TADEAS:
fukuyamovo review
We're Cookedhttps://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/were-cooked/Robinson’s most recent book is his 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, which Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books. The novel begins sometime in the mid-21st century, when global warming has continued largely unabated from the present. It begins with a massive heat wave that kills 20 million people in India in a single week, and ends, somewhat later in the century, in a happy place (spoiler alert) where enough carbon has been sucked out of the atmosphere to not just slow but to reverse global warming.
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The premise of the novel is that, following the Indian heat wave, the climate crisis has gotten so dangerous and immediate that governments around the world start throwing everything they have into fighting it. The crisis stimulates a shadowy underground movement called the Children of Kali that starts to assassinate executives of fossil fuel companies, blows up refineries, and shoots down airliners for their carbon output. Governments do not wait for international agreement, but on their own launch ambitious geo-engineering projects to do things like increase earth’s albedo or slow the melting of Antarctic glaciers. The most important initiative carried out by Mary Murphy and her Ministry is to convince a group of central bankers to issue unlimited numbers of carbon coins, which in effect pay people to either not produce or sequester carbon. Rather than making money from pumping oil and gas, fossil fuel companies find that they can earn more profits keeping their reserves in the ground. In addition to reversing the climate crisis, these massive interventions permit governments to cap incomes and institute something like universal basic income, so that everyone is protected from the huge economic disruptions that take place.
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I suppose that this novel is intended to be a hopeful blueprint for a way out of the climate crisis. Knowing what I do about global politics and human nature, however, The Ministry for the Future left me rather despairing that it will ever be solved. For all of his seeming political sophistication, Robinson posits the most optimistic possible political developments at every turn, developments that enable Russia, China, the United States, Europe, and the developing world to work together cooperatively to solve the problem. For example, the first three countries listed take their aircraft carriers out of military service and use them to support the pumping of groundwater in the Artic. After the heat catastrophe, India gets its act together and acts boldly as a world leader in geo-engineering. The assassinations of corporate executives and the downing of commercial airliners does not lead to repression of the eco-terrorists, but rather convinces people that they should travel by steamship and dirigible instead. They discover that they don’t actually need to get from Zurich to San Francisco in a day, but are much more productive spending several weeks on a ship. The massive economic downturn provoked by the effective withdrawal of liquidity produces global unemployment higher than that of the Great Depression, but it lasts less than a year as central banks create massive amounts of liquidity and are put under the effective control of the people of their respective countries. After being kidnapped and held hostage at one Davos conference, the world’s elites are safely released and agree to climb onboard with the policies demanded by their kidnappers. Five million people spontaneously march on Tiananmen Square and force the Communist Party to work to save the planet instead of prioritizing economic growth. At the same time that they deal with the climate crisis, governments around the world cap wealth and implement something like universal basic income. They do this as they are depopulating millions of square miles of their own territory and allowing it to be reclaimed by native flora and fauna.
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Robinson is right that our future depends on some big governance choices we have yet to make, both at national and international levels. I’m afraid, however, that if he’s right about the needed agenda, we’re all cooked