The Ministry for the Future

Mary and MftF economist Dick Bosworth discuss how to make economics as a field more responsive to climate change. Dick explains that at present, we value our own needs substantially more than the needs of future generations. Dick calls a hypothetical number that quantifies how much we prioritize our needs the “discount rate.” In India, they’ve flipped the rate by giving much higher priority to future generations, an idea in keeping with the Indian notion of decision-making built on responsibility to the seven generations that come after yours. Dick thinks MftF should follow that model to reform economics. Mary and Dick agree that they should expect strong pushback from entrenched powers who benefit from the current discount rate.

The first-person narrator is a Children of Kali assassin who describes how the group’s methods for killing those responsible for the heat wave have evolved. They started with suicide bombs but moved to drones eventually because they were effective. Their targets became more isolated and hidden behind security, so it got harder to get to them. Although the Children of Kali feel their actions are ethically justified, they minimize so-called collateral damage because killing innocent people will make them just like their targets. The assassin warns those who were complicit in creating the heat wave that the Children of Kali are coming for them.

This chapter comprises notes taken by an unnamed transcriptionist. Mary and Badim visit Chandra and Vikram, the person now occupying her role, in India. The Indian government plans to do a double Pinatubo because temperatures are spiking again. When Mary and Badim ask about the shortened monsoon season (the wet season that provides crucial moisture needed to grow crops) as a possible unforeseen impact of the first Pinatubo, Chandra refuses to admit to any worry. Chandra takes them to the state of Kerala to see the New India in action. The farmers there are proud that their governance is radically egalitarian and that all own the land in common. They agree when Badim labels them as “Communist organic farmers” (140).

Badim continues to ask Chandra and Vikram aggressive questions that border on offensive as they complete more tours in India, culminating in his inquiry about whether the Children of Kali are a government sponsored group, the equivalent of green pest control. Badim and Mary depart, and both are concerned about the aggressive nature of the pride Indians feel about New India. It seems that their pride could very easily slip into a nationalism that disregards the needs of others.

A refugee recounts in the first person the dehumanizing process of crossing the Adriatic Sea from North Africa and arriving at a processing camp in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Men and women were separated and subjected to X-rays for tuberculosis; no explanation was provided. Next, staff at the processing center attempted to herd them on trains that appeared to be heading back to Austria, the first step to returning home. This was the last straw. The narrator recounts rioting against the guards and participating in burning the center down, even if it meant dying. Soldiers regained control over them as they crouched to avoid the smoke. The narrator explains that the degrading treatment they received transformed them: “[F]or an hour, I was not a human being” (146), the narrator laments, with the result being the rage the refugees showed during their revolt.

By 2032, the ice on the Arctic Ocean melts, kickstarting a feedback loop that leads to an increasingly hot planet with unsustainably high sea levels. The loss of permafrost on the North and South Pole resulting from this melt will inevitably lead to such a large release of carbon dioxide that temperatures will make most of the planet uninhabitable for humans. Desperate and expensive measures to thicken the ice are not effective enough to stop this cycle.

The narrator is a young girl who, along with her mother (Syrine) and sister, refugees from Libya to Switzerland by a dangerous boat ride. Her earliest memory is of being in the riot at St. Gallen. Her family later encounters Frank, now known as “Jake” and teaching English in the camps where refugees are housed. Although Frank is an aid worker, it is obvious to the little girl immediately that he is a deeply traumatized man. Frank eventually establishes a romantic relationship with Syrine, and the two marry. The marriage falls apart when Frank begins having angry, violent outbursts (likely caused by his unresolved trauma).

This chapter is a Socratic dialogue between two speakers on how the current damaging economic order might be destroyed to end inequality and create policies for the greater good. One voice proposes multiple models and solution. The second voice rejects these solutions by noting that state power and the rich always crush such efforts. Traditional methods of resistance like demonstrations are ineffective. The speakers conclude that resistance to change is built into the monetary policies and political structures of the modern world, meaning that disentangling them is the equivalent of trying to defecate despite having severe constipation. It’s a hard task that will take a long time.

The first-person narrator is an attendee at the World Economic Summit held at Davos, Switzerland. This event is primarily attended by world elites who are benefiting from the current capitalistic economic order despite giving lip service to their efforts at philanthropy. The usual self-congratulatory events end this year when an unnamed group takes the attendees hostage and seals them off from the surrounding world.

In the early days, no running water or plumbing is available, making the attendees slightly more sympathetic when their captors force them to watch films about the miserable conditions most people live in as a result of inequality. The narrator and many attendees sneer at the poor quality of the films and PowerPoints to which they are subjected. The indifference of the attendees slips, however, when footage of their spoiled and unhappy offspring appears on the screen. Their captors tell the Davos hostages they will be watching to see what the captives do from now on. The kidnappers then free the hostages. The narrator uses vulgar language to tell his captors that their plan to change the behavior of the elites is ineffective. Some are even using the experience to make money.

The political philosopher discusses a serious flaw in economics, namely, the focus on efficiency as being inherently good. The narrator cites Jevon’s paradox, the idea that increasing efficiency through technology or policy leads to more, not less consumption of resources, especially when the efficiency comes from technological advances. It is therefore foolish to think some undiscovered technology is going to save us from catastrophic climate change caused by carbon emissions. We should instead redefine the good as whatever protects the biosphere—“the Leopoldian land ethic, often summarized as ‘what’s good is what’s good for the land’” (166). That ethic will sometimes mean embracing inefficiency that protects people and the earth.

From September 11 to October 4 of one year in the 2030s, a city of 1 million people goes without tap water or rain. The first-person narrator of this chapter describes how the fear of dying of thirst made people cooperate fully with authorities and aware of how few people they knew. Paradoxically, the need to pull together and follow the rules made them aware of what it means to be a citizen in a society. People like Margaret Thatcher, who is supposed to have claimed there is no such thing as society, only individuals, are mistaken. When rain came after 12 years of drought, everyone celebrated together.

Janus Athena narrates this chapter. Dick and Janus Athena bring a proposal to Mary. They want to create carbon coin, a currency you can only earn by sequestering carbon, to address the problem of the high discount rate (we discount the destructive impact of our choices on future generations because we won’t have to pay them). Coupled with a carbon tax that makes burning carbon more expensive the more you burn it, carbon coin would make doing what’s good for the biosphere profitable. The true cost of sending carbon into the atmosphere would also now have to be considered in economic policy. It would take central banks in the US, UK, and China backing the tax and coin for this scheme to work. Mary asks Dick and Janus Athena to write up a proposal she can take to a meeting of the central banking heads she will be attending.

This chapter is in the form of a riddle, the answer to which is blockchain, encryption, and code, tools that will be of use in creating an economy that can address climate change.

Griffen gets funding from a Russian billionaire to try out a method of pumping seawater onto the Antarctic to slow the rise in sea levels. Even if the idea works in practice, it will take staggering amounts of energy (supplied by nuclear ships), pipe, and money to work.

Mary goes to California. She meets with people who have contributed to California’s successful effort to become carbon neutral and who are working on water management and nature conservancy to become carbon negative. She attends a US Federal Reserve meeting; the heads of the European Union, Chinese, England, and German central banks are there as well. Jane Yablonski, the US chair, rejects her proposal for carbon coin because she only thinks in terms of national interests—protecting the US dollar in this case.

This chapter is a riddle, the answer to which is the market. The first-person narrator compares the market to a creature who starts off small but eventually consumes everything, even the reader.

Frank has been living in Switzerland for nine years. After the debacle of his divorce, he spends his days doing volunteer work at different shelters, ogling women at the beach, and avoiding Zurich’s extensive surveillance system as he walks through the city. He attends a meeting of the 2000 Watts Society, a group that provides practical guidance on living on equitable, sustainable amounts of energy resources. Frank is at a feeding station for immigrants one day when nationalist thugs attack. The police scan retinas and faces and check them against a database as they do interviews. Frank’s face gets a match to someone with a warrant, so they arrest him.

A first-person narrator describes what it is like to be confined to a refugee camp for years. She resents but understands the distance the comfortable Swiss volunteers maintain to avoid burnout. She hates the gratitude she is expected to feel (and encouraged to feel by the clerics of her faith) and never receive. She thinks about escaping through the barbed wire fence around the camp, but she never follows through.

This chapter is a history that explains the origins of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund after World War II. Although there were other options, the world powers chose a system that allowed the US and its currency to dominate the new economic system and led to low-income, industrializing countries staying in debt held by the US. The hegemony (dominance) of the US created a new form of colonialism backed by this debt

Mary visits the heads of national banks in major nations to pitch carbon coin, and one after the other, they reject her proposal. Using insights from Janus Athena, she eventually realizes she is caught between two globalizations—the one that exists because we all share the same biosphere and the one in which the United States and Germany (to a lesser extent) dominate. She grows discouraged. When she hears from Badim that Frank has been arrested, she visits Frank in prison. Seeing him makes her feel less helpless but also inspires in her a strange sympathy for him. She finally sees him as a person like herself. She promises to consult with his lawyer to help him after he tells her he doesn’t think he can do his time in prison and survive.

At the start of the 2030s, the “zombie years” (227), the world continues burning carbon. The “structure of feeling” that emerges during this time centers on dread and repression. Everyone is aware that “[c]ivilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth” (227). People repress that their daily actions are killing people in the millions, but the guilt and hopelessness that comes from involvement in this planet-killing inevitably pops up in many forms. All this ends when the Children of Kali—or some other group—begins crashing planes (the day it happens is dubbed “Crash Day”), sinking container ships containing diesel fuel, and infecting cows, a major source of methane and cause of deforestation, with mad cow disease. These interventions are horrifying but effective in slowing climate change effects. All but the ultra-rich and protected cease flying. Ships that run on fossil fuels diminish in number. The market for beef collapses.

A supporter of New India ideology narrates this chapter in the first person. They describe India’s progress in reorganizing governance, agriculture, and IT to meet the problem of climate change. With one seventh of Earth’s population, India can have an immediate impact on the climate and serve as a model for other nations.

This chapter is a riddle, the answer to which is a photon, which celebrates how it and its siblings “hit Earth and light it up, and the gas wrapping the planet’s hydrosphere and lithosphere gets warmer” (236). Despite this glee, the photon is part of the heat and light burning the planet.

Mary continues to hash out with economist Dick how to get nation-states and private individuals who control fossil fuels to endorse carbon coin. She grapples with how to define the struggle in which she and the MftF are engaging with these people, and decides it “mostly just discursive struggle, a war of words and ideas and laws, which only had brutal death-dealing consequences as a derivative effect that could be denied by aggressors on both sides” (237). Mary wants the elites thriving on profits from fossil fuels to “go long” (betting on a thriving biosphere) instead of “short[ing] civilization” (240)—betting against the survival of the biosphere heated by carbon emissions.

The legal teams for fossil fuel industries are interested in MftF’s idea of switching from pumping oil to pumping water onto the Antarctic at least. Janus Athena has another fix—a user-owned social media platform to rival Facebook. With control over their own data and blockchain, people can create a banking system when the current banking system inevitably collapses due to climate change effects. National governments will be forced to bail out their central banks, which will give governments legislative control over an economic system that currently drives economic decision-making that ignores the climate crisis. So far, no one has come up with a catchy name for the site.

This chapter is narrated in the first person by a young French person who becomes involved in an environmentalist protest movement in France after being inspired by the populist yellow vest protest movement that started years ago in opposition to the economic policies of then-French prime minister Emmanuel Macron (2018). For the narrator, the protests were initially a way to get out of school, which the narrator hated because of poor treatment from teachers and low grades. The occupation lasts for seven months, during which the youth sees their pro-Earth movement gain momentum from France’s existing protest culture. Ordinary people express support, although some begin to complain about disruptions to daily life.

Watching the course of the movement, the narrator moves away from thinking wholesale revolution that destroys the old order is possible. The narrator begins to think older participants’ desire for incremental change is more achievable. The police eventually use pepper spray and beatings to subdue the protestors. The narrator feels angst because responding to the police with violence didn’t seem possible or wise. It wasn’t all for nothing, though. Afterward, more people seem aware of the issues the protestors raised. The narrator is now a teacher—a member of the class that so oppressed them as a student.

Tatiana, the legal counsel for MftF, tells Mary in a memo that the biggest roadblock to changing laws is that there is no court that has jurisdiction over cases brought on behalf of future generations. Mary tells her to pick the most impactful cases anyway. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are high enough that the insect populations that are the base of most food chains have begun collapsing. Mary sits under the statue of Ganymede one day, watching the serene swans enjoying their lives and animals. She realizes their work of the ministry is futile. She meets with Badin and questions him to find out if MftF’s black wing is responsible for Crash Day. He denies this but tells her they need a religion that will inspire a new pro-biosphere ideology. No one feels moved by dry talk of money and self-interest.

Griffen and his team go back to the Antarctic and find definitive proof that pumping seawater up onto the Antarctic will be too costly and slow to stem the rise in sea level, despite oil companies and rich investors’ willingness to fund such attempts. Using their last year of funding, the team returns to the project of slowing the speed of glaciers (and thus their rate of melt) by pumping the water from under them. Their trials prove this plan is feasible, but Pete dies in an accident caused by his own refusal to follow safety protocols.

This is a chapter on economics. The philosopher proposes the Mondragón system, a cooperative of cooperatives whereby workers own the cooperatives and use the collective profits to make a living and funnel money back into charities and communities. This system has thrived in the Basque region of Spain since the 1940s and might well be an “alternative to capitalism” (274).

A struggling Los Angeles actor recounts in the first person the day torrential rains flood the city and its suburbs. Despite her newly healed arm, she uses her kayak to help people. She feels inspired by the way people pull together during the crisis. As the immediate crisis subsides, she has the pleasant realization that the ugly, unplanned, overbuilt city has been destroyed and needs to be rebuilt into something more humane and environmentally responsible. She commits to finding other work that will allow her to pitch in.

Mary is the point-of-view character in this chapter. She continues her work to shift the economy to address climate change, and she also keeps abreast of what Badim and MftF’s black wing are doing. Badim gives her only vague previews of what will happen, however. Meanwhile, the flood of Los Angeles and another deadly heat wave that causes political and humanitarian crises make it even clearer that time is running out to address the temperature rise.

YourLock, an open-source social media platform that is a MftF project, finally gains ground and revolutionizes social media, privacy, and banking. People own their data for the first time, and even people in closed countries like China begin using the system. Now that people own their data, they can make money from it. That money is paid in carbon coin.

Meanwhile, Mary meets with the heads of major banks to ask them to establish carbon coin, and this time, they agree to go with her plan. The weather events and success of YourLock have forced their hands. Their version of carbon coin will require a very big bureaucracy that will certify that people desiring to be issued a carbon coin have actually engaged in activities that decrease how much carbon dioxide they emit or even that they’ve captured carbon. For every ton not released into the atmosphere, this new bureaucracy will create a new carbon coin and give it to those responsible for sequestering the carbon.

Mary uses her anger and meticulously researched presentations from her staff on the snowballing of negative climate impacts to convince these bureaucrats. Her arguments move Minister Chan, the new Chinese central bank head. Despite working out the details of carbon coin, the bank heads fail to follow through, and Mary remembers that they always react rather than move proactively to avoid disaster. The MftF’s headquarters are destroyed with a bomb one night while no one is around. Mary is forced to go into hiding and chooses the Alps.

This chapter is on the “structure of feeling” people develop as a result of the collapse of the biosphere around them during the 2030s. One reaction is Götterdämmerung Syndrome (named after a Wagner opera on Ragnarök, the destruction of the world by gods in their death throes). Inspired by their rage, fear, privilege, and the inability to see other people as real, people in this mindset try to accelerate the end of the world. Götterdämmerung capitalism is an economic system that does the same.