Kim Stanley Robinson imagines utopia in 2025

what climate futures here on Earth might look like. Be it the underwater metropolis he imagined in his novel New York twenty one forty, or how a United Nations agency and its dark wing of eco terrorists tackle the climate crisis in his book The Ministry for the Future. Stan has been a guest on Zero before, but I wanted to speak with him again because that book, The Ministry

for the Future has been on my mind recently. Although it was published in twenty twenty, The story in the book kicks off in the year twenty twenty five, and well here we are. The book opens just after a fictional COP twenty nine summit, as a deadly heat wave hits India. The plot follows the choices faced by United Nations officials in a new department called the Ministry for the Future, as they try to cope with the spiraling

impacts of a warming planet. With twenty twenty five upon us, I wanted to see how Stan was feeling about the book's version of this timeline and find out what he thought about the unpredictable direction real life events have taken since he wrote it. We talked about the value of science fiction as a way to see into the future, as well as sci fi's dangers, and why a writer who admires science and technology so much still remains enamored with the unglamorous work of a body like the Yuan.

Welcome to the show.

world trying to do something about climate change at a scale. Finally, So now here we are sitting at the start of twenty twenty five, the exact time period when the Ministry for the Future sort of gets started on his journey, and I thought it might be interesting to just revisit and update our outlooks of where we are, sort of a check in. We are in the future you were imagining today it is here.

And that was already true in twenty twenty two. I had realized that the dates that I had put in Ministry for the Future were all wrong, and that I had set things out happening in the far future of a few decades from now that were going to happen one way or another in the twenty twenty So the acceleration seems to stay. You'll be speeding up, and I

mean by this, both bad things and good things. And I suppose I should address what looks to be the big reversal, which is the unexpected reelection of Donald Trump. At least it wasn't expected by me. I had it called exactly backwards. And I'm still shocked and dismayed. But I'll point out that my novel Ministry for the Future was written during Trump years. I was very angry then, and it postulated a world in which the United States was not a major player in dealing with climate change.

It was really the other nations of the world driving the process out of necessity, and the United States being a somewhat big rich kid and narcissistic child in the background, being dragged along into the adult world of reality. And maybe that's again a little bit true. But a lot of things happened between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four that are now path dependent in their own good way. The good things have been speeding up as well as

the bad things. It's simply cheaper to build new clean energy than old dirty energy, and this is crucial in a capitalist world that every source of investment that isn't government is looking for some kind of highest rate of return, and if there is a higher rate of return that can come to doing a green project rather than a dirty project, then it will get done. So some guardrails

have changed a little. The I rebuild that the Biaden administration got pasted was very important because it shows that it's not just a matter of carbon quantitative easying of the central banks and the government's cooking up new money, which I think is important and really needs to happen, but also simply legislation that legislators of the world, when they vote in climate action, economic activities, and investments in private businesses in their nation, states that good things can

happen and that they multiply.

bear on the planet. That is in the form of wealth transfer, in technology transfer, in creating a carbon space for developing countries to use, and COP meetings are the place where that conversation around inequality comes to bear, and the ministry for the future is created through the COP framework. As you imagine. And you've been a regular listener of this show, and I'm guessing you've followed the coverage of

what happened at COP twenty nine. How do you think this year's COP stacks up against what you imagine cops to be doing.

it's necessarily glacially slow. So necessary but not sufficient. And the other things have to happen that we're all doing in individual nation states and in the internationally, just in terms of trade and international relations that are more tangible than the promises made at COP and their good things can happen. Now, I want to point out that in my Ministry for the Future, it starts as a tiny, little functionary agency that is trying to rally year round

support to get COP promises adhere to. And in a way, it's kind of an invention that creates a point of view for a novel that is legible in that there's characters with a plot. But at the same time, last September, the UN out of the Secretary General's Office, issued a Pact for the Future during their Summit of the Future, which was their name for Climate Week last September. And they're appointing an Envoy for the Future.

any power in particular of its own. The UN has a lot of consensus, but it also has the post World War two structure that means that it is not a gigantically effective agency. So a novel that says, oh my gosh, we got something done in the world by

something coming out of the UN. Naturally, my novel is popular there amongst those young diplomats, and they're feeling like the world is spinning out of their control, like all of us, feel they're doing the best that they can, and they think this is maybe one tool to focus on the future, to focus on the narrative of the member states nation states becoming member states in something larger

that manages to cope successfully with climate change. So yes, by telling that story from that point of view, I have inspired that particular group of people.

to coping with climate change. So they want it to be a place of public outreach, of changing hearts and minds, of explaining the story, of organizing the narrative and repeating it and over and over again. It's not exactly a collaboration, but I am a sort of senior advisor, instant le emeritus. I'm hoping to a push to make sure that we make it something that is of interest to the audiences who come to it or hear about it.

consume media in general. That we as a people are imagining the future less and less, or we are imagining the future much nearer, that our horizons are not as far as they used to be. Is that a perception that is accurate or is it just in my mind?

change could do that and make it even worse. It's the poly crisis, as Adam Tooz calls it, all of the crises of pollution of pandemics coming out of the natural world, and then also the various political complications of our own making. So there's a poly crisis. Well, I feel like attention to that in the twenty twenties is such that the farther futures are and this is finally getting to answer in your questions. You don't think about, oh, what will happen when we go to the stars, which

is always impossible. You don't even think about, oh, what about the greatness that will happen when we all live two hundred and fifty years and it's the year twenty four hundred? Who can think that? When we are having trouble thinking our way through the twenty first century. So science fiction has collapsed to near future science fiction is one way to call it.

the bureaucrats, the technocrats, the scientists, the teachers. Society is resilient. Civil society is real in which we help each other out in daily life, transcend fools at the top shouting and trying to wreck the system. So we have a soap opera, But is the soap opera actually wreaking the damage that it pretends that it wants to wreak. Everybody actually wants their daily life to continue as best it can in a positive direction. Everybody's stressed out, everybody's in

the precariat. The last thing you need is for the soap app that the talk to actually be meaningful. And if life goes on for everybody in their ordinary daily existence, substantially the same. Because of the path dependencies of all of our systems and the kind of resiliency of civil society that in itself will be a victory. And I'm not saying it's a sure thing by any means. This

is sort of an experiment. And how strong is the American system If there is a group at the top trying to wreck it, deliberately trying to wreck it, we'll see we are in a corrupt political system and there's huge challenges to democracy. On the other hand, votes are still votes, and it's not entirely possible to buy them. So it's a mix, right, It's a you can't actually give up. You can't actually start celebrating. The twenty twenties were always going to be a kind of crux in

human history, and they still are. And it might be that the crux goes on for a decade longer than that. It's not at all inevitable that things are going to be all right, given the tendency of the forces of disordered rising. But the situation is not impossible either, And I guess you know is that the utopian statement the good result is not impossible. Yet.

for quite some time. But it is the first sort of big and it's not very big, but it's still a big ish producer of fossil fuels that has signed up to the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty. We had Minister Susanna Muhammad, who has the Environment Ministry under her talk on this podcast. And I know you've been thinking about how this is going to play out, you wrote

to me after listening to that episode. So when you try and imagine a future where a country has to build its entire economy anew to move away from the old stuff because the old stuff just can't continue at current pace, how do you think that happened?

these petro states. What happens then we can't afford in social senses to have failed states left right and center. They need help. How could it come? Well, there's the Loss and Damage Fund, there's a Paris Agreement itself, and this Fossil Fuel's Non Proliferation Treaty is really important as a framework that if a nation like Columbia, who is a great example because they're the fifth biggest coal producer on Earth, if they say we want to stop, help us.

Help needs to come. So at that point you need a system that is arranged sort of like the cop processes Lost in Damage or like the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights, which is a mechanism to help countries that are in trouble in paying their debts to get them the money that they need. And so this system would have to have these aspects of it that I've considered and I throw it out there for others to consider.

It would need to be a discounted compensation. They can't be paid as much as they would be for fossil fuels as they stand on the market now that's like one six hundred trillion dollars. What you would need is a discounted system. They take a haircut. Also, it would have to be amortized so that they get paid out over a century like it would have been if the fossil fuels had been burned, and then every country that signs on would be getting a steady payment that would

also be entailed. You'd be signing something like the Extractive Industry's Transparency Initiative eiiti that already exists, just like the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty and the IMF Special Drawing Rights and the cop Loss and Damage Fund that three hundred billion dollars was just promised into. When a nation signed on that line, they would then have an income stream that they had promised to keep from being corrupted, and that it would be devoted to green projects and

the clean transition. And that way there would be a a financial inducement for signing the Fossil Fuels Non Proliferation Treaty and then also the physical and financial help to make that transition possible and save these countries from falling into dysfunction by way of bankruptcy and social disorder. It

seems to me it has to happen. And I've talked to people about it at OECD and in other places, other venues, other people in places of power, including the UN, and I have to say it usually gets a cool response or a visible shutter of oh my god. You know, the Saudi's suggested something like that, even though they're rich

as creases, et cetera. Well, none of the past is really relevant now in this respect, We've got seventy five percent of the fossil fuels on this earth owned by nation states that have governments that are responsible to their people, and accommodation simply must be made. And when the question then follows, oh, well, where could that much money come from, you just answer quantitative easing. You point to two thousand and eight, you point to twenty twenty. At the start

of the pandemic, trillions were generated. I'm gonna say out of thin air, because the mechanisms involved are complicated, but in fact, federal governments, central banks make up new money all the time. The money can be made. And I'll end with this, John Maynard Keynes really the most important economists for our current moment. I would say, anything that we have to do, we can afford to do.

And it feels contradictory to me because you know, if I were to be born anytime in history and I had the choice, I would be born today because it's a pretty good time to be born. You have a whole set of diseases that we know how to defeat. You have the ability to be able to travel across continents, you have the ability to be able to speak to anybody in any corner of the world for almost free,

and yet there is this yearning for the past. How do you make sense of this yearning for the past where none of these good things existed.

Your lived experience is when you were younger, you were healthier, Your life lay before you as a set of open possibilities or a struggle to be had. But in any case, nostalgia for the past is always a kind of delusion that one has because the future is scary. Individually, you're going to end up falling apart somehow and dying. The

future never looks particularly good for the individual. For the collective, you can imagine that things will go on for our descendants, and that they will be in a better world, and that's the solace of being human. I myself am very much in love with science right now. I should be dead at this point. Medical science has saved me now twice.

I'm very grateful. I'm very cognizant that science is a force for good, is a Utaon'tian effort in the world that is making us all of our necessities and all of our toys, and that when people are anti science, when they speak against it, when they get sick, they'll

run to a scientist. So it isn't real. It's another not a nostalgia, but a denial of reality that there's this collective force in the world, a group of people following a method that is enormously productive and is saving our lives and keeping us going, and who knows what it might accomplish in the future as a collective effort.

whole social world. But in any case, that crowd is not to be trusted because often politically and philosophically they're intensely naive. They seize on one idea and then that explains everything, and because they're rich, they think they know it all. Now, I am overgeneralizing here, and in my own personal acquaintanceships with billionaires, because I am near Silicon Valley and I am a science fiction writer, I've met a few. They are very often nice guys. They are

very often meaning well. They are very often Democrats rather than Republicans. So you have to go to soap opera land to get a kind of a unicorn figure like Elon Musk, who is particularly wealthy but particularly volatile and unhelpful, you might say in his narcissism. Not all of the Silicon Valley computer billionaires who go to Washington are going to be narcissists. A lot of them are going to be solid citizens, saying I've got more money than I need.

Why don't we have progressive taxation? And also, why don't you try plan A, B, and C that we have carefully tested and it might work. So again, the technocrats, the billionaires, none of them can be trusted to be the solution. In a way. It's like saying AI will solve a problems. These are artificial intelligences. These individual humans. They're natural, but they're artificial in the sense of why are they so wealthy? The solution always comes from elsewhere,

But actually it's a more collective thing. Really.

it's really crucial stuff. So at that level, I would say the European Union shows what happens when nation states become member states, and so the European Union is powerful even though it includes many little countries that are in economic trouble, but they're part of a larger hole. They hang together. It's fractious, it's difficult, it's hard to work it, but it's a change of consciousness in that when you're a member state, you have a different financial, legal, and

emotional set of circumstances that guide you. If something like the UN or the WTO or the OECD taken seriously, as if those organizations had teeth and you had to do what was agreed there because you were a member in good standing, well that would make a huge difference now, who's most likely to ignore and flaunt that forever The United States of America. The US has this slim majority that lives in a fantasy of, Oh, we can go it all alone. We're the best, not the best, can't

go it alone. These fantasies hopefully will lose at the ballot box after the probably spectacularly stupid political events at the top over the next couple of years, and then maybe that would be like the last flaring out of some resentful minority that's losing its power to the world majority. Who knows, But here's my wish that every nation state took its membership in the larger organizations dead seriously as a guide to action, and then climate change would have a chance to be solved by us.

for the United Nations. Zero's producer is Mighty Lee Rao Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Saige Bauman, and Head of Talk is Brendan nunim Our. Theme music is composed by Wonder Lee. Special thanks to Schwan Wagner, Shan Chan, Ethan Steinberg, and Jessica beck I, am Aksha Thrati back So