To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
September 27, 2021
By Eric Gordon, Seattle Workers’ Voice
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the Green Earth trilogy (or Science in the Capital trilogy) between 2004 and 2007, and then republished it as a single volume, edited down to 1000+ pages, in 2015. It's a fictional story set in the near future that tackles the looming crisis of global warming head on, and Robinson saw the problem quite clearly. The book is well researched. The proof of his research is that some of the events he predicted only came to pass 10-15 years after he wrote about them. This is the great strength of the book: he predicts multiple things that have now come to pass, including a superstorm devastating the east coast, as well as other events which haven't happened yet but which scientists are now predicting with increasing certainty. And not only does he predict them, he gives explanations for how they develop in understandable terms.
For example, major plot drivers of the first two books of the trilogy, signaled by their titles, are major climate events which get the world's attention: “Forty Signs of Rain” references an east coast superstorm – presaging the 2012 Superstorm Sandy; “Fifty Degrees Below” references an extreme cold snap which also hits the east coast – presaging the polar vortex cold snaps of recent years. Another example is another major event which occurs in the book, the stalling of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – which is a huge phenomenon including currents on the north and south hemispheres of the Atlantic Ocean, and joining currents in the Indian Ocean as well. The Gulf Stream is one part of this overall flow. This is a significant concern of climate scientists today. (1)
Where he is weakest is how he imagines these catastrophes will be resolved:
Problems with
laying all hope on the scientists: Certainly science is a key
component in understanding climate change, and understanding is a first
step to solving the problem. We have seen that while the climate
scientists are generally right on target about the dangers of climate
change, and do a good job of sounding the alarm, and even of calling
for “something” to be done. However when they do weigh in on what needs
to be done, scientific organizations tend to fall back on the favored
solutions of the ruling class: market solutions of one sort or another.
Robinson titled his trilogy “Science in the Capital”, and in the
book imagines that a harsh wake-up call from a couple of dramatic
events hitting the Washington DC area is all it will take for
policy-makers to get serious and start basing policy on what the
climatologists are saying. A White House staffer who is concerned about
climate change, a president who becomes willing to listen to the
scientists, a key figure at the National Science Foundation, plus a few
other elements, are all that are necessary in the book to start the
policy makers onto taking real action toward correcting climate change.
Robinson has no apparent understanding that without sustained and
organized pressure from the masses of people, the politicians will
continue to serve their bourgeois masters no matter how bad things get.
Look: here in the US we've already had a city devastated by a hurricane
(Katrina), a large part of the east coast trashed by a superstorm
(Sandy), and now Ida has smashed its way through Louisiana and wreaked
havoc in New Jersey and New York killing people, an extreme cold snap
which overloaded power in large parts of the south of the country, and
more and more dire scientific predictions are coming out with alarming
regularity. And still the politicians are playing games, either denying
the reality of climate change or promoting the proven fraudulent market
“solutions” of taxes, offsets and trading – anything to allow
business-as-usual profit-making. Nations squabble over who has to make
the biggest sacrifices, and refuse to submit to hard, enforceable
emissions targets based on necessary timelines. And meanwhile actual
carbon emissions worldwide continue to rise.
The fraud of market measures: On the topic of markets: Robinson describes the (real) development of futures markets for events like terrorist attacks – these have been around for years now. There, the idea is that a system that attaches financial rewards to predictions will improve the accuracy of those predictions. Robinson toys with the idea of a futures markets on geo-engineering ideas, as well as futures markets on individual people who are innovators developing geo-engineering ideas. Now, he doesn't come across as an enthusiastic advocate for these markets, but he does have his heroes speculate about how these markets could be used to advantage, either within or beyond their intended benefits: One of his characters speculates on ways that calculations on futures markets on carbon credits “could be tweaked to make it more accurate and useful”. Another speculates that carbon treaty talks would cause a huge jump in these carbon credit futures markets, resulting in a huge fund which “could be used to prime the pump for mitigation projects”. And in his most recent book, Ministry for the Future – which I have only read reviews of so far – he talks of a carbon-specific cryptocurrency. So he's clearly hopeful that some way can be found to improve the methods of using the market to control emissions.
Techno-solutions: Robinson depicts the nations of the world joining together to pull off great geo-engineering feats. As one example from the book, when it becomes clear that the AMOC is stalling, the world leaders conclude together that they must ship huge volumes of salt to the North Atlantic, to dump into the ocean. There is a logic to the plan: the melting of massive amounts of Arctic and Greenland ice introduces a huge amount of fresh water into this conveyor, and the differences in density of salt and fresh water are predicted to slow or even halt that flow – and there's some evidence that slowing has actually started to happen. So in the book, a vast number of salt mines around the world and a vast number of ships of many countries are brought into this effort, and after this massive effort the circulation returns to stability. But with every massive geo-engineering project, while they may look good on paper, it is impossible to know what unintended effects there might be until after it is too late. – Robinson has a character dispense with this concern by saying “No more of this law of unintended consequences! There is no such law.” And perhaps more importantly, today we see climate summit after climate summit essentially fail – with outsized fanfare about tiny successes. Each country blames the others for intransigence, and none will agree to any enforcement mechanism for effective action. Robinson depicts the sudden demand for salt as causing a huge rise in the price – which is certainly realistic – but he also has a climate ally just having bought a bunch of salt, so the profiteering is magically rendered moot. The shipowners are described as being “very accommodating about letting them be used to move salt” – so no sense that there would be profiteering in this realm. Robinson is enamored with the idea of these big projects, and though he mentions some of the real-world barriers, he doesn't take the question of how to overcome them seriously. It makes a feel-good story, but squarely in the realm of fantasy.
The very scale
of the problem: While the book talks about global climate
change, and the geo-political effects, Robinson's focus is the effect
that it has on the United States – what climate change means for the
residents of the USA. There is a tokenism in recognizing the effects on
other countries: one plot thread is the fate of a fictional island
country called Khembalung which initially builds dikes to stave off
being flooded, then has to evacuate when the dikes are overtopped by
rising sea levels. The refugees take up residence in the National
Science Foundation building. Other than this very small country, very
little is mentioned of the effects on other countries or the fact that
just about every country has large port cities. The question of climate
refugees is going to become a huge issue, and major shifts are going to
have to take place: today, bourgeois leaders of many countries are busy
whipping up hatred of immigrants, yet working class interests demand
that instead they are welcomed into the communities they're relocated
to.
Social change is not just a lifestyle choice: Probably the greatest weakness is Robinson's failure to understand of how social change happens. In the book, as climate effects bring ordinary life to a halt, one of his main characters “drops out” and starts to live what might be called a “neo-paleo lifestyle” – buying high-end camping equipment to survive the 50 degrees below temperatures and building a hidden platform in the trees of a large DC city park. There he meets a community of people – a mix of homeless people, squatters, scavengers – who spontaneously take up the tasks which need to be done: one group maintains the city trees, another manages the escaped animals from the city zoo, others scavenge food and other materials. These people are living off of what's left behind by the semi-collapse. Robinson clearly has a great sympathy for this kind of anarchist life style, but doesn't take seriously how society as a whole moves forward beyond consuming what's left behind from the old society. What kind of society do we build, after this? In the book only a small minority seems to take up this anarchist life “answer” – but what happens to the rest? Even though he is clearly interested in exploring social issues in his writing, Robinson doesn't even try to answer these bigger questions.
Underestimating
the necessary role of the masses: Further on the question of
social change: In fact, the masses of workers play no political role in
the 1000+ pages. They make an appearance in calculations which Robinson
has his characters discuss – an appearance as producers of surplus
value, but no appearance as actors on their own behalf in the political
arena: there are no climate demonstrations, and there is no fight
against the ruling classes who profit by the destruction of the
environment. No, the scientists are going to make everything alright.
There is a point in the book where a character develops and experiment
designed to ask: “if the scientific community were to propose a
platform of political goals based on scientific principles ... what
would the platform say?” And, among other things he imagines them
demanding that “minimum 51% share of the value of one's work should be
returned to one as surplus value beyond salary, this value to be
measured by objective and transparent accounting as defined by law”.
Thus, he imagines the scientists taking up economic demands on behalf
of the workers, and the politicians and lawyers managing the
implementation. The politicians, embodied in Green Earth in the
President, are still politicians, but they slowly grasp that it is in
their interest to do what the scientists say. And likewise, the
capitalists who profit from destroying the climate play no real role in
the book either. Whereas in the real world, big oil is still
constructing thousands of miles of pipeline, and the coal industry is
still extracting and exporting as much coal as the market will bear –
full speed ahead; meanwhile they lobby and spread lies about global
warming. In the book, the masses taking up the fight to end this
warrants barely a mention.
One challenge that faces us is that there are many people who are genuinely and rightly alarmed by climate change, who still believe that somehow, when the chips are really down, those in power can and will wake up and really address the problem in a way that considers everyone's needs. As clearly as Robinson saw the problem of climate change early on when he wrote this book, he is weak in this same respect. His characters talk of capitalism as the root of the problem, but he looks to capitalist market methods to solve it. He also doesn't recognize that when they absolutely must finally take action, the capitalists will seek ways to preserve their profits and place the burden of policy changes on the backs of the workers and poor. Not seeing that, he doesn't see how the workers will have to join together in united action, to maximize their strength and clout against these actions of the ruling class:
• We need to organize to demand effective and enforceable regulation
of carbon emissions and other environmental devastation – enforced by
the workers themselves using their power acting as a class for its own
interests.
• Climate change is a global problem. It is increasingly clear that effective policy on climate change is going to require more than a crazy quilt of policies locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Effective policy must include planning and direct regulation to rapidly shift from a climate destruction economy to a climate repair economy. The capitalist class has on its own accord adopted planning in those times of crisis when they've believed it's in their interest to do so, and at some point in the near future they may decide it's time to do that around climate change. But there's going to be a fight over who bears the brunt of the changes required, and the capitalists will always seek to preserve their “right” to unending profit above all other interests. That means the working class must fight to shape planning policy, with a different prime motive: reversing the headlong rush to destruction, and saving whatever can be salvaged. The workers are the only ones who have the interest and – with sufficient organization – the power to do so.
• We need to demand that the slogan of “climate justice” is more than just pretty sounding electioneering words, that it's made into actual policy. The communities which have been used as dumping grounds for the toxic waste of industrial processes need to be cleaned up, paid for by the capitalists who trashed them.
• We need to fight against the phony dichotomy of “jobs versus the environment” which the ruling class puts forward to impede progress toward effective policy to protect the environment: protect the environment and make sure all workers are protected. The workers of the world create the wealth which the capitalists are pocketing. We must demand that the capitalists pay real living wages, provide clean, healthy work environments, provide fully paid job retraining, for jobs which are built around protecting the environment. Every workplace, every job, will need to integrate an element of environmental protection – monitoring how waste products are handled, choosing products which have less environmental impact, and so on. This creates more work – more jobs – not fewer.
• We need to fight to change the reality of immigration policy. There's no clear dividing line between flight from climate change, and other motives for migration. Only the capitalists benefit by the current rules: capital flows freely across national borders, while travel of labor across borders is heavily regulated. Even the bourgeois rules for “legitimate” immigration – those who flee for fear of their lives – are a cruel joke in practice. The issue of immigration policy is going to intensify, and we need to fight for the full right for all people to relocate across borders as they need to.
• There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done to address the effects of climate change, including relocating refugees, building homes for them, modifying agricultural production to reflect changes in climate (what crops can be grown, when and where), building climate mitigation infrastructure, cleaning up the messes the capitalists have made, and so on. The workers are going to have to fight for these efforts to be undertaken – at a good living wage.
Robinson has a significant audience for his writings, and he is
clearly very concerned about the crisis of global warming. He sees that
it demands radical action, and it is to the good that he is using his
platform to raise the alarm in a popular and accessible way. But
because he doesn't recognize any significant role for the masses, he is
left looking to the “experts” for any solutions. This leaves him
advocating fanciful ways of trying to make tried-and-failed market
solutions work, and hoping that hail-Mary geo-engineering will fix the
problem.
(1) • Joanna Thompson, “Atlantic Ocean Currents Weakening, Near Verge of Collapse, Study Says”, August 24, 2021, HowStuffWorks.
• Ira Flatow interviewing Dr. Levke Caesar, “What Happens If
Atlantic Ocean Currents Cease To Churn?”, September 3, 2021, Science
Friday.
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