The Ministry for the Future

This chapter is a riddle, the answer to which is the sun, which promises that one day it will eat the reader.

Using the Paris Climate Accords, an international treaty to protect the environment, the signatories to the treaty create “the Ministry for the Future” (MftF) to force nations to follow through with their promises to lower carbon emissions. The new body is also a voice for future generations that will experience negative impacts from uncontrolled climate change. It is 2025.

Mary, a former minister for the Irish Republic, is now minister of the Ministry for the Future, headquartered in Zurich near the big Swiss banks. In the aftermath of the heat wave in India, the Indian government plans to lower the global temperature by dumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere (a process nicknamed a “Pinatubo,” a volcano whose sulfuric ash reflected enough light back to the sun to lower global temperatures after its 1991 eruption). Chandra Mukajee, the Indian liaison to MftF, tells Mary on a phone call that India will not wait for permission to do the Pinatubo because as many as 20 million people are dead, mostly because of all the carbon that high-income countries emitted during their industrializing pasts. She doesn’t care what the treaty says.

An Indian aid worker narrates in first person what they find during the rescue effort after the heat wave. They are among the first to arrive in Uttar Pradesh, where they discover Frank, who is so burned that he is barely alive. The worker notes that the scale of dead people, dead animals, and burning plant life is overwhelming.

Most high-income nations move on from the disaster quickly despite expressions of sympathy for India. High-income nations believe that, unlike the low-income nations clustered around the equator, they won’t suffer such events; having gotten through the process of industrialization, they can afford to use cleaner energy and have moved on to cleaner energy. They just don’t see heat waves as their problem.

Before the heat wave, India’s economy was still growing and thus dependent on carbon-emitting fuel—a contributor to increasing temperatures. After the heat wave, India radically reorganizes its energy infrastructure to create clean energy. A wide political coalition throws out those in power and ends the caste system. The Children of Kali, a more extreme faction, threaten to use ecoterrorism to force the world to address climate change. The elected Indian government presents itself as the moderate alternative.

After recuperating from his physical injuries, Frank requests that the aid organization send him to Glasgow, where the temperature is cool enough to prevent him from having the panic attacks that heat now causes him. Frank asks the aid worker who rescued him why Frank survived while the others died. The worker speculates that better nutrition, medical care, or even being a swimmer made Frank stronger than the Indians around him. Frank is disturbed that his accumulated privilege saved him. Out loud, he only says that it might just be fate, a sentiment that echoes the line of the young Indian actor he saw sheltering at the lake during the heat wave.

An unnamed narrator calculates that we are just 500 gigatons of burned fossil fuel away from raising the temperature enough to kill people and disrupt food production. Fifteen companies, mostly controlled by governments, hold the bulk of what is still in the ground. Maybe 500 people at these companies will make the decision to extract this fuel from the ground. These decision makers will mostly be men who will think of themselves as good citizens and stewards of their children’s futures. They will never admit their part in climate change.

Mary takes two meetings in Zurich that day, one with Badim, her chief of staff, and one with Tatiana Voznesenskaya, the head of MftF’s legal department. Mary and Badim sit down beside a statue of Ganymede and an eagle (said to represent Zeus). Mary experiences a moment of fear when she sees how determined Badim is to change that outcome. Badim says India’s planned Pinatubo is moving ahead, despite fears of unintended consequences. At the meeting with Tatiana, Mary gives Tatiana the go-ahead to use lawsuits in international courts to get some climate justice for future generations that will bear the brunt of poor decisions today. Tatiana and Mary suspect these efforts to fail, but there are few alternatives.

An Indian pilot who participated in India’s Pinatubo narrates this chapter. Although the work was exhausting, the narrator remembers how right and good it felt to do something practical after the death of so many. The narrator has nothing but anger and impatience for people who argue that the plan was extreme. You had to be there for the deaths and the flights to understand.

A philosopher offers some thoughts on the abstract meaning of the term ideology. In elevated diction, the unnamed narrator argues that while most people define ideology as a distortion of the world as it is, humans depend on ideology. Ideology is a tool that allows one to act without achieving complete understanding of all of reality (an impossible task, in any event). Science is the soundest ideology because it is rooted in multiple forms of crosschecking to make sure it more closely approximates reality; its goal is to create a theory of everything.

The narrator of the previous chapter characterizes our current reality. Science says we live in the age of the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which our actions have accelerated mass extinctions and irreversible climate change effects. As evidence, the narrator includes a long list of extinctions that have happened in our lifetime. It will take 20 million years for the process of evolution to replace the species we’ve destroyed, but we won’t be around by then.

In the years after surviving the heat wave, Frank tries many of the treatments for the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he suffers as a result of his experience. Nothing works because life itself—heat, sweating, thirst—is what triggers his panic attacks. He even returns to Uttar Pradesh to see if being there again will heal him. He is shaken to see that everything looks as it did before the catastrophe. Only he remembers, he believes, because only he survived. He attempts to connect with the Children of Kali, a group now committed to direct action—violence—if the high-income nations refuse to act on the causes of climate change. They have no use for Frank because the Children of Kali are a group for Indians. What Frank can do is deliver a message: The Children of Kali will kill people who contribute to climate change. Frank is free to do whatever he wants to do beyond that.

The narrator is a doctor who runs a small medical clinic and has a wife and child. The narrator’s life is comfortable until civil war breaks out in the country. The threat to the narrator’s safety becomes so bad that the narrator must be connected with someone who can smuggle the narrator and family into Turkey or some other European country. Most people in the narrator’s nation cannot afford the cost of escape. Connecting with the smuggler and driving away from home on the night the family leaves the country helps the narrator realize that the flight from the country is likely a permanent exile.

This chapter comprises meeting minutes compiled by Trudy Maggiore, a clerk for MftF. Mary meets with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, insurance specialists, climate specialists, and glaciologists (including Slawek and Pete Griffen). They all conclude that the effects of accelerating carbon dioxide emissions are such that the world and environment are on the brink of collapse. Mary argues that any means to leverage what they do have to change things is thus acceptable. Badim shows shock at her statement because it implies even violence is permissible.

The philosopher posits that we have all the food, energy, money, and other resources to sustain everyone if we distribute these resources equitably. At present, industrialized countries—specifically the 1% who hold most of the resources—stand in the way of this because they can never be satisfied with having enough instead of more than what they need. The narrator leaves the reader to imagine the practicalities of how such a distribution could take place.

This chapter is a Socratic dialogue (a series of questions and answers designed to get the student to use logic to clarify their ideas). The participants in this dialogue are a teacher and a reluctant, irreverent student who upends the teacher’s ideas (or perhaps the inverse). Many people (and non-human agents like AIs) keep the system functioning—“system” refers to the political and economic system doing such harm through carbon emissions. However, one of the speakers concludes that it is only the rule of law (as opposed to brute force or violence to uphold the status quo) that sustains it all. That’s a terrifying thought to the other speaker because legislators who make the law are so corrupt and inept. The best we can do to avoid the collapse of the system is to make sure the rule of law “stick(s)” (61), according to the last speaker.

Frank keeps trying different therapies to deal with his PTSD. Frank’s life is unbearable. Nothing his therapies offer, including EMDR—moving his eyes rapidly from right to left as he retells the story of the heat wave—is enough to put distance between the experience of the Indian heat wave and his day-to-day life, especially when he gets hot. He omits this experience from his application to get a job on a science expedition in Antarctica, but he feels triggered even there, one of the coldest places on earth. He wants his life to have meaning. He wants to punish some of the people responsible for climate change. He radicalizes himself with this train of thought.

This chapter is narrated in the first person by a man trafficked by owners of a boat. The Children of Kali rescue the narrator, one of eight forced to work on a fishing boat in the South Atlantic, during an operation to punish the traffickers. The Children of Kali blow up the boat, likely dooming the crew and captain to death. They film the incident to discourage commercial fishing, which damages ocean habitats and burns fossil fuels that damage the environment with carbon emissions. The narrator knows there is something wrong with using violence instead of laws, but he believes his resulting freedom would be a good thing.

The philosopher explores the ways we’ve tried to quantify inequality. Every measure is fundamentally flawed in some way. The dominant methods like Gross Domestic Product (an economic measure of goods and services produced in a year) or the Gino coefficient (a calculation that measures how varied the level of inequality is in a given economy or economies)—all show that we are living in perhaps the greatest age of inequality in human history. Whatever the method, these indexes tend to reflect the biases of the powerful. GDP, for example, incorporates economic activities that are blatantly destructive of people or the environment. We could, however, go outside and observe with our own eyes what inequality looks like.

The first-person narrator is an affluent partygoer at the house of a woman whose house borders a public beach. During the party, the narrator and a group of young men led by one Edmund decide to remove Frank from the beach because his disheveled appearance annoys them and prevents them from enjoying their luxurious surroundings. Frank tells them off for destroying the planet. Edmund mocks him with a quote from Shakespeare. Frank strikes Edmund with a piece of driftwood and kills him (likely by accident). The narrator is shocked by this outcome.

This chapter is narrated in the third person by Janus Athena, who uses no pronouns. Adele Elia and Bob Wharton, two people who work for MftF, run into Griffen and Slawek, glaciologists who have thought about one solution to rising sea levels due to glacier melt. Slawek suggests that pumping water from beneath glaciers and dumping it onto nearby glaciers will reduce several sources of the increased rate of melt. This intervention will be expensive but less so than dealing with catastrophic rises in sea level. Slawek didn’t share this idea at the meeting in the previous chapters because getting it done would force him to think politically.

Frank escalates his campaign to kill someone who is responsible for climate change by stealing a gun and aiming it at a target. He cannot go through with the assassination because doing so is an intentional, criminal action that will make him a terrorist. He doesn’t seem to realize that he killed Edmund.

The philosopher reflects further on ideology. Cognitive science has revealed that we are prone to many kinds of errors, especially cognitive (thinking) ones (an extensive list is included). Knowing that cognitive errors are built into the ideology we use to function does nothing to help us avoid them, although philosophy and science can help a little with this problem. Even these tools are unavailable, however, in an irrational mind. The narrator argues that holding an irrational ideology can lead to extremely destructive outcomes.

This chapter is narrated in the third person from Mary’s point of view. Frank kidnaps Mary. He admits to having killed people. They end up at her apartment after she refuses to go with him to his place. He argues that the MftF’s interventions will not work fast enough to prevent the mass extinction of humans and animals. The group needs to embrace violence, including targeted assassinations of the people most responsible. They need a “black wing” (99) to carry out such operations. Killing them would be an act of self-defense if future people did it.

Mary believes in using the law as it is to effect change, not violence. Frank argues that trials after the Holocaust set the precedent that one should not comply with unjust laws, and current laws unjustly doom people of the future. Their tense exchange ends when police officers knock on the door to check on Mary because an unknown man who is not an acquaintance entered her apartment. Mary denies this because Frank forces her to. She also realizes that someone with authority is surveilling her. Frank isn’t there after the officers leave, so Mary runs out of the apartment to tell the officers the truth.

Frank has a fake passport and visa that allow him to be in the country under the assumed identity of Jacob “Jake” Salzman. Switzerland has pervasive surveillance that will make it hard for him to travel, however, so he hides out in a community garden shed for the time being.

Mary has constant, visible security after the kidnapping, and she is furious with Frank for forcing her to give up her privacy. She is shocked when she realizes that Frank’s arguments have shaken her commitment to the ideology of the rule of law. She broaches the topic with Badim. He tells her there is already such a wing—there is always one—and everyone involved assumed she knew this, given her position and the history of Ireland. She demands more details, but Badim tells her that this is not the way things are done. Leaders shouldn’t know enough about black operations to incriminate themselves: They will lose their leadership ability if they know too much. Mary realizes her naivete.

There are stories in the Hebrew tradition of humble, righteous people who rise up to save their people in times of trouble and then disappear back into anonymity. The narrator speculates about whether real secret actors exist, and if so, how they’ve acted on human history. Will they act during our time?

Glaciologist Griffen, first-person narrator of this chapter, tries out his plan to pump ice from beneath glaciers to slow down the melting that causes catastrophic rises in sea levels. His test pump works for four days, but water stops coming up. His postgraduate students remind him that although a fix like this is urgent, failing to show it can work early on might lead to a loss of research funding.

The philosopher examines what defines the character of the first two decades of the 21st century as a historical period, speculating that it might resemble 1900-1914, the moment before the catastrophe of the world wars remade the world. What many comprehend about the 2020s is that everything is falling apart, and no one can stop it.

That overwhelming, shared sense of resignation and fear that emerged during this period is an example of what 20th-century theorist Raymond Williams calls the “structure of feeling” (75), and it shaped people’s values and actions during this period. People’s feelings about this time might change; such feelings generally do over time. Biologically, all living things are falling apart (every living thing must die), so this feeling of doom might not be so far from reality.