Let's Get Some Imagination

I've just finished rereading Kim Stanley Robinson's mid-2000s trilogy known as Science in the Capital, which were an important part of starting the subgenre now known as cli-fi. (The books' titles are Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, and they center around people who work at the National Science Foundation on climate issues, with a big injection of Tibetan Buddhism.)


I first read the books as they came out in 2004, 2005, and 2007 and thought it was time for a reread to see how they've held up after a decade and a half, the Great Recession, Obama, and Mafia Mulligan. Oh, and remember, these were written before smart phones or most social media existed, before the Paris Climate Accord, and when the world's CO2 level was about 380 ppm.

The answer is: they hold up pretty damned well. I think they're supposed to take place in the late twenty-teens or maybe the early 2020s (at one point, CO2 is said to be at 440 ppm — it hit about 415 in present-day 2019 — but there are still Vietnam veterans young enough to be run for president). Robinson's means of addressing our carbon addiction involve a bit too much geoengineering and at the time of writing, "clean coal" appeared to be possible... but there's still plenty in there that sounds just like the Green New Deal, too. He shows characters realizing that air travel is a major carbon-belcher. And he came close to predicting someone like Mulligan as president, believe it or not (though not as extreme, because what editor would have let a fantasy like that get published?).

Cory Doctorow, who has also written fiction that somewhat fits into cli-fi (Walkaway), wrote in a recent Toronto Globe and Mail commentary that "The looming climate emergency is proving the axiom that 'it’s easier to imagine the end of the human race than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.'" Doctorow disagrees with that inevitability, however, and goes on to hold out science fiction as one way of getting past our inability to think of a way out.

Robinson's books are very much part of the effort. I marked some pages from Sixty Days and Counting as I went through it because his characters were telling the story we need to make the Green New Deal a political reality, more than a decade before it was named.

The first quote is in the voice of Phil Chase, who in the story has recently been elected president on a GND-like platform. His words sound like something I could have read on Twitter last month in answer to the question, "Is it too late do anything about climate change?"

...it seemed like it broke down in one of two ways...: Is it too late or not? And it seemed like this:

If it isn't too late, we don't have to do anything.

On the other hand, if it is too late, we don't have to do anything.

So either way, don't do anything. That was the problem with that way of putting the question. What we came to realize was that it was a false problem or a question put the wrong way, because there was never going to be a too late. It was always going to stay a question of better or worse. It was more a question of, okay, how fast can we act? How much can we save? Those are the questions we should be asking. (pages 249–250)

In another scene, a character named Charlie, who is staff to the new president on the climate crisis, meets with reps from the UN's IPCC and the World Bank, where the bank reps maintain the "business as usual" case for everything:

Charlie saw that the meeting was useless.... The Bank guy was going on about differential costs, "and that's why it's going to be oil for the next twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years.... None of the alternatives are competitive."

Charlies pencil tip snapped. "Competitive for what?" he demanded.

He had not spoken until this point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion. Everyone was staring at him. He stared back at the World Bank guys.

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays for it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year...runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year.... These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You're helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible." (page 142)

How's that for a bit of wish-fulfillment? That's what I want my White House staff doing.

Charlie then goes on to analyze the World Bank's effect on developing nations, ending with "You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead you've been the United Fruit Company." As the meeting ends, Charlie hands them the president's plan for the Bank's new mission.

In the final pages of the book, President Chase, who has been shown to be inspired by FDR, uses his blog to make the case for structural economic change as part of this new way of doing things:

Capital is created by everyone, and should be owned by everyone.... And the Earth is owed our permanent care. And we have the capability to care for the Earth and create for every one of us a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and human rights.

To the extent our economic system withholds or flatly opposes these values and goals, it is diseased. It has to be changed so that we can do these things that are well within our technological capabilities. We have imagined them, and they are possible. We can make them real....

Taking care of the Earth and its miraculous biological splendor will then become the long-term work of our species. We'll share the world with all the other creatures. It will be an ongoing project that will never end. People worry about living life without purpose or meaning, and rightfully so, but really there is no need for concern: inventing a sustainable culture is the meaning, right there always before us....

We have to become the stewards of the Earth. And we have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine. (pages 367–368)

I'm now starting Robinson's 2012 novel, titled 2312, which I somehow never got around to reading when it came out. I don't know if it fits into the cli-fi subgenre or not (I think it's a bit more in outer space than that), but I trust he'll be imagining all the way through.