A Review of Ministry for the Future and its Representation of International Cooperation

Post-capitalist society for climate's sake

Image courtesy of Li-An Lim on Unsplash

The snowy, wintered streets of Zurich evoke many ideas in the minds of those unfamiliar with the locale: masterfully delicious chocolates, carved-oak Alpine-themed clocks and watches, and, for those familiar with global politics, intense diplomatic conversations among the world’s politicians. This environment is particularly depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future as the backdrop to the world-saving work undertaken by the cast of characters to address the global climate crisis and imagine a post-capitalist global political economy while doing so in a world resistant to such upending change. A yin-yang balance of soft and hard power behind the Ministry is established with its highly descriptive illustrations of important meetings with the Swiss Federal Council, the American Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and members of various world governments, while also including sparse details concerning the shadowy acts of the Ministry’s eco-terroristic ‘black-wing.’

While a work of speculative science fiction, the book’s content is drawn from the situation we face now in 2025. In the book, the Ministry for the Future, and its mandate as a “subsidiary body for the implementation of the agreement,” was created from Article 14 of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the fictional COP29-Bogota. Given in 2024, the real-life COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in 2024, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed the world was “teetering on a planetary tightrope,” as provided by the frameworks from The Ministry for the Future, what does the state of the response to climate change spell for future international cooperative ambitions?

On page 288 of the book, Robinson narrates the setting of a meeting in the anciently stoic Kongresshalle of Zurich. “A spring storm lashed…with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain onto the silvery lake surface…,” a description which serves as a remarkably placid juxtaposition to the scene unfolding within the building, as members of the global banking community, some of the most powerful and influential individuals in the world, are gathered to discuss economic solutions to the world climate crisis. In this meeting, the idea of a carbon coin, a global currency backed by the world’s major banks, in which each coin represents a ton of carbon left unburnt and solidly underground in the form of raw coal, untapped oil, or any other form of greenhouse gas, is flouted and hotly debated by the personalities in the room. The result would theoretically make these resources rarer and thus more expensive, while subsidized renewable energy would continue getting cheaper until the benefits of green energy outweigh the opportunity costs of resorting to greenhouse gases. This result would also solve one of the most intense debates in the climate agreements; how to balance the global imperative to reduce carbon emissions while promoting the continued growth of developing nations.

However, it took 288 out of 563 pages to reach the point where the carbon coin was seriously discussed, and another 54 pages before it was implemented by the world’s banks, roughly sometime in the 2030s. Given that COP29 and the establishment of the ministry would have aligned with 2024, and where we stand now in 2025 with newly-inaugurated President Trump having just withdrawn from international agreements and agencies such as the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, where do we go from here? The statistics, warnings, and dangers from scientists, politicians, and environmentalists could not be clearer: action is needed, and not when Miami is already six feet underwater. Just this year, the UN declared that “no significant progress” towards solving the crisis was made, and as of right now, not a single country has met its Paris Agreement goals. If the world’s governing bodies understand the gravity of the situation, and the pro-environmentalist forces in many of the world’s countries have been making active gains and victories in this category, then why are these agreements failing?

Yes, the climate is a depressing topic. However, even though the day’s news is dominated by our collective failings in that regard, it does not mean the international community has never taken actionable steps. The Montreal Protocol of 1987, the first such climate treaty to be ratified universally, outlined steps to combat the man-made hole in the atmospheric ozone layer. This ranged from the moratorium on the production of aerosol-based products with chemicals harmful to air quality, which helped prevent a forecasted 2.5-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century. It stood as a hallmark of global cooperation as one of the earliest examples of legislated action on climate change. Additionally, the European Commission reports that since the protocol’s adoption, global usage of ozone-depleting products has fallen by 98%. Tight EU Ozone regulations take a step beyond the Montreal Protocol’s stipulations on production and trade of these materials, by also prohibiting their use within the European Union.

We generally agree the Montreal Protocol was successful. However, its successor and the lovechild of COP3 in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, left a troubled and complicated legacy for its ultimate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The triumph of the Montreal Protocol left many diplomats and politicians optimistic as to the future of climate cooperation, which led to the deal struck in Kyoto. Kyoto codified in legalese written emissions-reduction agreements for the first time in international legal history. Yet not only did they fail to achieve any reduction, CO2 levels were found to have risen by 44% in 2012 from their 1997 levels. So, why did Montreal succeed where Kyoto failed? The answer can be found in that very scene from The Ministry for the Future which speaks to an innate human concept. For a solution to work, it requires a clear understanding of the ultimate goal and a clear approach to arriving there. With the Ministry and its carbon coin, the goal was to reduce global income inequality and reduce carbon emissions in a way that worked within the confines of the contemporary economic system. With Montreal and the ozone layer, the goal was to reverse the damage done and avoid the litany of problems associated with an expanding gap in the ozone, problems such as skin cancer, plant degeneration, and marine wildlife loss. With Kyoto, the goal was simplistic, really; one that we have heard a million times over with little substance. Reduce carbon emissions. Get rid of greenhouse gases. Save the planet. But in Zurich, spring storms are known for their unpredictability. Sudden gusts and thrashing squalls batter the quaysides of the lakeshore city, and to sail through a storm like this is incredibly nebulous and dangerous. In a similar sense, the way forward with climate agreements requires fighting against this confusion. With Kyoto, the ways forward were too numerous to be effective, and each too costly to be desired. To reduce carbon emissions, one had to fight the varying levels of development possessed by each of the world’s countries, then convince them all to abandon their lucrative factories and coal mines and oil derricks and uranium quarries, scrap it all, and accept the consequences. Montreal on the other hand, offered a more targeted solution: remove products with chemicals harmful to the ozone, and subsidize their replacements in the local economies. The carbon coin itself was the solution, acting in the same way money as a concept does: money holds all the value we give it, and if endowed with the value of the world’s untapped natural resources, suddenly the economy as we know it is entirely rewritten.

Kyoto placed the burden of reducing greenhouse gases in their varied and diverse forms squarely onto the shoulders of countries with no real plan for success. Kyoto was, on paper, a success after all; countries met their required targets without major disruptions to their economies. But the issue with this is the same as, when cleaning your room, pushing 90% of the unwashed laundry beneath the bed and then neatly folding and putting away the remaining ten percent. As clean as the floor seems, the real behemoth of undealt laundry still lurks beneath the bed frame.

One final thought left by a furtive read of Robinson’s work is that of the unharnessed potentials that can be seen if examined just a bit more closely. If viewed from the lens of opportunism, the carbon coin worked within the current global system to incentivize people to keep their carbon in the ground by attaching monetary value to that carbon. In a similar sense, Montreal was a tantalizing opportunity from an innovative entrepreneurial perspective of how it forced the world to look away from traditional refrigeration techniques. To be the state actor to pioneer a new technique is to build a new niche in the global marketplace, which offers a new, environmentally friendly, comparative advantage. Another reason why it could be said Kyoto failed was the lack of such a business incentive, of a readily understood problem of supply and demand that could be solved by reworking the graph and coming up with a profitable solution. So if this is what the world needs to grease the wheels of progress, what could this bode for climate agreements?

This is not a critique of the effort that went into building Kyoto. This is a warning against the mistakes made in the past, of plans either too ambitious or not far-reaching enough, and especially with plans that write tall orders without clear avenues to reaching them.

Progress towards different layers of agreement: could visibly see as someone without education on the topic, comm strategy is easier, much easier to make politically viable

W Kyoto, there is no real cost effective plan on replacing natural gas and oil: harder to convince people to give something up rather than replacement: government’s need to ask the populace to give up a lot more

No real business incentive: w Montreal, already enough research and replacement to put in refrigeration units without it: if you can be the country that produces the replacement to the issue fastest, that represents a real comparative advantage: east Asian tech revolution

Post-capitalism: the advantage in creating the innovation; outside of a major disaster that affects capitalists, it is hard to overturn it. Paris provisions: continuation from Kyoto, similar issue, political difficult question: another failure of the Kyoto protocol politically was that countries were worried about losing a comparative advantage. Nationally determined levels of emissions, set goals appropriate for the national goals: addresses those inequalities. Make the EU, China, and US give up more by setting more ambitious goals for development. International Law is enforced by diplomatic favor.