Every now and then I make a point of diving into a sci-fi novel because I find it thought-provoking to read stories about how the world might be, rather than as it is or was. My choice of author is random, since I am not a devotee of the genre, but I reckon this is a sound counter-complacency strategy – expecting the unexpected. Not all sci-fi is tech-based: the last one I read (Shikasta) involved not space-travel, but an imagining of future politics on Earth, whereas the current read (Red Mars) is a classic, let’s-settle-on-Mars-because-Earth-is-becoming-uninhabitable trope.
Of course, there are more down-to-Earth ways of being jolted out of complacent thinking. Last week, I was cajoled into joining an online seminar hosted by Flatpack 21, a movement devoted to encouraging the election of politically independent candidates to local councils. Its argument is that local government is often not best served by party loyalties that cloud the issues. The evidence put forward was pretty convincing, but there is only so much that can be controlled locally. The litter-picking excursions that have lately become my lockdown exercise regime, have focused my mind on the causes of the problem rather than demonisation of the culprits. Ultimately, no matter how many bins the council provides, litter is a symptom of social distress caused by the socio-economic policies of national government. And, on a global scale, it is an early warning sign of the overall eco-ruination of Earth. If it goes unabated, we may be scrambling to buy tickets to Mars from the likes of Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos sooner than we imagined. Nevertheless, to those who sneer that litter-picking does little to save the planet, I would quote Edmund Burke’s rebuke, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little”.
But while billionaires are building the escape ships (at our expense), salvation may yet come in the form of renewable energy. According to BP’s own projections, use of fossil fuels will decrease and renewables will increase in all the scenarios it studied. And the International Energy Agency reports that, Covid notwithstanding, clean energy was the only part of the energy sector that grew in 2020. The pace and scale of the transition to renewables have already exceeded the most optimistic projections. When fossil fuels are no longer burned to create power for our machinery, carbon levels can be brought under control and one of the planet’s problems – climate change – might be mitigated. If so, there would be a consequential effect on geopolitics, since many modern international conflicts, when stripped of their camouflage of nationalistic nonsense, are about control of oil fields. For example, the devaluation of oil may one day obviate strategically motivated sales of arms to Saudi Arabia. But it’s not going to be that simple. Electrical power may be cleaner, but it requires an infrastructure of batteries and wires, which means increased demand for materials like copper and cobalt, shifting the focus to countries that have them.
Some of this is the story of Red Mars, where the colonists’ dream of establishing an egalitarian society around a sustainable economy is soon wrecked by a “gold rush” from Earth as soon as it becomes feasible to mine Mars for the desired resources. Utopia, it seems, is not so much a place as an ideal. And yet, there are reasons to be hopeful: when the protagonists set off to colonise Mars, they do so because Earth’s population is rising at a Malthusian rate, whereas today’s mathematical projections show it reaching a peak in 2064 and declining thereafter. If that turns out to be true, we have some time to sort things out. Let’s hope that some of our glorious leaders are sci-fi fans: the stories contain many useful dos and don’t’s.
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