The Inconvenient Truth from The Ministry for the Future

Violence might become necessary

The Ministry for the Future is a book by Kim Stanley Robinson in which he tries to lay down a possible scenario for dealing with the climate crisis in the coming decades.

To solve the problem United Nations came up with an organisation called The Ministry for the future, which was

“… set up after the Paris meeting of 2024. They thought it would be a good idea to create an agency tasked with representing the interests of the generations to come. And the interests of those entities that can never speak for themselves, like animals and watersheds.”

Throughout the book the UN and the Ministry is just going from one conference to another, really not doing much more than their conferencing thing.

But the real progress picks up only after a terrorist group named “Children of Kali” takes matters into their own hands.

What do they do?

They hack into Swiss banks and wipe out their massive bank accounts, they highjack climate conferences and hold the panelists hostage, they target billionaires’ private jets and smash them to the ground. You know, fun stuff! Soon enough CEO’s, politicians and billionaires go into a self-imposed lockdown and indeed start changing their ways.

Other solutions like a carbon tax, carbon coin and even drilling beneath the glaciers in polar regions begin to work only after the whole capitalist monster is decapitated. And so the world recuperates.

But is this realistic or is it just cynical?

Well, I guess there is some realism to it.

Dr Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University made some interesting research on baboons.

In a typical troop of baboons, its members are usually highly stratified: aggressive males dominate society and hold primacy over the resources such as food, which was in this particular instance poisoned.

Having been the first to feed, alpha males died from tuberculosis while their subordinate non-aggressive peers survived. At once, the most brutal elite members of society got eliminated. That alone changed how other members of the group treat…