What Would It Take to Save the World?

     Kim Stanley Robinson uses The Ministry for the Future, beyond simply telling a narrative, to display a future where the world must make choices and changes to combat our climate neglect. In doing so, several alternatives to our current living standards are offered, each presenting their own sacrifices and challenges. While not exactly advocating or denouncing any of these ideas, my goal is to acknowledge the varying and necessary viewpoints for proper change to come about, and debate their plausibility. 

    One of the solutions depicted in the novel is the strategy taken by India, where they engage in such green practices that they reach carbon negativity, specifically in the state of Sikkim (Robinson 231). The benefits of this practice are obvious: their lifestyles are actually lowering the carbon in the atmosphere, which in turn helps to slow down global warming. However, such a lifestyle comes with consequences. This region ends up being one of the poorer regions in India comparatively, which is a hard choice to make consciously. This specific inverse relationship between money earned and positive impact on the environments becomes the major barrier to attempting to counteract climate change.

     Many people have come to not only enjoy, but expect, many modern comforts. Things like television, smart phones, other devices that can access the internet are all included. Transportation such as planes also accounts for this. These are incredible advancements in technology, but they also cost money and in the case of planes can be directly harmful to the climate. If the world were to try to become more environmentally friendly, then that would mean both giving up environmentally unfriendly advancements, such as oil-fueled transport, as well as expensive comforts like personal technology, since more of that money would be going to green efforts. Willingly sacrificing comforts that have become commonplace to many people is an incredibly challenging ask. Personally, I don't take planes very often, but it's how I visit my grandparents in Florida. On one hand, I'd like to be able to see them without the process taking weeks. However, if change isn't brought about, Florida could potentially become uninhabitable within 50 years. Similar arguments could be made about the phone I use or the computer I'm writing this blog post on. I wouldn't expect people to give up those things to solve a distant problem, I'm not even sure I could do it. 

    So what exactly could be done to enact this change with minimal sacrifice? Well, those with an extreme surplus in money taking on the brunt of the cost would be nice, but that's hard to expect. There are small lifestyle changes that can be made in the short term without the massive system reform brought on in India, like using oil transport like cars and planes more sparingly. Perhaps if we were to give up comforts like those, we would find that it's not so bad, and that making a difference is actually much closer and easier than our problems would make it out to be.