This is a work of fiction in the “cli fi” genre (climate science fiction). Here’s a Wikipedia article on it: (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future).
I loved this book! And there are sooooo many things to talk about within it, so I started jotting them down (into the three big sections below) – and would love to start smaller conversation threads about any/all of these. Have you read it? What grabs you?
Intriguing Ideas/Solutions or remedies (which may or may not be feasible): • Do a Pinatubo” by releasing sulfur dioxide in aerosol form to deflect sunlight with the goal of reducing global temperatures by a degree or two for a couple of years.
• Pumping seawater up and spraying it onto ice sheets (on either pole) in order to reverse sea-level rise. A related idea was scaling down this type of operation to thousands of small solar-powered machines that would live permanently in the Arctic and pump/spray all summer every year.
• Stopping the sliding of glaciers into the sea (which speeds up their melting) by attempting to pump all the water out from underneath the glacier (which lubricates the slide) so that the glacier anchors onto bedrock and doesn’t move.
• Direct air capture of carbon on a massive scale.
• A global religion centered around the Earth
• Relocating huge amounts of seawater to large dry areas of the planet (the Sahara for instance) in order to mitigate sea-level rise.
• Staining the Arctic seawater yellow in order to prevent sunlight penetrating deep into the water.
Some concepts (can’t say as to whether these are accurate or not) and some vocabulary: • To keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees we have a “budget” of only 500 more gigatons of fossil carbon that can be burned (about 40 gigatons burned per year at the start of the book). But there are 3,000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground that have been located (1/4 of them owned by corporations, ¾ owned by nations) worth about 2 trillion $US.
• The 2000 Watt Society (
https://www.2000-watt-society.org/).
• Wet bulb temperatures (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature).
• Jevons Paradox – increases in efficiency in the use of a resource results in an overall increase in the use of that resource (thus eliminating the benefits of the efficiency) – (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).
• Gini Coefficient – a measure of income inequality within a nation or social group. (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient).
• The Carbon Coin – a cryptocurrency that is generated by the documented proof of storing carbon or leaving carbon assets in the ground. (
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-coin-climate-change-crypto).
• The Masque of the Red Death Syndrome (after the story by Edgar Allen Poe), where since the end is imminent and inevitable, there’s nothing left to do except party while you still can.
• The International 4 Per Thousand Initiative (
https://4p1000.org/?lang=en.
Some fictional projections and fictional events in the book (which spans about 4 decades from maybe the 2030s to the 2070s): • A heat wave so severe that it kills 20 million people in India.
• The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover would melt entirely away in the late summer of 2032.
• California would be carbon neutral by the 2040s or so. They would also have developed statewide measures to protect groundwater and refill their aquafers. And created large wildlife corridors, restored large swaths of oak forest and salmon runs.
• Ecoterrorism – in the book there were chapters that featured fleets of commercial fishing boats sunk in order to preserve the world’s ocean fisheries, “Crash Day” where 60 commercial jetliners were blown out of the sky to scare people away from air travel, Mad Cow disease cultured and introduced by drone dart into millions of cattle to both kill them and scare people away from beef and dairy altogether. Assassinations of major oil executives. And others (like a funny chapter about the attendees at Davos being rounded up and subjected to “reeducation” films about income inequality.)
• Rare earth mining operations using slave labor.
• A storm so prolonged and severe that the entire Los Angeles Basin floods, stranding 10 million people.
• A week-long heat wave in the US that led to wet bulb temperatures of 38 degrees, power outages, and several hundred thousand Americans dying in a single day.
• Huge wildlife corridors like the “Y2Y” (Yukon to Yellowstone) from Yellowstone to Yosemite, talk of “Y2T” (Yukon to Tierra del Fuego), and lots of smaller corridors branching off of these large routes.
• Buyouts of rural towns that relocate the rural population (while giving them a lifetime annuity) and raze the human infrastructure in order to rewild the land (part of the Half-Earth plan).
• Massive container ships (big polluters) broken into smaller ones that run on wind and solar. The giant ships were being sabotaged and sunk, so this was both an energy conserving move as well as a business survival tactic.
• A global Super Depression.
• World Citizenship and a Global Passport scheme for refugees.
• The global fertility rate would fall to less than replacement (which is about 2.1) and by the end of the 2070s be around 1.8 (and potentially keep falling lower as time went on). Thus the human population would stabilize and decrease (lots of talk about the optimum number of humans, 3 billion? 4 billion?).
• The Half-Earth Initiative being instituted by nations, after the book by E.O. Wilson which advocates for setting aside one half of the land mass in the world for animals (no humans allowed) - (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Earth).
• The global bird population (today at around 50 billion) would increase to 60 billion by the end of the book (as a result of various climate schemes improving life for them).