A sci-fi writer’s guide to a low-carbon future

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To tackle climate change, we need good stories and we need good storytellers. Kim Stanley Robinson is a climate fiction author who has written more than 20 novels, including Ministry for the Future, which was published in 2020. It opens in 2025, with a heatwave that kills millions in India. It’s a grim scene, and what follows is the story of humans striving to cope with an increasingly inhospitable planet — there’s ecoterrorism, high-finance, wild chases over the Swiss Alps. What emerges in Ministry is the a ‘optopian’ roadmap, in which the world gets to grips with the climate crisis and begins to rectify the situation.

In the first of three episodes talking with climate storytellers on Zero, we hear from Robinson about how he crafts a good story out of a desperate situation, what he thinks the limits of climate storytelling are, and how his thinking has changed since publishing Ministry for the Future.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd and our senior producer is Christine Driscoll. Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Todd Woody and Abraiya Ruffin. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit bloomberg.com/green

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati. This week, dystopia, utopia and optopia.
0:20.4	There's a quote I really like from the documentarian Werner Herzog.
0:22.6	It goes and I quote,
0:24.5	Facts never illuminate you.
0:26.5	The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you.
0:30.2	But these rare moments of illumination that you can find when you read a great poem,
0:35.2	you instantly know.
0:36.8	You instantly feel the spark of illumination.
0:39.3	That's also the power of a good story.
0:42.3	It takes something and makes it clear.
0:45.3	You suddenly get it.
0:47.3	The world makes a little more sense.
0:50.3	And when it comes to working out how we are going to tackle climate change, I think we need good stories.
0:56.6	And we need good storytellers.
0:59.4	So over the next few episodes of Zero, that's what we are focusing on.
1:03.3	We'll hear from Dorothy Fortenberry, one of the creators of the Apple TV show, Extrapolations, and Amy Westerweil, an investigative journalist behind the true crime podcast
1:12.5	drilled. But we start with my guest today, one of the best known writers of climate fiction,
1:18.2	Kim Stanley Robinson, who goes by Stan.
1:20.9	We're in an emergency. It doesn't do any good to just sit down on the ground and say,
1:26.5	oh my God, we're in an emergency.
1:28.7	It's a race against disaster, so you have to run like hell.
1:32.4	And that's what I'm seeing happening more and more in ways that I like.
	...

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