What kind of emergency is our emergency?

Kim Stanley Robinson on the structure of feeling of this perilous moment.

This past weekend in the Financial Times, Kim Stanley Robinson ponders the nature of the current climate emergency, trying to capture the “structure of the feeling” of our current moment.

https://www.ft.com/content/ff94df96-b702-4e01-addd-f4253d0eecf6

In 2020, Robinson published an astonishingly good, optimistic and furious novel about the climate emergency, “The Ministry For the Future,” whose goal was imagining what that “structure” feel like if we actually averted the end of civilization.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/03/ministry-for-the-future/#ksr

What’s that mean? It’s going beyond, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It’s easy to imagine the end of capitalism — I’ve written many postcapitalist worlds. The hard part is writing the ending of capitalism — the actual transition.

Robinson’s MINISTRY is conflicted on this score. On the one hand, he describes spectacular acts of violence — say, terrorists knocking every private jet out of the sky — but never shows us what it’s like to be in one of those jets, or what it’s like to pull the trigger.