Kim Stanley Robinson is not a great writer, and this book is not great literature. Nevertheless, I'm still thinking about several days after I finished it, and I'm recommending it widely - because it's a positive utopian work about climate change and how 'we' - loosely defined - save our planet and our civilisation. It's a plausible vision, with little reliance on technologies not yet invented or - except for the eponymous Ministry, which is created by the COP to represent future generations - actors that don't exist. The political and technological narratives are possible, even if from the perspective of now they don't seem very likely. Along the way 'we' also solve the problems of inequality and ecocide/biodiversity loss.
Among the things I liked were the positive vision of India as an agent of change, the relaxed attitude to geoengineering, the nuanced view of China and its Communist Party, and the rich depiction of Switzerland, where KSR lived in his younger days when his wife worked there as an academic. An extra bonus is that quite a few of the initiatives and organisations that he describes are actually real - like the 2000 Watt Society, which I hadn't previously heard of.
So I'll be reading more of Kim Stanley Robinson, even though his prose is not the best and his characters are sometimes a bit wooden. His politics and his reportage more than make up.
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