Stranger than fiction: imagining our climate future/ Ben Barry and Jeffrey Mazo

In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates shows why a net-zero world is necessary, and how it might be achieved through fostering demand for and the supply of innovation. He argues that technology, policy and markets must be shaped at the same time, and in the same direction. His technocratic approach ignores (explicitly) climate politics and (implicitly) the second-order consequences (including social disruption and violence) of political and technological innovation. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future offers an all-too-plausible example of how today’s climate emergency and attempts to address it might give rise to armed action by insurgent groups, international organisations and governments, and even a transnational insurgency against climate change itself. These complementary portrayals of the path to a sustainable industrial ecosystem for the planet are unlikely to resemble the true course of events in detail, but they may in spirit.

CLIMATE DISASTER, CLIMATE CHANGE, NEWARTICLS