I chose to set The Ministry for the Future in 2025 to ask: What could we do, starting right now, facing the gravity of this situation? In our time, the bar has been lowered to thinking, if we can dodge a mass extinction event, this is a utopian future, because that’s the one catastrophe that we can never claw back from. Extinctions are forever. Even if you imagine some clawing back in the twenty-second century from the disastrous twenty-first century, whatever has gone extinct will be gone for good.

Williams: Indeed. Another question: I want to touch on the themes of violence and the limits of nonviolence portrayed in the novel.

Robinson: There is a chapter that describes a completely screwed up 2030s, where it’s obvious we aren’t doing what we need to do. And some people resort to violence. They set off drones in swarms like geese in front of commercial airplanes as they land and take off. They bring down a lot of planes on a single day, “crash day.” The violence gets people to stop flying and makes them aware that terrible forces have been unleashed in the world.

There’s anger in the book from people who’ve suffered because the developed world didn’t bother to pay for decarbonization and clean energy for the developing world—which in fact is happening now. That is going to cause retribution and vengeance.

I’m against violence myself, but I put it in the book as a sample of what could happen—that it could get chaotic in bad ways. It would be better if we acted before things got that dire.

Williams: Do you think that well-established and unjust structures of power can be changed by peaceful protest? Or do arms only get twisted by the threat of force or by force itself? And if force is used, do you think it corrupts all who participate in it, in deep ways that unfold over time, and only perpetuates the evils they hope to change?

Robinson: I would agree with the last part of that question, that there is such damage done by violence against humans. There have been violent revolutions in the past, world revolutions—but it’s hard to rate their effectiveness, because they’re the only things that happened.

Williams: When you write about this kind of violence, there are echoes of Edward Abbey. That was his distinction with the Monkey Wrench Gang—that sabotage was committed against machinery, not against people. It’s interesting to me that you bring that idea of sabotage into the twenty-first century, with climate chaos.

Finally, there’s a part in the book toward the end where what is called for is a spiritual awakening. To me, that was the redemptive part. That was the piece that, as part of the mosaic, I could hang on to: What is the spiritual aspect of imagining a different world, and how do we put that into action? It also made me think about what we do with our anger, which you also bring up. How do we take our anger and turn it into sacred rage?

One question I have, Stan, is a big one, for me. You dedicate The Ministry for the Future to Fredric Jameson, a Marxist political theorist, who is said to have uttered this oft-quoted phrase: “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” What are your thoughts on a postcapitalistic society? And how do you see us fixing the problem?

Robinson: I would describe myself as an American leftist, trained by a Marxist member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and happy to be so. But let’s take the system that we’re in now and the emergency that we’ve got. What do we do, in a practical sense?

We need government seizure of the market, like what happened in World War II. The British treasury took over the Bank of England. The American economy was organized entirely by the government to prosecute the war successfully. Everybody went along with it, because it was needed.

That was guided by the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. Keynesianism, in our present time, might be some form of modern monetary theory that fights climate change. In that case, the central banks make up new money to spend on decarbonizing projects. And $2 trillion, or even $4 trillion, a year, year after year, made up from scratch and spent on decarbonization projects, would mean a giant public works administration and full employment, raising the standard of living. It wouldn’t be the total solution; you would need to have regulations; you would need to have legislation. But it would be nice to have a big carbon tax that got bigger as time went on.

In other words, there would be a political economy that would go stepwise, from what we’re in now to anti-austerity, to Keynesianism, to social democracy, and maybe to democratic socialism. But these would be new inventions, financialized. It’s best maybe to call it postcapitalism, simply improvising something that works so that there’s equality, equity, and sustainability.

Williams: You say we’re going to have to pay to keep it in the ground, meaning oil and gas. That caught my eye, especially considering the West, where we’re looking at federal lands, public lands, and these oil and gas leases. You talked about the idea of quantitative easing. Can you speak about that a bit?

Robinson: Quantitative easing is when central banks make up new fiat money—what the Federal Reserve did in the United States after the 2008–9 economic crash. In my example, the new money is spent on decarbonization; call it carbon quantitative easing. Quantitative easing worked in 2008 and again during the 2020–22 pandemic. A whole lot of money was made up from scratch to keep the economy liquid and to keep people at work. If we spend it on decarbonization, all the better.

But we’re going to have to pay to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Eighty percent of the fossil fuels on this planet are owned by nation states. They’re powerful. They rely on fossil fuel reserves for their future. It’s their economy. It’s their finance reserves. If those become stranded assets, those countries will be in terrible trouble, headed for depression and disruption and violence. The petro states—Russia, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran—have to be paid to stop drilling. Since the United States has 75 percent of the capital in the world, we should be the ones actually backing the payouts and taking the loss. These states need to be compensated, or else the world goes “smash.”

This gets very strange. It’s like we’re paying off a blackmailer. But we all grew up burning fossil fuels. We’re not innocent. So we’ve got to give up the moralism—the holier-than-thou feeling of “I’m a self-righteous person, a liberal person,”—in order to get something done.

Williams: My last question to you, Stan, is simply: What keeps you whole spiritually, so you can be optimistic, as well as a pragmatic visionary who can look at hard things, can ask the difficult questions that keep us up at night?

Robinson: My optimism is partly biochemical and comes from my mom. It’s also political, a matter of a chosen political position: if we can make a good future, we should. And I keep going for my family and friends, my garden, the Sierras, the sense that California is a political, multicultural entity that is progressive, that is recreating the commons for its water, that is a place to be proud of—and it’s so beautiful.

Williams: So beautiful. Thank you, Stan. You have truly left us with a “ministry for the future.”