This was the final book of a trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, a leading speculative fiction writer. Robinson was acclaimed for his RED MARS series, which described the colonization of Mars by humans in great detail.

I'm not going to do a critique of this trilogy, except to say that Robinson is not a great storyteller. Maybe that is because his subject, environmental catastrophe and abrupt climate change brought on by global warming, is so broad, by its nature, it doesn't lend itself to a great story.

Nevertheless, I think speculative fiction is an interesting and perhaps important way to work out real life problems. Yes, it is fiction, but it is fiction riddled with factual information, again lending to the sterility of the story.

What I'd rather do is maybe spend a blog or two post looking at some passages in the books, and leaving the thoughts out there for all to consider. I'm making no warranties about the accuracy of the facts Robinson presents. I think he has done a lot of research and tries to be as accurate as he possibly can, but I can't vouch for that, and I don't have the time or the inclination to do the research to verify every single statement he makes. I take everything with a grain of salt; there are two sides to every story and I think global warming is no exception. Michael Crichton's STATE OF FEAR presents an alternate look at the problem, through a different set of lenses, and presents different answers to the same types of questions. Is he correct? I don't know that either, but I do know that my environmental engineer in-law believe global warming to be real, and have told me that most of the serious scientists she deals with accept most of the theory as factual.

This bit is where character Charlie Quibler goes off on the World Bank bigwigs in a meeting about the environment. Charlie is one of the president's trusted advisors (for lack of a better word).

(begin quote)

"The Bank guy was going on about differential costs, "and that's why it's going to be oil for the next twenty, thirty, even fifty years," he concluded. "None of the alternatives are competitive." Charlie's pencil tip snapped. "Competitive for WHAT?" he demanded. He had not spoken until that point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion. Everyone was staring at him, He stared back at the World Bank guys.

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion, so actually it's thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you add the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You're helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible."

The World Bank guys flinched at this. "Well," one of them said, "we don't see it that way."

Charlie said, "That's the trouble. You see it the way the banking industry sees it, and they make money by manipulating money irrespective of effects in the real world. You've spent a trillion dollars of American taxpayers' money over the lifetime of the Bank, and there's nothing to show for it. You go into poor countries and force them to sell their assets to foreign investors and to switch from subsistence agriculture to cash crops, then when the prices of those crops collapse you call this nicely competitive on the world market. The local populations starve and you then insist on austerity measures even though your actions have shattered their economy. You order them to cut their social services so they can pay off their debts to you and to your financial community investors, and you devalue their real assets and then buy them on the cheap and sell them elsewhere for more. The assets of that country have been strip-mined and now belong to international finance. That's yur idea of development. You were intended to be the Marshall Plan, and instead youv'e been the United Fruit Company."

(end quote)

I found this particular passage in SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING to be interesting, assuming that there is truth in it. Again, I can't vouch for the veracity, but if it exactly described the actions of the financial community, it would not surprise me one bit. And if it's a true representation of how the World Bank operates, then it borders on obscenity.

The books are filled with little tidbits like this, quite political in nature, and clearly biased toward one side of the equation. But mostly Robinson is biased toward SCIENCE. He clearly believes (if the subject matter and tilt of these books is a fair indicator) that science can provide most of the answers to the problems that face the world and our society today. I find this belief to be attractive to me, because I believe in science myself. I'd like to consider myself a scientist-type first and a businessman second. (Chem major, two classes away from a math minor, then a very thorough education in health sciences.) I would hope that facts and real world results would win out over political necessities, but I don't have much hope that this will occur in today's world.

It's especially true in this election year. Is there a candidate who stands for what I do? I haven't found him or her yet.

More from these books later...