WEBVTT - A sci-fi writer’s guide to a low-carbon future 0:00:01.320 --> 0:00:15.960 Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week dystopia, utopia, and optopia. 0:00:18.840 --> 0:00:22.239 There's a quote I really like from the documentarian Werner Herzog. 0:00:22.720 --> 0:00:26.680 It goes an I quote, facts never illuminate you. The 0:00:26.680 --> 0:00:31.280 phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you. But these rare 0:00:31.360 --> 0:00:34.000 moments of illumination that you can find. When you read 0:00:34.000 --> 0:00:38.120 a great poem, you instantly know, you instantly feel the 0:00:38.200 --> 0:00:42.519 spark of illumination. That's also the power of a good story. 0:00:43.040 --> 0:00:46.919 It takes something and makes it clear. You suddenly get it. 0:00:47.280 --> 0:00:51.159 The world makes a little more sense. And when it 0:00:51.159 --> 0:00:53.320 comes to working out how we are going to tackle 0:00:53.320 --> 0:00:57.160 climate change, I think we need good stories and we 0:00:57.240 --> 0:01:01.400 need good storytellers. Over the next few episodes of Zero, 0:01:01.680 --> 0:01:04.959 that's what we are focusing on. We'll hear from Dorothy Fortonberry, 0:01:05.000 --> 0:01:07.880 one of the creators of the Apple TV show Extrapolations, 0:01:08.319 --> 0:01:12.080 and Amy Westervelt, an investigative journalist behind the true crime 0:01:12.120 --> 0:01:15.800 podcast Drilled. But we start with my guest today, one 0:01:15.840 --> 0:01:19.400 of the best known writers of climate fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson, 0:01:19.640 --> 0:01:20.880 who goes by stan. 0:01:21.160 --> 0:01:24.200 We're in an emergency. It doesn't do any good to 0:01:24.920 --> 0:01:27.199 just sit down on the ground and say, oh my god, 0:01:27.240 --> 0:01:30.640 we're in an emergency. It's a race against disasters, so 0:01:30.680 --> 0:01:33.679 you have to run like hell. And that's what I'm 0:01:33.720 --> 0:01:36.560 seeing happening more and more in ways that I like. 0:01:37.040 --> 0:01:39.840 Stan is the author of more than twenty novels, including 0:01:39.920 --> 0:01:42.839 Ministry for the Future, which was published in twenty twenty. 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:45.720 It opens in India in the year twenty twenty five 0:01:45.959 --> 0:01:50.040 with a heat wave that kills millions. It's a grim scene, 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:53.160 and what follows is the story of humans striving to 0:01:53.200 --> 0:01:58.520 cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet. There's eco terrorism, high finance, 0:01:58.840 --> 0:02:02.600 wild chases over the SSS helps, and what emerges at 0:02:02.600 --> 0:02:04.320 the end of it is a kind of plan to 0:02:04.400 --> 0:02:07.760 deal with the climate crisis. For me, Ministry for the 0:02:07.760 --> 0:02:12.320 Future perfectly fits Herzog's description of illumination. It's not a 0:02:12.400 --> 0:02:16.600 dystopian novel where civilization has already been destroyed. It's a 0:02:16.639 --> 0:02:19.760 story of how the world gets to grips with the crisis. 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:23.079 It's a long road, but it allowed me to imagine 0:02:23.280 --> 0:02:27.519 how the solutions can work despite the planetary scale messiness 0:02:27.600 --> 0:02:31.320 that comes within advanced civilization, and that ability to tell 0:02:31.360 --> 0:02:34.920 a story of solutions, even though it's fictional, is a 0:02:34.960 --> 0:02:39.359 powerful thing. So in this first episode talking with climate storytellers, 0:02:39.560 --> 0:02:42.200 I wanted to hear from Stan about how he crafts 0:02:42.200 --> 0:02:45.480 a good story out of a desperate situation, what he 0:02:45.520 --> 0:02:48.720 thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his 0:02:48.840 --> 0:02:57.800 thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future. Stan, 0:02:57.919 --> 0:02:58.760 welcome to the show. 0:02:59.040 --> 0:03:01.080 Well, it's good to be here. It's been a long 0:03:01.160 --> 0:03:02.880 time since we crosspaths. 0:03:03.120 --> 0:03:06.640 Yes, and you're speaking to us from beautiful main I 0:03:06.800 --> 0:03:12.119 hope you're having a beautiful day there. Now. Climate touches everything. 0:03:12.480 --> 0:03:17.160 We feel it directly through the weather, through the season's wind, rain, snow, sun, 0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:22.200 but its impacts run much deeper. Climate effects, food production, 0:03:22.400 --> 0:03:28.799 population movements, the presence of plants and animals. It's a huge, complex, 0:03:29.280 --> 0:03:33.000 vast thing. There are a million threads to pick ut 0:03:33.200 --> 0:03:37.160 if you are a fiction writer, where do you begin. 0:03:37.720 --> 0:03:43.600 It's a problem. So I write novels, and therefore I 0:03:43.640 --> 0:03:48.360 think you have to begin with characters and a plot. Characters. 0:03:48.360 --> 0:03:51.400 We understand you need a protagonist, but here you already 0:03:51.400 --> 0:03:55.200 have a problem, especially talking about climate change. It's a 0:03:55.240 --> 0:03:59.680 global problem. It affects eight billion people, so any characters 0:03:59.720 --> 0:04:03.320 you KOs are going to be seen as representative types. 0:04:04.000 --> 0:04:07.280 The novel is kind of designed to show the relationship 0:04:07.360 --> 0:04:11.680 between the individual and then their family, their context, their 0:04:11.720 --> 0:04:15.880 maybe their society, their social setting, and maybe history at large. 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:19.120 Only when you get to science fiction do you have 0:04:19.400 --> 0:04:23.120 a relationship between the individual and the planet. So science 0:04:23.120 --> 0:04:27.200 fiction is the good genre for talking about climate but 0:04:27.320 --> 0:04:30.680 still you have to have characters and a plot I've 0:04:30.720 --> 0:04:34.800 decided is really the story of something going wrong. We 0:04:34.880 --> 0:04:37.840 have two joys in reading fiction. One of them is 0:04:37.920 --> 0:04:40.640 sort of like anthropology. You get to go to other 0:04:40.720 --> 0:04:44.159 times and places and you get to be inside other 0:04:44.200 --> 0:04:48.040 people's heads. So in science fictional terms, you could call 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:51.960 this time travel and telepathy, and fiction gives us both 0:04:52.000 --> 0:04:56.080 those things. And here's where it gets kind of fun. 0:04:56.480 --> 0:05:00.680 Climate change is something going wrong to the plan and 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:05.320 the causal agent is human beings, And then you can 0:05:05.360 --> 0:05:09.120 pick your individuals to represent the types people who are 0:05:09.120 --> 0:05:11.200 trying to ignore it, people are trying to do something 0:05:11.240 --> 0:05:15.080 about it, and the plot is given to you on 0:05:15.120 --> 0:05:18.000 a platter. In this case, if you're doing climate fiction, 0:05:18.400 --> 0:05:21.240 the plot is can we deal with it somehow? And 0:05:21.320 --> 0:05:24.560 if we don't, what will happen then, because things can 0:05:24.600 --> 0:05:29.440 go spectacularly wrong when the weather gets crazy. So to 0:05:29.600 --> 0:05:32.800 track my trains of thought as I came through my 0:05:33.120 --> 0:05:37.320 career as a climate fiction writer, beginning well, really with Antarctica, 0:05:37.520 --> 0:05:41.760 but then also the Washington, DC trilogy that I now 0:05:41.800 --> 0:05:45.280 call Green Earth, and then New York twenty one to forty, 0:05:45.440 --> 0:05:48.800 and then Ministry for the Future more and more. If 0:05:48.839 --> 0:05:51.039 I put my science fiction in the near future, it's 0:05:51.160 --> 0:05:54.320 had to be climate fiction. So I keep coming back 0:05:54.360 --> 0:05:55.800 at it from different angles. 0:05:56.200 --> 0:06:00.560 And your books play with disaster, but they tend toward topia. 0:06:01.320 --> 0:06:03.640 Why do you choose that path? And do you think 0:06:03.680 --> 0:06:07.880 that writers should avoid telling disaster stories. 0:06:08.320 --> 0:06:11.120 It's interesting you asked that, because what it does is 0:06:11.160 --> 0:06:14.200 it puts me back before I was writing climate fiction. 0:06:15.080 --> 0:06:19.840 I was always a utopian science fiction writer, and this 0:06:19.920 --> 0:06:23.360 is sort of my political project. You might say, I 0:06:23.400 --> 0:06:27.599 feel like the disaster stories are too easy. Dystopia is 0:06:27.600 --> 0:06:30.159 too easy. It's even a kind of a comfort food 0:06:30.520 --> 0:06:33.760 where we imagine situations worse than ours and then rest 0:06:33.800 --> 0:06:37.080 comfortably that we're not that bad. And as part of 0:06:37.120 --> 0:06:40.839 being an American leftist, the idea of that would be 0:06:40.960 --> 0:06:44.599 we could make a better society, and we need to 0:06:44.640 --> 0:06:47.560 do that work as an obligation to the people who 0:06:47.560 --> 0:06:50.960 come after us. So this, I would say, in the 0:06:50.960 --> 0:06:54.520 broadest terms, is the leftist project that we could make 0:06:54.560 --> 0:06:57.880 a better government than the governments we have. And I've 0:06:57.920 --> 0:07:01.240 written that story many times. When you get to the 0:07:01.240 --> 0:07:06.520 climate crisis, the utopian urge is highly modified, to say 0:07:06.560 --> 0:07:09.880 the least. Essentially, the bar has been lowered. If we 0:07:10.200 --> 0:07:14.440 dodge a climate catastrophe and a mass extinction event in 0:07:14.480 --> 0:07:18.800 this century, that's a utopian story. And indeed, I've been 0:07:18.880 --> 0:07:22.320 using a word that I think Joannaares invented called the optopia. 0:07:22.880 --> 0:07:25.600 So it's not the utopia, the no place, the perfect place, 0:07:25.680 --> 0:07:28.920 it's the optopia. It's the optimum that we can do 0:07:29.680 --> 0:07:33.000 given the situation that we're handed. And that's what I 0:07:33.040 --> 0:07:35.560 think I was doing in Ministry for the Future. That too, 0:07:35.640 --> 0:07:38.600 is utopian novel, because at the end of it, we've 0:07:38.640 --> 0:07:41.360 decarbonized and moved on to all the other problems that 0:07:41.440 --> 0:07:42.040 still remain. 0:07:42.760 --> 0:07:45.240 Science fiction does so many things, but one thing that 0:07:45.480 --> 0:07:49.400 it does do, especially if you're thinking distant science fiction, 0:07:50.120 --> 0:07:55.360 is that it plants ideas in people's head that become reality. 0:07:55.560 --> 0:07:58.600 So what was the motivation in writing the Ministry for 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:02.000 the future in such near term scenario. 0:08:02.560 --> 0:08:05.400 Yes, well, that's true, and it was a deliberate choice 0:08:05.440 --> 0:08:11.240 on my part. I had written utopian scenarios before, but 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:15.720 they were always elsewhere and in the future, one way 0:08:15.760 --> 0:08:20.160 or another, either near or much further out, but always 0:08:20.200 --> 0:08:23.640 a break. And this is actually a famous aspect of utopia. 0:08:23.680 --> 0:08:26.640 It starts with Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia, where it's called 0:08:26.680 --> 0:08:31.720 the Great Trench. The utopian island was a peninsula, and 0:08:31.760 --> 0:08:34.839 they cut a big trench across that peninsula to make 0:08:34.880 --> 0:08:38.880 it into a canal and make it more defensible. And 0:08:39.200 --> 0:08:42.120 people have taken that as being a good image or 0:08:42.160 --> 0:08:46.720 symbol for how utopias are separate from history, and so 0:08:46.800 --> 0:08:51.800 they become less applicable because you can indeed theorize or 0:08:52.480 --> 0:08:56.360 imagine societies that work better than ours. That's not very hard. 0:08:56.720 --> 0:08:59.320 But we're stuck in our history, and so the utopia 0:08:59.360 --> 0:09:03.080 becomes like a thought experiment, it's not really a plan. 0:09:03.800 --> 0:09:06.480 So I had put my utopias on Mars. I had 0:09:06.520 --> 0:09:10.920 put them in Antarctica, an alternative history, in fact, where 0:09:11.160 --> 0:09:14.160 all the Europeans died in the Black Death. Always there 0:09:14.200 --> 0:09:16.920 was a great trench of one sort or another, and 0:09:17.160 --> 0:09:20.120 I began to think to myself, it's not that hard 0:09:20.160 --> 0:09:23.880 to imagine a social system working better than ours does, 0:09:23.920 --> 0:09:27.160 because ours is an improvisation and very poorly suited to 0:09:27.200 --> 0:09:30.360 the present emergency. I might add, but the problem is 0:09:30.440 --> 0:09:33.080 we are in our history and we can't just simply 0:09:33.160 --> 0:09:36.240 jump the tracks to something better just because it might 0:09:36.320 --> 0:09:41.240 be better. So I thought, let's continue to express the 0:09:41.360 --> 0:09:45.320 utopian imperative and put it started right now and make 0:09:45.360 --> 0:09:50.280 a bridge toward utopia. We're in trouble. The wet bulb 0:09:50.559 --> 0:09:55.560 heat problem is severe and it's coming on us fast. 0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:58.720 And now I think that actually ministry is not the 0:09:58.760 --> 0:10:01.960 best case scenario. There are actually better cases than that 0:10:01.960 --> 0:10:04.160 that we can achieve. But I wrote the book in 0:10:04.200 --> 0:10:07.400 twenty nineteen and it was a darker time than now 0:10:07.480 --> 0:10:08.559 in many ways. 0:10:08.960 --> 0:10:13.079 How did you choose which climate scenario to pick when 0:10:13.160 --> 0:10:15.600 you wrote Ministry for the Future, Because you start with 0:10:15.640 --> 0:10:19.360 the Skiller heat wave in India, which you don't feel 0:10:19.480 --> 0:10:21.480 maybe a reality anymore. 0:10:22.000 --> 0:10:26.280 Well, I think, actually, unfortunately, the fatal mix of heat 0:10:26.320 --> 0:10:29.679 and humidity is all too possible. That has not gone away. 0:10:30.480 --> 0:10:34.200 It's not that the situation has become less dangerous. It's 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:40.240 that humanity seems to me to have woken up. And 0:10:40.280 --> 0:10:43.120 I think it was the COVID pandemic did this to us. 0:10:43.400 --> 0:10:45.760 It was a slap in the face, showing us that 0:10:45.800 --> 0:10:48.360 the biosphere can kill you, It can wreck everything, it 0:10:48.400 --> 0:10:52.880 can cause panics and rec supply chains. It woke us up. 0:10:53.040 --> 0:10:57.200 And now when I look around, I mean shows like yours, 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:02.000 Bloomberg Green is a persistent reck of people doing things. 0:11:02.360 --> 0:11:05.400 And in twenty nineteen, the reason I say it was 0:11:05.400 --> 0:11:08.680 a darker time then was not because of the actual 0:11:09.280 --> 0:11:13.199 climate situation, but because of the human situation. We hadn't 0:11:13.280 --> 0:11:17.679 yet fully grasped the emergency that we're in. And now 0:11:17.760 --> 0:11:21.360 I think many people the only way to explain the 0:11:21.440 --> 0:11:25.120 response that you see around the world now is that 0:11:25.240 --> 0:11:28.960 people have got it. They're scared. They're realizing this is 0:11:29.120 --> 0:11:32.840 serious for the future and even for us the rest 0:11:32.880 --> 0:11:36.720 of our lives, that this cannot be avoided. And that's new. 0:11:37.000 --> 0:11:41.599 And so that's where Ministry now exists, as a historical 0:11:41.720 --> 0:11:45.200 novel that comes from the pre pandemic times. 0:11:45.640 --> 0:11:49.079 Taking another book of yours, you traveled to Antarctica twice 0:11:49.520 --> 0:11:52.120 and after the first time you visited in nineteen ninety five, 0:11:52.480 --> 0:11:55.320 you wrote the book Antarctica. On your second visit in 0:11:55.400 --> 0:11:58.199 twenty seventeen, you said a lot of people you met 0:11:58.520 --> 0:12:02.400 in Antarctica who are there because they had read your book. 0:12:02.880 --> 0:12:05.800 So you recognize your books have influence beyond the pages. 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:10.240 In writing the fiction that you do, do you hope 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:13.080 that someone is nudge to take action? 0:12:14.360 --> 0:12:19.800 Yes, I do. I understand that this is a peculiar 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:25.240 stance from the world of literary fiction. There's an art 0:12:25.320 --> 0:12:29.680 for art's sake, vibe that comes out of ordinary fiction. 0:12:30.080 --> 0:12:32.880 For the novel to be shrunk to that only is 0:12:32.920 --> 0:12:35.680 a terrible diminution in what the novel can really do. 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:38.960 And in the nineteenth century you see people using the 0:12:39.000 --> 0:12:43.040 novel fully like ballsoc like George Elliott, to show the 0:12:43.080 --> 0:12:48.040 relationship between the individual, their traumas, their family concerns, but 0:12:48.080 --> 0:12:50.920 then also their relationship to the politics of their time 0:12:51.120 --> 0:12:54.520 and to their history at large. That's what the novel 0:12:54.559 --> 0:12:57.160 can really do. And then science fiction brings in the 0:12:57.200 --> 0:13:01.520 planetary element, and there you have the total package of 0:13:01.520 --> 0:13:04.200 what the novel can do. So I write with a 0:13:04.240 --> 0:13:09.520 specific political impulse. You can't avoid it. You're always expressing 0:13:09.559 --> 0:13:12.000 a political opinion, even if you stick your head in 0:13:12.040 --> 0:13:15.160 the sand, and that too is a political stance. It's 0:13:15.240 --> 0:13:16.640 just kind of a chicken one. 0:13:16.960 --> 0:13:19.200 Well. One way to think about ministry for the future, 0:13:19.360 --> 0:13:23.800 given it's based in the near future, is that you 0:13:24.080 --> 0:13:27.160 end up in a world that is still run on capitalism. 0:13:27.840 --> 0:13:29.920 I was reading a book as I was writing my 0:13:30.040 --> 0:13:34.400 own nonfiction book, which is called climate capitalism. But it 0:13:34.640 --> 0:13:38.480 was the same impulse, which is that we have thirty 0:13:38.559 --> 0:13:41.280 years to try and get to net zero and a 0:13:41.280 --> 0:13:45.280 few decades to go beyond that to keep temperatures below 0:13:45.320 --> 0:13:50.160 one point five degree celsius. Is it a given that 0:13:50.160 --> 0:13:52.400 that's how we have to solve this? 0:13:52.559 --> 0:13:52.839 Now? 0:13:53.240 --> 0:13:56.480 The dominant economic system is where we are, and we 0:13:56.600 --> 0:14:00.640 must nudget in the direction of it working the world 0:14:00.840 --> 0:14:01.800 rather than wrecking it. 0:14:02.400 --> 0:14:05.960 Well, I think so, and I say that with some 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:11.400 reluctance and unhappiness. I am an anti capitalist. Capitalism is 0:14:11.440 --> 0:14:15.400 the name of a power relationship of the few over 0:14:15.440 --> 0:14:20.840 the many. It is a hierarchy. It is feudalism liquidified, 0:14:21.440 --> 0:14:24.720 where money has replaced land as the source of power. 0:14:25.200 --> 0:14:27.840 But there's still the powerful, and there's still the weak, 0:14:28.000 --> 0:14:32.760 and there's still incredible inequality in the world system. If 0:14:32.800 --> 0:14:38.120 you set aside the abstractions, then we have a world system. 0:14:38.400 --> 0:14:42.880 It's a laws, treaties, it's in place. We can't change 0:14:42.920 --> 0:14:46.080 it fast enough to deal with the climate crisis. So 0:14:46.880 --> 0:14:49.560 looking at the system that we have, how can it 0:14:49.600 --> 0:14:55.560 be nudged? I think of keynesianism. I think governments sees 0:14:56.280 --> 0:15:00.840 the direction of the economy as they did in the 0:15:00.840 --> 0:15:05.000 depression and in World War Two, and in this case 0:15:05.080 --> 0:15:08.960 we have an emergency that is as existential as those were. 0:15:09.720 --> 0:15:13.280 So it's appropriate for the governments of the world to 0:15:13.360 --> 0:15:16.400 say we are going to spend money on these projects. 0:15:16.560 --> 0:15:19.680 They're so important they can't be left to the private market. 0:15:20.200 --> 0:15:25.400 I'm very, very unimpressed by neoliberal capitalism. The idea that 0:15:25.440 --> 0:15:28.680 the market solves all problems, to me is obviously wrong, 0:15:28.760 --> 0:15:31.200 and it's been proved wrong over the last forty years. 0:15:31.640 --> 0:15:34.560 The market is a kind of a foolish algorithm. We 0:15:34.600 --> 0:15:39.880 need government direction. So capitalism, yes, But Keynesian capitalism for me, 0:15:39.960 --> 0:15:42.040 would just be the first step, and the next step 0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:46.080 might be what we now call social democracy out of Scandinavia, 0:15:46.400 --> 0:15:50.480 That too, is a capitalist system, but it's ameliorated by 0:15:51.000 --> 0:15:54.520 social overwriting concerns that the market is just a tool, 0:15:54.640 --> 0:15:55.520 not a master. 0:15:56.120 --> 0:15:58.920 You have said that you wish you had read more 0:15:58.920 --> 0:16:03.400 of Thomas Picketty before you had written The Ministry for 0:16:03.440 --> 0:16:06.080 the Future. Now, the central thesis of that book that 0:16:06.200 --> 0:16:09.520 Picketty wrote, Capital in the twenty first Century is that 0:16:09.960 --> 0:16:13.720 inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of 0:16:13.840 --> 0:16:19.360 capitalism and can only be reversed through state interventionism. The book, 0:16:19.560 --> 0:16:23.800 this argue is that unless capitalism is reformed, democratic order 0:16:24.040 --> 0:16:25.280 will be threatened. 0:16:25.520 --> 0:16:26.960 Yes, if we do. 0:16:26.920 --> 0:16:31.600 Believe that's right, why is it that the capitalistic system 0:16:32.080 --> 0:16:35.240 as a solution to the climate crisis is okay? 0:16:35.560 --> 0:16:38.760 It's not okay, it's just what we have. And to 0:16:38.920 --> 0:16:44.360 make it work as a climate crisis solution, we would 0:16:44.400 --> 0:16:47.480 have to reform capitalism until it was some kind of 0:16:47.560 --> 0:16:52.480 post capitalism. And Picketty is very useful in pointing out 0:16:52.640 --> 0:16:55.760 the nature of the beast, but also the solution, which 0:16:55.800 --> 0:17:00.640 is state intervention. And he points quickly to tax and 0:17:00.680 --> 0:17:04.080 Picketee is pointing at laws that would create more equality, 0:17:04.440 --> 0:17:08.240 just progressive taxation like existed in the United States around 0:17:08.320 --> 0:17:14.639 nineteen fifty three under Republican Congress. Progressive taxation could flatten 0:17:15.080 --> 0:17:18.200 the inequality. You could make sure that there was social 0:17:18.240 --> 0:17:22.679 security so that the one of the minimum salary for 0:17:22.760 --> 0:17:25.840 any citizen in the world was an adequacy. And then 0:17:25.920 --> 0:17:28.479 by way of taxation itself, you could make sure that 0:17:28.560 --> 0:17:32.080 the richest person on the planet had ten times adequacy, 0:17:32.200 --> 0:17:35.720 which when you think about that it carefully, you realize 0:17:35.800 --> 0:17:40.000 that's already incredible luxury. You don't need the current American 0:17:40.680 --> 0:17:44.919 ratio of six hundred and seventy to one between the 0:17:45.000 --> 0:17:49.800 executive compensation and the worker compensation. We're in a ridiculous 0:17:49.960 --> 0:17:53.280 gilded age situation. And as Picket points out, it's the 0:17:53.480 --> 0:17:58.600 natural course of the accumulation of capital to accumulate more. 0:17:58.680 --> 0:18:00.879 And then, as he points out, there's enough that you 0:18:00.920 --> 0:18:04.560 can buy the state, you can essentially buy off the 0:18:04.600 --> 0:18:08.520 people running the state apparatus, and then you control the 0:18:08.560 --> 0:18:12.159 government too, and you again reward capitals so that you 0:18:12.280 --> 0:18:17.120 become into a cancerous growth in the capitalist system. That's 0:18:17.160 --> 0:18:18.080 what we're in now. 0:18:18.440 --> 0:18:20.160 And what do you mean by adequacy? 0:18:20.520 --> 0:18:29.000 Good question, food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, electricity, and 0:18:29.119 --> 0:18:32.320 a sense that that will endure through the course of 0:18:32.320 --> 0:18:34.439 your life, in your children's lives. So I guess you 0:18:34.440 --> 0:18:37.399 could call that security. If you had all of those 0:18:37.480 --> 0:18:41.240 needs fulfilled, then you get to this kind of Abraham 0:18:41.320 --> 0:18:45.360 Maslow pyramid of needs to wants. If you have your 0:18:45.440 --> 0:18:48.560 needs fulfilled, then you can begin to think about your wants. 0:18:48.920 --> 0:18:52.000 If you don't have your needs fulfilled, your life as 0:18:52.040 --> 0:18:54.760 a human being is crimped. Your life is an animal 0:18:54.880 --> 0:18:58.520 gets crimped and made miserable when it doesn't have to be. 0:18:59.320 --> 0:19:03.000 So that's what I mean by adequacy, and it's a 0:19:03.040 --> 0:19:06.359 big ask, but I think adequacy for all eight billion 0:19:06.440 --> 0:19:08.359 humans and all the rest of the living creatures on 0:19:08.400 --> 0:19:13.080 the planet is actually achievable. And so the raining in 0:19:13.359 --> 0:19:16.480 of the capitalism that we existed in in the last 0:19:16.560 --> 0:19:19.359 forty years and the last two hundred years, and the 0:19:19.440 --> 0:19:23.040 shifting of it to some kind of more just and 0:19:23.400 --> 0:19:27.680 effective system in the world, in the accommodation with the 0:19:27.720 --> 0:19:31.560 biosphere and spreading of goodness around, that's all possible. But 0:19:31.600 --> 0:19:34.160 it's a project that's in progress. 0:19:34.640 --> 0:19:37.400 With a work of fiction, you can let your imagination 0:19:37.840 --> 0:19:42.080 run wild, create the world you want, organize it, engineer it. 0:19:42.400 --> 0:19:44.960 Do you think that when we're trying to solve the 0:19:44.960 --> 0:19:50.000 climate crisis, we're not letting our imagination run wild and 0:19:50.040 --> 0:19:53.520 thinking of the kind of transformation we really can make happen. 0:19:54.600 --> 0:19:56.760 Yes, I think there's a bit of a gap there. 0:19:57.000 --> 0:20:00.840 Because it is fiction. You can set the endgame. You 0:20:00.840 --> 0:20:03.560 can say, I want a best case scenario here, Let's 0:20:03.560 --> 0:20:06.960 tell the story of things going right within the constraints 0:20:06.960 --> 0:20:11.080 of the reality effect. So, especially when I was writing Ministry, 0:20:11.119 --> 0:20:14.280 for instance, I wanted there to be no point at 0:20:14.320 --> 0:20:18.800 which the reader said that couldn't happen, or that doesn't happen, 0:20:19.320 --> 0:20:22.359 or people are not like that. I wanted people to 0:20:22.440 --> 0:20:26.720 read it with the in literary terms called the reality effect. 0:20:27.320 --> 0:20:31.480 It seems real. So there's a whole lot of countervailing 0:20:31.520 --> 0:20:35.560 pressures in writing fiction of this sort, and I've done 0:20:35.560 --> 0:20:39.800 my best to try to assure my readership this is 0:20:39.800 --> 0:20:43.040 still going to be fun. And so I am now 0:20:43.200 --> 0:20:45.919 a kind of a walking cliche or a brand. I mean, 0:20:46.040 --> 0:20:49.479 chat GPT three or four can write a Kim Stanley 0:20:49.560 --> 0:20:54.399 Robinson's story and it's quite bad, but it's it's apt. 0:20:54.920 --> 0:20:59.160 It's clearly playing off something that people recognize in my work, 0:20:59.640 --> 0:21:02.760 not just the brand, but a cliche. But I think 0:21:02.960 --> 0:21:05.880 one part of it, of my brand is that it's 0:21:05.920 --> 0:21:09.119 still going to be fun, it's going to be entertaining, 0:21:09.200 --> 0:21:11.600 it's going to include all the human emotions, it's going 0:21:11.640 --> 0:21:15.280 to include characters you care about. The ordinary novelistic virtues 0:21:15.320 --> 0:21:18.400 will still be there. So, yeah, it's a problem. 0:21:18.680 --> 0:21:22.040 So I'm a journalist. I deal with facts, and facts 0:21:22.080 --> 0:21:27.000 are all I think about. My imagination does not run wild, 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:30.440 and so it's very hard for me to put myself 0:21:30.440 --> 0:21:33.280 in your world and to think about how to think 0:21:33.320 --> 0:21:37.679 about fiction. And so with that in mind, what do 0:21:37.880 --> 0:21:41.840 you think are the limits of fiction for climate solutions? 0:21:41.920 --> 0:21:45.919 And what are things that only fiction do well? 0:21:46.000 --> 0:21:49.439 I'll start at the back. What fiction can do is 0:21:49.600 --> 0:21:54.320 put you in the experience a novel. Especially, You're going 0:21:54.359 --> 0:21:56.520 to take twenty hours of your life. You're going to 0:21:56.520 --> 0:21:59.320 take a couple of weeks and give it your creative time. 0:21:59.480 --> 0:22:02.760 Because reading fiction is a very creative activity. You have 0:22:02.800 --> 0:22:04.920 to bring it alive in your head by an act 0:22:04.960 --> 0:22:08.080 of the imagination. These words on the page suddenly they 0:22:08.080 --> 0:22:10.439 are feelings in your mind. There are people that you know, 0:22:11.320 --> 0:22:15.240 that's your achievement, not just the lines on the page. 0:22:16.000 --> 0:22:19.040 So that's what fiction can do, is put you through 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:22.919 the experience of a heat wave in India, or twenty 0:22:23.000 --> 0:22:26.240 years of a person's life where they have continued to 0:22:26.320 --> 0:22:31.280 struggle year after year to get something done. And while 0:22:31.320 --> 0:22:34.000 you're reading it, you believe it. You're even kind of 0:22:34.080 --> 0:22:37.280 living it like you would live a hallucination or a dream, 0:22:37.640 --> 0:22:42.359 a vision. This is the power of fiction to my mind. 0:22:43.200 --> 0:22:47.440 But where I would say when you talked about your 0:22:48.160 --> 0:22:52.439 focus on facts, the reality effect is there too, but 0:22:52.560 --> 0:22:55.720 also which facts, And this is where I would say 0:22:55.760 --> 0:22:58.800 the creative aspect of journalism comes in. And the work 0:22:58.840 --> 0:23:03.159 that you are doing is you're sorting. You're a sorting 0:23:03.200 --> 0:23:08.240 mechanism yourself. You're making judgments at all points which facts 0:23:08.280 --> 0:23:11.400 are actually important enough to pursue and tell the stories 0:23:11.440 --> 0:23:15.040 of and to make into a narrative form. And indeed, 0:23:15.280 --> 0:23:18.439 I want to ask you a question. You've been talking 0:23:18.480 --> 0:23:20.520 to people all over the world since we met at 0:23:20.520 --> 0:23:23.879 COP twenty six. You have never ceased to talk to 0:23:23.920 --> 0:23:29.000 people as your job as a journalist, and there must 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:33.159 be making in your mind a cognitive map, a sense 0:23:33.200 --> 0:23:35.720 of where we're going, So not just a sense of 0:23:35.720 --> 0:23:38.880 where we are, but a sense of where we're going. 0:23:39.400 --> 0:23:42.560 All this work for Bloomberg, Green and Bloomberg Green itself 0:23:43.119 --> 0:23:47.439 seems to suggest that we're Can I say this that 0:23:47.480 --> 0:23:50.040 we're going in a good direction? Is that true? Do 0:23:50.119 --> 0:23:51.080 you have that impression? 0:23:51.440 --> 0:23:54.160 It's a very good question. I've been a climate journalist 0:23:54.160 --> 0:23:58.720 for seven years now, and the way my cognitive map 0:23:58.760 --> 0:24:02.400 has evolved in that pie is that every year has 0:24:02.440 --> 0:24:07.119 been a completely different year. And that's true. When you 0:24:07.160 --> 0:24:09.760 come to a new subject, you will learn and then 0:24:09.800 --> 0:24:12.679 you'll refine it, and so the first few years are 0:24:12.800 --> 0:24:16.280 very steep, and they'll usually be quite different. But I've 0:24:16.280 --> 0:24:20.040 been surprised and shocked that after the first three years 0:24:20.520 --> 0:24:24.240 they've continued to be that different. And that tells me 0:24:24.320 --> 0:24:27.240 two things. One is that either the subject is so 0:24:27.359 --> 0:24:31.080 vast that it does just take that much time. But 0:24:31.240 --> 0:24:34.040 that's definitely not the only thing, because the world in 0:24:34.080 --> 0:24:37.879 that period has done so much that we have gone 0:24:37.880 --> 0:24:41.720 from a world where temperatures of five to six degrees 0:24:41.760 --> 0:24:46.200 celsius work completely within the realm of possibility by the 0:24:46.280 --> 0:24:49.760 end of the century, and they are not anymore. Now. 0:24:49.800 --> 0:24:52.800 We're looking at three degrees celsius, which is a pretty 0:24:52.840 --> 0:24:57.760 bad scenario, but it's not the dystopia that could be 0:24:57.840 --> 0:25:02.800 five or six degrees celsius. So there's certainly more happening 0:25:02.800 --> 0:25:05.960 in the world which is keeping me on this treadmill. 0:25:06.280 --> 0:25:09.960