Wonkette Book Club Part 1: A (Climate) Change Is Gonna Come
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For The Future, Week 1.
We're starting off our summer 2023 edition of the Book Club with a book that's about as timely as you could hope for: Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future, which imagines a very near future of catastrophic climate change and a decades-long process of humanity's attempts to bring the climate crisis ... well, not under control, but to at least to remake politics and economics in a direction that's better suited to survival of the Earth's inhabitants.
For this week, I asked you to read the first chapter, which is fairly short, and and tends to stay with you after you read it. If you just got here and want to catch up, the publisher, Orbit Books, conveniently posted Chapter 1 in full right on the interwebs for free! The discussion from here will involve spoilers for the first chapter, so take a few minutes to go read it ... or maybe the discussion here will make you want to go read it.
Last summer, novelist Monica Byrne tweeted for a lot of us who have read the book:
\u201cIf you haven\u2019t\u2026.you should. Because I basically can\u2019t think about my future without it now.\u201d— Monica Byrne (@Monica Byrne) 1628265324
I feel like my circles have divided between those who’ve read the opening chapter of The Ministry for the Future and those who haven’t.
If you haven’t….you should. Because I basically can’t think about my future without it now.
Let's jump in, shall we? In this brief chapter, we meet one of the novel's many main characters, Frank May, an American everyliberal from Florida who's working at the local office of an unnamed relief NGO in a small city in Uttar Pradesh state in India. A perfect storm of atmospheric conditions leads to a long heatwave, with heat and humidity at levels — a "wet bulb" temperature of 38 degrees C (103 degrees Fahrenheit) at dawn, with 35 percent humidity — that's right on the edge of what human beings can survive.
Then the overstressed electrical grid goes down, all over the region. Things go from bad to worse. No one is coming to help. Frank does what little he can for several local families, inviting them into the clinic where he works, where there's a single window air conditioner connected by an extension cord to a portable generator on the roof. He keeps for himself the last of the water in the clinic's refrigerator, in a thermos jug he's careful not to let anyone see.
The toilets back up, the temperature keeps rising, the oldest and the youngest start dying. On the second day with no power, a group of young men break in and point a gun at Frank, telling him they'll be taking the AC and the generator.
“We need this more than you do,” one of them explained.
The man with the gun scowled as he heard this. He pointed the gun at Frank one last time. “You did this,” he said, and then they slammed the door on him and were gone.
And really, dear reader, Frank did. So did you. So did I. America and Europe filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for 150 years, and then other countries, like China, began adding their own greenhouse emissions. The countries already suffering from the worst effects of climate change — such as last year's floods in Pakistan, which killed over 1,700 people and left millions homeless — are not the countries that caused the climate disaster.
By the end of the chapter, everyone in the city except Frank is dead. He's the only person still alive in a shallow lake filled with corpses.
I'm reminded of the end of Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (spoiler coming!), where the murderous serial killer the Misfit says of the grandmother he's just killed — after her sudden realization that all humans are family to each other — "She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
The first chapter of The Ministry for the Future may just be the gun we all need pointed at our own heads to make us pay attention.
So let's discuss a few things!
1) How are you doing? This chapter hits hard, but I also want to shake every elected leader in the country and tell them they have to read it. At Slate, Rebecca Onion, in an interview with Robinson, told him that the first chapter "gave me insomnia, dominated my thoughts, and led me to put the book down for a few months. Then I picked it back up and found that the remainder of it is actually quite optimistic."
Robinson replies:
I wanted pretty much the response you described. Fiction can put people through powerful imaginative experiences; it generates real feelings. So I knew the opening scene would be hard to read, and it was hard to write. It wasn’t a casual decision to try it. I felt that this kind of catastrophe is all too likely to happen in the near future. That prospect frightens me, and I wanted people to understand the danger.
2) Did it work? That is, did the chapter make climate change more real to you? Or did it squick you out so badly that you stopped reading? (If so, do you think you'll pick it up again?)
3) As you'll see as we go along, this isn't whizbang laser gun science fiction. There's almost no technology we don't have today — Robinson doesn't even cheat by bringing cheap infinitely abundant fusion power online a decade from now. If anything, I think the "science" being fictionalized is about equal parts sociology and economics. Gee, I guess that was more a comment than a question.
4) Colonialism is a running theme in the novel, not only as a historical backdrop but, as is the case right now, in terms of how the damage from climate change hits less wealthy nations who had virtually nothing to do with wrecking the planet's atmosphere. And yet our focus character for Chapter 1 is Frank, an American in India. We don't get the perspective of any of the Indian characters, just the white outsider who witnesses their deaths. He's also close to death, but he is the lone survivor. As we keep reading, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how Robinson navigates questions about affluent nations and the parts of the world that have climate change landing on them like a million-pound shithammer.
Those are just starters, of course, it'd be terribly boring if y'all only address those like essay questions. Feel free to disregard them if you want to talk about other stuff, including just your visceral reactions to the story — one of the things I loved about Glen Reed, my American Lit professor at Northern Arizona University, was that on the day we discussed "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," he didn't start off with the standard stuff about O'Connor's work, her Catholic faith, and the way her stories often rise to a crisis and a "moment of grace." Instead, he said that every time he'd read the story, it just scared the hell out of him to think of his own family in such a situation: having a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere because of a bad turn, and then the person who finds you is a killer. I loved him for that.
So let's also talk about this chapter, and climate change, as humans. Let's talk about the whole book that way.
Your assignment for next Friday is a lot more than for today: Let's read through Chapter 30 (they're mostly short chapters, some only a page or less).
And if you haven't read the book (THIS week you can go do the reading right now of course), always feel free to join the conversation. It's not a class and there won't be a quiz. Also, no worries about spoilers, since for the most part this is an idea-driven book, not a plot-driven one. (We'll talk about that more next week, including the fairly common complaint from some readers that after that holy shit first chapter, the rest of the book reads like a collection of white papers, not a novel.)
The one rule I am going to enforce strictly for this post is that, to keep the conversation focused, I will remove any off topic comments and ask you to save 'em for the open thread in a couple hours, please. I'd honestly like to keep the conversation going all weekend, and if you wanna come back and say more, please do so!
So talk!
[The Ministry for the Future (Wonkette gets a bit of sales from this linky) / Slate / Chapter 1 at Orbit Books]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep this little mommyblog going!
Rural America Gonna Get Woke Clean Energy Dollars. Thanks A Lot, Joe Biden!
Rural utilities won't even have to teach CRT, so it's quite the deal.
The Biden administration is rolling out another part of its effort to speed up America's transition to renewable energy, announcing Tuesday that $11 billion in grants and loans are now available to rural areas to ditch old inefficient fossil fuel plants and replace them with affordable clean energy.
The aid comes in the form of two Department of Agriculture programs: The "Empowering Rural America" or “New ERA” program will provide $9.7 billion in grants for rural electric cooperatives to "deploy renewable energy systems, zero-emission and carbon capture systems," and the "Powering Affordable Clean Energy" (PACE) loan program that will provide another billion dollars in partly forgivable loans to a range of rural and tribal energy entities to "help finance large-scale solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, hydropower projects and energy storage in support of renewable energy systems."
The administration has been very diligent in pointing out that this is the biggest federal investment in rural energy infrastructure since Franklin D. Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Act in 1936, although the announcements have also been fairly careful not to put the words "green" and "New Deal" anywhere near each other.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a press release,
The Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to cleaner energy provides rural communities with an affordable and reliable power grid, while supporting thousands of new jobs and helping lower energy costs in the future. These investments will also combat climate change and significantly reduce air and water pollution that put children’s health at risk.
The funding for the two programs comes from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and is just one of a series of interconnected strategies to finally get the USA off the fossil fuel teat and transition to a clean energy economy. The two programs start accepting letters of interest in June and July, and once the grants start going out to help build clean energy projects, count on a whole bunch of press releases from Republican members of Congress who'll brag about how they're helping their communities, even though they voted against the infrastructure bill.
The New ERA program for rural electric cooperatives, Vilsack told reporters on a press call,
will help rural electric cooperatives reach parity with private utility companies who have already begun significant investment in clean energy. [...]
"We have a climate crisis that requires all of America to participate in reducing emissions to get to the net-zero future," Vilsack said.
Rural electric co-ops, which currently serve about 42 million Americans, get about 22 percent of their power from renewable sources, so the new funding should help boost that. At a White House event announcing the new programs, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), who chairs the Senate Ag Committee, said the clean energy funding is
"an important piece of how we commit to rural America."
"This is really about saying to people in rural America, we want you to stay there, we want your kids to come home there, and to have a quality of life there," she said.
In the Ag Department news release, the administration notes that the PACE loan program is in keeping with Biden's "Justice40" initiative, which is aimed at making sure 40 percent of the help from climate spending goes to "disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution."
That's been a running theme in Biden's climate policy, because disadvantaged communities have historically been hit the hardest by fossil fuel pollution, and continue to be disproportionately harmed by the effects of climate change. While we're at it, let's give props yet again to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who made environmental justice a central part of his 2020 climate plan, which Biden adopted and has stuck with from the start of his administration.
Also too, this is a good place to remind you all that the Wonkette Book Club is back, and for this Friday, we're going to read the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 climate novel The Ministry for the Future. You can read more about the book club right here. If the UN ever does establish an agency similar to the novel's imagined ministry, we'd want Jay Inslee running it, please.
[USDA / Reuters / NBC News / Photo (cropped): Jason Jacobs, Creative Commons License 2.0]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please help out with a monthly $5 or $10 donation. If you haven't grabbed a copy of The Ministry for the Future yet, the linky right there gives Wonkette a small cut of any sales. And if you were planning on shopping at Amazon for other things, the link below does the same!
Wonkette Book Club: Chaos, Capitalism, And Saving Humanity From Itself
We're gonna read The Ministry For the Future
Heya Wonkers, the Wonkette Book Club is back, finally! Over the next few weeks, we're going to read Kim Stanley Robinson's influential 2020 climate change novel, The Ministry for the Future, which proudly proclaims right on the cover that it's among Barack Obama's favorite books of the year.
UPDATE: Well this is exciting! I see that the publisher, Orbit Books, has the first chapter of the novel free to read on the web. Check it out here!
Pretty easy to see why. It's a Big Ideas novel whose first chapter takes you gently by the throat and says "Pay attention. This is important." And it is. Set in the very near future (the novel opens in the last years of this decade and goes forward several decades), Ministry for the Future imagines how humanity might finally make the changes it needs to make in order to get global warming under something like control. Spoilers: it isn't easy, and the catastrophes of an ever-warming world aren't at all downplayed. But without giving away too much, the tone by the end is one of hard-won hope. Humanity, what's left of it, survives. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.
I'm planning to have our book club posts weekly, starting next Friday, and to get started, I think we should actually read just the first chapter, because even though it's fairly short, it's a LOT. The scenario is not only plausible, but extremely likely: A massive heat wave hits India, in a perfect storm of deadly atmospheric conditions that end up killing millions. It's the kind of disaster that's very likely to hit the warmest parts of the world in the next decade or so.
Previously: Climate Crisis Well Into 'Just Like Science Fiction' Territory
I'm going to suggest you just go ahead and get a copy of the book and read Chapter One, although I'll warn you that it is haunting and gruesome, and it will stay with you (I summarized it in this recent story if you want to decide whether to take the plunge.) Update: Or as I say, you can read Chapter 1 right here at the publisher's website free for nothing. I'll add that the subsequent chapters are far more aimed at how we might tackle this monster we've made.
EDIT/UPDATE: After a glance at the comments, I hope I haven't scared off too many of you! The first chapter is devastating, but this isn't Cormac McCarthy. As the novel goes forward, the novel gets into the thorny business of actually trying to address the crisis. It's not relentless gloom, but also not Pollyanna-ish "cool tech will save us" either. No flying cars, no giant robots, no technology that we don't already have.
If you want to read beyond that first chapter, go for it, there is never a penalty for reading ahead. We're not that kind of book club, for heaven's sake. And for that matter, you're entirely welcome to participate in the chat if you haven't done the reading, this isn't a class.
Also, after you've read the chapter, check out this interview with Robinson at Slate, too. Lisa Simpson-style overachievers are encouraged to read this more in-depth interview with Robinson at the MIT Press Reader. Terrific observation by Robinson:
I think it’s very important to emphasize science fiction’s double action, as both prophecy and metaphor for our present. As prophecy, SF is always wrong; as metaphor, it is always right, being an expression of the feeling of the time of writing.
So there's your homework for a week from now: Chapter One, and one or both interviews. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding a copy of Ministry for the Future; used and library copies are fine, or if you wanna get it through our Amazon linky here, Yr Wonkette will get a tiny cut of the sales.
I haven't yet scheduled out how long we'll be reading this sucker; I'm thinking we should be able to finish it off in three or four weeks tops, since after next week we'll go a lot faster than one chapter at a time. I'm looking forward to book clubbing with you all!
[The Ministry for the Future ($11.99 for Kindle ebook, $16.49 paperback, Audible narration $12.99 with book purchase) / Slate / MIT Press Reader / Orbit Books: first chapter free linky]
Yr Wonkette is supported entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 monthly so we can keep reminding Dok to read stuff.
EPA Gonna Punch That Climate Emergency Right In The Snoot!
Stop it, Joe Manchin, we will pull this yacht over right now!
The Biden administration rolled out yet another piece of its climate plan today, as the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new regulations to limit the greenhouse gases emitted by electric power plants fueled by coal and methane (so-called "natural" gas). As the New York Times puts it in an admirably simple and accurate sentence,
The nation’s 3,400 coal- and gas-fired power plants currently generate about 25 percent of greenhouse gases produced by the United States, pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
Instead of mandating any particular technology, the rules set caps on rates of carbon dioxide pollution that plants can release, leaving it up to energy producers to find ways to meet the goal of eliminating CO2 emissions by 2040. If industry can find ways to capture all CO2 from smokestacks — technology that doesn't exist yet — then great. But it's more likely that utilities would have to switch to green energy, or for gas plants, to burning green hydrogen (the kind produced without fossil fuels), which emits no carbon.
And while the EPA doesn't say it, we're happy to: The faster the US and the world adopt solar and wind electricity, the cheaper that electricity will be per megawatt hour. According to an Oxford University study published in September, a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar could save the world $12 trillion by 2050, which would help offset other costs of the transition like grid upgrades and developing reliable storage/backup/distribution of clean energy. Going slow, on the other hand, will cost more and result in greater climate caused damage.
The EPA press release says the regulations will
avoid up to 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide (CO2) through 2042, which is equivalent to reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles, roughly half the cars in the United States. Through 2042, EPA estimates the net climate and health benefits of the standards on new gas and existing coal-fired power plants are up to $85 billion.
The EPA emphasizes the public health benefits of not burning all that stuff, which doesn't just contribute to global warming but releases nasties like particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides into the air Americans breathe, especially in communities nearest to power plants, which tend to be home to poor and minority people because America. In addition to helping to keep the planet more habitable for large mammals like gazelles and the NCAA Final Four champion men's and women's teams, the proposed standards would mean huge health gains. In 2030 alone, the EPA says, cleaner air resulting from the new standards would prevent
• approximately 1,300 premature deaths;
• more than 800 hospital and emergency room visits;
• more than 300,000 cases of asthma attacks;
• 38,000 school absence days; [and]
• 66,000 lost workdays.
Under the new rules, virtually all coal and methane gas plants would be required to either reduce or capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions by 2038, or shut down. Currently, roughly a quarter of American coal plants are already scheduled to be retired by 2029, per the US Energy Information Agency.
Needless to say, industry groups and Republican state officials are at this very moment working on the first drafts of legal challenges to the policy, written as is traditional with the congealed blood of seals and dolphins killed by oil spills. The Times reports that West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) is already declaring the EPA plan DOA in the courts, whining that "It is not going to be upheld, and it just seems designed to scare more coal-fired power plants into retirement — the goal of the Biden administration." Stupid not-wanting-climate-catastrophe Biden!
Sen. Joe Manchin ("D"-West Virginia), whose family fortune is built on selling some of the filthiest coal available — a mining waste slurry called "gob" coal that's particularly carbon intensive — also threatened today that he will oppose any new Biden appointees to the EPA unless the plan is dropped. Manchin griped that the administration is
"determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal- and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability."
Also, fuck the future, the man has money at stake, and he hasn't spent a career lining his own nest with filthy feathers from crows with black lung disease just to watch it all go away because people in the tropical regions think they "deserve" to live.
So yeah, kids, this is going to be a fight between the wealthy bastards who want to keep pumping the atmosphere full of planet-heating pollutants, and the first president ever whose administration is actually taking the action needed to get close to meeting the US's commitments to decarbonization by midcentury, which all nations need to do in order to hold warming to non-catastrophic levels.
Previously:
When you combine the anticipated greenhouse gas reductions from the EPA's recent vehicle emissions standards, its methane reduction standards, and the power plant emissions standards announced today, the Times reports, the total emissions that would be eliminated would be around 15 billion tons of CO2 by 2055, or
roughly the amount of pollution generated by the entire United States economy over three years. Several analyses have projected that the Inflation Reduction Act will cut emissions by at least another billion tons by 2030.
That could put the nation on track to meet Mr. Biden’s pledge that the United States would cut its greenhouse gases in half by 2030 and stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by 2050, although analysts point out that more policies will need to be enacted to reach the latter target.
And that, children, puts the world within what I'll call realistic hoping distance of actually meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting warming since the start of the industrial age to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). It would require all countries doing the same as or better than the Biden plan is close to accomplishing, so yeah, that's freaking difficult. But doable, genuinely doable, according to the climate boffins. The Times again:
“Each of these several regulations from the E.P.A. are contributing to the whole picture that is necessary to steer this ocean liner away from the worst climate disaster,” said Dallas Burtraw, an economist with Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research organization that focuses on energy and environmental policy.
Also I just remembered that we were going to do some kind of Wonkette Book Club on Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 climate novel The Ministry for the Future (Wonkette-gets-a-cut link), so I guess I'd better actually make a plan and write it up for tomorrow, damn my eyes.
Let's choose hope. But back it up with action.
OPEN THREAD.
[EPA / NYT / Oxford University / AP / NBC News / Photo: American Wind Energy Association, used by permission]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep this mommyblog going! If you're shopping at Amazon anyhow, here's a link that will help out Yr. Wonkette with a portion of sales.
