The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They had been introduced by the Russians in the 2020s, and spread rapidly after that. They spread faster than the spread of the implications of their existence. Nation-states kept spending billions that could have been used elsewhere on navies and air forces and military bases, none of which could be defended against these new weapons. They were more powerful than the atomic bomb, in this very particular sense: you could use them. And they couldn’t be stopped. That was the main thing that was not being understood, either accidentally or on purpose, so that people wouldn’t have to change their armaments or their purchase orders: these missiles couldn’t be stopped. They were small, they launched from mobile launchers, they came from all directions in a coordinated attack in which they only congregated at their target in the last few seconds of their flights. They did not give off radioactive signals, and thus could be hidden until the moment of launch. And they were relatively cheap.

  After you launched them, they flew at about a thousand miles an hour. That and the fact they only coalesced to their mob moment in the last seconds before impact was enough to forestall any realistic defense against them. They were lethally explosive versions of the drones that had brought down all the planes on Crash Day.

  Aircraft carriers? Sunk. Bombers? Blown out of the sky. An oil tanker, boom, sunk in ten minutes. One of America’s eight hundred military bases around the world, shattered. Death and chaos, and no one findable to blame.

  The war on terror? It lost.

  Either everyone’s happy or no one is safe. But we’re never happy. So we’ll never be safe.

  Or put it this way: Either every culture is respected, or no one is safe. Either everyone has dignity or no one has it.

  Because why? Because this:

  A private jet owned by a rich man— boom.

  A coal-fired power plant in China— boom.

  A cement factory in Turkey, boom. A mine in Angola, boom. A yacht in the Aegean, boom. A police station in Egypt, boom. The Hotel Belvedere in Davos, boom. An oil executive walking down the street, boom. The Ministry for the Future’s offices— boom.

  What people then had to consider was that this list of targets could be greatly extended. The US Capitol, various houses of parliament, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, the Taj Mahal— and so on.

  No place on Earth was safe.

  Meetings at Interpol and many other agencies concerned with global security were inconclusive as to the source or sources of these attacks when they happened. Although, as with the nerve gas made by the Russians and used to kill Russian dissidents in Britain, these pebble mobs were definitely complex military devices, not something you could cook up in your garage. They were nation-state devices, in effect, made for fairly big and sophisticated militaries by fairly advanced aerospace and computer companies, then sold or given to smaller actors.

  So, after the Interpol meetings, a rumor began to circulate that it was in Russia where the Arabian coup against the Saudi royal family had been planned. But wait, why would the Russians be party to that? Because with Arabian oil off the table, and then Brazilian oil too, Russian oil was that much more valuable. But this was speculation only. The Russian government denied all these rumors and identified them as part of the ongoing anti-Russian campaign common in the West and elsewhere. Nothing to it. Each nation responsible for its own security. Russia was a keeper of all its treaty obligations and a force for stability in the world. Pebble mobs might even be a force for good, because now war was rendered impossible. It was mutual assured destruction, not of civilian populations, but of war machinery. An end to the twentieth-century concept of total war, a return to the focus on military-against-military that had characterized armed conflict before the breakdown of civilized norms established at Westphalia in 1648, then forgotten in the twentieth century. Now back again.

  But not really. Because anything could be targeted. So it was not really military-against-military, as Russia claimed, but anyone-against-anyone. If they could get hold of one of these assemblies.

  A heat wave hit Arizona, then New Mexico and west Texas, then east Texas, then Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and the Florida panhandle. For a week the temperature/humidity index hovered around wet-bulb 35, with temperatures around 110 F and humidity 60 percent. For the most part electrical power remained functioning, and people stayed inside air-conditioned buildings; if they didn’t have air conditioning themselves, or were nervous about losing it, they congregated in public buildings where it existed. All fine, but then the heat wave was met by a high-pressure cell coming up from the Caribbean, and the so-called double wave created wet-bulb 38s, seriously fatal. Demand for power grew until there were power failures and brownouts, and even though some of these were planned to avoid blackouts, and all of them eventually contained, and relatively brief, they still exposed millions to fatal levels of heat. Somewhere between two and three hundred thousand people died in a single day during that heat wave.

  Later that figure was revised, as it was discovered over time that the previous decadal census had significantly undercounted the at-risk population. But no matter the exact number, it was huge. Not as large as the great Indian heat wave had been, but this time it was Americans, in America. That fact made a difference, especially to Americans.

  Although still, in the months that followed, people’s biases emerged. It was the South where it had happened. It was mostly poor people, in particular poor people of color. It couldn’t happen in the North. It couldn’t happen to prosperous white people. And so on. Arizona’s part in it was forgotten, except in Arizona.

  This was yet another manifestation of racism and contempt for the South, yes, but also of a universal cognitive disability, in that people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence. It was some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism, some speculated, a way to help people carry on even when it was pointless to carry on. People living just twenty miles from a town flattened by a tornado in Ohio would claim that the flattened town was in the tornado track and they were not, so it would never happen to them. The following week they might get killed, in the event itself surprised and feeling that this was an unprecedented freak occurrence, but meanwhile, until then, they swore it couldn’t happen. That’s how people were, and even the torching of the South didn’t change it.

  CO2 levels that year were around 470 parts per million.

  They had gone from driving a car to hanging on to a tiger’s tail. Hanging on for dear life.

  70

  COP meetings of the Paris Climate Agreement kept happening every year, despite the increasing sense of irrelevance everyone in attendance felt in the face of the world’s ever-widening disasters. It was clear that the worsening situation vis-à-vis carbon in the atmosphere meant that many of the developing countries, those which could least afford to cope with climate catastrophes, were now being struck by weather disasters on a regular basis, and these were perhaps the prime drivers in the human conflicts now breaking out everywhere. For those who held to that perception of ultimate causes, the Paris Agreement remained something to hold on to, however weak it was beginning to look relative to the crisis.

  The UN’s climate negotiations had always made a strong distinction between developed and developing nations, with lists of each specified, and repeated injunctions made that developed nations were to do more to mitigate climate problems than developing nations could. Much of this call for “climate equity” was spelled out in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Clause 2 of Article 2 states, “This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances.” Article 9’s clause 1 repeats this principle: developed nation
s are to assist developing nations, they can and should do more than developing nations.

  These were crucial clauses in the Agreement. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. The delegates who had pushed hardest for the inclusion of these articles had given their all, they had spent years of their lives working for them. On the subway rides during summit meetings they compared notes on divorces, bankruptcies, broken career paths, stress-related illnesses, and all the other personal costs accrued by throwing themselves so hard into this cause.

  Were they fools to have tried so hard for words, in a world careening toward catastrophe? Were they fools to keep on trying? Words are gossamer in a world of granite. There weren’t even any mechanisms for enforcement of these so carefully worded injunctions; they were notional only, the international order of governance being a matter of nations volunteering to do things. And then when they didn’t do them, ignoring the existence of their own promises. There was no judge, no sheriff, no jail. No sanctions at all.

  But what else did they have? The world runs by laws and treaties, or so it sometimes seems; so one can hope; the granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets. And if one were to argue that the world actually runs by way of guns in your face, as Mao so trenchantly pointed out, still, the guns often get aimed by way of laws and treaties. If you give up on sentences you end up in a world of gangsters and thieves and naked force, hauled into the street at night to be clubbed or shot or jailed.

  So the people who fought for sentences, for the precise wording to be included in treaties, were doing the best they could think of to avoid that world of bare force and murder in the night. They were doing the best they could with what they had.

  Now, as the situation continued to deteriorate, there were delegates at every annual Conference of the Parties who kept on focusing on words and phrases. Many of them were now arguing that all the young people on Earth, and all the generations of humans in the centuries to come, and all their cousin creatures on the planet who could never speak for themselves, especially in court— all these living beings added up to something like a poor and vulnerable developing nation, a huge one, appearing inexorably over the horizon of time. These new citizens were young and weak, in many cases utterly helpless. And yet they had rights too, or should have rights; and under the Paris Agreement’s equity clauses, which every nation had signed, one could argue that they had rights equivalent to those of a developing nation. And without quick and massive efforts from the Annex One nations, meaning the developed world, the “old rich” countries, that giant new developing nation’s development, even its very existence, looked less and less likely. So the COP meetings had to keep insisting on equity as a fundamental value and policy. Which meant that support for the Subsidiary Body popularly known as the Ministry for the Future should continue to be supported in full.

  71

  Notes taken for Badim again, regular executive meeting with Mary and leadership group. The usual summary of points, plus impressions (B wants more). Will clean this up later. Typing as they speak. I keep forgetting to go to the bathroom first.

  Badim next to Mary, silent, distracted.

  Tatiana Voznesenskaya next to him, also distracted. She’s being sued back home, can’t go to Russia safely, here no longer living in same place. Her report: Lawsuits in over a hundred countries. Also joined defense of nearly four hundred groups being sued for doing good things. T not happy.

  Imbeni: MftF being attacked might have caused others to step up. African Union backing all nationalizations in Africa, means a united front toward China, World Bank, all outside forces. Africa for Africans the fastest growing party in every country there. Pressure on Nigeria in particular to claim the carbon coin like Arabia and Brazil. Doing so could fund a lot of other things. Basic infrastructure and education, then more. Possession of oil now seen as a curse to be exorcised. Chance here to help leverage good change. Africa led by Africans.

  Bob, Adele, Estevan in a team report. Mostly Antarctica. Test projects pumping water out from under glaciers getting positive results. Pine Island Glacier slowed from hundreds of meters a year to tens of meters. We should help scale this up, support it fully. 60 Antarctic glaciers, 15 Greenland glaciers. Big push, but amazing cost-benefit. Bang for buck. Let’s do it. M nodding.

  Kaming not so cheery. Rate of extinctions still rising. Sumatran tiger, northern white rhinoceros, more river dolphins, these just the latest charismatics confirmed to be gone in wild. Orangutans next, along with 350 other mammal species in red zone danger of extinction.

  Indra: Direct air capture now more powerful and less expensive, need to scale up appropriately, then find places to sequester billions of tons of dry ice. Progress being made in this technology means more should be invested in it. Like most of the MftF budget, and a huge dose of carbon coins.

  Elena: The 4 per 1000 movement has made an accurate, uncomplicated, inexpensive test kit for year-by-year changes in carbon in the soil. Measurement now possible, need a whole army of certifiers to certify, then good to go.

  Mary: Anyone paying farmers for losses incurred in transition to new ag methods?

  Elena: No. No payers found.

  Mary: But this is perfect for carbon coins! Why shouldn’t they be getting carbon coins?

  Dick: The banks have to make it clear the carboni can be issued in fragments of a coin. Like carbon pennies.

  Elena: We would like to see that. But we’re only just now able to quantify what’s being sequestered. Also, defining sequestration becoming an issue.

  Dick: The standard definition from CCCB is being held in storage for a century.

  Mary: Is that long enough?

  Dick: Long enough for now. Kick the can down the road a century, not bad compared to not kicking it at all. Emergency definition, in effect.

  Indra: This is part of why geoengineering no longer a useful word or concept. Everything people do at scale is geoengineering. Glacier slowdown, direct air capture, soil projects like 4 per 1000, they’re all geoengineering.

  Mary: But solar radiation management is definitely geoengineering.

  Indra: Sure but so what? The American heat wave has brought that one back again for sure. Indian results still debated. Claim that a double Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by three degrees for the five years following the event, a degree in the decade after that. Now we’re back to pre-intervention levels. But so many confounding factors, all these figures contested.

  Mary: Not in India. They’re going to do it again.

  Indra: Generally agreed there that their intervention worked. So you can see why they might want to. Talk of it now also in US Congress. Controversial. Meanwhile, we’re working with CCCB to list all ways carbon drawdown could be quantified and confirmed, in ways that would allow for carbon coins to be created and paid to individuals. All geoengineering, all good. The word itself needs to be rehabilitated.

  Mary: Good luck with that. Dick, what’s going on with finance? World still in Super Depression but finance sailing along just fine, what’s up?

  Dick: Effect of carbon coins on global finance a nice stimulus for them! (joking as usual). Finance unfazed by anything, carbon coins just another tradeable commodity, listed in currency exchanges just like any other currency. Betting on the spread between the stick and the carrot. Thus you see people shorting carbon coins, meaning the worse the climate does the more money they make. They’ve hedged the apocalypse.

  Mary: Can we stop them?

  Dick: A falling price on carbon coin is a sign that the incentives to not burn carbon are not strong enough yet. Also, measurement of anything always leads to financialization of the measurement method itself. So, just the usual thing.

  Mary: What can we do to up the pressure on carbon burning?

  Dick: Get WTO to change rules in ways that penalize carbon burn of any kind. Up carbon taxes progressively. Publicize sabotage of petro now happening more and more
frequently, this will encourage more sabotage copy-cat style. In short: arbitrage and sabotage.

  Mary: Ha ha.

  But some of us laughed for real.

  Dick: The market needs the state healthy, to back money itself. The state needs the market healthy, to keep the economy liquid. But state and market aren’t working hand in hand. Or they are hand in hand, but only because they’re arm wrestling! Struggling for control of the situation they comprise together.

  Mary: And we want the state to win.

  Dick: States make laws, laws run the system. So yes, state is the crucial actor. But we can’t just banish market. Not now. It’s too big, it’s the way of the world. We just have to force it to invest in the things we want.

  Badim nods at this.

  Janus Athena: Something Dick said before bombing hiatus struck those here in the AI group. (Meaning JA themself, but they never use any pronouns referring to themself.) That ministry should form a sort of shadow government, Dick said, so that when the system breaks down, people have a workable Plan B to turn to. So AI group has been trying to sketch a workable shadow government and put it up on websites. Plan B open source. We’re seeing an increasing rate of uptake on YourLock. Already a new internet; now its users may be turning into a new kind of citizen of the world. Gaia citizenship, or what have you. Earth citizen, commons member, world citizen. One Planet. Mother Earth. All these terms used by people who are coming to think of themselves as part of a planetary civilization. Main sense of patriotism now directed to the planet itself.

  Matriotism, Dick jokes.

  JA nods. Support growing fast. Could cross a tipping point and become what everyone thinks. A new structure of feeling, underlying politics as such. Global civilization transcending local differences. A different hegemony for sure. Shadow government plans are just one part of that larger movement. Like a software for a feeling.