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.

Now in the FT, Robinson tries to imagine a less bloody transition. We can tell that something is going to give: the pandemic, the fires, the floods and extreme weather events. Something is going to rupture.

Robinson makes a virtue of this sense of impending crisis. WWI, he says, sandbagged the world — the seemingly stable world order shattered in a matter of moments. As bad as it was, it was worse for being a surprise, for catching us all flatfooted.

By contrast, WWII was visible on the horizon for years, this impending doom that everyone saw coming — that people might have done something about. They tried — the League of Nations — but in the end, the crisis couldn’t be averted.

For Robinson, the climate emergency is a WWII kind of emergency, and the Paris Accord is our League of Nations — thought whether it will enough to blunt the emergency is a great unknown.