The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Author:Kim Stanley Robinson [ROBINSON, KIM STANLEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Hosting a meeting of a dozen or twenty of the most powerful people on Earth, which meant also accommodating large staffs for each of them, was a big job, but one that the Swiss were used to performing. For this meeting there were too many people for the ministry offices to hold, so they held the meeting in the Kongresshall, down by the lake.

The morning they convened, the broad picture windows spanning the south wall of the big room provided them with the pathetic fallacy in full measure: a spring storm lashed the Zurichsee, with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain onto the silvery lake surface, the windows running wild with deltas of rainwater kaleidoscoping this view. Nothing unusual in that, no LA-like climate apocalypse here, just Zurich spring weather as usual; but still very fitting, given the mood in the room, which was one of grim virtue. They would weather this storm, they said to each other while looking out at it, and all the stark emotion in the room was heightened by the dark metallic sublimity of the rain-lashed whitecaps on the lake, the sound of the wind ripping through the flailing trees.

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.

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