The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Mary brought them to order. She reminded them of the meetings she had had with them over the past few years, in which she had urged them to create a new currency of their own collaboration, based on carbon sequestration, and exchangeable on currency exchanges; money like other money, but backed by the central banks working together, and securitized by the creation of really long-term bonds, bonds with a century pay-out at a guaranteed rate of return large enough to tempt anyone interested in fiscal stability. In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious ways that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them. No way, she said to the bankers; not a chance that would happen. Shorting civilization and imagining living on in some fortress island of the mind was another fantasy of escape, one of many that rich people entertained, as ridiculous as retreating to Mars. Money was worthless if there was no civilization to back it, no civilization to make things to buy— things like food. So even if the central bankers were regarding their task in the very narrowest terms, as stabilizing prices and helping the employment rate, and more than anything else, preserving the perceived value of money itself— to do that now, they had to leave their usual monetarist silos, and regard themselves as what they were, the not-so-secret government of the world. In that capacity, something more was now called for than merely adjusting their fucking interest rates.

  Yes, they were shocked by her bluntness, by her disgust for their timidity. These Irish! they were thinking; she could see that. But they were also paying very close attention to her; they were transfixed, the storm outside forgotten. Now the storm was in the room, in the form of one angry intense middle-aged woman.

  Well, she had to remember; when a meeting got hot it was usually going badly. This was a calculated risk, getting their attention by lashing them a bit; now she had to calm it down. So she did that. The last time she had asked them to do this, she reminded them, they had refused her. Now, she told them, the situation was different. It was so much worse it could scarcely be believed. And as the current representative in their midst of all the future generations to come, she was going to have to insist that they act. She was (remembering what Dick had told her about letting them invent the instruments) open to their suggestions as to how best to act. Possibly the Bank for International Settlements could be brought out of its twentieth-century time capsule and used as the instrument at hand for this. But act they must. Because civilization was trembling on the brink. They were going down.

  Here the pathetic fallacy of an ordinary Zurcher spring storm helped bring her point home. The wind was really howling now, the air was black though it was just before noon, the whole lake was slamming into the windows and blurring the view, then the wind clarifying it with a blast, time after time— it was almost as rainy as Galway.

  The new Chinese minister of finance, who served as the head of their central bank and was also at the same time a member of the standing committee, and thus one of the seven most powerful people in China, stood up to speak. A woman who had learned her English at Oxford, it sounded like, and she had a cheerful relaxed manner, as if they were discussing history, which Mary supposed they were. She pointed out that Mary had not visited China in her tour of the central banks, nor had she herself been finance minister at that time, so she had not been part of the earlier unenthusiastic response Mary had just described. In fact, in China the national banks were always trying to throw their weight around as vigorously as they could to help China’s economy, and they would be happy to join any international effort that they felt could help in a way that was good for China and the world. Indeed, it sounded to her as if what Mary was asking for was precisely the kind of thing that the Chinese government did all the time.

  True enough to be a discussion point, Mary replied. But no matter which national or surpranational (with a nod to the European Union’s central bank head, and the BIS head) model they referenced or preferred, now she urged them to consider again something new and fully international: a carbon coin, a digital currency backed by a consortium of all the big central banks, with open access for more central banks to join; these coins to be backed by long-term bonds created by the consortium, and shored up against financial attacks by speculators who were sure to attack it. Defended by all the central banks working together, they would be able to repulse successfully any entities that tried to hamstring their new system. Indeed, if the central banks blockchained not just the new carbon coins but all the fiat money that existed, they could probably squeeze parasitic speculators right out of existence. The best defense being a good offense.

  The crucial banks, Mary thought privately, were the US, the ECB, and China. Germany and the UK were also important, also Switzerland itself. The more the merrier, of course, as always; but the big three were crucial. Even if it were just those three, they could probably go it alone; although if they were in, Mary was sure others would join.

  So, right now, although the new Chinese finance minister thought she was being positive by cheerfully comparing the proposal to ordinary Chinese practice, this wasn’t actually helping much with the others; they were looking skeptical that becoming more like China was really the answer for this moment. China was debt-laden, opaque, oligarchic, authoritarian. Even granted the modifying Chinese characteristics always referenced, they were avowedly socialist, even Marxist. What that really meant no one knew, not even the Chinese, but their financial practices were constantly offending ordinary Western norms and sensibilities, so it hadn’t been a very diplomatic move on the part of the Chinese finance minister to suggest to them that by necessity they were now having to become more Chinese. But looking at her, Mary didn’t think that this new finance minister was really very regretful about that. Her look was amused, but in the way a hawk might be amused, something hard to imagine. She had a fierce edge.

  On the other hand, all central banks were undemocratic technocracies, not that dissimilar to China’s top-down system. They were run by financial elites who did what they felt was best without consulting even their own legislatures, much less the citizens of their countries. As institutions they were in fact specifically designed to function outside any legislative or democratic whims, the better to keep the financial ship of the world steadily sailing on into the great west of universal prosperity— for the elites first, and everyone else if they could be accommodated without endangering the elites on the first-class deck. So an invitation to become more undemocratic, if couched diplomatically enough, would not be entirely unwelcome to this crowd. It would be a matter of how one phrased it.

  Phrasing was also important when showing the stick. First the carrot, which she felt was the best way to lead: do it, she told them, and you are the saviors of the world, staving off chaos and allowing the huge resources of humanity and the Earth to be brought to bear on the greatest crisis in history. People would be writing about them, analyzing them and copying them, even celebrating them, for centuries to come; and a model would be built by them here and now which could be adapted to deal with any future crises of similar dimensions. Thus the carrot.

  The stick: if they didn’t do it, Mary and her team could arrange the whole thing to happen through YourLock accounts as a distributed ledger coin, created and given by people to each other. This would cut hard into any power central banks might be said to have. Then also, the Ministry for the Future had allies within every relevant legislature, and Mary’s legal team had prepared detailed advice for governments to introduce new legislation that would expand legislative control over the central banks, giving them mandates and responsibilities to mitigate climate change proactive
ly, as opposed to just responding to the financial risks reactively. The new mandates would require central banks to create a digital currency and manage the exchange rate of it, using all the mechanisms at their disposal. In short, Mary was prepared to start a movement worldwide in which governments put their central banks on leashes and directed them to act in ways governments wanted. The great example of how effective this nationalization or internationalization of the national banks could be was the takeover of the Bank of England by the British Treasury during the Second World War. Britain had commandeered the Bank of England to properly guide capital where it was needed to win the war. The same could be done again with climate change, if the relevant legislatures felt it was necessary. Country-appropriate laws were ready to be introduced by sympathetic powerful politicians in every country.

  That’s what we’ll do if we have to, she concluded. She was being blunt again, as at the start; she was slipping into that certain Irish rhetorical mode that was so often useful, the one that said No more fucking around, reality has struck— said with blunt disdain for any naiveté or cowardice that refused to admit the obvious facts. That mode was a mode she liked.

  But of course, she went on silkily, I don’t think a total takeover of central banks by governments, or replacement by a new people’s currency, will be necessary. Sharing for a moment a single basilisk glare with the Chinese minister, who clearly was enjoying her presentation. Renminbi was Chinese for people’s money, after all. The situation we’re facing is unprecedented, she went on, and its causes are clear, and now we have to act, and so we will.

  Are the causes so clear? asked Jane Yablonski sharply. I’m not so sure!

  Mary let Badim and the rest of her team make the case. She had asked them to prepare a kind of group presentation that ran around the table in cause/effect mode, describing each aspect of the problem in turn. Of course the causal chains ran in all kinds of directions, it was a cat’s cradle, but she could make that point at the end; for now, three minutes each to describe the problem: climate change caused by carbon dioxide and methane released to the atmosphere; knock-on effects very close to releasing vastly larger quantities of CO2 and methane, now cached in the Arctic permafrost and the ocean’s continental shelves; oceans unable to uptake more CO2 and heat; rate of extinctions already as high as at any time in Earth’s history, in terms of actual speed of extinctions per century, thus set now to match the Permian in terms of total percentage of species gone from the land, which was ninety percent; subsequent to that coming extinction, inevitable famine, dislocation, and war— possibly nuclear war— leading to the destruction of civilization; impossibility of insuring against such an eventuality, or clawing back from it. Irreversible and unfixable catastrophe.

  Thus, ultimately, as a result of all these converging factors, Mary concluded at the end of her team’s presentations, they were facing the impossibility of stabilizing inflation rates and employment rates as the climate heated up. The specific principal tasks that central banks were charged with could no longer be fulfilled if the climate emergency got out of hand. In other words, central banks would fail in their principal tasks if they did not save the civilization that had charged them with those tasks. And although it was true that full employment would always remain a key objective for them, she finished, it wasn’t such a victory if the remnant of humanity that survived the crash ended up working as scavengers and peasant farmers. That wasn’t the kind of full employment that the world had in mind when central banks were created.

  She saw that Yablonski and the Europeans were offended at this final sarcasm, and she pondered for a moment simply shouting suddenly in their faces, or taking her shoe off and pounding the table Khrushchev style. Or throwing a chair through the picture window and letting the storm pour in over them. Sudden fury at their mulishness: Fuck your inflation rates! she wanted to shout. Do the job that only you can do!

  And judging by their faces, it was possible that her own face held all these sentiments and imagined actions and curses, perfectly visible in the way she was looking at them. The power of the eye. Not Medusa, turning them to stone or killing them with a strike from a snake on her head— instead, she fervently hoped, some kind of electrical jump-start, applied by jumper cables that had her two eyes as the contact grips, leaping the gap from mind to mind. Yes, she was very close to losing it.

  Then she saw that the Chinese finance minister was grinning broadly, not even trying to hide it. She checked her cheat sheet; who was this woman again? Madame Chan. Daughter of a finance minister from the generation before. A child of the Party hierarchy, like Xi had been, and so many others. Mary liked her look.

  In the following days the representatives of the central banks kept meeting in the same room, and while the Zurichsee provided emotional guidance by way of a succession of brilliantly sunny days, marked by tall clouds like galleons, sailing over the lake as if carrying vast treasure, the central bankers finally invented a proposal they could all agree on. It was as bold as anyone could want, and Mary felt that none of the central bankers there would have touched the plan with a ten-foot pole if all of them weren’t in it together to take the heat sure to follow. They would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS: one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air. They promised to establish a floor in the value of this carbon coin, which exposed them to great danger from speculators trying to scare money out of the plan; and they foretold a rise in the value of the currency over the coming decades. By doing these things they made this investment a sure thing, assuming civilization itself survived. That by itself would guarantee a certain large amount of capital from many different sources looking for just such a sure thing. Pension funds, small national reserves, big corporate assets, really anyone responsible would want the security involved, especially now that there was no security anywhere else. In essence it was like throwing a life ring to drowning people. It could overwhelm the system, actually, if everyone grabbed at once; but carbon had to be sequestered to create the coins in the first place, so if there was a mad rush to do that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. And the central banks could always adjust upward the amount of carbon saved that would be required to earn a coin, creating derivative complications of all kinds and giving them more control knobs. Getting the certification teams for the sequestrations up and running was going to be a crazy effort. In fact, at the end of the agreement they all lent some fiat money of the ordinary kind, pooled into a fund administered through the BIS, which would be enough to pay for this new bureaucracy of verification that would have to be created to certify that carbon was really being sequestered. This was a bureaucracy so vast no single bank could afford it, nor of course the ministry, not even close. It was almost a full employment plan all by itself.

  So it was a total program. Mary’s team wrote it up in detail, in consultation with the bankers on hand and their staffs, taking all their suggestions and folding them in, and then in the end, after each bank had consulted with its government back home, they announced it, and offered the first tranche of carbon coins for purchase. Began to disburse them too; and the trade price for them held, even rose a little.

  Then nothing happened.

  This, Mary thought as the days and weeks after the meeting passed, was beginning to look like a pattern. They were only really doing things to try to ameliorate the situation they were falling into after it was too late for those things to succeed. They kept closing the barn door after the horses were out, or after the barn had burned down. At that point their actions, which a few years or decades earlier might have been quite effective, weren’t enough. Maybe even close to useless. Over and again it was a case of too little too late, with nothing stronger anyone could think of to apply to the worsening situation.

  If this were really true for something physical, like the Arctic’s permafrost me
lt, or the ocean’s acidification past the point of life at the bottom of the food chain surviving it, or the Antarctic’s ice sheet collapsing fast— then they were fucked and no denying it.

  And yet there were still people fighting tooth and claw. And it could be that it was only in the realm of the social that they were so far behind the curve of the moment. Anyway people were fighting.

  Although not just for the good, but also against the good— fighting tooth and claw to forestall their efforts, to hamstring them. Thus in effect there were people trying to kill every living thing on Earth, in some awful genocidal murder-suicide. Here they were, walking a tightrope over the abyss, and these fuckers were jumping all over the balancing pole they were holding, doing their best to cast them all down to disaster and death.

  “There will always be idiots,” Badim intoned as Mary cursed another manifestation of these people.

  But it was worst than that. “There will always be assholes,” she said viciously.

  Badim said, “Focus on all the people still fighting for the good. There are many more of them than the other kind.”

  Then one month after the carbon coin announcement, a bomb went off in their offices on Hochstrasse.

  It happened at night, with no one in the building; perhaps that had been the bombers’ intent, but there was no way to tell. The Swiss police who accompanied Mary to see the wreckage were taut with apprehension, and they were not so much apologetic as they guarded her, as stolidly disapproving. Blaming the victim being one of the errors that law enforcement people were so often prone to.

  They advised her to accept more police protection. In fact they insisted on it. And it was true that the sight of their offices, solid stone Swiss buildings, built to last a thousand years, blown open, shattered, their interiors visible from the street, a black shambles that would have killed them all had they been inside, was indeed shocking to her. So she agreed.