[kX4A8o4mVmX8aW]

Thanks for all the detail. On further thought I read Smil's article uncharitably. I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson's "Ministry for the Future" which is a near-future novel trying to thread the needle of how we might escape total climate catastrophe. Limited carbon burn continues throughout the novel, and the obvious need for that was probably in my mind to where I thought Smil's article must have had some ulterior motive for making such a basic point. I suppose instead it's sadly the case that even today a lot of people think that any fossil fuel reduction is impossible or, at the other extreme, that the only acceptable path is a total and immediate halt. Smil seems aimed at both of those types of folks.

It looks like Smil's new book is available at my local library so I'll read it and judge for myself. Thanks again.

[dredmorbius]

Smil does find himself in a target-rich environment and attacks with abandon.... Again, neither an optimist nor pessimist.

I'm a bit over 3/4 through MotF, which is quite a read. Francis Fukuyama reviews that and Neal Stevenson's Termination Shock (which I've not yet read. And his principle criticism of Robinson is that the book is far too optimistic:

While there are some dramatic responses in the book, like the kidnapping of the Davos crowd and assassinations of oil executives, the book imagines what is in a way the best possible future outcomes. The eco-terrorist campaign and attacks on airliners do not trigger massive repression (people, it appears, don’t mind giving up air travel); five million people march spontaneously on Beijing and compel the CCP to speed up the energy transition; the crisis becomes the occasion to implement universal basic income around the world with no adverse consequences for the economy apart from a six-month recession; and the various attempts at geo-engineering all work as planned and produce no unanticipated effects.

https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/two-futures/

I'd make a similar response to Fukuyama as to you: KSR wrote a specific book with a specific point in mind: if you want a survivable outcome, then events would need to play out largely as he suggests. KSR isn't arguing that this is the probable or plausible path, but that it's the necessary one.

(It's also very much a vehicle for advancing KSR's political views, which is another discussion. That said, as a minority opinion, I think the airing is well-deserved.)

[kX4A8o4mVmX8aW]

I agree with your position that MotF portrays what generally needs to happen for us to have a non-horrifying future, though as a matter of probability it's like getting heads on ten coin flips in a row.

Fukuyama's criticism about characterization is unfair because I don't think KSR was trying and failing to make amazing characters. They were just vehicles for the larger story. Being disappointed that a main character didn't have sex at the end is really missing the point.

An aside: while reading MotF I felt the same sort of relentless sense of passing time that you get in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar. Interestingly both the book and movie are about climate change and time and, also, about centering the story and setting at the expense of characterization.

I'm ambivalent about the advantages of arguing for political change as a necessary part of environmental change. But as you said in an earlier comment, rapid transition (which I think is likely, as we go right to the cliff and then fall off) will itself be horribly traumatic. It will require massive government intervention to prevent total societal collapse. After hurricanes and earthquakes, you don't adjust tax rates, you send in the military.

My own major criticism of MotF is that, as the COVID crisis makes clear, people live by motivated reasoning, and as climate change gets worse that motivation will be fear, and frightened people will act badly. Most of the opposition in MotF are rich people trying to hold onto what they have or technocratic rulers too timid to act. In the actual world the real problem will be billions of terrified people whose past has been or is about to be destroyed and with no clear future. However that story told honestly would look like a Cormac McCarthy novel and maybe KSR just doesn't want to go there yet.