Big News at UCSD Climate Change Panel with Ministry for the Future Author
A Pledge to Decarbonize Campus Power by 2030
UCSD’s Chancellor Pradeep Khosla stole the warm up show in advance of a Monday evening conversation with author Kim Stanley Robinson.
The Chancellor’s announcement of a commitment to decarbonize the campus by 2030 highlighted one of the key points in Robinson’s Ministry for the Future sci fi novel and anticipated an announced campus walkout/protest scheduled for Wednesday. (It’s still happening; more on this further down the page.)
Last night, a crowd of nearly 300 people heard (actually well done) forward-looking speeches by four students designated as UC Ministers For The Future. Dignitaries and sponsors were recognized and thanked. And then Robinson, seemingly unaffected by the burden of rock star status, came to the stage for roughly an hour of discussion led by Audrey Geisel University Librarian Erik T. Mitchell.
He covered a range of subjects including his years at UCSD, an LSD-tinged first look at the Sierras, and his experiences at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (commonly referred to as COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.
There were questions and answers submitted in advance, some of which asked questions about the execution of his craft. I personally was thrilled to hear another writer say only his typing figures knew what was coming next.
The entirety of the talk will be broadcast on UCSD TV in the near future.
Ministry for the Future left me awed when I first read it a couple of years back. It was, in short, a vision of climate change different from any other (that I’ve read) told in 106 short chapters from the point of view of individuals from varying locales and backgrounds.
Robinson is a science fiction author whose many writings reflect deep research into what’s possible as opposed to magicians waving wands to change the course of history. Ministry is a book about the near future that didn’t need to invent an earth shaking event/device used by many writers in envisioning a future vastly different from our current reality and expectations.
Climate change is already here. And the novel’s opening chapter describing brutal heat waves killing millions of people in India and Pakistan is just a tick away from being the reality.
The novel tells the story of the challenges faced by an imaginary United Nations and the innovative (but not far-fetched) ways humanity responded technologically, politically, and culturally to a planet defiled by economies focused on the wants of a few, as opposed to the needs of the many.
I’m sure anyone with literary interests (is there anybody in there?) in the MAGA crowd would be horrified by Ministry. After all, it involves the UN and has a generally “globalist” setting. Collective action by institutions saves the day rather than some wannabe Rambo with an AR-15.
Right wing thinkers know that living through climate changes caused by humans necessarily involves collective action. That’s why they are deniers, along with the constant stream of support from dirty energy companies more concerned with the next quarter than the next decade.
Lots of lefties will take issue with the concept of the novel’s use of Central Banks as change makers, along with the idea of an environmental action covert force, and the suggestion of capitalism as we know it killing itself.
The point of the book, however, is not about those specific institutions or concepts. It shows a way forward within the parameters of our current reality.
Robinson doesn’t claim to know what the future specifically holds for political/economic/cultural elements of society, beyond the certainty of change dictated by circumstances being inevitable.
A decent discussion on this area can be found in a Jacobin interview with Robinson from a few years back. An excerpt:
What I want to say to all my leftist readers is, get over it. We’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation, where every possible thing that has ever been suggested to escape the mass extinction event is going to be on the table. And these theoretical arguments — it’s just another capitalist ploy, it’s a silver bullet, it’s a fantasy — well, some of that’s true and some of it isn’t. So there is no excuse for ideological rigidity about something this important. As a leftist, I would say to other leftists: Get over the prejudice against the term geoengineering and look again at the situation that we’re in. We need to decarbonize. Anything we do at scale to achieve that is a form of geoengineering.
Here’s one thing I’ve been saying to open eyes around geoengineering: women’s rights are a geoengineering technology. Here’s why: when women have developed and achieved rights, because we need to get to post-patriarchy as well as post-capitalism, the population replacement rate — a steady population is like 2.1 kids per woman — drops naturally from their own life choices to a rate of like 1.8 or 1.6.
So, if you start talking about women’s rights as a geoengineering method, that takes it out of the techno-silver-bullet land, which is where we’re stuck right now. Because right now, when a leftist hears “geoengineering,” they think about an oil company pulling the wool over our eyes, suggesting we can keep burning carbon if we just throw dust into the atmosphere, and how we could end up in some kind of Snowpiercer or other extreme, far-fetched situation. So it serves as an allegory about things that could go wrong.
But I want to argue that humanity is now a major player in Earth’s biosphere, and anything we do to help Earth’s biosphere at scale — in other words, the whole civilization doing it on purpose — could be defined as geoengineering. And then you get software as well as hardware solutions.
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A Protest That Could Be a Celebration.
UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla’s pledge to decarbonize the campus by 2030 is as good as his word. It is not a binding agreement. What happens if he’s no longer around? How about California electing a –gasp!-- Republican Governor?
Although the walkout/protest announced for Wednesday was called to demand what the Chancellor has now promised, it is still important. So here are the deets, ripped off from a press release sent by the UC Green New Deal Coalition.
This Earth Week, the Green New Deal at UC San Diego will be rallying at 12 noon Wednesday, 4/19/23 at Geisel Library, followed by a teach-in at 1pm. We expect many hundreds of students to walk out of classes to join us, along with allies from the Sunrise Movement San Diego, San Diego 350, Sierra Club’s San Diego Chapter, the United Auto Workers Locals, The California Nurses Association, and many others.
UC San Diego must stop burning fossil gas and lead the transition to renewable energy. This will encourage the 10-campus UC system to do the same, help California's renewable energy
Assorted News You Should Know About.
India May Tip This Year to a Wet Bulb Temperature Threshold That Will Test Human Survival Via Daily Kos. I wonder who wrote about this sort of thing not long ago?
DeSantis leans on GOP-controlled Legislature to thwart Disney Via Politico. Rat vs Mouse. Ya’ gotta love those small government GOPer’s aiming to kill one of Florida’s largest tourist attractions. DaSantis vetoed funding for a news prison last summer.
Fox News Is in Big(ger) Trouble Via LA Times’ Harry Littleman
The judge has ruled, and will instruct the jury, that all of Fox’s statements were false. But Dominion still has the right to make its case. So they are going to present the statements, from their first opening, in all their lurid detail. Fox has to just sit there and take it.
This exclusive island town might be California’s biggest violator of affordable housing law Via Liam Dillon at the LA Times. I have to assume this story was turned in too late to make today’s Union-Tribune, since they share the same owner and printing presses. Anyhow, it should be pointed out that Coronado’ heartless Mayor, Richard Bailey, is running to replace Terra Lawson-Remer on the Board of Supervisors in 2024.
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Lead Image via UC Green New Deal Coalition