I had read in the NYT that this was one of Obama’s favorite books of 2020, but it’s not very interesting.
I listened to the first 25 chapters, saw the boring pattern develop, and skipped ahead to Chapter 90.
The author’s intent was to write a near-future speculative novel about the climate crisis and how we can fix it, which he has done. The book is timely — last week I heard that parts of South Australia logged new record temperatures of 50C (122F). Earlier this month, there were 100-mph firestorms in Colorado that burned the suburbs of Boulder and Denver. Climate change is the greatest existential crisis humans have ever faced.
There are some interesting scenarios in the book, great details of climate science, and creative geo-tech interventions, but it’s just not plausible.
Like Marx, Mr. Robinson has greatly overestimated man’s capacity to think and act collectively for the common good. Unfortunately, Adam Smith was right: Men are stupid, self-serving animals who will only act for themselves. It’s just not believable that humans would suddenly learn to share and put the other guy’s welfare ahead of their own.
The best sci-fi novels (like Dune) are grounded in real-world political and economic behaviors. Introducing a better, more enlightened human is like adding time-travel to a novel — it breaks the known laws of the universe — and breaks our belief in the fiction.
There are other startling omissions in the book as well. Toward the end of the book, the main character, who is head of the UN Ministry for the Future, takes great pains to avoid seeing humans themselves as the problem. Yet she fails to credit locally huge human extinctions and plummeting birth rates worldwide with reductions in atmospheric carbon. It’s estimated that the average human on Earth adds four metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year; and the average American is reckoned to add five times that amount annually (https://www.inspirecleanenergy.com/blog/clean-energy-101/average-american-carbon-footprint)! Humans are the problem. If we all dropped dead tomorrow, the planet would be much better off.
Another elision bothered me: Once in the atmosphere, CO2 take about 600 years to degrade and return to the earth. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, our children would be living with the cumulative effects of climate change for the next 500 years. Yet, toward the end of the book, characters were debating how low they should drive CO2 parts per million; maybe push CO2 down to pre-industrial levels of 260 or 280 ppm. I guess the author explained that phenomenon with some radical carbon sequestration scheme, described in the chapters that I skipped.
Whatever. Like this planet’s resources, my time is finite. I don’t have days to waste listening to a hopeful, yet ultimately silly, fiction.