I have been very impressed by the latest work, as of this writing, by Kim Stanley Robinson: "The Ministry for the Future" ("for" as "in favor ", or "in defense of"). That in the story is the unofficial name of an organization set up under the aegis of the United Nations to fund research on how to take proactive action to help mitigate and, as much as possible, reverse the effects of CO2 and other pollutants on the one planet we all have no choice but to live on, whatever Mr. Elon Musk might think about Mars as a viable alternative.
There is also a group of Indian origin, calling itself "The Sons of Kali", the Hindu Goddess of Death, who attacks and destroys through sabotage and terrorist acts those responsible for activities that cause most of those emissions and profit most from doing this.
And the Ministry itself
might have a secret and perhaps rogue "Black Wing" that takes care of things the hard way.
It starts very dramatically in India with a grim climate catastrophe -- told from the point of view of a survivor that will become one of the important and most problematic characters of the novel -- caused by a monstrous heat wave there that goes on for days and days and kills twenty thousand people. The upshot of this is the start of deep political changes there and elsewhere, as well as the gathering of an international conference prompted by such a disaster, where the creation of the Ministry is decided, to be funded to the tune of several billion dollars a year.
Not only I recommend this long book for being very well written and with many passages that are actually page-turners and characters one can sympathize with and that grow on one as the pages go by, interspersed with serious and also interesting ideas and information well researched by the author. Robinson has long been active in leading organizations dedicated to understanding and helping understand the problem of climate change, and this shows.
The bottom line is that the only good thing about global warming I can think of is that it has prevented an otherwise likely new Ice Age from getting started. But if jumping from the fridge into a hot frying pan is what we have been doing, that is not a wonderful thing to our credit.
Wished we had a Ministry for the Future right now, working full-tilt towards getting us and the future generations out of this mess we live in, one of our mostly innocent and ignorant own making.
But Robinson probably is right: only an unprecedentedly horrible catastrophe is what might finally push the Powers That Be of this world to move from empty gestures and declarations to actual positive and sustained action. Color me pessimistic. For now.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...binson-review-how-to-solve-the-climate-crisis
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Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the classic Red Mars trilogy of novels about geoengineering the red planet to be habitable by humans, now offers a story about whether we can geoengineer Earth back into Earth."
