Kim Stanley Robinson - What I’ve Learned since The Ministry for the Future Came Out in 2020

[Applause] well thank you JP for that kind introduction and thank you bioneers for having me back it is a pleasure to be back um yay so I wrote Ministry for the future in 2019 and that is a long time ago and previous geological era and a darker time than now I want to assert Trump was still president and it looked like he might win in 2020 and uh people were not taking the climate change crisis that Alan Adam twos now calls the poly crisis very appropriately we're not taking it seriously enough and there was a feeling of being caught in syrup or a frog in a Boiling Pot there are sentences in Ministry for the future that I now find astonishingly Dark One the 2030s were zombie years now that's not going to happen and that I even wrote that sentence I now find shocking there has been an acceleration and I've seen it and I want to describe some lineaments of it to you so that you can perhaps I've been trying to construct a cognitive map for myself in these rapidly Changing Times and I want to share it with you in case it is useful to you also so social scientists talk about the great acceleration since World War II everything that social scientists measure has accelerated so that all the graphs are hockey stick graphs not just population or food production or CO2 released to the atmosphere or pollution in the Earth's biosphere but everything the great acceleration is a useful way to think of where we are but within that um a sense of these last 70 years of a constant historical acceleration there are accelerations within the acceleration when alfman tofler wrote future sock in 1970 there was a sense that the last five years had created a sense of craziness which those of you who are my age and older you remember it's hard to convey now except we're in another acceleration within the acceleration so it might be possible for younger people to now imagine what it felt like from 65 to 75 in the last century um since 2020 we've had first and foremost the pandemic and secondly but also significant increasing numbers of climate catastrophes floods and droughts mostly but others as well there's been also Russia's invasion of Ukraine a land war in Europe again hard to believe then also the financial crises not just a 2008 as a kind of precursor but also 2020 when the pandemic hit was an instantaneous Great Depression that needed some quick work and by by the central banks to avoid an instant Great Depression and then now also the AI moment that we're in somewhat of a scam somewhat of a reality hard to unsort since we don't really know what's going on it being proprietary within businesses that have an enormous impact on us all of these add up to a feeling of urgency and a kind of new moment and this is straight out of gramshi the old order has fallen apart the New Order has not yet been born in the interregnum it feels weird and we're in that now I would suggest so um because of that feeling and particularly I think the sense of increasing danger I want the one more thing I would add to this sense of an increasing acceleration is simply this the news from the ipcc's the news from climate science and uh there's one I think important moment in that which is a paper in nature from 2009 that listed nine planetary boundaries living within planetary boundaries it's a Johan rockstrom and will Stefan they wrote this paper it was published in nature six years later the Paris agreement was signed there is a sense now I think that's widespread and growing that these planetary limits planetary boundaries that if we break them the danger is Extreme of a runaway greenhouse effect to a hot house Earth that would wreck human civilization outright um and food shortages would be part of it but ever the stresses at every level would be such that um it's quite possible that our ability to hold together as a community of eight billion people would be shattered and a lot of people take that seriously now and so the list of good things that I'm going to mention to you now that have come about since then I think are precisely from an increased sense of danger to the biosphere itself that we are the danger that we have to change that feeling is there and then actions follow it so the Paris agreement of 2015 rather astonishing that all the countries on Earth gathered together and agreed to a work on climate change and to decarbonize as fast as possible and to set up an annual meeting these cop meetings to talk it over and two things about that I want to quickly say about the Paris agreement it's a consensus agreement all of the Nations have to sign off on every sentence of the annual statement or it doesn't function and so it makes it very slow cautious but it makes it very compelling and Powerful every nation has signed on the other thing I would say about it is within the agreement itself is a promise to themselves the Nations to each other to improve every year each Year's agreement has to show a ratcheting up of the promises to do better in one way or another so in Egypt last year at the end of last year it was the loss and damage bank account finally built to compensate Nations that are being hammered by climate change first oh one more interesting thing about the Paris agreement it's explicit that the rich nations are to do more to help the poor Nations all these are interesting another thing yeah another thing that has happened since then and this is also last year at in Montreal the Chinese ran the biological biosphere Health Congress of the parties a different treaty system again all the nations again it got signed last year to do 30 by 30. 30 percent of the Earth's surface left to our wild cousins by the year 2030. well this is astonishing and when I read EO Wilson's half-earth 15 years ago or so I thought great idea very utopian I'll put it into my utopian science fiction of course so great never going to happen and here we are with 30 by 30 already on the books as an international agreement and California has a state program as such I met Jennifer Norris the head of it she tells me California is at 24 they'll get to 30 by 30 percent by 2030 and she says everybody in the movement also talked talks about 50 by 50. 50 percent of the land protected by Twenty fifty again amazing and then lastly this International ocean treaty a different treaty system and yet also signed on by many nations especially those with coastlines and it took 10 years to do it the same thing for the oceans 30 by 30 30 of the oceans left alone and essentially this means not fished by the year 2030. and so these are huge and they are important and I don't think they would have happened without a sense of fear and of danger unavoidable danger we can't negotiate our way out of it we actually have to do things and so these treaties have come up precisely because of that reason we're at about 410 it fluctuates through the year parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and because there's path dependency because there's resistance to this program of decarbonization we are not decarbonizing as fast as we really need to to keep to the 1.5 C limit that has been declared safe by the scientists involved um so we're going to have to decarbonize going forward probably we'll overshoot not in people that's not even a thing because of considerations I don't want to get into but a carbon overshoot is quite possible and we're going to have to decarbonize and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the years to come to bring ourselves back within the zone of safety and biosphere stability that's possible there is mechanical drawdown by way of vacuum cleaners it's expensive it's big machines it would take a lot of them and yet and yet it would draw down CO2 so it's being discussed and investigated and that's one part of the puzzle because we are in an all hands on deck situation but on the other hand a reforestation and you all know about this stuff so I will not dwell on it too long but regenerative agriculture is real and I'm Amazed I was intensely worried that it was a kind of a false front a name without a without a real topic behind it like for instance artificial intelligence um but regenerative agriculture is more real than that there's a about one percent of carbon by weight in the soil in the heavily farmed areas of the Midwest and around the world we're making food and also ethanol by way of intensive agricultural practices that deplete the carbon in the soil if you bring it back up to three or four percent of carbon by weight in the soil for all the aglands on Earth you actually draw down as much CO2 as we've put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began so it's an immense Bank of possibility it won't happen that we can do all of it in any one way but since we need to grow food and we need to decarbonize when those two get coupled together into a technology which we're calling regenerative agriculture then this is powerful and Farmers themselves are interested in it because it takes them out from under the shackles of contracts with companies like Monsanto and restores their Farms to them so this is good too now um all of this is going to cost money and one aspect of Ministry for the future that I think has been one reason for the attention that it's gotten along with being one of the very few descriptions of how we get through this Century without a mass extinction event which people are hungry for that story so it makes perfect sense no matter the weirdnesses of that particular novel people are hungry for that story and so in that story is a story of Finance we have to pay ourselves for doing the right things rather than the wrong things the last time I did a keynote at bioneers up in Marin County I talked about how we were paying ourselves to do the wrong things and tearing the Earth apart and also creating the one percent Etc that that had to change it does and it is and so whether that can work further and faster I don't know but I just want to point out to you that at the monetary level of monetary policy so this is central banks and that level of Finance there is a network for Greening the financial system and this is um the 90 of the biggest essential banks in the world including China the United States EU all the big essential Banks discussing how to green money at The Source by its issuance as Fiat money by central banks can it first be given to green projects and then enter the general economy this organization existed when I wrote Ministry for the future but I did not know about it and it is great news that it exists because it needs to be more than an idea in a single novel and it is then also the international monetary fund and the World Bank who have been as I mentioned five years ago spectacularly bad at what they supposedly do and have been great for imperialism as a soft power but they're changing too because it's younger people and they sense the danger so the international monetary fund has a thing called special drawing rights what that means is loans that you don't have to pay back for poor countries that are in distress financially countries are being kept from a fate of uh Sudan or Somalia or Venezuela by way of loans from the IMF that they don't have to pay back and naturally the IMF don't want certain people to know about this program because it looks like you're helping poor people which is very unpopular in certain quarters but it is so then um shifting over from the monetary to the fiscal as they say in that Biz that's just legislation so we have the IRA Bill stupendous achievement a great thing the biggest climate bill in history and a 380 billion dollars and 40 percent of it to go to areas a disadvantaged in America amazing and then a lot of it to go to businesses within America again amazing industrial policy coming back neoliberalism taking a Blow To The Head as we realize that neoliberalism was bad for us so this bill was astonishing and it is already written in the law it can't be undone um then the carbon the carbon coin that I described in my book is really carbon quantitative easing so that it is what I described at the beginning and it's a program that says that if you draw carbon dioxide down out of the atmosphere you get paid for it at a certain rate that means that you make money while you do it backed by the central banks well the carbon coin is is a thing and they are calculating now the the ecological economists the climate economists working on this that about a a trillion or two trillion of money generated year by year and paid out for good green work would be enough to see us through and the recall that the gross World product is about 75 to 100 trillion dollars per year per year so this is a lot of money but it isn't not outside the bounds of ordinary fiscal and monetary policy in short it you can make up that money from scratch pay it for green work and not destroy people's faith in money by which you don't create inflation or deflation so in that larger World economy if we start pushing in the way that all of these financial and monetary schemes suggest that are all in play and being discussed sometimes at the World Bank sometimes at the Federal Reserve sometimes within the in the dark and hidden interior hallways of the Pentagon because it's part of National Defense some of them think inside the Pentagon you begin to see the possibilities of a program that is mainstream that is also green it's I just want to suggest that it's out there because it's still submerged and it's still more a plan than a reality but it is a plan so and in fact I want to finish with this I mean I've just described all of these things happening that if they happen it would be good it's legitimate to ask is that real or will these things happen because there will be intense resistance to them because there will be a lot of shouting and freaking out about it um could it could it really happen in this so-called fractured political landscape that we're in I want to suggest that some of the fracturing of the landscape some of it is real and dangerous are you gonna have to try to get a working political majority of 51 or 55 percent or 60 percent to back these things and it's going to be hard to get those majorities sometimes and there's going to be losses disasters catastrophes that is going to make it look like it's not working so it'll be like the cross chop that you sometimes see under the Golden Gate will be between wind and tide and waves and swells from offshore you get a ferocious cross chop just a wild water on going through the Golden Gate but the question is this where's the current underneath going and that's what we have to keep our eyes on as we go forward and stay calm through the cross chop on the surface of the discourse realize that this is it yes it's a it's a plan Only the Good result for out of the mainstream by way of technological and financial means it still needs to be enacted and so it's going to be a wicked political battle for the rest of our lives it's not going away but I will say that one of the things I learned to go back to JP's prompt that I went to cop 26 in Glasgow it was astonishing and what I saw were 40 000 people working for their countries to make an agreement and the inside the Red Zone which is the organizer Nigel topping invited me into the negotiating sessions themselves which I didn't understand for a few days but then I spent all my time inside there watching the negotiators mostly well I would say 60 percent women young women in their 30s and 40s lawyers and diplomats okay that was where the real work was being done the actual speeches on stage were the typical mix um and I can't speak much to that being an old white guy myself um but the work was being done to make sentences to make the world better it was very beautiful and so there is real work being done and Nigel at the end he said ah Stan you've you've got the solution here and I said well what do you mean he said I've been saying about the cop process Greta tunberg has been saying blah blah blah and what you're saying is la la we change those laws and we keep working to the fight the political battle and win it and the biosphere is going to come back in health and so I want to Echo what John Warner said so beautifully on the video just before there's a lot of work to be done in a scary situation and you have to keep a sense of dread or at least of high danger but the possibility of a good result is out there two one zero thank you foreign [Applause]

Channel: Bioneers

Views: 10,339

Keywords: Kim Stanley Robinson, Bioneers 2023, The Ministry for the Future, climate change

Id: POs0APzpkSU

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023