⏱️ Karma for the environment
Learnings from the book Ministry for the future
What we do now will determine our future, that’s karma.
My father taught me the concept of Karma Pala, a Balinese Hindu philosophy. Karma means behavior and pala means action.
Our actions will reward or punish us in the future. Either in the current life or after reincarnation. Do good, and you could be born again as a good-looking prince. But if you do evil, you could be born as an unhealthy human or even an animal or plant. Regardless if you believe in karma or not, it’s a good principle to have to be responsible in life.
But the future is not as easy as good or bad, black or white. Someone told me that the future is like light entering a prism. It dispersed into different color variations.
Similar to light, there are a lot of things that can happen to the future of our environment. We have done a lot of forecasts to understand what will happen to the climate. For example, the increasing temperature scenario of 1.5C to 4.2C from the Paris climate agreement.
From best case to worst case scenario, there are still many possibilities that can happen. It depends on our actions today. We will never know what happens until it happens. As Nassim Taleb said in Black Swan “Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence”.
In this article. I will tinker into the future and discuss learnings from a recent book that I read: Ministry for the future. One of the best reading experiences I had in a while.
📗 Ministry for the future
I am usually not a big fan of fiction. Only after reading fiction books recommended by Tim Ferris such as The Alchemist and How to get filthy rich in rising Asia, I am open to reading more fiction.
In a Greenpill podcast with Raphaël Haupt, the founder of Toucan (the 1st on-chain carbon provider), he recommended a book that has inspired him which is The Ministry for the future by Kim Robinson.
“It’s based on the idea of green quantitative easing. Backing money with Carbon and experimenting with how money provides value to the environment.” Raphael Haupt
Green quantitative easing means that central banks buy green bonds to increase investment in more sustainable projects. The European Central Bank has been using this policy in addition to other climate policy tools such as carbon tax.
So the book Ministry for the Future is a Cli-fi book (Climate fiction). The story is set around the year 2040, about an independent body tasked to fight for the rights of future generations. Such as pushing countries to reach their Paris Climate goals or enabling a social system that does not exploit citizens' data.
However, inter countries collaboration is not an easy task. The policy of one country could positively or negatively impact the other. An international prisoner dilemma. For example, if one country introduces a carbon tax to curb emissions, the affected industry will just move to another country with no tax. Hurting the economy of the former.
I experienced this back in 2012 when Australia introduced its first carbon tax. A bold move to curb the carbon-intensive mining industry. However, mining is one of the biggest job providers in Australia and the backbone of the economy. The people voted the government out. Resulting in the closure of the Queensland Office of Climate Change, where I did my first internship.
Back to the book. The author imagined a world where decades of inaction to stop climate change finally hits us. Extreme heatwave in India killed millions of people, estimated to have more casualties than WWI. Climate refugees flooding international borders. Desperate youth taking actions in their own hands committing acts of terrorism against the biggest polluters.
The Ministry for the future is tasked to find innovative ways to stop this catastrophe. One big breakthrough is the introduction of carbon tokens called Carboni. This token is aimed to incentivize carbon capture and sequestration. Central banks of the biggest economies of the world will issue this Carboni and provide the financial backing, exchanging carbon emissions captured with fiat money. If capturing carbon is more economical than emitting it, it’s a no-brainer not to do it.
What differentiates the book from other climate books I have read is that it’s a fictional story about the future. We can still alter our life. Innovate, invest, and make the right policy to change the course of climate change.
I would not serve justice to try to explain the book in several paragraphs. Read it for yourself to get inspired to create a bright optimistic future in the world of doomerism.
“Ministry for the future presents the urgency of this crisis in an original way and leaves readers with the hope that we can do something about it. The next chapter in the story of our planet is still being written, and the ending is up to us.” - Bill Gates
And if you are interested in how Toucan implements the Carbon tokens in the real world, check out the greenpill podcast below.
💭 Conclusion
The future is ours to hold. What we do now will determine not just our future, but our future generations, and the environment that they will live in.
The only catastrophe that can’t be undone is extinction. People can take their fate in their hands. There is no such thing as fate. - Kim Robinson
The best way to finish this article is with a great song from Radiohead called Karma Police.