulb temperatures of 35 Celsius. The one narrated at the outset, in India, lasting two weeks, results in an estimated 20 million deaths.
Around the same time the COP, hoping to kick-start some momentum in climate policy which has been so far absent, creates a standing committee — colloquially named the Ministry For the Future — to direct ongoing climate efforts in between conferences. Its chief, Mary Murphy, is the viewpoint character of the novel.
For the first few years, the Ministry encounters little but bureaucratic stonewalling, with the same meaningless debates and unenforceable promises that had previously characterized the Paris process.
Meanwhile the Children of Kali, an environmental terrorist organization, was galvanized into existence by the trauma of the killer heat wave. At one point Mary, frustrated by the lack of any concrete progress, floated the idea of a “black wing” of the Ministry, semi-autonomous, a somewhat softer version of the Children of Kali, doing illegal or semi-illegal things with plausible deniability. But when she floated the idea with Badim, a member of her staff from Nepal who had actual ties to organizations engaged in such activities — she was taken aback by the implications.
“So what has this black wing of yours done!” she exclaimed, suddenly frightened.
“I really can’t say.” He saw her face, temporized. “Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again. In a sense you could say that worked.”
“How do you mean worked?”
“The plants stayed shut, and solar’s gotten another investment boost. And new coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”…
“Has anyone been hurt or killed?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Has anyone been terrorized?”
“You mean scared away from burning carbon?”
“Yes.”
“I think it might be good if that had happened, don’t you?”
“But how?”
“Well, you know. What really scares people is financial… access to their money, if people get cut off from that, they are definitely scared.”
Although she initially fails to explicitly embrace their efforts or sanction Badim’s participation in them, over the years she comes to tacitly acknowledge Badim’s connections as a black wing of the Ministry, and to some extent even encourage its activities.
The Children of Kali’s actions continued to escalate, with or without unofficial aid from the Ministry.
So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives.
Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines….
One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were.
It was noticed that none of the experimental battery-powered planes had been brought down, and no biofuel-powered planes, also no blimps, dirigibles, or hot-air balloons; no airships of any kind. But in that period there were so few of these, it was hard to tell at the time if they had been given a pass or not. It looked like they had, it seemed to make sense, and the surge in airship manufacture, which had already gotten a small start, has never ceased to this day.
The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land. Torpedoes from nowhere: a different kind of drone…. They ran on diesel fuel, of course. Loss of life in these sinkings was minimal, but world trade was severely impacted. Stock markets fell even lower than they had after Crash Day. A worldwide recession, a feeling of loss of control, price spikes in consumer goods, the clear prospect of the full-blown depression that indeed followed a few years later … it was a time of dread.
Two months after Crash Day a group called Kali, or the Children of Kali, issued a manifesto over the internet. No more fossil-fuel-burning transport. That was about twenty to twenty-five percent of civilization’s total carbon burn at this point, and all of it vulnerable to disruption, as the manifesto put it.
* * *
“It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.”
The parallel growth of civil society organizations is quite similar to that in New York 2140 and Red Moon. Like those other novels, this one features a Householders Union and other debtors’ organizations that engage in strikes and boycotts against the financial system and landlordism. To quote a character in NY2140:
So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today….
What I mean by a householders’ strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages … maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated … So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? … That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
And as we shall see below, they wind up doing just that. The development of all these civil society organizations gets its initial boost from the creation of an open-source social media platform intended to starve Facebook and Twitter of resources and then supplant them.
“The AI group is making open source instruments that mimic the functions of all the big social media sites.”
“So people can shift over to this new set?”
“Yes. And it will protect their data for them using quantum encryption.”…
“How many do you think will shift?”
“Maybe half. After a few years, everybody.”
“So, the decapitation of Facebook.”
“And all the rest like it.”
“Replaced by a system owned by its users, in effect.”
“Yes. Open source. A distributed ledger. The Global Internet Cooperative Union. GICU.”…
“Then if it works, it will serve as the operating platform for ICU…. International Credit Union. A people’s bank. The team has set that up too. Lots of bank mirroring, and credit unions are already a thing. This won’t be quite like a credit union, because it would be an open network of people who make a distributed issuance of credit, issuing carbon coin fractions to each other on proof of good action on carbon. People deposit their savings and create new value in a customer- and employee-owned distributed ledger. Their bank, as one function of their YourLock account. It invests mindfully as a group mind, a kind of planetary mind, that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities. Also, a place to go if everyone removes their deposits from current private banks at the same time. Those banks are so over-leveraged that they will immediately crash. Then individuals have to have a safe harbor.
As in Red Moon, the ongoing economic crash results in the rise of mass populist movements swarming Beijing and Paris by the millions, along with virtually every large city in the world.
Something then caused us to all converge on Paris. In France, that’s where you go…. Of course once we got there we couldn’t take on the police or the army, that would be suicide, we had to overwhelm them with numbers. And eventually there were so many of us we couldn’t be contained, everything ground to a halt…. Now we had to show what could happen in our time. So we took over the city, Paris was ours by way of sheer bodies jamming the streets. And of course some of us had read about the Commune and realized if we didn’t win decisively we would be hunted down and killed, or at best jailed for life. So at that point it was win or die, and we buckled down to making it work as an alternative system of life, a kind of commons that was post-capitalist, even post- money, just people doing what it took to keep everyone fed. And I must say, so many Parisians came out and helped us, cooked food, provided rooms, manned the barricades in every way, that again we had to realize that it wasn’t just those of us in the streets, it was all France, maybe even the world, we couldn’t tell. But for sure what happened then was the most intense and important feeling I could ever live in this existence. Here’s what it was: solidarity. We could see so many others with us, all on each other’s side. Paris was a commons, France was a commune.
Another subplot involves various geoengineering projects. Among the most interesting was an effort to forestall the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps, by drilling down to the melt water below the glaciers and pumping it up to refreeze on the surface, in order to reseat the ice on the bedrock and slow glacial flow to historically normal levels.
Another one was the development of rewilded habitat corridors — major stretches of contiguous territory restored to wild nature without permanent human settlements. Considering the sparsely populated nature of much of the world and the willingness of the few residents to be bought out, they expanded rapidly despite a slow start. In North America in particular, by the end of the book, most of northern and central Canada, and a strip including most of the Rockies and US northern plains, had been converted to such corridors — often with Indigenous stewardship.
Mary met with the heads of the world’s central banks, proposing the issue of “carbon-coins” backed by sequestration of CO2 or abstention from burning fossil fuels. They initially refused, since it was so far outside their understanding of their institutional missions. But as periodic heat waves recurred, environmental terrorism against carbon-burners intensified, and the global depression worsened, the previously reluctant central banks agreed to issue the coins.
In the late 30s, following a military coup in Saudi Arabia (thereafter simply “Arabia”), the new republic committed to keep all its petroleum in the ground, in return for an annual revenue stream in carbon-coin equal to their expected revenue from oil production. This further drove up the price of fossil fuels and heightened the cost advantage of renewable energy.
The Ministry for the Future began to imitate the “shadow government” tactic of minority parties in parliamentary regimes, formulating detailed reform proposals and legislative agendas for friendly governments that came to power — sort of an ALEC, except not run by Nazis.
The terrorist threat was kicked up a notch by the development of “pebble-mob” weaponry, cheap swarms of small guided missiles that travelled faster than sound and converged on their target only at the last minute. They were unstoppable, and not only made armored vehicles and military aircraft obsolete but rendered virtually any other target chosen completely vulnerable. Their production still required state-level resources, which lessened the potential chaos considerably, but their availability to a host of poorer nations enraged by heat waves and continued climate damage by the industrialized countries made fossil fuel production, and carbon-intensive forms of energy, industry, and travel, even less tenable.
In the meantime the radical states forming the African Union encouraged further radical changes of government on the continent, culminating in a majority of African governments repudiating their “odious debts” to the World Bank and China, and nationalizing all mines and other extractive industries — including rare earth extraction formerly worked by slave labor — and putting them under worker-ownership.
And student unions in Western countries voted for a payment strike on student loan debt. In the face of this and debt strikes by the Householders Union, combined with the other financial volatility, much or most money on paper “turned to vapor,” as banks paused most lending in hopes the state would reestablish trust, and debtors suspended payments against the possibility their creditors wouldn’t exist in a week. “In other words, liquidity freeze.”
Local currencies took up part of the slack, with at least some fraction of the larger-scale need for liquidity at the regional level provided through microlending and other forms of coordination on YourLock. But the vacuum was such that only central banks could address the full need, by taking over banking systems and issuing new money.
And the ongoing ecoterrorist war continued to destroy the profit model of centralized global capitalism.
Stores are bottlenecks, being distribution centers and not that numerous. You kick them in the balls when you attack their distribution centers. Their stock price drops at news of such attacks, and they have no way to counter that…. A hundred thousand dollars of physical damage can leverage a hundred million dollars in lost asset value. Big pension funds notice there’s a problem and move their monster assets elsewhere, then endowments and trusts and universities and non-profits and hedge funds all notice the big dogs moving, and they try to get out of the house before it falls on their head. And suddenly a big famous corporation, which is also of course a legal person, has suffered something like a stroke, and is now lying there paralyzed in a hospital bed, on life support, his heirs arguing over who gets the last of his stuff.
So stores were torched, sure. In the past that would have been the end of it. People like direct action because it’s quick, and afterwards you don’t have to face any real change. But around this time the Householders’ Union backed the Student Debt Resistance in support of its payment strike. That was non-compliance in action, meaning stay-at-home for almost every job. It’s a form of general strike.
The result was that a sort of global tipping point or paradigm shift occurred, as a majority of people for the first time began to think in terms of systemic transition.
Then on July 16th big parts of the internet, the online store of stores, stopped working. That felt freaky. And we had done it. Was it smart? Wasn’t the internet like our nervous system now? It was like that guy who cut his arm off to get out of a canyon in Utah. A very desperate measure. We had cast ourselves out into an interregnum, the chaos between dynasties. The Crisis, Year Zero: oh my fucking god.
In a situation like this, there has to be a plan. You can’t make it up on the fly in the middle of the breakdown. Not in the modern era of hyper-complexity. Say the internet stops working, your savings suddenly vanish and money doesn’t work anymore…. Can you make up a new society from scratch at that point? No, you can’t. Things just fall apart and next thing you know you’re eating your cat. So take this in: there has to be a pre-existing Plan B. And it can’t be a secret plan, popped on the world in the time of chaos…. So it’s in that spirit that Plan B has to be a known plan…, like the shadow government of an opposition party, putting out all its plans for citizens to consider and hopefully vote for. All of the proposals on the table and argued for. Step-by-step assembly instructions.
…[C]onsider this one example, which is actually an example of how the lack of a Plan B can stop a revolution from even starting in the first place, despite the crying need for one, so it’s especially relevant for us now: meaning Greece and the failure to Grexit, back in the early years of the century….
So who was going to lose here, the Greek population or international finance? Syriza put the question to its people in the form of a poll. The Greek people voted by a large majority to defy the Troika and refuse austerity. Syriza then promptly accepted austerity and the EU’s leash, going belly-up and begging for a bail-out.
Why did Syriza do that, why did they betray the wishes of the people who elected them? Because they had no Plan B. What they needed at that moment was a plan that would get them out of the EU and back to the drachma. They would have needed IOUs of some sort to stand in and do the job of money while they printed new drachmas and made all the other necessary changes as they transitioned back to a country in control of its own currency and sovereignty. And in fact there were people in Syriza working furiously to design that Plan B, which they called Plan X, but this turned out to be a case of too little too late, as they couldn’t convince their colleagues in government to risk trying it.
So, in the absence of such a plan ready to be enacted, Syriza had to cave to the EU and global finance. It was that or chaos, which could have meant starvation….
This time, our time, when the whole thing broke all over the world, there had to be a Plan B.
What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it’s called socialism.
As in the other two Robinson books I’ve repeatedly referenced, his understanding of “socialism” is relatively blindered:
Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.
Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover story for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let’s call it real political representation….
One scary thing, there has to still be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means the already-existing central banks have to be part of it, which means the current nation-state system has to be part of it. Sorry but it’s true, and maybe obvious. Even if you are a degrowth devolutionist, an anarchist or a communist or a fan of world government, we only do the global in the current world order by way of the nation-state system…. It is what we’ve got now, and in the crux, when things fall apart, something from the old system has to be used to hang the new system on, hopefully something big and solid. Without that it’s castles in air time, and all will collapse into chaos. So yes: money, meaning central banks, meaning the nation-state system. It’s a social agreement, nothing more.
Note the portions I highlighted in the paragraph above. “We only do the current world order” is doing a lot of heavy lifting — especially in a book recounting systemic change on the scale of this one. The best I can say, in charity to KSR, is that in a world where the nation-state has preempted and coopted most avenues of large-scale coordination, people’s daily survival depends on institutions that are intimately intertwined with the nation-state, and a new ecosystem of post-state counter-institutions has not yet coalesced on a scale sufficient to take over the burden of keeping people alive, it might be impossible to bring the necessary changes about sufficiently fast through a single rupture event that entailed the destruction of the state. A transition period, as between feudalism and capitalism, might be necessary, combining a number of major non-reformist reforms within the structure of a nation-state system which was itself rapidly evolving in a non-state direction.
But no, money — simply an accounting system — does not as such require a nation-state framework to function. Nor does any other form of coordination. The nation-state system is only a few centuries old; although they functioned according to very different rules, money and land tenure nevertheless existed under a polycentric medieval order without anything like territorial sovereignty or a general police power in the modern sense. An ecosystem of Greco’s mutual credit systems, land trusts, fiber optic and rail infrastructures, etc., can function based on non-sovereign, functionally oriented institutions coordinated by standing federative bodies, themselves likewise functionally oriented and possessing no general police powers, relations between them governed by a sort of common law derived from their mutual interactions as equals.
And Robinson’s own fictional Martian government in the Red Mars trilogy is arguably closer to the non-state than the state end of the spectrum; most of the egalitarian goals of the Martian polity are achieved through pre-distribution (see here, pp. 14 et seq.), or the initial definition of property rules, rather than through ongoing state redistribution and regulation. Land is defined as a social commons, and all economic enterprises are defined as the property of their workers. The Martian state itself is little more than a standing administrative body (in the Saint-Simonian sense of “administration of things”) that judicially enforces these property rights.
At any rate, the actual transition scenario in this story was much more an emergent development, coalescing from self-organized, counter-institutional building blocks on the ground, than his adamant statements quoted above would suggest.
Thus the shadow government devised by the Ministry for the Future in Zurich, Switzerland, became one template for a new plan. Not completely new, of course. In fact it was a rearrangement of various elements of old plans, in many ways. Mondragón, Kerala, MMT, blockchain, Denmark, Cuba, and so on: all the elements had been out there working all along. Which made the new methods easier to implement.
* * *
Details can be arranged on a case-by-case basis, and even though the devil is in the details, they are still details, a matter of making the pieces of the puzzle fit. These details can be worked out, and often they already have been. The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.
Under the combined effects of eco-terrorism, technological advance, and carbon coin incentives, de-carbonization continued apace.
After several years of container ships being sunk on a regular basis, taken out by drone torpedoes of ever-increasing speed and power, the shipping industry had finally begun adapting to the new situation. It was adapt or die; there were only about eleven thousand container ships afloat, only two hundred of them in the Very Large class, and after forty of those were sunk the verdict was clear, the writing on the wall….
So the first attempts at transitioning to ships the saboteurs wouldn’t sink involved altering the ones that already existed. Electric motors replaced diesel engines to spin the props, and these motors were powered by solar panels, mounted as giant roofs over the top of the cargo.
But because these ships were massive, the solar power was only sufficient to drive them slowly.
Fairly quickly there emerged specialized shipyards devoted to taking in container ships and cutting them up, each providing the raw material for five or ten or twenty smaller ships, all of which were propelled by clean power in ways that made them as fast as the diesel-burners had been, or even faster.
These changes included going back to sail. Turned out it was a really good clean tech…. The new versions had sails made of photovoltaic fabrics that captured both wind and light, and the solar-generated electricity created by them transferred down the masts to motors that turned propellers. Clipper ships were back, in other words, and bigger and faster than ever.
News came sometime in the early 2040s that atmospheric CO2 levels had not only stopped rising but, thanks to sequestration efforts — reforestation and ocean regreening via phytoplankton feeding and the like chief among them, but also carbon-negative concrete, regenerative agriculture, and a host of other things — had fallen from 275 to 254 ppm over a four-year period. And the drop continued, at an accelerating rate.
By the end of the book, we get the sense of a transition survived, and of — to paraphrase Alasdair Gray — living in the early days of a better world. The new world has been born, if still red-faced and screaming with effort, and most of the monsters successfully fought off.
One of my very favorite genres of science fiction is a medium-future utopia of libertarian socialism and post-scarcity emerging from the present and near-future Time of Troubles. Considering the times we actually live in, this meets a great psychic need — or at least it does for me, anyway. If you have a similar need, I highly recommend Ministry For the Future.
