An unlikely alliance of economists and science fiction authors may be the key to saving the planet from the worst of global heating.
We write as the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) opens. The United Nations’ first global stocktake report, released in September, showed that the world is way off course to bring carbon emissions under control and keep global heating under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. And yet, just as the diplomats and their scientific advisors scramble to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible, the vested interests attached to fossil fuels have managed to turn COP28 into a platform for coordinating more investments in oil, gas and coal.
This inconsistency is a product of the current economic model, which rewards profit over – and even at the expense of – human wellbeing and nature’s health. For profit to keep growing, the economy must grow, and with it the pressure it exerts on the planet.
Can we keep advanced capitalism and still save the planet? This would require “green growth”, economic growth decoupled from environmental pressures on all planetary boundaries.
The problem with this idea is that nothing remotely similar has ever been observed on the global scale. Some of the richer countries appear to have achieved this, but this is due to them “exporting” their emissions to lower-income countries, where most of the mining and manufacturing happen.
In the words of Lund University economist Timothée Parrique, “If you believe in green growth, the burden of proof is on you”. Like Parrique, more and more scholars are calling for an all-out redesign of our economic system, refocusing it away from extractivism, consumerism and extreme inequalities and onto human well-being that leaves no one behind.
All this need not be bad news. There is extensive modeling suggesting that we are already en route to producing enough renewable energy for all of humanity to live well, provided wasteful material consumption is rolled back. We have all the right technologies to stop global heating and live well; what we lack is an economy that does not reward the exploitation of fellow humans and nature.
Such lack is, admittedly, no small matter: not just because vested interests can be expected to resist any comprehensive attempt at reform, but because we struggle to imagine what a viable alternative system might look like. No surprise there: for over 40 years we were told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the status quo. With every critical mind dismisses as impractical, if not delusional, policy makers resolve to keep to the path of economic growth, and here we are now.
Rejecting TINA and economic science fiction
This is where science fiction comes in. A small cadre of economically inclined science fiction authors have not bought into TINA.
Ursula K. Le Guin shrugged it off: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings”. Cory Doctorow dismissed it outright: “Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘there is no alternative’ was always a demand dressed up as an eternal truth”.
These and other authors have connected with the academic economists advocating for system overhaul, taking their ideas and making them come alive in their work. Among the most striking example is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which imagines a future history where a monster heat wave kills 20 million people in southern India; this tragic event causes the countries that are signatories to the Paris Agreement to create and resource an agency charged to implement them.
The rest of the novels focus on the policy innovations that, amidst much struggle, finally bring emissions under control. Economists, in turn, seem fascinated by this type of science fiction: leading thinkers like development economist Ha-Joon Chang and degrowth theorist Giorgos Kallis have written essays about science fiction novels. Former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis published a science fiction novel of his own.
Economic science fiction is important. It helps us imagine our lives (our jobs, school, health care, parenting…) in unfamiliar economic systems, just as the architect’s rendering helps us imagine our lives in a yet unbuilt house; it also helps us imagine the ways such systems can fail, and how they can be protected. By doing so, it enables all of us – not just professional economists – to be part of the conversation about how we want to organize the way we invest, produce and consume, within our beautiful and finite planet. Economic science fiction can be a powerful tool to democratize deep economic reform.
A case in point, straight from the agenda of COP28, is carbon markets. They are evoked by Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, but how exactly they should be implemented is hotly contested.
Markets cannot operate without trust, and how can you trust that you are buying a legitimate carbon reduction (for example, a newly planted forest somewhere on the planet) without a robust mechanism for verification, enforcement and punishment of misdoings? How would such a mechanism work out?
The Ministry for the Future imagines one such mechanism: a carbon currency backed by a consortium of the world’s largest central banks (“the end of the world is bad for the dollar” remarks one of the characters).
This is just an idea; we can have others, but only if we reject TINA and build alternative scenarios that are both bold and rigorous. Like, indeed, the best science fiction.
