Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 11: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

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Season 2, Episode 11: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I will be speaking with Kim Stanley Robinson, the world-renowned science fiction author known for his internationally best-selling Mars trilogy, to discuss his latest works, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Robinson's works have been translated into 28 languages and have received many top awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Robinson explores the impacts of climate change on global society and politics and vividly imagines a possible chain of future events as the climate crisis unfolds.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Stan, this is a show that has featured many of the world's leading historians, but you're the first historian of the future that I've had on.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it is the right way to describe your work.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: You are writing the history of the next two centuries, I think very accurately, I might say.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: When I read this novel and enjoyed it enormously, I said, this man has sat through a lot of UN meetings because I thought the book was so apt at describing the year after year UN deliberations about this critical subject of climate change.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they must resemble other I've sat in on academic meetings, a lot of conferences, scientific conferences for sure.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a kind of combination of the two.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: I was imagining the UN to be a space where conferences like the scientific conferences that I have been to, like the AGU meeting or the ACS, American Chemical Society, my wife's society, the Society for Environmental Toxicologists and Chemists, CTAC.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: I've been to a lot of CTAC meetings.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then academia.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: Although I've not been an academic my whole uh for many decades, I began as an instructor of uh freshman composition in the University of California system when I was young and got my PhD.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: That requires a fair bit of meanings.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think they were that different.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Although having said that, when I did see the UN meetings, specifically COP26 in Glasgow, I wished like anything that I had had that experience before I wrote ministry.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: It would have been a little sharper on details.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: And there was something unpredictably strange about the COP meetings.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: The people who invited me were the UK hosts, Nigel Topping, the UK government, and they gave me a red pass so I could go right into the negotiation sessions rather than being in the blue zone where it's a trade zone or the green zone.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I had to have that explained to me by my UN host, uh Stan.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: You can go anywhere you want.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know what the red pass meant.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: And after that, they told me which meetings to go to.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: And what I found unusual there and un something that I didn't um couldn't imagine was the slow, meticulous argument over sentences, that essentially it was an editing process of uh the statement that was going to come out um and uh the Paris Agreement requires each cop to make new promises to ratchet up the pressure.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it was more than 50 percent, perhaps 70 percent young women, by which I mean women in their 30s and forties, very serious, very cheerful.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: They were lawyers, they were diplomats, maybe a couple scientists, and they were working over these sentences, which is a process that I'm quite familiar with from my own work, and I just loved it.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: And then there would be like a maybe an old Brit who had been at Bretton Woods with a battered briefcase and kind of a limp and ancient like I was, uh to kind of mm ballast or uh provide some low-keyed ironic humor to these serious discussions of sentence making.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I watched them for an hour argue about whether a data presentation should be in rows or columns.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And because of my wife's work, I know that that can be serious, that the presentation of data can provide clarity or it can obscure things.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I I was entertained, but when I talked to my UN hosts afterwards about that, they groaned and they said, that's why we're doomed.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: We're too slow, we're too slow, we're not going fast enough.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And they had this horrible feeling that as admirable as the COP process might be, it's going slower than the crisis is.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: That that, uh, after all, is is the theme of your works, and really powerfully so.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: That as our great historian of the future, you are in fact describing how slow it goes compared to what's happening on the planet.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think you introduced a concept in another work about a decade ago, 2132, if I'm correct, the dithering of uh this long process that is arguing about sentences while the planet burns, in a way.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I must say my overwhelming life experience in this since I started my career as an incoming first-day budding economist 50 years ago, is that I've watched 50 years of discussion on this, where you're wondering when do we get to the action?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that negotiation over words, which I thought you must have watched over and over again because it really is part of the cadence of uh the Ministry for the Future.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Flying to meetings, hoping something's gonna happen.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, not quite yet, flying to the next meetings, and then real life at the same time taking its course as these seemingly endless meetings go on.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, to I want to reassure your our listeners who maybe haven't read the book that m I cleverly having written about scientific meetings in my uh Washington DC trilogy, sometimes called Science in the Capital, sometimes called Green Earth, when I compressed it to one volume, a lot of meetings, and it began to drive me crazy, and the novel kind of burst out of the doors and went outdoors.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, notes for meetings could suffice.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have to dramatize these scenes.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I was finding all kinds of literary tricks to make ministry uh faster and more entertaining and in the kind of play of forms, so that what kind of genre will you be reading when you move from one chapter to the next over the 106 chapters?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you don't know till you start it, and if it is going to be a meeting, unless it's a crucial one, you just get the notes from somebody taking notes to the back.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's over very quickly.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: There's also dialogues, there are riddles, there are it narratives where an object talks to you about its life, etc., etc.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: The the and the eyewitness account, I guess that's the crucial innovation for me in literary terms in ministry, is that I had a lot of anonymous people who were somehow at a crux moment where where slow violence turned into fast violence or where something decisive happened.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And these eyewitness accounts are not like dramatized scenes in fiction.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: They are faster, they're um they cut to the chase, they make judgments about the actor and history itself, like this is what it meant to me, this is what it meant to the world, I saw it myself.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: That I found a beautiful genre, very emotional, but also very fast.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh so that sense of propulsion, I think, really helped this novel.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's long, but the chapters are short, and a lot of stuff is happening, and I think that's crucial to the feeling that you're talking about of history.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: I like it that you talk about this as being historical.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: Science fiction is indeed a historical fiction, but the problem is if you set a novel five million years in the future, anything could be happening, and the historical link between now and then is disappeared on you.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: If you set it five years in the future, you're doing a kind of a realism of the present, but with a trajectory to it.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: You're pushing one aspect or another that reveals your theory of history.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like this this is why things are going to happen the way they are, and this is why the present feels the way it does.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, ministry is definitely near future science fiction.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I started essentially now and run it out three decades and try to imagine a kind of a best case scenario that you can still believe in.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: That was a very important thing.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I thought that time horizon was indeed superb.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you mentioned uh even political changes, say in India, that relate to the current political scene, but within 10 years is a very plausible switchover or making those links to what we're holding right now, but far enough uh ahead that you're telling us something quite important of how things uh can unfold.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I I would also uh tell you that I first read the book, as it were, by listening to it on the audio book because this was the COVID period, so I was home and uh taking long walks in the afternoon and listening, and it's a wonderful book to listen to, I must say, especially because there are short, quick chapters, as you say, lots of huge, quick changes of venue, and it works very well as a drama played out on an audiobook.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love the fact that the minister of the Ministry for the Future, that is the UN official who's a wonderful character, Mary Murphy, uh has her Irish uh accent and has her wonderful character in this and actually shows agency.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Something can be done, and that's pretty uplifting for those of us working in this seemingly endlessly ponderous negotiations of 196 signatories and so forth.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: But hearing her voice counts.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because of your experiences at the UN, I I wanted to ask you about this.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: The the COP system and the Paris Agreement is a consensus model where every nation has to sign off on the annual document that's put out at the end of the COP meeting.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And uh Zayd al Rad Hussein was uh frustrated by this and saying that's an explanation for how slow it is, that the consensus model is unusual even in the UN, much less the rest of international diplomacy.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And he was hoping for something more like majority rules or uh something that might make the process be bolder and faster.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: And since you, you know, with the SDGs, I wonder what you thought of that.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell You know, it has cut both ways.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: The urgency should come not necessarily through the shortcut of a majority vote, but actually through the understanding of what we're really facing more clearly.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that there is unanimity, if I think about it, yes, of course it made things slower, but one example where it made things better was in the Paris process.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in 2015, the small island states, which otherwise would be completely rolled over in the system, absolutely held their ground in Paris and said, we need the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit in there, because that's us going underwater if you violate that.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And many people scoffed and said, well, we're not gonna achieve 1.5 degrees, it's not possible, and why put it in there?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the small island state said there is no agreement without it, and it actually found its way in.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And while we're not gonna hold to 1.5 degrees, at least uh without an overshoot, almost surely.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: The fact of the matter is it's played actually perhaps the most constructive role of some clarification of what we're really doing in all of this, of anything that I've seen.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And just in a nutshell, of course, the agreement says we should aim to keep well below two degrees Celsius, and no one quite knows what that means.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Only diplomats would say that because it's not really a target, but they said well below two degrees, and then the small island states, because of this unanimity rule, we're able to push the 1.5 degree, we should aim to stay below 1.5 degrees.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Then the scientists came in soon after that in the intergovernmental panel, and they said, oh, 1.5 degrees, absolutely far more serious than anything else we could set, and you have to decarbonize by mid-century in order to be able to have a reasonable chance to hit that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so suddenly we had at least a little bit of clarity about the what to do.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so thinking about it, the holdouts in any rule you pick would be powerful countries, first of all, whether it's majority rule or not.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have the U.S.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: and China and the European Union in there, you're not going to have any kind of meaningful agreement, period.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe the unanimity rule, oddly enough, I never really thought about it so straightforwardly until your question, enabled some of the otherwise nearly voiceless countries to have some voice.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, we come to something which I think is fundamental in your books.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Very accurate, very clear, very important, Stan, and I think you you really nail it.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: The slowness is not actually these government negotiations or the UN.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is that we have a system of economics, we have real power, we have big corporate power, we have lots of powerful interests, and the system's really a system.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not just there to be altered because some diplomats say so.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The diplomats are there because there are governments that are really enthralled to powerful interests after all.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the books make clear, to my mind, beautifully, that there's a deeper system at work.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it is slow, it is deeply locked into place, it is about money, it is about capitalism, it is about greed that that engenders.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the capacity of rich people who can easily know what's going on to not care about what's going on is a stunning feature.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Those who are in control of the major enterprises that really could make a difference.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I appreciate that what you're saying.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: I am interested in trying to suggest ways that we can make the system that we are in right now work faster to confront the mass extinction event that we're starting.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we have the nation-state system, you know, Treaty of Westphalia, all that, sovereignty, and we have global capitalism, the the kind of system of accumulation and extraction and exploitation of less powerful people by more powerful people.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: This this system, I've argued against it my whole career as an American leftist.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: And indeed, like in my Mars novels, I would present a different political economy.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what utopian novels do, made up from scratch, using earlier models, but having that almost hypothetical moment of we're writing a new constitution here and we're making a new political economy, let's make a better one.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's all very well, and it's interesting and fun, but that's not the situation that we're in now in the world.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so my own political preferences, uh such as they are, because I'm pretty labile in that regard, with a except for always preferring public over private, the commons over property, uh, and so on, just the usual leftist values of egalitarianism, etc.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: So what?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: The system that we're in, we need to dodge a mass extinction event using it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: So in ministry, I had to think about Keynesianism, about pickety type tax structures, that there there shouldn't perhaps rich people should be taxed out of existence, perhaps there should be a floor under which no human being can fall of security and adequacy.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's true.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then the biosphere as a citizen that has to be healthy for us to be healthy, using the tools that we have now.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore the central banks, fiat money, quantitative easing, the so-called carbon coin, which is a kind of a green quantitative easing, not dissimilar from this recent IRA bill, but comprehensive.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: And these are much less radical changes, innovations that I was struggling to imagine what we could do in the system that we currently have.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: In that the European Union, if you're a member state of something rather than a sovereign nation, that's a huge change psychologically and legally and fiscally.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: So uh there were models there, since we're all supposedly member states of the Paris Agreement, for instance, of the UN.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And as you said, the big nations think they can do what they want.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's a there's a psychological set of sovereignty there that is a little bit unhelpful and exaggerated, that the concept of a member state is good at making something more global, which is what we need now.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: So these were the kind of thoughts that went into the the crafting of the plot of Ministry for the Future.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm a little bit desperate.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: I think you must know this feeling that you've got a system, you need to make a fix, you've got to use the tools you've got, and some improvisation uh is required.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I what I what I think is uh compelling about uh this book and and uh New York 2140 stan is uh it it's not a utopian novel, that's for sure.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a dystopian novel either.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is it's a history of the future, it really is.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it shows how things can unfold at multiple levels, and that is also both fun, interesting, thought-provoking, and and a great read.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And by that I mean there are the UN processes, there are the central bankers uh there, but there are also individuals on the ground coping with an extreme heat wave.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there are desperate young people forming a terrorist cell as uh as the response to uh the dithering that's uh going on.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they take uh desperate action.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: There is government of India saying we have to take this into our own hands.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: No one cares about us.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: We've had a massive die-off because of this.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna put sulfates into the atmosphere, do geoengineering.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to ask for anybody's uh permission.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's accurate about this is that there is a background, deep dynamic, but then there's agency all over the place, some of it perhaps horrendously wrongheaded or right-headed or uh not exactly working the way people want, but people are trying to react and pushing in a variety of ways.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why it's not dystopian, because there actually are solutions sometimes in the ground from the ground up literally that spread.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes a top-down breakthrough occurs, usually 20 years after uh it should have.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that that's what makes this history it is an unfolding of a real complexity, and we're dealing with the complexity.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we'd like the solution now.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and by the way, you know, my experience is for 15 years I was heading an institute at Columbia University, the Earth Institute, with hundreds of climate scientists.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And damn it, if they didn't tell me every week, Jeff, it's worse than we thought.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's going faster than we thought.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in the midst of that, you know how terrifying this is.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you see the contrast, because I would spend uh days then at the UN in these parsing sentences and trying to explain what I'm hearing from from the scientific crowd.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: But you're capturing how things can unfold, and it's definitely not dystopian, though obviously neither is it utopian.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think of it as the utopia of our time, if you think of utopia as a Name for a kind of history rather than an end state.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this is H.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: G.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Wells' great innovation that the utopia for our time is you dodge the mass extinction event and everything else you can repair later.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: But extinction is irrevocable and a catastrophe for future generations and for the biosphere itself, our our extended body.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's still a utopian novel, but it was very crucial that it started in the present and it and it was one that you could believe in, a kind of reality test that one puts to fiction at all points.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: There is the willing suspension of disbelief.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: There is the ability to read fantasy novels, but when you're reading something like this, the reality test is, could this really happen?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I wanted the novel to pass that test at every point along the way, even though at the end of it, 30 years on, they're in a much better situation than we are now.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so I notice now that for any good thing that happens in the novel, something bad immediately follows in the next chapter.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: The mess of history, the chaotic nature of it, the fact that there's a lot of people who don't agree with our vision of what's going on in the world, don't agree that climate change is an existential threat, and so on.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: That had to be acknowledged and become part of the story, or else the story wouldn't be realistic enough.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I must say, the two years since this book came out have been astonishing to me, bizarre and unexpected for sure.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_02: And what it what it's taught me is people are desperate for a story like this.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Any strange peccadillos of this particular novel are irrelevant because of the hunger for a story that we could scrape through.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the scientists are telling us that if we did indeed do everything right, we still are right on the inside edge of these planetary boundaries.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's just barely possible that this is a story that can come true.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not a fantasy or cruel optimism, I hope.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: But you can't say for sure because you're talking about the future, and it's changing very, very rapidly in front of us, and we're closing in on planetary boundaries that if we break them, we can't claw back even if we wanted to.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: Even if we devoted all of human civilization's effort to it, we can't bring, I don't know, the ocean back to health or various planetary boundaries.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: We can't stop the permafrost from melting and dumping a huge load of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at which point we're we're cooked even with geoengineering.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: So the moment is super dangerous in presenting a positive story.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: On the one hand, it has the dangers of creating complacency.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, we're gonna scrape through, let's not worry about it.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, if you don't have that story, then you're just caught in the world of dystopia and post-apocalyptic uh the imaginary of our time.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, we're doomed, so let's just party a kind of Goethe Domerang.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think the books New York 2140 came first, uh or before uh this one.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It chronologically it follows this book.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: New this book, The Ministry for the Future, takes us uh to mid-century, basically, and it gives the sense that by mid-century, after lots of very serious disasters and a lot of uh global warming and climate change, there is at least a budding new global civilization that is coming to grips with this challenge.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the interesting sidebars of Ministry for the Future is this attempt to pump water in Antarctica from under one of the ice sheets to prevent it from creating uh the disaster of sea level rise.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you for the last 15 years, my lead climate guru, my close colleague and a genius and a wonderful person, James Hansen, has been telling me in advance of IPCC and others by many years how dangerous the Antarctic situation is and how we are basically committed to multimeter sea level rise, but over what time span, hard to know.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: But this overshoot of carbon in the atmosphere is likely to have devastating effects unless we not only stabilize but really reduce the atmospheric concentrations of CO2.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, a point that I would make, even a scientific point, is your modest optimism that 30 years or so of uh somewhat more dithering and some terrorism and upheavals and some disasters, the world could get around to a new political economy, isn't inconsistent with the fact that by then we could actually lose a significant piece of uh West Antarctic ice sheet to later in later in the century or on some time scale like that.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's notable, I want to turn to New York 2140.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: I I often say, by the way, in speeches around the world that I too live on a small island economy because I am a Manhattanite, and uh we are a small island economy, an unusual one.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this remarkable novel, New York 2140, takes place after what you call the two giant pulses that end up creating.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't you describe it?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I will, and it it's fun because it comes out of a James Hansen paper.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: He was the first of about 18 co-authors from a variety of different scientific disciplines, because it's very hard to determine where sea level was in the past because the the lithosphere itself is moving up as and down, as well as the hydrosphere moving up and down.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's highly speculative.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And this paper was contested by other people.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's a controversial one, but for me, wanting Manhattan to be half underwater, wanting as a thought experiment to describe a world where Manhattan's a kind of a Venice, at least lower Manhattan, because of a 50-foot rise in sea level by the near future, and the reason it's out in 2140 is that's as near as I could make it seem plausible.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: That Hansen paper was hugely encouraging to me, despite its controversial nature, because once in the Emean, he and his colleagues claim, so 130,000 years ago or so, there was um a sea level rise of about thirty feet in one century.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: And this is just radically fast, and they tried to explain it, and that's where he came up with this phrase, the Antarctic explanation.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: The ice down there, there's a buttress to the buttress.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: Under the West Antarctic ice sheet is a kind of a bowl where it's shallower near the edge of the ice sheet uh in the ocean than it is further inland where it's actually the ground is deeper there, the ice is deeper.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: The implication is a lot of ice could come off, go out into the ocean, melt very quickly, and raise sea level, and we're very close to that.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_02: So my those two novels don't describe the same future history.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I never like to do that.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: These are different futures, but in the New York novel, I have them failing.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: In Ministry for the Future, I have them actually attempting to cope with that because some glaciologists think that we could possibly slow the glaciers back down to their historic speed and avoid this relatively quick and certainly catastrophic sea level rise.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because if it does rise that much, we've lost all the beaches automatically because they're at sea level.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: But then also all the seaports, all the coastal cities.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: I've heard estimates of 10 to 20 percent of humanity, and many of the great cities of the world are right there at sea level.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: So could we pin those glaciers back down by freezing them back to the bottom?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I want to actually write about this again in a nonfiction book about Antarctica.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: I've been down there twice, I have stories to tell.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: But in the New York book, it hasn't worked.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: The two big pulses have meant that lower Manhattan is underwater.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: But also, and I know you will appreciate this being a Manhattanite, the intertidal zone, the New York Bay, I think the h difference between high tide and low tide is ten or twelve feet.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if sea level were fifty feet higher, there would be many blocks, like maybe ten to twenty blocks of midtown or lower uh whatever, in the thirties in terms of the avenues that would be of the streets I mean, that would be underwater at high tide, but exposed to the land at low tide.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then you get into very weird property laws because of the old Roman law that the intertitle cannot be owned.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: So there I had my games.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: I could make fun of finance, I could make fun of the the tendency for finance to want to make money off of anything, including catastrophe.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I had a great game to play there, and I would I mean, I New York 2140 is a lot more was more fun to write.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's more fun to read.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a comedy of coping.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have the kind of grim um edge of uh breakdown that ministry has to cope with.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's simply a different kind of novel.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: I found it great fun to read, especially since I'm in the Upper West Side.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh at least we we stay above the uh flood zone.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember, by the way, uh of course I remember vividly a decade ago with our superstorm Sandy, which was a devastation and created massive loss of life and around sixty billion dollars of damage in in one day.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: My wife and I were walking around the upper west side feeling seems to be a little bit exaggerated, but on the lower part of Manhattan, of course, it was utter devastation that we didn't know about until the next morning.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you tell that story incredibly, and I'll never forget with Superstorm Standy.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: One of my very esteemed colleagues at the Earth Institute was saying for years and years and years, we're gonna have massive flooding here, we're gonna have massive flooding here, the city wasn't paying any attention, state wasn't paying any attention, the Army Corps of Engineers, no attention, and then this colleague's house was caught in the floods in disaster, which I found so sad and ironic because he was the one that had nailed even to which subway stations were gonna be the ones to be buried by the flood.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I realize, again, this is a book that has a lot of fascinating agency to it and a lot of uh similar politics, actually, of a system that is a pretty deep system, like you say, how do you make money off of every disaster?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: Which incidentally, you know, is hilarious uh in the way you tell it, but it also struck me, it reminded me of an event that I went to where a hedge fund manager, very rich, successful hedge fund manager, into a big crowd, described his past year of each event and then how he reacted to it in the market.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I remember every event because I'm involved with public policy uh on almost everything, and I realized I missed the instinct.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every single terrible event, he thought, well, does that mean I should short the kroner or long the yen?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I never had that impression even once during the year.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was saying, oh my God, what do we do about it?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Geopolitical crisis, how can we stop a war?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: How are we going to save these people?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the hedge funds really are trained in a completely crazy way.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: What is the market play from all of this?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, exactly.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: And they're they've abstracted out of the world in a way that you have not the uh reality that money means nothing if civilization has crashed.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: If the biosphere has crashed, you can't cash in.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: It will be pointless.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: So they need to uh be thinking differently.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: I had great education for New York 2140, a group at UC Santa Cruz and at New York University, Randy Martin, um, the financialization of daily life.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: These were my teachers for uh the finance approach to life, and then the big short, that's a wonderful book by Michael Lewis, I think, describing the the um the mentality of of of finance, uh, of financialization as being a kind of parasite on the real economy and also on the real biosphere.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so that has a kind of a black comedy to it, uh, how can we make money off this?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: But also my financier in the book, uh Franklin Garr, he learns to think differently.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: He's probably the character that changes the most in having a kind of uh an epiphany or a satori on the Hudson River up there near the cloisters.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: And parenthetically, uh trying to get the girl after all.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: It changes his mind, exactly.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and and real uh the real economy that that investment could, if you went long on reality and on human uh welfare in the future, then you would have to invest in different things.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: And and what I'm seeing, what I saw at Glasgow, was what they're calling risk-adjusted investment.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: That means the risk adjustment is taking reality into account, taking the climate change into account.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: And now risk-adjusted investment.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: The group that Mark Carney assembled at Glasgow to promise to use their assets for green work, and that was$130 trillion worth of asset, a fairly significant portion of the world's private assets, that was a good sign.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter if mm there are some broken promises there, that there's some greenwashing in it.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_02: That does not matter.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that private capital is now risk adjusting is into account at least.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh i if if only to understand uh how future assets uh might respond to future events.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you can see the political fight against it, that ESGs, these being risk-adjusted is politically volatile and controversial because some people are committed to the Goethe Daumerang.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, if we have to change or the world goes down, the world is going down because we're not going to change.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that political battle is is being clarified for us, and it might lead to um further progress.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh some of the things I've learned since I uh wrote ministry, which was 2019, have made me more encouraged rather than less encouraged.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think a better future than the one in ministry is actually possible now.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this is because Trump lost, this is because Bolsonaro lost.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um and the the network for greening the financial system, this co consortium or or study group of the big central banks, I didn't even know about it.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they are working on a carbon coin equivalent.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um these were this this was news to me.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: And what I realized is you cannot keep up, and actually, even from your position, you can't keep up with the present.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Things are changing too fast.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: There's too much to know.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: You can't possibly know it all.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: One individual has to have a filtering system, and you accidentally filter out sometimes excellent news that can give you reasons for hope or projects to pursue.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, this glacier project, I thought it was one glaciologist's crazy idea.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: I was willing to run with it.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, it's a fairly well-developed plan amongst a whole group of glaciologists, and it's still highly speculative, but you know, it's worth pursuing, it might work, et cetera, et cetera.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: It would be a kind of military operation, but we need the military doing useful things.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I've I've had a mixed uh couple of years, but uh quite an education.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: I thought one interesting point in both books, uh, I think you use the same uh expression, riot strike, riot, as uh a little bit of the fact that things won't just sit still for big power necessarily.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: One of the events in New York 2140, without uh going into all the plot details, is uh that there's a mass social reaction.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not surprisingly, after the city basically is disappearing underwater.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's my friend Joshua Clover.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's the name of his book, Riot Strike Riot.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_02: And um, he's my friend and teacher here in Davis.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to say he's he's part of a discussion, includes Andreas Maulm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, or Erica Chemical.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, well, somebody knew how to blow up a pipeline.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's a I have my suspicions too, and I'm not too happy about it, I have to say.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that book is really um it's not a technical manual for saboteurs.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a it's uh attempting to make a distinction between sabotage and murder and what is civil resistance, and so why civil resistance works by Erica Chenowith.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's another important uh book on these topics.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: And especially for the New York novel, I was very involved in the idea that the public can bring down the financial system by a targeted non-payment of their debts, uh student debt, mortgages, rents.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you if ever on 4th of July of 2024 everybody didn't pay, then the banks would fold.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought in when I wrote the New York novel, which is more like, I don't know, 2015-2016, that if we nationalized the banks, the private banks, like we nationalized GM in 2008, that that would solve all problems.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now, this was overly simplistic.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: I learned things since then that made me think that that there is no total solution, and that would be interesting, but it wouldn't solve all our problems.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: But it would be interesting, and that the public could make it happen by a targeted fiscal action.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: This was news to me, and so the plot of New York 2140, I was just very excited.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, oh my gosh, there can be effective public action beyond just voting.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: We can bring the system down and then have a government in power that would take it back over so there would be more public power over private capital.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know if we even need that, but it's interesting to think it may go back in some way to Leviticus, uh, to the Jubilee, which is uh the idea of a fresh start.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that there could be some merit in that.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you about one of the epigraphs of the many wonderful epigraphs uh in New York 2140.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: You quote Picasso, I thought a wonderful quotation.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Art is not truth.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: I felt that was speaking about your your uh your books.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they're not lies, but uh they are helping us to realize the truth.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: They are long complicated lies.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's what somebody told me novels were, that's why they only read nonfiction.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought, well, I don't know why that doesn't ring right, but Picasso clarified that.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a wonderful quotation, and I think it fits well.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And to say that I think these are not complicated lies, they they really are helping us to see the truth.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we discussed it briefly, and uh we're all gonna learn about it.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Ministry for the Future is soon to be followed by the summit of the future of the UN in 2024.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can't help thinking your book had something to do with that, although I don't know that, yes or no, but it certainly could have and and may have.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna have a World Summit for the first time to talk about the future explicitly.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Just love your closing thoughts on that.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh some insider friends in the UN have told me that indeed the Ministry for the Future had uh an effect on this decision.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very, very pleased.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, congratulations.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: Again, yeah, astounded.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think I will be invited to take part in it as a kind of um court jester figure, which is great.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I I I'm hoping that you'll be there.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: What I want I'm planning.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: What I want uh I I'm reading I've read, you know, the Ages of Globalization and uh a new foreign policy, your two most recent books.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: And what I'm hungry for from you and the economists at your level is precisely some kind of neo-Keynesian, Tomas Piketty political economy, uh the the political economy for our time, the uh the the set of laws, mechanisms, guardrails, procedures, regulations coherently laid out for the world to use as tools going forward.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh because I think it's missing.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I've been looking, I haven't found it.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's hard.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: I've I looked into modern monetary theory, very interesting, a kind of neo-Kynesianism.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: We've got to get past the neoliberal um the market rules, the state it facilitates the market.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's not gonna cut it.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: We need a return.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I've often used the analogy of World War II, where the Allied governments in particular took over the economy.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: The the British government said to the Bank of England, you're now just part of the treasury, we're gonna tell you what to do.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_02: We're in an emergency, and therefore uh the highest rate of return, quarterly profit, shareholder value, these are terrible rubrics if you're trying to save the biosphere.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: We need a different set of rubrics and a and a different and uh uh an advanced set of rules.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: Based on what we've got now, you can't just go theoretical and make up Plato's Republic or whatever.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: You have to actually have and and you've been doing that, so you're already in the groove.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yeah, it's very interesting.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll tell you last week we had a meeting at the Vatican, actually, of a wide range of thinkers on the theme that we need new economic institutions, which is what you're referring to, and what you implicitly and explicitly write about, new economic ethics as well.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need to think about what we're doing in a different way.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh actually, the market system is based on an ethical system.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's often not made very explicit.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little weird.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it came out of England, really.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a British empiricist ethics from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: It gets a lot weird and a lot wrong.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we definitely need something something new uh and something better.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: So as you write your next, I'm trying to write a principles textbook based on those uh themes.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I'm working on that myself right now.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a lot we can uh chat about in that.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I hope to come to New York for this uh summit of the future and maybe we can meet there.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm very glad to hear you say that.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: And what you say chimes with this.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: Economics is a powerful social science, but if you think about it as a kind of a geometry that has axioms and it has theorems, that the axioms have to be re-examined from scratch, because that's what you're talking about, ethics.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: These are not physical properties, these are social properties that we make up ourselves.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: So if that you solve for a different equation by changing the axioms.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we want no human suffering.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: We want the biosphere healthy solve for that as a political economy.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: Stan, you're exactly, exactly on point.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: This will be our next discussion, uh, which I will hugely enjoy.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, thank you so much for being together for this discussion, the Ministry of the Future, New York 2140, and all your wonderful writings on these and other subjects.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: They're an absolute joy and a gift for the world.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: So we're most grateful and uh so much fun to be with you.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and it's been an absolute delight, Stan, to be together with you today.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you, Jeff, and thanks for your work.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I look forward to seeing more of it.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.