Indeed, he devoted an entire (and quite lovely) novel, Aurora (2015), to demonstrating why deep space colonization would be impossible. It follows the crew of an interstellar craft as they fail to inhabit a distant planet and then try, against the odds, to return to Earth, with a much-sharpened appreciation for its fragility and beauty.
The real danger of fantasizing about space travel is that it creates a moral hazard: one begins to care less about the fate of our own world. And Robinson very much wants us to focus on this world. In book after book in recent years, he has laid out the path forward for dealing with the existential crisis that climate change has clearly become.
In a trilogy of novels set in the near future in a rapidly heating Washington, D.C. -- collected in 2015 in an omnibus edition titled Green Earth -- the US government and the National Science Foundation are still focal points for the fight to save the planet. By 2025, in the new novel, it is a UN agency that takes the lead -- "The Ministry for the Future," formed in response to the Indian heat wave by the parties to the Paris climate accord. The ministry is located in Zurich, an often overlooked city that Robinson describes with great intimacy and affection, and is headed by Mary Murphy, an Irish-woman -- she is, for my money, an accurate and beguiling composite of an actual former UN commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, and Christiana Figueres and Laurence Tubiana, the two diplomats who did more than any others to pull off those Paris talks. (That women have been at the center of climate diplomacy is perhaps less noted than it should be.)
No UN ministry, of course, can move world affairs -- that waits on the interests of the powers that be. In this case, those interests come in many forms. Some countries, like India, are scared enough to try anything: Delhi launches a fleet of airplanes that ferry sulfur compounds into the atmosphere, where the particles block some incoming solar radiation, a fairly low-tech (and in the real world highly controversial) geoengineering plan to reduce the temperature.
The ministry sponsors other technological tricks, all of which have to be applied on similarly immense scales to have any effect: drilling holes to the base of Antarctic and Greenlandic glaciers to drain the meltwater collecting there so the ice sheets slow their slide into the ocean; dyeing the newly melted Arctic Ocean yellow so that it stops absorbing so much sunlight. Some schemes work better than others, but by themselves they're nowhere near enough, and indeed The Ministry for the Future mostly brushes past them, more concerned with the changes in the world economy and governance that must come.
Such shifts are opposed by entrenched interests like fossil fuel executives and the status quo politicians. And so those interests are targeted by a terror group, the Children of Kali, which arises in India to avenge the victims of the heat wave, and also by a dark-ops wing of the UN ministry itself. These operatives are clever: in one of the more enjoyable interludes in the book, they manage to take over Davos, subjecting the global elite to an endless series of seminars and workshops on global poverty and environmental disruption. Meanwhile, on what will henceforth be known as Crash Day, the terrorists send swarms of drones into the engines of jets around the world, downing them. Some are the private jets of plutocrats, but not all -- the deaths of innocent people are real, if limited. As a result, far fewer people are willing to fly, except in the growing fleet of solar-powered dirigibles and airships that slowly circle the Earth.
Similarly, vast, smoke-belching container ships are torpedoed by futuristic "pebble-mob" missiles that can overwhelm defenses by sheer force of numbers. They are replaced by photovoltaic clipper ships that harvest both sun and wind as they make their more stately way across the ocean. (Murphy travels in one from Europe to Florida, making the obvious point to anyone who's lived through the pandemic that as long as you have your laptop you can as easily work from the deck of a boat as from an office.) But again, these technologies -- all in various stages of development today -- aren't the real salvation.
That lies instead in the various changes that start rippling through societies. Minister Murphy's most important interventions are with the four or five crucial central bankers around the world; they're persuaded not only to tax carbon but to issue a "carbon coin" as a reward for actions that keep oil and gas in the ground or sequester CO2 from the atmosphere. This "carboni" begins to replace the dollar as the underpinning of the global economy, and as that happens, neoliberalism -- really capitalism itself -- begins to bend a little in its dictates.
"The euthanasia of the rentier class," as Keynes called it, begins; more and more of the uber-wealthy find themselves compelled to take a serious haircut, left with tens of millions in place of their billions in increasingly stranded assets. Popular movements break out everywhere -- debt strikes by students, and then by the debtor nations of the global south; uprisings in China of migratory workers long denied residence permits in the cities where they work, who take to the streets by the millions and force some basic changes from the Chinese Communist Party:
There was so much going on, such a spasm of revolts occurring spontaneously (if it was spontaneous!) all over the world, that some historians said "it was another 1848." Coincidence? Conspiracy? World spirit, Zeitgeist in action? Who knew? All they knew for sure was that it was happening, things were falling apart.
And when things fall apart, new things can emerge. It is here that Robinson is at his best -- he has a head full of all the hopeful experiments on our planet, the ones that run a little counter to the prevailing wisdom. For instance, there's a tidy discourse on the town of Mondragà �n in Basque country that for decades has seen a successful and fascinating experiment in cooperative control of industry; there's an informed account of the state of Kerala in the south of India, where a low GDP coexists with high quality of life; there's a nod to Modern Monetary Theory and the idea that deficits might not matter, and to Vandana Shiva, an activist and pioneer in organic agriculture who has long argued that local agriculture is significantly healthier for people in developing countries.
Robinson also understands the blockchain technology underlying currencies like bitcoin, and the ways it might stop the wealthy from hiding their cash in the Caymans; he knows what the agronomist Wes Jackson is up to at the Land Institute in Kansas, where they're figuring out how to grow wheat as a perennial, not an annual crop; and he's followed the French law intended to increase carbon in farm soils. He's got a handle on rotational grazing and on wild oyster farming, and on a thousand and one other possibilities. He knows that -- pace Margaret Thatcher -- there is an alternative to capitalism, or really millions of alternatives, each designed for its own place. If only the system can be moved.
And it turns out that climate change -- as Naomi Klein posited in her great book This Changes Everything -- is the tool for moving it, the crisis that finally forces us (because chemistry and physics simply won't be denied, the way morality and justice can be) to deal with our inequality and our unjust history and the whole wretched mess we've managed to make of things in the early twenty-first century. Robinson's scheme is not utopian, it's anti-dystopian, realist to its core: there's still money and still nation-states and still central banks, and change comes from riot and occupation and protest (grahasatya, he calls it, or force peace, in a realpolitik nod to Gandhi) but "it will be legislation that does it in the end, creating a new legal regime that is fair, just, sustainable, and secure...The best Plan B will emerge from the multitudes."
In The Ministry for the Future, it all kind of works. Yes, there's a great and savage depression, and ongoing ecological wreckage, especially in the acidified oceans. But by the 2050s the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has begun to drop, and fairly fast -- down five parts per million per year, maybe even headed back to the 350 mark that the climate scientist Jim Hansen set as the boundary for some kind of civilizational chance.
Is this possible, outside the confines of fiction?
I think it might be: the emergence, for instance, of Greta Thunberg and a hundred other high school-age leaders, militantly demanding change, seems like it could easily have been a plot point instead of a reality. The youth of the Sunrise Movement and their demand for a sweeping Green New Deal exemplify the kind of change Robinson imagines. The rapid development of cheap renewable energy makes a quick change in that direction technically and economically possible, even at this late date.
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