Today I finished listening to Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s a fantastic book. If you like audiobooks, I highly recommend listening to it, as it’s extremely well narrated by a whole cast of readers.
My one complaint about the book is the way that they used blockchain for money and for social media, which would be a disaster in and of itself. The larger a blockchain gets, the more CO2 emissions it will be responsible for, unless you can somehow guarantee that all the power behind it is clean energy (something that even in this story is not quite possible until the end). Blockchain is built on difficult math problems, and the more transactions on the chain, the harder the math problems and the more energy needed to solve them. This fact seems to have been completely missed by Kim Stanley Robinson.
The thing I love most about this book is that it isn’t really set in a far off, unknown future. It starts in our present, though a slightly different present, where a heatwave devastates India instead of a pandemic devastating the world. It moves through the years after that. The voices are of UN Agency officials, activists, refugees, scientists, and ordinary people. The story tracks some realistic ways that we could be combating climate change, and has a hopeful arc overall without sugar coating things.
The book does not shy away from pointing a strong finger at the way that capitalism values money over everything else. It plots a path out that is mostly based on positive steps, though it recognizes the impact of some violent actions as well. Some might see the violence in the book as an encouragement to terrorism, but I think that it’s more of a warning or a reminder that if you don’t take positive steps that are available, desperate people will take desperate and horrible measures.
Everything in the book is stuff that is either possible today or so close to possible that it makes sense on our current technological trajectory IF THE MONEY WERE PUT IN THAT DIRECTION. And that is so key. Without capital to support the shift, we can’t meet the challenges. If we don’t meet the challenges we face, then we will have heat waves like the one described in the book, where millions of people die in a matter of days. We will have floods that destroy entire urban areas. We will continue to face new pandemics. We must reduce CO2 emissions.
Ministry For The Future is an excellent book. I not only recommend reading it, I recommend discussing it with friends, family, and community.