The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It was also the case, though not a single poster or panel referred to it directly on this day, that the global human replacement rate was now estimated to come to about 1.8 children per woman. As a level replacement rate was hit at about 2.15 children per woman, the total human population on Earth was therefore going down, slowly but surely. The idea that there was still a demographic surge ahead of them had gone away; demographers no longer predicted it. Some economic theorists worried that the economy couldn’t handle such a diminishing population; others welcomed the change. But all of this was so new and controversial that at this conference, they left it unspoken. It was a topic for another day. The old attack on the environmentalist movement, that it was antihuman, still had enough force to make many in the scientific community wary of speaking on the subject. It was too hot to handle. But in this case, good news; so it was mentioned pretty often, it was one of those things being spread by word of mouth.

  It was somewhat the same in any discussion of the recent Super Depression, and how the social and economic disruption of that had actually been a good thing in terms of carbon burn and biosphere health. That events which had caused suffering for millions of people might be good for the rest of the planet’s life was again seen as a possible antihumanism. Best just to frame all this aspect of the general situation as managing disaster as best one could, making the best of a bad situation, etc. And in the flood of information being presented, some things were clearly being left to word of mouth, especially inferences and suppositions.

  Over all of it, in the most literal sense because of the banner, and the air itself, the immense flux of information was often summed up well by what was being called the Big Index or the Big Number, meaning the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This had now dropped 27 parts per million in the previous five years. It was down to 451 now, same as in the year 2032, and it was on a clear path to drop further, maybe even all the way to 350, the pre-industrial high point on the 280–350 ppm sine wave that had existed for the previous million years, marking shifts in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. 350 parts per million of CO2, if they wanted that! The discussion now was how far down they wanted to take it. This was a very different kind of discussion than the one that had commanded the world’s attention for the previous forty years.

  In this same period, the Gini index figures for the world at large had flattened considerably. Every continent was showing improvement. The pay justice movements, the wage ratio movements, and the central banks’ recommended tax plans, plus political movements everywhere supporting job guarantees and progressive taxation, sometimes under the rubric of “an end to the kleptocracy of the plutocrats,” as one poster put it, had had powerful effects everywhere. Setting a generous definition of a universal necessary income, guaranteeing jobs to all, and capping personal annual income at ten times that minimum amount, as they had done in many countries, had immediately crushed Gini figures down. The EU had led the way, the US and China had followed, and then everywhere else had begun to leak their most educated young people to these flatter countries, until the countries losing educated people also instituted it. Guaranteed jobs, yes, but also universal basic services, and supported social reproduction, along with infrastructure and housing construction projects, had completed the rise out of poverty at the low end of the world income scale. Capping individual income and wealth had flattened the top of the scale. Of course many rich people had attempted to abscond to a safe haven with their riches, but currency controls, and the fact that all money was now blockchained and tracked, meant that all the old havens and shelters were being rooted out and eliminated. Money was now simply a number in the global banking system, so even if one shifted money into property, that property got listed, with an asset price on it, and then got taxed accordingly, and often therefore sold to avoid property taxes that had gone sharply progressive. Some land was surrendered in order to keep the owners solvent in the new tax regimes, which meant there was now more and more public land, defined as such and used as a commons. State-owned enterprises using a lot of big data and Red Plenty algorithms became less lumbering than they had been, avoiding the old bad inefficiencies, while keeping the good inefficiencies in ways that were important for resilience and justice.

  A whole new economics was springing up to describe and analyze these new developments, and inevitably this new kind of economics included a lot of new measuring systems, because economics was above a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement. So now people were using older instruments like the Inclusive Prosperity Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the UN’s Human Development Index Inequality Adjusted, and the Global Footprint Index. And they were also making up many new ones as well. All these new indexes for economic health were often now amalgamated to a new comprehensive index of indexes, called the Biosphere and Civilization Health Meta-Index. BCHMI.

  The carbon coin had played its part in all of this. For a while, in its earliest days, it had looked like the creation of carbon coins would simply make the rich richer, as some of the largest fossil carbon companies declared their intention to sequester the carbon they owned, and took the corresponding pay-out in carbon coins, and then traded most of those coins for US dollars and other currencies, and then made investments in other capital assets, in particular property, thus becoming richer than ever— as if all their future profits were going to be paid to them at once, at a hundred cents on the dollar, even though their assets were now stranded as toxic to the biosphere and thus to human beings.

  But the central banks had worked out a scheme to deal with this. The fossil fuel companies were being paid, yes, and even at par, if that meant one carbon coin per ton of carbon sequestered, as certified by the Ministry for the Future’s certification teams, just like any other entity doing the same sequestration. But pay-outs above a certain amount were being amortized over time, and would be paid out, when the time came, at zero interest; zero interest, but not negative interest; and with guarantees, thus becoming a kind of bond. And then the companies were required by law and international treaty to do carbon-negative work with the initial use of the carbon coins they were given, in order to keep qualifying for their pay-outs, because if they merely invested in other biosphere-destroying production, especially carbon-burning production, then they wouldn’t be sequestering carbon at all in the larger scheme of things. The upshot of these policy implementation decisions was that the oil companies and petro-states were being paid in proportion to their stranded assets, but over time, and only for doing carbon-negative work, as defined and measured by the Paris Agreement standards and certification teams. The young staffs of the central banks were all quite proud of this arrangement, which they had concocted over the years in an effort save the carbon coin, and then watched as their bosses approved and implemented it. Those staff reunion parties were raucous to the point of almost scandalizing staid old Zurich.

  What the success of the carbon coin meant was a huge amount of money was now going to landscape restoration, regenerative ag, reforestation, biochar and kelp beds, direct air capture and storage, and all the rest of the efforts described elsewhere in the hall. A banner over one of the rooms put it this way:

  “Revolution comes; not the expected one, but another, always another.”

  The people under the banner who had put it up told Mary it was a phrase from one Mario Praz, which had been quoted by a John P. Farrell, who had then been quoted by a Christopher Palmer. They were pleased with it, these Swiss staffers.

  The second day, their final day, devoted to “outstanding problems,” was a sobering reminder that they were still in the thick of it. And yet, given what had been revealed and celebrated the day before, there was a sense in the hall that these problems, as wicked as they were, were impediments to a general movement, to history itself, and thus susceptible to being overwhelmed, or solved piecemeal, or worked around, or put off to a later time when even more momentum would be available for deplo
yment against them.

  That day’s banner over the entryway proclaimed the motto:

  “Overcome difficulties by multiplying them.”

  This the staffers attributed to Walter Benjamin, who apparently when he wrote it had added that this was “an old dialectical maxim,” though no one could find it anywhere earlier in the relevant literatures. Probably he had made it up and given it a false provenance, although someone remarked that that wouldn’t have been like him, as he had been a very diligent historian and archivist. There were people trying to find the true source on the internet, but again this only demonstrated that the internet, although huge, was not even close to comprehensive when it came to the material traces of the past. A drop in the bucket, in fact.

  Anyway, Mary felt there were more pressing matters than finding the real source for this quote. She wandered the halls as she had the day before. Overcome obstacles by multiplying them: easy to do! The outstanding problems were on this day being discussed, evaluated, rated, even put into a hierarchy of urgency; then compiled into an index somewhat like the Association of Atomic Scientists’ “minutes to midnight” clock, which indeed still stood in the hallway, set at about twenty minutes to midnight, where it had been stuck for decades, making Mary wonder if it had any validity, or rather carried any weight. Stuck clocks; not the best image for a deadly serious danger. For all the most pressing dangers they faced, she felt that the clock was always ticking. But when she mentioned this to Badim, he shook his head; that atomic clock was simply saying the nuclear danger has never gone away, he said. We act like it has, but it hasn’t. So it’s a way of saying we are good at ignoring existential dangers. Really it would be better to do something about that one. Shoot it in the head. You could disarm all those weapons in under five years. Fission materials used as energy fuel, burned down to nothing and the residues buried. It’s stupid.

  After that, she wandered the halls feeling that maybe she was in fact no good at trying to rate danger. The Arctic petro-nations still had a not-so-secret affection for climate change, for instance; was this a danger? Recently it had seemed that keeping the Arctic sea ice thick and robust was now Russian policy. So Mary wasn’t so concerned. They had the fleet, and they would keep staining the open Arctic Ocean yellow, to keep sunlight from penetrating deep into the water and cooking them all; same with the icing drones now sent out every long dark winter night, to spray the sea ice with added layers of frozen mist, and seal unwanted polynas and open areas and so on. No; if the Arctic was an outstanding problem, it was at least not intractable. Russia would do its part, she judged.

  Down the hall, she was thrust back into the realm of nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Badim wasn’t the only one worried; there was a whole slate of panels devoted to it. Could these problematic materials be turned into nuclear power somehow, burned down to a concentrate that could be safely cached, or slung into outer space? No one could make a compelling case either way on this, Mary judged. It was indeed an outstanding problem.

  Then the thirty poorest countries. The bad thirty, the sad thirty, the weak thirty; she heard all these names. These thirty included at least ten so-called failed states, and some of those had been failed for decades, immiserating their people. Wicked problems, in the technical sense of the term, were problems that not only could not be solved, but dragged other situations down into them; they were contagious, in effect. So it seemed that these countries suffering wicked problems needed to have interventions made by their neighbor countries, meaning the whole world; in effect, to be put into regional or international receivership. But sovereignty disregarded for one nation implied it could be disregarded for any nation, if the political winds blew against it; so no nation liked to tamper with sovereignty. And it was usually the prosperous old imperial powers that were insisting most strongly that the various post-colonial disasters be put back into subaltern positions, which insistence never looked good, even if the intentions were benign. The American empire had been mostly economic and undeclared, and so had never been understood or acknowledged to be an empire by Americans themselves, despite their eight hundred military bases around the world, and the fact that their military budget was larger than all the other nations’ on Earth combined. So you could get things like the Washington Consensus, in which the World Bank and the IMF and even the WTO had been used as instruments of American hegemony, forcing small poor countries to join the world as a new kind of colony, American colonies in all but name, or else suffer even worse fates. Even the Chinese with their Belt and Road Initiative, and their local power in Asia, were not as bad as the Americans when it came to imperial self-regard pretending to be charity, as in the structural adjustment procedures at the end of the twentieth century, which had wrecked local subsistence so that entire countries could become cash crop providers for American markets. No: Mary would include American stupidity and hubris, and the assumption of being the world’s sole superpower, as one of their outstanding problems; but there wasn’t a panel or even a poster given over to that idea, no, of course not. Another word of mouth issue. It would take the whole world combined and coordinated to attack that problem, and of course the other countries could never agree among themselves to the extent of being very good at that, especially since most of them were beholden to the US, and more than a few bought lock stock and barrel.

  Then the continuing poisoning of the biosphere by pollution, pesticides, plastics, and other wastes and residues of civilization was growing in people’s perceptions as the CO2 problem began to look like it might be receding. The biosphere was robust, sure; but taking in and processing poison was something that any living thing could only do up to a point, after which it was simply poisoned, and in trouble.

  Then came a hall devoted to discussing the mistreatment of women, individually and collectively, often in the same countries that rated lowest in all the other categories of well-being and political representation and functionality. That was no coincidence, of course. The status of women was not just an indicator, but fundamental to the success of any culture. But many of the old forms of patriarchy were not dead, and so among the worst of the outstanding wicked problems were patriarchy and misogyny. Mary sighed as she looked in at that hall, where of course there were lots of women, and fewer men by proportion than elsewhere. In a room of a hundred people she counted five white men, twenty men of color. Even if it were demonstrated to be the worst problem left, still there would be few men willing to take a look that way. It wouldn’t be men who solved this one, but women; laws crafted by women and rammed through by women. So it was indeed an outstanding problem, a wicked problem indeed. Although to be categorized like that, as a problem alongside pollution and nuclear arms and carbon and misgovernance and the like— it was galling, it was another aspect of the problem itself. Women as Other— when would that stop, them being as they were the majority of the species by many millions?

  On then to other intractables. Resource issues. Women as resources, Mary thought, no, forget about that. Water. But with copious clean energy, they could desalinate. Soil: regenerative ag was the hope there, biology itself. The biosphere generally: loss of habitat, of safe habitat corridors, of wildlife numbers. Extinctions. Invasive biology problems. Watershed health. Insect loss, including bee loss. Where to store the CO2 they were drawing out of the atmosphere. Even with the progress made, these were still acute problems.

  Ocean health. They could do nothing about ocean acidification, nor the heating of the ocean that was baked in by the previous century’s carbon burn, nor the deoxygenation. Thus die-offs were happening, and presumably extinctions they didn’t even know about, that might have catastrophic cascading results. Ocean health would be an outstanding problem for centuries to come, and little to nothing they could do about it, except to leave big parts of the ocean, half of it at least, alone, so that its biomes and creatures could adapt as best they might. Coral reefs and beaches and coastal wetlands of course were also a big part of that, and almost equally beyond
what humans could do to help. Stand back, get away, keep out; maybe try fishing for plastic rather than fish, at least in the big areas left alone; or even in the fishing zones. Set new foundations for coral reefs. And so on. It would be a wicked problem for the rest of their lives.

  Oh yes, it went on like that, all day and all over the Kongresshall. And it didn’t help that many of these problems were incommensurate, that it was offensive to have women’s welfare put on the same card as the welfare of coral reefs or nuclear stockpiles. To hell with these anthologies of outstanding problems! Lists like these were in some senses useless, she felt. Perhaps better to have ended the conference the day before, with the celebration of progress they already made and were still making. That had felt good, this felt bad. Possibly the anger generated on this day could be put to use, but she wasn’t sure. A lot of shocked or depressed-looking young people were wandering Kongresshall, especially young women. Mary stopped some of them when they were in groups that looked as if they were talking things over, and she tried to encourage them to fight on, to go out there and kick ass, as they had been. Some nodded, some didn’t.

  A mixed day, therefore. And then she got a call from the clinic where Frank was being helped. He had collapsed and was doing poorly.

  They had him in a room of his own, a small room almost filled by his hospital bed and the monitoring and life support equipment, and three chairs. His bed was tilted so that he was sitting up. He wore a hospital gown and had an IV port in the back of one hand, tube running up to an IV bag on a stand. Monitor had his pulse bumping a graph, pretty fast she thought. His face was white and swollen, dark circles under his eyes. Hair cropped short; she noticed his receding hairline.