A Weird, Wonderful Conversation With Kim Stanley Robinson
About this episode
Klein has a wide-ranging conversation with science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson about climate change, utopia, and the human future. They discuss his novel 'The Ministry for the Future,' which imagines the institutions that might actually force decarbonization, and why he believes markets alone cannot solve the climate crisis. Robinson talks about Antarctica, his Mars trilogy's vision of terraforming as a metaphor for political transformation, the economics of a post-capitalist future, and why scientists make compelling protagonists. The tone is earnestly utopian: Robinson insists that imagining plausible better futures is itself a political act, and that despair is a luxury the climate crisis does not permit.