Factually! with Adam Conover - The Science Fiction of Climate Change with Kim Stanley Robinson

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Most science fiction about climate change is apocalyptic. But what if we actually used our imaginative powers to invent a universe in which we DO something about climate change? This week, renowned author and outdoorsman Kim Stanley-Robinson joins Adam to talk about his book Ministry for the Future, and to explain why the future may not be as dark as we think. -- Listen to Pretend: A True Crime Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pretend-a-true-crime-documentary-podcast/id1245307962 EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/factually Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we are going to have a fantastic time doing it.

Now I want to remind you that I am on tour right now. If you live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania or Raleigh, North Carolina, you can come see me do my brand new hour of stand-up live. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and showtimes. Hope to see you there. And if you enjoy this show, I hope you will consider supporting us on Patreon.

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That's patreon.com slash adamconover. Now, this week, we're talking about climate change again, a topic we hit pretty often on this show because it is one of the most important on the planet, but we have a little bit different of a spin on it this week. Because this week, we're talking about climate change through the lens of science fiction. I am a huge science fiction fan. I love the genre because I love to see people imagine possible futures for humanity, possible different ways of life, different ways of addressing our greatest challenges, thought experiments of if we did X, what would happen? Would Y happen? Would Z happen? It is such a wonderful way to explore the possibility space of reality. Now, climate

change is a topic that's been covered before in science fiction. For instance, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is an incredible book that really presciently talked about what a world might look like in which climate change radically reshaped American society for the worse. It's an incredible book, and if you haven't read it, I really recommend it. But here's the thing, that is only one possible future that climate change might bring us to. Like, sure, there could be an apocalypse if we do everything wrong, but there's also a possible future in which we actually take steps to fight climate change, in which maybe we stop some of its worst effects. Maybe we won't get everything right, but, you know, humans have done a lot of incredible things in the past, like, I don't know, the Hoover Dam, K-pop, there's a lot of great stuff. The point is, maybe there's a future in which we do fight climate change. And since we want to live in that future and not in the

apocalyptic one, well, maybe we should start imagining what that future actually looks like so we can, you know, start making it happen. Well, today on the show, we have an absolutely incredible writer who is doing just that. He wrote one of my favorite books I read this year. It's a science fiction novel called Ministry for the Future. And what is so incredibly cool about it is that it begins in the present day. Basically, just like a few weeks from now, when the real, actual, devastating effects of climate change start to become truly undeniable in that millions of people start dying. And then he describes what happens next. Not just what happens in terms of the technology, which is what a lot of science fiction novels cover, but what happens geopolitically,

what happens socially, what different groups of people do in response to climate change, the steps that they take, and the innovations that they start driving towards. And he shows how all of those little movements added together in fits and starts, you know, always imperfect, taking a couple steps forward and a couple steps back, but how taken together, those actually can start to move the needle on climate change in a way that really matters. Now, it is fiction, but it is a profound work of imagination that helps you envision what our real future could actually look like if we actually start doing the work today. I have never read a novel that has connected the dots between science fiction

and the real reality I lived in so closely, and it was such a thrill to get to talk to him about it. So, without further ado, let us get to this interview. My guest today is the acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. He's best known for his Mars trilogy. He has won Hugo Award after Nebula Award after World Fantasy Award for his work. He is an absolutely incredible writer and thinker. I'm so excited to have him on the show. Please welcome Kim Stanley Robinson. Stan, thank you so much for being on the show. It's my pleasure, Adam. Thanks for having me. I'm really thrilled to talk to you because I read your book, Ministry for the Future,

this past year and was really taken by it very deeply. I have a lot of questions for you about that book, but I want to talk first about your new book that is out called The High Sierra, A Love Story. And I think part of why you're such a wonderful writer about climate change is because you're so deeply embedded in the natural world as it is, and it's something you have a deep relationship with. And that's what the book is about, correct? Just tell me a little bit about your relationship with The High Sierra. Sure. It is a book with photos and it's nonfiction. I've never done either of those things before. From Little Brown, which is an associated publisher to my regular publisher Orbit, they're part of the Hachette family and they're all interconnected in a great way. So I'm still in the family in the publishing sense. I've been going to the Sierra since I was

about 21 on a very regular basis and have tried walking in some of the other mountain ranges on this planet. Not very many of them, but they've all struck me very strongly as a kind of compared contrast to the Sierra, which is definitely the range I know best. It's a big stretch of wilderness, protected land, national parks, national forest, kind of extraordinary. There's a section of it in the south where I go the most that is over 100 miles with no roads crossing any of the passes, 100 miles north to south, about roughly 30 or 40 miles east to west. That's a big chunk of land. As mountainous as it is, it would be difficult to see it all in one lifetime unless

that was your only job. So I've been going up with friends all these last 50 years and loving it. And it's a little mysterious why it's so attractive, so absorbing and compelling. And I wanted to try writing about that. And ministry came at the end of a long streak of novels, like really long if you go back 40 years, but also a sequence for Orbit Books that was six books in 10 years. And ministry is kind of a culmination. I don't have anything more to say right now when it comes to novels. So that meant it was maybe time to try the Sierra book, and the pandemic hit, and I wasn't traveling. I was sitting in my front courtyard writing, and so the

Sierra book kind of poured out of me. And I guess the other thing is worth mentioning is that the method of Ministry for the Future is very much of a miscellany. Each chapter, 106 chapters in ministry, and each one, when you start it, you don't know what kind of text it's going to be in form or content. Well, I did the same thing in High Sierra, which made me nervous at first because I found that it's a mistake

to lift over methods from one novel to the next one. It's typically a mistake. But in this case, it seemed right. It worked for Sierra book, which is memoir, history, geology, and I don't even know what you would call it. I guess those three kind of cover it or moments of being, I call it just kind of stream of consciousness writing whilst up there. So these different modes are all mixed and mingled in the High Sierra book in the same way that different kinds of modes are mixed and mingled in Ministry for the Future.

Yeah, and it strikes me that you're going back and forth between very different scales of time. You're talking about, it's memoir, it's your own personal history. You talk about going up there for the first time in your 20s, and your experiences there. You also talk about the deep geological time and sort of the infinitesimally small period of that that we get to see. You write about the geology of the Sierra Mountains. Tell me a little bit about that. Well, thank you for that. It is interesting to me when you're up there in this year walking along, you have the moment to moment of stream of consciousness and you can be quite focused, especially when scrambling, when things are a little bit dangerous or intense, then you're very focused on that moment. And then it passes, it passes, you're in

the next moment. At the same time, you're on rocks that were formed 10 miles underground about 80 million to 100 million years ago. And they finally were, the burden of rock and soil over them was worn away over time. So about 20 million years ago, they emerged onto the surface of the earth and they've been rising or the rest of the earth has been getting worn away both at once for the last 20 million years. Well, these kind of timescales, you can throw those numbers around, but I don't think we can imagine them very well. If you try to cast your mind, oh, what does 20 million years mean? Well, what does even what does a million years mean? After a while, the human mind just blows up.

But there it is right in front of you. So you get an experience of both at once that I think is part of the magic of being up there. You can see the changes. Here's something you can see that you can somewhat imagine. It was 10,000 years ago that the ice left the Sierras since the last glaciation of the last ice age. And you can see what has grown there since in the way of forests, fell fields up in the very highlands,

and then sheer pure rock that in 10,000 years has not had a single thing grow on it, but it's been a little bit weathered by sunlight and rain. You can learn to see that, and maybe what I would say is read the landscape. You can look at something that is first quite confusing or blank, let's say, and then as you learn to read the history of the land itself, you can begin to say, ah, yes, that's a meadow because it used to be a lake, because a glacier scooped a hole there, and so on and so forth. It's quite fascinating if you begin to look at it as a historian. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do when I'm in a national park or on a hike of

any kind is to look at the landscape and say, wait, why is this like this? And I'm not a national park or on a hike of any kind is to look at the landscape and say, wait, why is this like this? And I'm not a geologist. My parents are both naturalists of some degree or another. But so they sort of brought me up doing that. So a lot of times for me, it's just a stupid hypothesis. Or I go look for a plaque that'll explain it to me. Yeah. Well, a lot of it you cannot figure out on your own. It's not like right now I'm on Mount Desert Island, which is a circular island right on the coast of Maine. It's Acadia National Park. I bring it up because in the 30 or 40 years I've been coming here,

since I married my wife and she came from here, this round island began its life 500 million years ago down near the equator, 10 miles underground, and then came to the surface. It was a caldera of a volcano. The rock is super hard. It cooled down there. The plates of the Earth have been moving about until it crashed into the coast of North America. Well, there's no way you can deduce that. That takes a network of scientists. It takes a network of scientists, and it takes tectonic plate theory. So in the last 30 years or so, in the last 50 years for sure, our whole sense of why the earth looks the way it is has been revolutionized. And that's kind of fun too, that you can have new explanations

for what was before completely mysterious. Like why is a rocky granite island off the coast of Maine of all places? Well, because it drifted in from the equator. I mean, it's hilarious in a way. because it drifted in from the equator. I mean, it's hilarious in a way. Yeah, you write in the book that we actually didn't know why mountain ranges exist at all until plate tectonic theory, which I grew up being taught plate tectonics,

but I often forget that that theory didn't even become solidified until the 70s. Yes. Like, literally, we didn't know about plate tectonics until just a couple decades before I was born. And as a result, we didn't know why mountain ranges existed. That's crazy. Yes, I love it because I'm old enough

that when I was reading as a boy, everything was wrong. And the theories were doing the best they could, but without plate tectonics, you got nothing really. So that when it was thought that maybe the earth was shrinking as it cooled down, you know, not a bad thought. And that therefore the surface was wrinkling at the surface because it was a bigger surface with a smaller interior so like a sharpie dog's face and then the other theory was that the earth was actually expanding and that cracks were therefore appearing in the surface and lava was pouring up so they're opposite theories yeah and they were

just uh both of them you know not even wrong they were so outside the realm of what was really going on because they didn't have plate tectonics. Well, it's just delightful to see a science have a paradigm formation that makes sense of all this wild data that we have. Yeah. Well, look, I want to ask you about Ministry for the Future and climate change, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Kim Stanley Robinson. Okay, we're back with Kim Stanley Robinson. I have to ask you about Ministry for the Future. Your new book is, as you say, memoir and nonfiction. But Ministry for the Future is,

I mean, it says right here on the cover of the copy that I have, Jonathan Lethem called it the best science fiction nonfiction novel I've ever read. And I think that's an interesting way to put it, because I find this book to be very difficult to categorize. I often think of science fiction as being, or at least a lot of the science fiction I enjoy, as being a thought experiment to ask what would happen if X, Y, Z. thought experiment to ask what would happen if X, Y, Z. But your book starts, it's the first science fiction novel I've ever read that starts from the present day. Like its starting point is so near in our future that it feels like you're spooling forward rather than a thought experiment about an alternative reality, our current reality in a very specific way.

And I wondered if you could talk about that at all. Like, what is your approach? Like, do you feel like you're predicting the future in a way? Or are you – I've run out of steam on this question. I'd love for you to just respond to all the mess of what I just said. Yeah, sure. you on this question, I'd love for you to just respond to all the mess of what I just said. Yeah, sure. No, and it's not a mess because it really brings up all of these fundamental questions of what is science fiction up to and what is this book? I would say it's a novel,

for sure. And novels are simply very capacious and they can have a lot of stuff in it that looks like nonfiction, but has been incorporated into the task of being part of a novel, of making the novel seem more solid and realistic, et cetera. But then also it's a science fiction novel. I would say any story set in the future, starting from 10 minutes into the future to 5 million years into the future, that whole zone is science fiction.

That's a big zone, so it subdivides. And what I've been saying is that you put stuff in the far future and it might as well be fantasy. You're zipping around the galaxy in spaceships. You're going faster than light, et cetera. That I call, a lot of people call this space opera. And Star Trek, Star Wars, we all, there's a sense that science fiction is nothing but space opera, but that's not true. There's also near future science fiction, but that's not true. There's also near-future science fiction,

day-after-tomorrow type stuff. You take the present, you press it in a few maybe technological innovations or a few historical incidences happen, and then you're reading about the near future. Typically, it would be best not to put a date on it just so that it remains in a nebulous near future. And there's a lot of very good science fiction that has been set in that near future zone. Now, in between it is a zone I'm super interested in, say about 100 years out, 200 years out. It's not just pushing

the present. It's not far future fantasy. It's what I call future history. And it tries to play that game. I wouldn't call it prediction. I would say a modeling exercise, like a scenario, like a climate, like running a computer, you put in these parameters, have these rules of behavior, let's run the computer through, you know, a million seconds and see where we're at in terms of the modeling. Well, science fiction works kind of like that. It's, you're never going to predict what really happens because that's always too bizarre to be predicted. If you accidentally predict something, that's just an accident. But what you are doing is modeling certain trajectories of a history or technology or both put together typically. And that's the game that science fiction is playing. So then ministry is clearly near future science fiction. I put it out three

decades. That was probably wrong to be that specific and to date things. And now, even though I wrote it in 2019, all those dates are wrong. Things are happening way faster, way faster than I predicted. Well, then I, then I postulated for ministry for the future. Um, it's all going to happen way faster. And here's why I wrote it before the pandemic. Yeah. And the pandemic slapped us in the face and speeded everything up. Like you, like a film speed had been accelerated. Now we're running at a faster pace. Time feels weird. The pandemic has proved to us that history is real and that the planet is real. And things that I was thinking in 2019 are now just seriously out of date. What do you mean by that? The pandemic proved

to us that the planet is real. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I think so. There's this sense, I think, in our civilization that we humans are so special and so technological that the planet is like a setting. And what the pandemic reminded us is that the planet is our life support system or even our extended body, that your body extends out past your skin. 50% of the DNA in your body is not human DNA. You are like a swamp or a forest. There's this stupendous collaboration between lots of little aliens that are cooperating symbiotically or parasitically or whatever. It's a vast little teamwork inside you. But then you're breathing in the world, you're drinking the world, you're eating the world. And the rest of the biosphere

is crucial to your health as an individual human that which you think of as so inviolate and singular, but it isn't. So you're dependent and interpenetrated, You might as well be a jellyfish. You know, the ocean's just washing in and out of you in this permeable membrane, which is not quite your skin, but also your lung cells and everything else. So, well, this is news, but the pandemic kind of smacks you on the nose with this news, right? I mean, everybody was scared you're going to die the next day of a virus that was being carried from person to person and then screwing up your system so badly you could die.

So in 2020, everyone was actually scared. Now, people aren't so much scared. There's vaccines. There's proof that you can get it and survive. Many of us have gotten it, and it was like less bad than a cold, partly because of vaccines, partly because of the changing in the virus. So, but I do think that it was a, it was a punched in the nose of civilization itself to say, pay attention, the biosphere is important. You cannot trash it, poison it, and not be poisoning yourself also.

You've got to pay attention. It's a necessity. And I think that's changed some things. I mean, clearly, we're not totally changed. We'll never be totally changed. But I think we are in a different structure of feeling as a civilization. It proves to us that we haven't mastered the world, that we do not fully create our own environment, that we are, yeah, we're meat walking around on an earth that affects us.

Yes. And we're very clever. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Humans are technological in that I would, I put it this way. We evolved into human beings by way of technology, which is to say fire and stones and all of the ways that we used pieces of the world as tools. It was pre-humans who figured that out and then evolved into us. So we're intensely technological. And we've got it. Here we are talking on the Internet.

Here we have this planetary technology that is extremely powerful. So I don't want to say we're at the mercy of this biosphere, but in some ways we are. We can't just transcend. And I've written about this often. I have humans going to Mars. I have humans going to the next star system inside of a spaceship that they've built. You know, we are often thinking of ourselves as if we've solved all these problems and that we live in a kind of spaceship of our cities or our apartments or whatever you got. all underlying all of it as our fundamental life support system, our food, our air, our water,

our infrastructures. It's all biosphere related, and we need to have this planet healthy for us to be healthy. So that's what I think we've been reminded of. And when I wrote ministry, I was just in a darker frame of mind. To get back to the book, you can see in the book, this is someone writing who doesn't think we're going to come to grips with things in the 2020s, that we're going to waste the 2020s. When you read ministry, you can see by the dates and by what happens that this is a book that doesn't believe people are going to start paying attention until a massive disaster happens. But now that the pandemic was a massive disaster, not quite the one that anybody thought it was going to be, but it was enough to change people's attitudes.

And now we have to figure out what to do about that. Wait, so are you saying that the pandemic made you an optimist? Is that what I'm pulling out of it? Well, I'm always being accused of being an optimist my whole career. It's a coded way of saying I'm such a silly, stupid person. Well, that's not what I meant by it. Well, but that's what people generally mean by it. Robinson, he's such an optimist, which is to say kind of obtuse, doesn't get it. You know, a simpleton, biochemically elevated, you know, either naturally or through artificial means into a level of happiness that is foolish. That's what optimist means in our culture, by and large, because there's an ingrained desire to be cool by being cynical and by being pessimistic. That shows that you're knowledgeable and you're hip and you're not going to be disappointed by having hopes, et cetera, et cetera. So our culture has a very bad attitude towards optimism, and I am always defending it.

But to get back to your question, which is a good one, I think the pandemic was a slap in the face that has accelerated history. the pandemic was a slap in the face that has accelerated history. And so there are ways in which I am more hopeful now than I was in 2019. In 2019, it looked like Trump might get reelected. It looked like we would never deal with climate change. We weren't talking about carbon in the same way. And now, just three years later, a lot of things are looking up, if you can put it that way. Maybe, I mean, if you're in an awareness of a coming crash, then you're aware of it, then maybe that's looking up compared to being headed towards that crash and being clueless about it. Yeah. I think your book, I think Ministry is interesting because I don't know that I would describe it as being an optimistic book because the first thing that happens is a heat wave in India kills millions of people, right? And I love that you use the word modeling. That's much better

than prediction because that is what I really enjoyed about the book, that you asked the question, okay, if we have, what happens in response to the very first large-scale climate disaster? What happens when one country becomes radicalized about climate change? India, in the book, becomes very politically radicalized around climate change, starts taking measures that other countries won't take in order to solve the problem. But the other countries are kind of like, well, India, whatever, sure, you go do that, but we're not that worried yet. And that, to me, felt very true. Yes, I think that might be what would happen if such a thing happened. It felt very plausible and helped me as a thought experiment figure out how things might go.

But so that's not an optimistic event, right? But by the end of the book, you've portrayed a future in which, well, we have, humanity has addressed climate change, if not in the whole of humanity, perfect way that we might hope, but in fits and starts, a little work here, a failure there, you know, a private enterprise does this, governments do that. Individual people start doing this. And it felt not optimistic, but maybe the sort of solutions that you start coming up with when you abandon optimism or pessimism, you abandon catastrophism or sort of what's the word from Candide? I forget. Everything is going to be fine. And you say, okay, what is actually achievable? What might happen that won't be incredibly good

and incredibly bad? I don't know if you agree with any of what I've said, but I'm curious. Yes, I know that. Thank you. That describes it very closely what I had in mind. And what I wanted to try was, given where we are now, which is really quite a bad spot, let's put that out there. We're starting a mass extinction event, we're burning too much carbon, we can't stop burning carbon instantly, there's massive inequality, and about a quarter to a third of the world's population needs relief to get to adequacy itself. So it's a scandalous and screwed up situation. Given that present, what's a best case scenario? Not the only one, but a best case scenario that you can still believe in

as you're reading it. So there's not going to be a plan. We're going to be fumbling our way forward here. To the extent there is a plan, well, there's the Paris Agreement. There's the COP26 meeting, COP27 soon to come in Egypt. That agreement, the Congress of the parties, that have all the nations on earth, except for a couple small random ones, have signed on to the Paris Agreement and said, we're going to decarbonize fast. So that's a kind of framework. If that framework were to work, there would still be a lot of bad things happening that are going to happen. It's inevitable.

And we're going to be fumbling our way forward. the next three decades happening in a planless way that nevertheless gets to a dodging of the mass extinction event and an alleviation of human misery. And that the reader reading it would go, well, yeah, that could happen. Well, of course, this is variable to the reader. I've read many responses to Ministry for the Future, and some of them will just say, wow, what a pessimistic guy. Some will say, oh, he's just so over-optimistic about the way humans are. So there's no accounting for the wide variety of humans' feelings about what the future can hold. But for the general reader, just reading it and reading

a novel is a very generous act. It's a very creative act. You give hours to it and you're looking at black marks on a page and things are happening inside your head. So that willing suspension of disbelief, as Coleridge called it, is like self-hypnosis and you're living that dream for a while. So already you're doing something generous. You read the novel, and then you pop in and out of it mentally. Mostly you're in it, but then in between sessions of reading, you're thinking about it. And sometimes right when you're reading a paragraph,

you're both in it and thinking about it at the same time. It varies wildly, but while you're in that process of reading it, can you be persuaded that, yeah, that could happen? Well, that could happen. That varies wildly. But while you're in that process of reading it, can you be persuaded that, yeah, that could happen? Well, that could happen. That could happen. And of course, there would be a backlash and there would be a disaster, but then people will still be working on X and Y. So this was my organizing principle in writing ministry, to try to make it seem plausible at every point. No moment is there a silver bullet. No moment did people come together in some kumbaya way.

Stays messy, and yet we still get to a better place 30 years down the line. Well, you know, this is why this book has had the response it's had. There aren't very many books that try that. And people were hungry for that story. I am telling you, there's an urge for that story. Yeah, people want, and this is what we've been talking about a lot on this show, people want a way forward that feels plausible to them, given the immense challenges that we face.

Was the book for you, was there at all a political project in it? Were you trying to give people some sense of an idea of how, what we might do about climate change or to expand the possibilities space for people in a way that might spur them to action or at least, you know, fight back against any, some sort of pessimism? Or is that too specific in terms of a goal for you? No. In fact, that might be the general goal. I might even have more specific goals than that. I'm an American leftist. I would always argue for government over business, for public over private, for the commons over enclosed spaces. This is just a political orientation I've had my whole life. So I'm always asserting that we're not going to solve climate change

as just private power pursuing profit. That won't get us out of the carbon burn disaster. We are going to have to have government direction. It might even devolve to a point of being like World War II, where governments simply seized their entire national economies in order to fight the battle that was necessary for existential survival. Now, many people at this point are hoping that some kind of Keynesian mix of government control and stimulus and then private business and private power collaborating together to make

investments into green biosphere work might be enough. I would judge the current moment right now is an ongoing discussion and efforts on all sides to see if private capital can be directed to doing green investing rather than short term extractive biosphere killing and unjust investment. So in other words, capital always goes to the highest rate of return. That is simply a law in our current financialized world. Capital will look around, what's the highest rate of return? I'm going there. If I got a forest, I'm looking at it across the lake at a forest.

If I keep that forest alive and I therefore get paid by a nature conservancy at a rate of 8% return on my investment, or I cut it down and turn it into toilet paper Japan and I get a 9% rate of return. Capital will go for the 9% rate of return. It does not give a shit about the future. the 9% rate of return. It does not give a shit about the future. What it cares about is short term return on value, the quarterly statements, profit and loss, and shareholder value, which is an estimate. These two rubrics for estimating the priorities involved are destructive and ruinous to us. And now people know that. I think it's clear to your listeners will be understanding. I won't go on too long about that because I think it's now clear

that we need to change the rubrics for deciding how to invest. And it looks like there is efforts on that front that there weren't. To my knowledge, three years ago, they weren't there, but it could have been I was ignorant three years ago. Now we know from all the discussions at COP26 and the whole world is talking about this.

How can we direct capitalist power towards biosphere work so that we don't blow ourselves up, so that we don't wreck our own home? This is really the topic. So in ministry, what I was trying to do was always push towards those kinds of solutions. And indeed, ministry probably gets it wrong in that it doesn't have as much trust in private investment as I'm now seeing might be worth looking into now. And this is another hopeful sign. There's trillions of dollars of investment capital

looking for good investment possibilities. If restoring the biosphere is suddenly regarded, and this would be called risk assessment, what do they call it? Risk-adjusted investment. That risk is of blowing up the biosphere. If you adjust for that risk, suddenly the investment opportunities look different. And so you're seeing asset managers

rather than hedge fund managers. The vocabulary and the methodologies are shifting pretty quickly. Yeah. And there is a degree to which capitalism is responsive because it looks into the future. I mean, you know, no one wants to buy a house that's going to be underwater in 50 years. And, you know, so these sort of calculations are sometimes included in these investments. But we have to also shift the incentives and cause that, you know, that investment to be profitable. One of the things I loved about the book is that I love science fiction that focuses on people as much as it focuses on technology in terms of how do people respond to the technology. And there are so many portions in the book where you see people

be pleaded with about, please take climate change seriously. And the people basically say, well, because of my incentive structure, I don't really care about what you have to say. There's a wonderful scene in the book where a bunch of people at a Davos style retreat, or maybe it's literally Davos, a bunch of, you know, climate terrorists, basically, or activists hold them all hostage and make them watch videos about how they're killing the planet. And all the rich people are like, oh, that was a funny vacation like uh those those silly revolutionaries you know and they sort of laugh at them and condescend to them and i thought the psychology was incredibly spot on that's exactly what those people would do that is what they are doing right now that is how people laugh

at greta thunberg they say oh my god look at this yelling child you know oh boy where's her parents they sort of you know snicker behind their hands and and move on because it's not actually affecting their lives in a in a discreet way you and sort of the purpose of government uh involvement is to make sure it affects those people's lives to change their incentive structure um because you can't stop humans from being humans but knowing that humans are humans, knowing how their psychology works, you can incentivize them to work in different ways, perhaps.

And it seems to me your book is showing us how we might do that if we really, if we don't ask people to just be good people and care about the planet because they're supposed to, if we accept they're never going to do that, but we instead change the incentive structure they live in, perhaps we can move ourselves towards a solution. Does that make sense?

Yes, yes. I would say it definitely makes sense. And I mean, incentives is a word from entrepreneurial capitalism. and there's a whole vocabulary there that I like to revise and expand to say that, okay, there should be laws where certain behaviors are illegal and then there should be indeed incentives, which is to say just this, jobs that you get paid in order to do good biosphere work. So there you're talking about Green New Deal, you're talking about Green New Deal. You're talking about full employment.

You're talking about carbon quantitative easing, that new money is created from scratch by the central banks, crucially the Federal Reserve of the United States, that on its first deployment in the economy, rather than giving it to private banks or shoring up private banks in their stupid gambling, it's given to people doing decarbonization work and green work in general. You're paid for it first. And this would be like the CCC and the Depression. That's why Green New Deal is even a name. Already passe, but the ideas still hold that the first use of new money should be for

saving the biosphere, then it endures the general economy, it's a multiplier effect, etc. And it's just as you say, if your job is to do good for the biosphere, then you don't have to be a moral person. It's your job. It's how you make your living. And then the goodness behind it is very satisfying. I think people do have more than economic motives. They want to be proud of what they do. They love having a sense of accomplishment and working towards future generations. All that's very well. That's super human. I mean, that's very human. But on the other hand, you need a job and you need to be able to pay your bills. And if that job entailed doing good things, well, it's a double good. And that's what we should always be looking for.

Yeah. Now, all those programs you're talking about, you mentioned the Green New Deal a few times and the creation of new money, very top-down government programs that the folks at the highest level of government would say, let us, you know, almost restructure our economy to prioritize the climate in various ways. It does look like we're going to get a big piece of climate legislation, but it's nothing approaching a Green New Deal in terms of, you know, what that is meant to say, you know, in terms of that type of program. Do you feel that, you know, the sort of programs that you're talking about are something that can eventually be implemented?

Is there a growing political appetite for it? Because sometimes I look at it and say, I don't know if any of this shit is going to happen. It's great on paper. It's great in your book. It's great in, you know, when Ed Markey proposes it. But are you know, are we going to be able to implement policies like these in the political system? Well, I hope so. We sure need it. And let's put it this way. We were just one vote away. So once you get a working political majority legislation, that's different than quantitative easing where central banks make up new money.

And for them to push that money in a particular direction would be radical for central bank action. On the other hand, legislators say, we have made this money up and we're deciding by a democratic process to spend this money on these kind of projects. So all we needed was one or two more votes and we would have had a massive climate bill, as it is, it looks like we're going to get a pretty damn good climate bill, the biggest one ever. So we don't want to complain too much when you've got the biggest one ever, because you can always build from that and call this a victory and move on to the next victory. And slowly but surely change people's structure of feeling which is to say their expectations of what's normal and what's right norms change such that maybe five years

from now everybody well of course you pay to save the biosphere because it's your body why wouldn't you like like would if your foot is falling off would you just or if you had two feet and you decided you wanted some money would you sell a foot have it chopped off and then you'd have ten dollars for a while, but you wouldn't have your foot anymore. So a structure of feeling begins to change where, of course, this work makes sense. And the fact that we were only one vote away in such enormously confusing times is a sign that things are changing already. And we just need to keep pressing the pedal to the metal and doing everything we can to scaffold the next good move. And it could happen. Now, I'm not saying it will happen.

I mean, people will immediately cry, oh, my God, that's really overoptimistic because look at what the polls say. But polls, first of all, they're not the same as elections. They're not timely. People are crying defeat in ahead of the battle itself. And so say you're in the biggest race of your life, and it's not at all clear you're going to win this race. To sit down on the racetrack and start crying is just not the appropriate response. sit down on the racetrack and start crying is just not the appropriate response. At this point, you got to race like crazy. And then when the race is over, then you can cry if you've lost.

And of course, you know, the race will never be over. So in a way, I'm just urging people to not be depressed, not be pessimistic, not declare defeat before the battle's over. And this is an old image from early Obama years. And it's a football image. Don't punt on first down. You've got some more downs to go before you have to punt. Yeah. And if you can build a win today, even if it's an imperfect win, that can give people the feeling of winning. They know what it's like to win for the planet. Um, and that can lead to more victories in the future. That's a wonderful message. I have a lot more to ask you though.

Uh, we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Kim Stanley Robinson. Okay. We're back. Uh, Stan, I,

I just have to ask this cause I've noticed as we're talking here on video, are we wearing the same watch? Are you wearing a Casio G-Shock watch? Well, I think so, yeah, yeah. It certainly is a Casio, a WR. It's the only watch I've worn for about 40 years. Not that it isn't, you know, every 10 years or so they fall apart, but I love it because it's got a, it's got a stopwatch

function on it and an alarm function on it. And you know, I like it. I think this is the same one that I literally the same watch that I'm wearing. I think it was the very same model. And I like it because it's a very simple and reliable piece of technology. It's been around for a long time. It's inexpensive. Um, it's, it's functional and it's simple. I'm curious how you think about technology. You know, there's a fair amount of technology in the ministry for the future, but you don't really postulate anything massively transformational. You do have a section about the blockchain and some blockchain-based ideas. But even that, of course, is based in the technology that's currently being invented. And you said earlier, humans are a technological species. But I'm curious about what you think

the role of technology is in combating climate change or solving any of our other problems. Well, that's a good question. And I'll start with a side note, which is that it was a mistake on my part to use the word blockchain in Ministry for the Future. I should have used digital coding or something. Blockchain is, as a technology of cryptography, is hopefully be superseded by something faster, more efficient, quicker. I think blockchain is just a fad of these last five years, a word and a tech that deserves to be superseded because it's so clumsy and clunky.

And when used in Bitcoin, it becomes a disaster and a tragedy of burning more carbon in order to make a speculative bubble that doesn't even function as money. It's just a scam. So when you say blockchain, a lot of people think Bitcoin, as if the two were entirely the same, which isn't true. But I shouldn't have used that word because Bitcoin is a scam, a delusion, a ripoff, and a climate disaster. So I should not even have used that word. Now, that said, let's go back to technology in general. I've been trying to insist to everybody that there's hardware and software and that software is still a technology. And because we're in a computer world, people understand what I say by that, I think. Software is still a technology.

The codes that you write, the systems. It means that law is a technology. Justice is a technology. Women's rights is a technology. Justice is a technology. Women's rights is a technology. Language is a technology, a very powerful early technology, language itself. These softwares are the crucial ones. The hardware, we decide what we can do. science in particular is making manipulations of the physical world that are alchemical and are going to do us a lot of good going forward to be less poisonous to the rest of the biosphere

while still making ourselves healthier and more comfortable. So I love technology. It's just that it should be for the people. It should be appropriate technology. It shouldn't be to allow a rich person to go helicoptering into the Canadian Rockies and drop out of a paraglider and land and ski down the side of a mountain. There's stupid uses of technology, of course. But there's also the main form of technology that I've been falling in love with is called medicine.

Medical science and medical technology has saved my life twice. And almost everybody my age, many of them are only alive because technology has intervened in their dying earlier. So go into any old cemetery here on Mount Desert Island and look at how long people lived in the 19th century, in the 18th century. And you'll see the occasional 80-year-old, but you see also that the median age must have been more like 40. And so we're in a medical miracle, which is called modern medical technology. And so that's a technology to love. It keeps us alive. It's good for humans. Now, can it be better integrated into the biosphere that supports us? Well, of course. And that's part of the project. And then could it lead to more justice amongst humans? There, the technology

would be law or women's rights or something like that. And those two are technologies. So as a science fiction writer, I'm always interested to think, well, what is science? What is technology? What is engineering? What is math? What is medicine? How does that relate to the human project?

It's really sort of what many science fiction stories are about. It's the topic, you know. It's what your story is trying to explore is this particular relationship between technology and humanity. How would that play out? Is it good for us or bad? And that's a very common science fiction question. Yes, but what I love about what you've said is including social technologies under the word technology. That, you know, political science is a science that can produce technologies. For instance, democratic technology, right?

Yes, yes. The Constitution of the United States is a technological artifact, and it was revolutionary for its time and created a lot of wonderful things that we benefit from today, but we also have the sense that, oh, it's a little bit outdated of technology. There are some adjustments that we would make today. There are political scientists

working today, coming up with new constitutions that work better and that are more advanced. And so I find that really interesting once we inject that, because a lot of people say, well, we're never going to solve, there's a debate about, are we going to solve climate change with technology or not? Are we going to come up with better fuel sources, et cetera? But if we include under that, no, we need to revise our social technologies as well. Our justice systems, our democratic systems, our patterns of development, the way that we build our cities, all of the, if we include all those under technology, then it widens the aperture of what seems possible. And your book does that really beautifully.

It makes that case. Yeah, well, thank you. I think that's right. Once you expand your definition of technology, then you can suddenly say, well, geoengineering, oh my gosh, what does it even mean? Try to alter the biosphere to make it less harmed than what we did before? Isn't that hubris? Won't we crash and burn? Aren't you looking for a silver bullet? Blah, blah. And then you think, well, if all the women on this planet had their full legal and human rights as they ought, so that's already a desirable thing, then the human population would begin to drop in a natural

way over time. That's been proved demographically already. So suddenly women's rights are a technology of geoengineering. And at that point, your categories are shattered. You have to rethink things. And I think all of us need to rethink things given that we're in an emergency and current systems are kind of bad. You could say that capitalism is a technology, a particularly mean and selfish technology, leading to injustice among humans, inequality, and wrecking the biosphere for current people's indulgences. So you could say, well, there's a technology that needs some upgrades fast, and we can do it because it's a legal system, and legal systems change all the time.

We can do it because it's a legal system and legal systems change all the time. So, yeah, I like opening up the category so that you have to think some new thoughts. Well, I want to go back to sort of bring us in for a landing here. I want to bring the High Sierra back in because you've written this wonderful meditation on your experience and time in these mountains. I also noticed that in Ministry for the Future, a lot of what the characters do in the book, when you're following your point of view characters, is they're walking around in the mountains. About half the book seems to be they're walking around in the Alps or somewhere else, or sometimes they're walking around in cities. But a lot of it is them just sort of looking at mountains and thinking about them.

And I found that very interesting that that is in that book as well. And so what is important about that experience to you that you felt you should include it in this very sweeping future history of climate change? Well, it's a good question. It was a real urge on my part. And I think maybe, okay, here's a book about climate change and about bureaucrats and government and about saving the world and it's global. Well, this is awfully abstract. And yet I'm trying to write a novel with characters. So they've got daily lives. And it seemed to me that you also read novels for fun. And you can describe ministry in a way that makes it sound like castor oil. It might be good for you, but it's not going to be fun. And I would want to claim that that novel is a fun read.

But why is it fun? Well, the play of forms, the fact that characters are having thoughts and that they're outdoors doing stuff in the world. The, the fact that characters are having thoughts and that they're outdoors doing stuff in the world. The book was set in Switzerland. My wife and I lived two years in Zurich. And so it was a love letter to Zurich, this novel. I'd never written about Zurich before, and that was 35 years ago. So I wanted to, you know, it's, what is that phrase? A local, give it a local habitation and a name. This is from Shakespeare. A setting and a sense of lived reality is super important for novels.

And I had never done the Alps. And the Sierras are a very particular range, dry, Mediterranean. The Alps are wet and beastly hard and dangerous as hell. They're different ranges, and I love them both. But the Alps, I'd never written about them either. So, and lastly, I guess I would say, you know, Aristotle and Plato, when they were running their academy, the gymnasium in Athens, they called themselves the peripatetics. This is to say you walk while you talk, and your talk becomes better. So there was some connection between walking and thinking that you

were doing better thinking if you were walking around the gymnasium and chatting as you walked. That's why they're called peripatetic in terms of the name of their philosophy. Well, I don't know how much there is to that to tell you the truth, but I do know that I like walking and I'm often talking. So this is why in ministry, you know, they go to Antarctica, they try to slow down the glaciers sliding into the sea and drowning us all. I think a novel gathers a certain pleasure and a certain heft by having some outdoor scenes. That's what it comes down to. But I mean, at the same time that you say that, that is a very sort of writerly, oh, I thought those scenes would be nice explanation. But I'm thinking about you writing the book. I assume that while you wrote the book, you went for hikes and walks in the Sierras because you've that's clearly a big part of your life.

And as you've been doing for decades and a lot of times when I'm in a natural environment like that, I'm confronted by this is so beautiful. And yet, you know, climate change is happening. Humanity is causing the destruction of this place. And you sometimes feel sadness when you're in those sort of places. You've been visiting the same mountains for decades. You must have seen changes there, I imagine, over the years. And so is there any connection there between your own experiences walking in those mountains and the issue of climate change overall? Or do you feel a sadness when you're on those hikes or not? I'm curious if there's anything in there for you. Yeah, yeah.

Well, thanks for that. Because I have been crushed up there. We went up there in, I guess it was just last year in 2021 to a high canyon top that had seven glaciers in its north-facing uppermost limits. And they're on the map. We had visited them in person in 2006, and they were gone.

Only one of the seven was left. Now, these are little glaciers in this era. I mean really little. And the one that was left was the size of maybe two or three Olympic swimming pools tilted at a 45 degree angle. It's probably gone now. It was never colder than freezing, even at night, even at 11,000 feet above sea level. The Sierras are going to be hammered. They're going to be desiccated. Lack of rainfall, the huge droughts that hit the American West will, some beautiful green meadows of the

Sierras will end up looking like the most blasted parts of Nevada. And that does make me sad. I was crushed from that particular trip. It's hard even to talk about it now. But friends have rallied me. They've pointed out the American West has experienced hundred year droughts since the last ice age. And yet that sky island still has the plants and animals that it has. These are extremophiles. They are survivors. Lots will die. Lots will survive. and not only that, but it's not the Sierras alone that is at risk.

It's every single spot on earth is at risk of radical change by way of climate change that will kill the plants and animals that were there. They will have to leave or they will go extinct. And so since it's a general danger that even threatens humanity itself, especially our civilization, but even our sheer physical existence, we're going to solve it. We have to. And we have the means to solve it. And so the Sierras are maybe like a canary in a cold mine because they're so high. But they're

also characteristic of every other spot on earth. And so I have been sad, but I've also been encouraged by friends to take the long view and take the political view that we are all in danger. It isn't just pretty spot at high altitude that I go to because it's so lovely. It's your living space, wherever your hometown is, it's in danger right now. So it's all part of a larger picture. And I still take a lot of comfort out of going up into the Sierra, even though when I see it, especially August or September, dry as a bone when it didn't used to be, or filled air filled with smoke from these big fires in California. The beautiful, clear, high air. Sometimes it can be as dark as Mordor. You know, a dark red by day.

You can taste it. You can grind the air between your teeth. There's ashes in it. So all of this is quite terrifying. It just simply is. We're living in a time of dread. And so although I'm trying to emphasize the positive and what we can accomplish, it's very important, I think, and maybe this is where you might want to end. We are in a dangerous spot. We have to act. It's not optional. If we don't act, catastrophe could follow, so we need to act.

But taking the long, I agree with that, and this is a wonderful note to end on, although I'll add this, that I think what you said about taking the long view seems really critical to me. And it seems something that your work does specially because you, again, in the new book, you're writing about geologic time, you know, many, many millions of years in the past. Your work in science fiction taken as a whole stretches far off into the future. And, you know, maybe there's a little bit more space for, you know, when we feel so down in the dumps about like, oh, my God, one senator killed our all of our chances of doing X, Y, Z or, you know, the wrong appointee to this body really locked us into

these outcomes. Well, on a very, very long time span, we are capable of a lot and a lot can change. And I don't know, I'm seeing more of a crack in a window there to more of light seeping through of of of possibility when I take that really long view. Does that do you as well? We are I like taking the long view for sure. It grounds you. It makes you pay better attention to the moment. No individual is going to be here for long, but the whole humanity is going to be here.

It could be for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. So we have to solve certain problems for that to happen. And they're smacking us in the face right now. It's so strange to be at a crucial moment in history that it's possible that one suspects that it's a delusion, that people always think they're in a crisis in history. And so why should this be any different? This one seems real. It seems different, that we need to get into a balance with the biosphere in the next coming couple decades. Or we might blow out some planetary boundaries and cause a hothouse Earth that will simply turn this into a jungle planet, no ice on the planet,

utter and complete disaster for all the current living creatures and the ones to come. So the danger is extreme, and it really is a crux in history. So taking the long view, well, it can be reassuring or it can be terrifying. It's both at once. What I want to say is that this year, 2022, and let's say the 2020s in general, to say is that this year 2022 and let's say the 2020s in general it's going to be both at once we're going to have to hold in your head a dread that things could go terribly badly and then a hope that if we get a grip on things we could actually come into quite a prosperous humanity in a balance with its with its one and only planet. So when you have two such radically different possible futures that are both equally realistic, so realistic isn't really the

right word here, and they both could happen and they're staring you in the face. That's why our time, you know, this year, this decade feels so weird because we have both of those feelings that are in us simultaneously and that's not an easy thing to comprehend or feel yeah but that's our feeling but i think what your work also shows us is that in addition to that feeling like everything everything that we do to choose the one uh reality over the other is a step in the right direction is an improvement that, you know, we have like literally as humans walking around, every single little step that we take can be part of that muddled, fitful, now we're doing it, now we're not progress towards the reality that we need to push towards. That's a very good way to put it. I like that very much. What it does is it

makes daily life into an existential project. And people like projects. They live for projects. The meaning is crucial to human well-being. You have to have meaning in your life. So how do you create meaning? Well, there isn't any meaning. This is existentialism one. You have to make it up yourself. But then if you have this project, which is, you know, something that you've made up to give your life meaning, and the project is I'm contributing towards coming into balance humanity in the biosphere, then all kinds of trivial daily actions become meaningful. And then you can also say, well, I don't have to be in despair. I've got a project here. And even if I think it's all going to hell, I can still work at this project in a kind of a rear guard action or, you know, it's better than any other response. So I like that very much.

That is a wonderful note to end on. Stan, I can't thank you enough for being on the show with us and for your wonderful work. Yeah, thank you. And I hope you'll come back again sometime in future. Oh, it would be my pleasure. It will be a while because I have to figure out what to write next. But that will be a sign

when I come back. It'll be a sign that I've figured out something new to say. I can't wait to see what it is. Thank you so much for being here, Stan. Thanks, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Kim Stanley Robinson for coming on the show I hope

you loved that conversation as much as I did if you did and you want to check out his books ministry for the future or his new book head to factuallypod.com books that's factuallypod.com books I want to thank our producer Sam Rod engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. That's Adrian, Alexi Batalov, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Ann Slagle, Antonio LB, Ashley, Aurelio Jimenez, Benjamin Birdsall, Beth Brevik, Kamu and Lego, Charles Anderson, Chase Thompson-Bowe, Chris Mullins, Chris Staley, Courtney Henderson, Daniel Holsey, David Condry, David Conover, That's a new one. Very funny. Thank you to all of you so much. Y'all be Samantha Schultz, Sam Ogden, Scooper, Spencer Campbell, Susan E. Fisher, and WhiskeyNerd88. Thank you to all of you so much.

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