12 years ago, Nori cofounder and CEO Paul Gambill was a College Republican. And while he wasn’t a climate denier, he didn’t think that humanity’s 1% contribution to global CO2 emissions was a big deal. And then he read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and began to understand the outsized impact of our actions. Not only did the science fiction novels change Paul’s perspective on climate change, they inspired him to dedicate his life’s work to making it better.
American novelist Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. Many of his books explore how climate change will impact us in the coming decades, including the new release (and self-described mic drop moment) The Ministry for the Future. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Stan joins Ross and Paul to discuss how science fiction can help us make better decisions and share his perspective on the politics of the genre.
Stan explains why central banks play such a prominent role in his most recent work, introducing us to the financial system he imagines in his future history novels and sharing his ‘creeping reformist’ approach to building an economy around carbon removal. Listen in for Stan’s insight on why cryptocurrency is featured in his new book and learn how carbon sequestration might work within the framework of modern monetary theory.
Resources
There are so many things referenced in this show. When Anchor ups its character limit for show descriptions we will go back and add them all. Here's a curated list:
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by John Clute and Peter Nicholls
Delton Chen’s Carbon Coin Plan
Also on this show
The promise and peril of blockchain governance, with Dr. Nick Cowen, July 2020
NFTs, carbon removal and the music biz, with Imogen Heap, July 2021
Where are the campy cli-fi series? With Daniel Backer, March 2023
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m the creative editor at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. Today I have with me my fellow co-founder and CEO Paul Gambill here co-hosting with me. Hey, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Hey, Ross. Hey.
Ross Kenyon: And at long last we have Kim Stanley Robinson. We’ve been reading your books for so long. Your fingerprints are all over Nori, though you may not have known it until recently. And you just released the new book, The Ministry for the Future, which we are very excited to speak with you about today.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, thank you, Ross. Thank you, Paul. Good to be with you, and thanks for reading my books. They’re long.
Ross Kenyon: That is, that is true. And yeah, Paul is one of the biggest science fiction aficionados that I know, and I’ve been hearing about the Mars Trilogy’s influence on Nori for a very long time. Paul, why don’t you catch Stan up on how that impacted you.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, sure. Back in college about 12 years ago, I was a fairly conservative Republican and was not necessarily a climate denier, but it seemed to me like, if humans were only emitting one percent of CO2 emissions, that, like, what’s the big deal? That seems like such a small number. And then I read the Mars Trilogy, which I loved. And the process of, like, going through the terraforming process and just, like, simply starting with planting lichens and mosses and seeing how that kind of impacted the ratio of different gases in the atmosphere.
And, like, the huge effects that very small actions ended up having really made it very clear to me how, like, one percent of carbon emissions is actually, like, an enormous, enormous amount that is going to have outsized impacts. And so that, like, hard sci-fi approach that you take really painted a clear picture for me that totally changed my perspective on climate change and ultimately led to me wanting to kind of dedicate my life’s work to figure out how to make it better.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, thank you, that’s great to hear, Paul. And I think it’s right that the Mars Trilogy was always about planetary management, terraforming as geoengineering, as we call it here. And later, and even in the trilogy itself explicitly, sometimes people will look back at Earth and say, oh my God, they’re terraforming Earth too now, with some early geoengineering ideas. So it was always a modeling exercise and a kind of compare-and-contrast thing going on, and it certainly led me down the path I’ve been on since then also.
Ross Kenyon: Has anyone ever told you that your work has de-Republicanized them?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, that is not an uncommon response.
Ross Kenyon: I love that.
Kim Stanley Robinson: I try — I have Republican friends, I had Republican parents, and I try to stay good with everybody’s politics. And I also think that as an English major, and I taught composition for about 11 years off and on, but mostly on, and very much liked it — freshman composition at UC San Diego, UC Davis. A lot of that had to do with the persuasion essay, and so it got me interested in rhetoric, and Aristotelian rhetoric, the whole Greek breakdown of the various types of rhetorical terms and how they’re used as a strategy of persuasion to convince other people. Because people aren’t very convincible, basically. That’s not something that we want to, or like to, do. But on the other hand, especially college students, open-minded, young — it happened to me, and I definitely was a young Republican until I got my draft number.
Ross Kenyon: And now, yeah, that’ll do it.
Kim Stanley Robinson: And, and of course, I mean that as a symbol for the whole late ’60s, early ’70s hippie cultural revolution, all that that represented. That changed me profoundly, with a lot of my professors. And I just got the impression from my own life and from everybody else that college students, because they are doing an intellectual exercise of educating themselves, because they’re choosing what they want to learn — and I guess I would say that that moment of confirmation bias, where you only start to take in information that reinforces what you already want to know, what you already believe in and want to keep believing, that’s something that [unclear] in the inquiring young mind. And it’s not a case of confirmation bias, because you don’t have anything to confirm for a while. It’s a process of paradigm formation or whatnot. And that is a great moment to read the Mars Trilogy, or anything else.
I mean, sometimes people will read Ayn Rand and become convinced Randians or whatnot. So there are political novels, there are works of art that are out to persuade you of a worldview. I’ve always been interested in that. And so mostly what I hear are people saying, oh my gosh, I read the Mars Trilogy and then I decided to be a geologist, or a natural historian, or an animal behaviorist — or, if they get into the sciences, engineers too. But the political angle is pretty obvious and has been pretty influential, and I’m happy at that.
Ross Kenyon: I can certainly see the link between your novel writing and the persuasive essay as a form. Do you see continuity formally between those two things? Do you also see continuity between your earlier writings on climate — has this always been what you’re interested in, bringing us all the way up to the present? It seems like even when it isn’t the theme of the novel you’re working on, it’s certainly lurking in there somewhere.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’ve been writing for so long that I go back into the prehistory of it, the pre-climate-change era.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like climate fiction before there was climate fiction.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes. But only in the science fictional gaming aspect of it. So I would say that science fiction in, say, the ’60s and ’70s, and when I started to write it in the ’80s, you would have things like J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, The Wind from Nowhere, The Crystal World. Ballard destroyed or changed the world in five different ways as kind of an exercise in variety, variations on a theme. And there would be an ice world by Michael Moorcock where the whole world was a frozen ice ball. And I wrote a story called “Venice Drowned” where sea level was — it must have been maybe 10 meters higher, a little less, just enough to drown Venice and have a landscape. I wasn’t thinking about what it would take to do that.
In The Wild Shore, this was a kind of a nuclear winter exercise. I wrote The Wild Shore as a kind of a stupid thought experiment: what if only the United States got nuclear bombed? And then I noticed that I had the weather all changed, and it was as if Southern California — I looked at the novel, I can’t really read it, but I looked at it and I saw that. Someone said, well, jeez, Southern California is now like it’s at the latitude of British Columbia. Well, that shocked me. But it was just a party trick, or a matter of setting as estrangement, and that strange things can happen. But I wasn’t thinking in a paradigm or a mental framework of climate change really happening.
Even though I have to say the news was out. I mean, Lyndon Johnson talked about it. Kenneth Rexroth, one of my favorite California poets, quoted all the science of the time, and in 1969 he said carbon dioxide, you know, that the equatorial regions are going to get hotter. It’s quite amazing how far back the science goes, but I wasn’t hip to it. And it was the Mars Trilogy where I got interested in climate change, just in the abstract. And then I went to Antarctica, which I had wanted to do just as a wilderness lover, and down there all the scientists were talking about climate change to me, and that was 1995.
So I would say that the light bulb actually went off in an explicit way after I finished the Mars Trilogy, but before I wrote Antarctica. So there’s a break point in my career, and everything I’ve written since Antarctica — and that’s like 1997 — has had climate change as part of it, unless I have a different game to play, like in Galileo’s Dream, where that wasn’t what that novel was about because it was more about Galileo. But other than that it’s been climate change, trying to find, again, variations on a theme, almost like Ballard, but also reacting to the latest information from the sciences and the latest developments in the local world.
Ross Kenyon: Your work lately has focused so heavily on macroeconomics, monetary theory and policy — as a hard sci-fi author, which, by the way, is that an acceptable term that you like to use? But turning that lens upon the mechanics by which we fund our shared social reality is seemingly something that you’ve become increasingly more interested in. Why has that captured your imagination so much?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I think it is a technology in the sense of a software. So computers give us a good mental model: that there’s a computer sitting over there, it’s got its hardware, it’s the object on your desk, doesn’t work without the software going, right? A programming. And civilization is the same way. There’s hardware, but the software, which has to do with laws and language and norms, structures of feeling, practices and concepts of justice — these are all technologies, but they’re the software. And then economics. Well, this is — I mean, I was brought up by Marxists in my academic life. My academic training is in Marxist literary criticism, and whenever you’re looking at society, that foregrounds the economic system as being the power relation between people. So that led to it.
And I don’t want to go too far on that strand of answering your question, filling out the Deleuze and Derrida and that sort of group. Well, Fredric Jameson was my teacher, and what he is very intent to do is: always historicize. So really it was all of them. So, Fred being Fred, this means the pre-Socratics and Hegel and then Marx, and then the literary criticism — Marxist literary criticism, Plekhanov, this kind of vulgar Marxism — and on through Raymond Williams, for me very important, Ernst Bloch, Althusser. A lot of my concepts, like structure of feeling, or the Althusserian definition of ideology as something that everybody has and needs, to adjust, like lenses on your eyesight — these all come out of that tradition, really.
But before we go by it, I just want to note, in a parenthesis, what you asked about — hard science fiction? No, I don’t like that term. And I don’t like any adjective to be put on science fiction, because science fiction itself was already a pretty tight little pigeonhole in this culture, at least it was when I was younger. Now it’s become everything. But I’m a science fiction patriot, and whenever people put an adjective in front of it, they are trying to box you in further and delimit you to that zone. And so feminist science fiction meant that you were of only interest to feminist radicals; literary science fiction meant that nobody really wanted to read you because you fell in the crack between literature and science fiction.
So, literary science fiction, which I was labeled with. Hard science fiction was a group of physicists who were not hard in their physics, they were hard in their politics. It was right-wing science fiction, where the gloss behind it was some kind of social Darwinism in action. So when I began to be called a hard science fiction writer, that blew up the concept, because it was obvious I was a leftist and so it never made sense. And what they really mean by hard science fiction is something — there’s no hand-waving, made-up sciences, no rubber sciences that are like faster-than-light travel or aliens that speak English five minutes later. It’s harder than that. But you notice that hard science fiction in the literature has faster-than-light travel and aliens that speak English five minutes later.
So the term was always bogus, and I hope that I’ve blown it up, but I notice it keeps coming back. There’s many zombie ideas that you actually can’t strike dead. They continue to wander the landscape for decades. And so I just want to say I’m a science fiction writer, I’m proud of it, I always identify myself like that. I don’t say I’m a writer and people ask, what do you write? And then I say science fiction, and then they look heavily disappointed. I don’t do that. People ask me what I do: I’m a science fiction writer. But the adjectives in front of it are usually political maneuvers and political attacks, even.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ll put aside that macroeconomic stuff for now, because I’m sure, Paul, you want to talk about science fiction, I bet.
Paul Gambill: Well, that’s super interesting to me, to hear helpful nuance that — it all makes sense to me, I guess, as a consumer of science fiction. Yeah, I always had that shared understanding that it just means that there’s no, like, hand-wavy bogus magic stuff going on. And it does seem like there are authors who kind of go more in that direction versus go more in the, I’m just going to, you know, use whatever elements are there as a backdrop to telling some other, some of the story. But that’s interesting, and telling us about your educational background and stuff, that all makes a lot of sense. So I don’t know, Ross. I don’t have a question at that; that’s just, like, that’s illuminating.
Ross Kenyon: Well, what I’m trying to poke at a little bit is, I think of science fiction broadly as more right-leaning than left, except for, like, Ursula K. Le Guin or someone like that. For the most part, I’m thinking of — it’s a lot of libertarian sort of wish fulfillment in space. I think you might agree with that, Stan.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, that is a sub-genre for sure, there’s no doubt about it, and we all know who we’re talking about in terms of the authors. But what I would say is it’s way bigger than that, and science fiction needs to be put into all of its sub-genres. So you’ve got near-future science fiction, which is kind of like just today pushed a little, and there are many writers who are quite good at that. Then you’ve got space opera, and that’s important to bring up, that if you go five million years in the future you can’t tell what’s magic and what’s technology. You play a game out there and you wave your hands.
Norman Spinrad has a wonderful phrase, “strategic opacity,” that at the point where you need to explain something quite miraculous in order to make your story go — Vonnegut called it the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which is a nice joke about the moment of strategic opacity where you have to wave your hands a little bit. Well, that’s okay when you’re doing space opera, why not? And I want to reference my late lamented friend and brother in arms, Iain Banks, who was definitely a leftist and did space opera in order to talk about political ideas in a fun way. Well, these are beautiful novels, the Culture novels, they’re quite [unclear]. And what they did was say to science fiction: it doesn’t have to be libertarian, it doesn’t have to be right-wing, it can be left-wing and communalist. It can be — the political valence of any of the science fictions can be anywhere.
And so it’s just a matter of popularity and fame for individual authors that makes you think that if Heinlein is who you think of as science fiction incarnate, then it’s going to be a little bit right-wing. And yet, he had a strange youth and was all over the map when he was younger. If it’s Asimov, then you’ve got a kind of liberal progressive. And on into the present, where my cohort, my generation, and then the younger ones, you see a widespread across politics. And so, I would say, science fiction is a big open genre with a lot of sub-genres, we can do anything.
And lastly what I’d say is, between near-future science fiction and space opera in the far future is a middle zone, relatively depopulated. I call it future history, just to give you an idea, because it’s about 200 — say 100 to 400 years — in the future for human beings, and still in the solar system, I would insist. And that zone can still be a pseudo-realism: you try not to break laws of physics and get into space opera land, and talk more about history, but not just day after tomorrow. But what’s this going to mean a century later? And that might be a zone of science fiction that has tremendous importance for, for instance, your project at Nori.
In general, one thing that economics doesn’t do well, micro or macro, is deal with that zone, like 100 years out. The finance of 100 years out — you can theorize to it, but it often is irrelevant to the next quarterly statement. So you get into political economy, or the border between economics and political economy, which maybe needs unpacking. But this is a great zone of science fiction that not that many science fiction writers dive into, because it’s hard, it’s strange, people don’t automatically love it because they’re more used to the one or the other.
Paul Gambill: And it’s hard because there’s, like, a certain amount of prediction required. And if your predictions don’t, like, meet the smell test, then it’s just like an uncanny valley kind of thing for the reader.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I think that’s right. I’m kind of — uncanny valley is a good way to think of it. It’s not today, it’s not magic land, and your theory of history gets exposed. And so if you say, well, in the next 20 years we’re going to dither around and we’re not going to come to grips with climate change very well, well, that restricts what the next 20 years could possibly look like. And then you extrapolate a little more, you run your thought experiment of your imagined future history another 20 years. And what I’ve noticed when I do it is you’re like hammering a wedge into a crack: the further you go, the more wedged in you are and the fewer choices actually look plausible.
And so the reader, applying just like you say this smell test, has to — well, would that happen? Real history is so weird and contingent that almost any fictional history looks weird and contingent, and so you begin to doubt the writer. So when I write in that zone, which I very often do, I’m often mildly freaked out and feeling constrained and wedged in. So a lot of writers are thinking there’s a giant audience for space opera, and let’s zip around the galaxy and we’ll be in a Star Wars, Star Trek universe and we can wave our hands and we have massive galactic battles and adventures. And it’s somewhat adventure fiction; often it’s really war fiction, you know what I mean?
Then the near-future guys — and there are some women too — are saying, look, now is already science fictional. Let’s twist that lens, the camera lens, five years into the future, and suddenly some things pop and other things get fuzzy, and we’ll write about the area that’s popped. And then you’ll think, oh my God, what a great near-future science fiction writer that is. And some big careers have been made out of that move. In between — well, like I say, it’s depopulated because it’s hard, because the audience — it doesn’t have a natural audience, you have to kind of create it out of people who are such science fiction fans that they’ll go anywhere you take them. And luckily that’s a big enough community that it’s viable, basically.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. That, that, that’s me for sure. Yeah, yeah. I think that — I’m going back to, like, the ideology thing earlier. To me, science fiction is pretty much all progressive at the very least, and that can go in different directions, but it’s all thought experiments. It’s what you’re saying right now: you’re imagining, like, you know, certain things happen and then what are the downstream effects of that. And to me science fiction has always been useful as a way of, like, trying to make what is imaginative more real so that people can — what I like about it is that you can use it to make better decisions in the present. It seems like that’s, like, an aspect of what you try to do.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Definitely. And there I would say this is a term from my teacher, Fredric Jameson: cognitive mapping. You read a bunch of science fiction and you’ve seen a lot of futures, and none of them are going to come true, so as prediction it’s useless. But as thought experiment, as a habit of mind, you think there’s going to be consequences, and you have a kind of theory of history that accrues from all the science fiction that you’ve read. You have a sense that, well, it matters if people are cooperative, and if they believe in their government it matters, if the planet falls apart and the biosphere begins to turn on us, these things matter.
And so a theory of history, which you could also call an ideology, develops out of all that. And then in the present you’re oriented, you think, well, I want to get to one of these better-case-scenario futures, and it’s obvious that to get to one of those, in the present we have to do X, Y and Z. And that’s a basic, very valuable orientation, even though no single science fiction novel that you’ve ever read is going to predict what really happens.
Ross Kenyon: Do you associate future histories with Mark Fisher’s hauntologies, and these abandoned pasts that never came to fruition?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, that is an aspect of it. What I would say is that the sell-by date on science fiction is real sharp. And my friend John Clute wrote 90% of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which by the way is an amazing statement to make. If you look at that encyclopedia it’s clear that John has access to time traveling or something. It’s an amazing achievement, and he says that he can read a science fiction novel from the past and guess its date to within a year or two of when it was written, by signals within the text itself: cultural signals, ideological signals, and then technological markers, et cetera.
And I believed him, and everyone can kind of do it. And older science fiction — these are these visions of futures that didn’t come to pass. I forget what you said, the hauntology, or the ghosts of futures that never occurred, and people make jokes about them. They’re always going to happen.
But if you want to investigate what did it feel like in the immediate post-World War Two period — what did it feel like in, say, America, or say Russia? You can do it either way, between, say, ’45 and ’55. If you read the science fiction from that period, what you get is their hopes and fears and their images of what futures are possible from their moment. And that is a big part of catching the vibe of an era. And so a good work of history now, if it is looking at an era that had a science fiction — so, say, from the late, mid-nineteenth century on — if you include the science fiction of that time into your study, you get a sense of that culture way better than you would have otherwise.
Just as one small example: in the 1920s you could ask any educated adult in America, is there a civilization of alien intelligences on Mars? And a huge percentage of them would say, well, yeah, that’s what the astronomers are telling us, it’s highly possible, we don’t know for sure, but they probably are up there doing their thing. And that’s because that’s what the science fiction combined with the scientists of that time were telling people.
So it’s hard to capture that back, it’s hard to look back and think, well, everybody at that time thought that there were intelligent Martians. Because later on that gets obscured by the obvious — like, even in the ’30s they began, the telescopes get sharper, you look at Mars’s atmosphere and it’s non-existent, and you’re thinking, no, there aren’t Martians because they have no air to breathe. So that collapses. So I’d say science fiction, even its inaccuracy as prediction, is nevertheless really useful and fun and productive to look at as part of history.
Ross Kenyon: Well, both New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future I feel confident I could place in the last couple years; it feels the urgency of climate change, the political. Red Moon I think I would have a harder time placing cleanly. But clearly you’re writing this firmly standing within your decade.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yep. In fact, it’s kind of a joke in New York 2140 — I mean, the year 2140, that’s pretty far away, why are they talking about Ben Bernanke and the crash of 2008 in some detail? Well, that’s because the readers of it are reading it in whatever, 2017 or so, and the book is obviously about both at once. So there’s an action going on in science fiction that I’ve compared to the glasses at 3D movies: the two lenses are showing you different things and you get a false 3D out of that in your brain. Science fiction: one lens is really trying to talk about the future, the other lens is really trying to talk about the present. When you bring those two images into one mental frame, you’ve got history popping for you. And so that’s the aesthetic action of science fiction.
And sometimes what you can do is, with canny readers, they’re reading New York 2140, they’re laughing at the jokes that I make. When you’re a naive reader and you look through those glasses and you read New York 2140 and go, godd*mn it, I cannot make this image cohere, there’s something wrong with these glasses, they’re giving me a headache and maybe I hate science fiction — so that does happen. But I like everybody to read my books, but I also like to play with an audience that knows what I’m up to in a kind of shared game.
Ross Kenyon: Science fiction nerds like Paul, basically.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. Well, and as a reader I love that too, because, yeah, I can see those games being played, it is fun.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Why not? Literature is an art form, you’re meant to have pleasure. It’s for beauty and pleasure and, you know, a kind of a glow state of seeing the world as beautiful. Now, that can combine with it being educational in a political sense. Those two are not, like, either/ors, and that’s sometimes forgotten in our culture. But very good theorists, Aristotle, Bertolt Brecht, they insist on the fun of education and the educationality of fun. And I’ve always wanted to have both.
Ross Kenyon: Well, let’s make it extra fun and let’s talk about central banking, monetary theory, macroeconomics.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, why not?
Ross Kenyon: Because it’s the first association everyone has, so let’s lean into it. Why that, of all the things? You could have chosen, you could have written more about the tech side of things, but you’re writing more about this institutional software by which we exchange value. Why is this so important?
Kim Stanley Robinson: I think it’s the crux, because we have a population of 8 billion and we have an — let’s bracket capitalism per se — but we have an economic system and a division of labor among the eight billion. So we all do different things and we mesh together into one civilization where all the work that we all do adds up to all the things that we all need. That has to be organized, that can’t self-organize from the bottom up. It is a system, and so that system is crucial.
So if you make your living by tearing out a forest and turning it into paper, extra-fine toilet paper for Japan, and you make a profit from that, so you make enough money then to live your life and even maybe bulk up your savings account — well, then that’s one economic system. But at the end of that process, the forest is no longer there, the next generation can’t do it. And in the meantime, part of the way that you’ve made a profit is to pay other human beings less than they need to live in order to get those trees turned into toilet paper in Japan. And that whole process is kind of a Ponzi scheme of exploitation and appropriation of value. And it’s a race to the bottom.
What you do is you hide a lot of your real costs and pretend they weren’t there, and that’s the only way you get a profit where you can give money to shareholders. And the shareholders did nothing except for having some shares, which means they had the capital and the ownership, the power of ownership of things, to continue to benefit from that system. The top, say, 10% of the people in the world in terms of wealth and power are benefiting by the destruction of the lives and the biosphere of the other 90%, and of all the creatures. So okay, that’s a finance system, that’s a set of laws, but it’s also a way that we value things, and it has to do with money. So we’re really deeply stuck in it. I mean, it is the international order.
If you begin to talk about alternatives to it, you quickly drop into a fantasy land of utopian thinking: well, things should be better. Definitely true, things should be better. Therefore, how are we going to do it? And you can postulate all kinds of theoretical alternatives, but we are in this world now, right? Our 2020, and with a crisis bearing down. So, okay, how do you tweak the already existing system so that everybody is working towards — and this is a very Nori point — the work that you do that makes your livelihood banks carbon and helps the biosphere, and you have not suffered for that, you have not sacrificed financially and paid to get it done and actually gone into debt. You’ve actually made your living doing it.
So: what are you? Well, I’m a carbon sequesterer. It’s a profession, I do it. How do you do it? Well, I grow kelp beds offshore, I’ve got a license and my acre of shallow water can bank five times as much carbon as your dang forest. And so I’m a kelp farmer. Or, no, I mean, I’m in the Pacific Northwest and they absolutely ransacked the forest of this entire watershed area, this entire bioregion; it’s screwed in a way that makes the Amazon look healthy. So I’m going into that empty forest and I’m reforesting, but not just to make more toilet paper — to make a living biosphere. And so then I get an extra charge, I get paid to do this, because I’m a carbon sequesterer.
And so I got into the central banks because people really like to believe in money, they want money to be secure. They don’t want to have to believe in money hoping that everybody else that needs to believe in money will believe in it. They want to have the rock-solid belief that their nation state and its army and police are behind their belief in money and will defend it as such — fiat currency, the currency made by governments and declared to be real.
Well, those central banks in 2008, and then in spring of 2020, they generated some trillions of dollars. Say, people say 2008 to 2013, something like just seven trillion dollars out of nothing, and nothing happened. The value of money was not — people did not suddenly lose their trust in money. You didn’t have a massive inflation, you didn’t have Germany 1927, you didn’t have deflation either. Essentially the world economy, which is churning, say, 75 trillion a year, could take on that newly created money.
And then this is where it crosses over with your Nori project. If that newly created money — and the European Union seems to be working on this — and in its first spend, the spending of that money is directed by government in a Keynesian kind of a way to green projects, to carbon sequestration first, and then it goes in terms of the rest of the economy in the normal way and circulates, that could mean that you could make money for sequestering carbon, make a living therefore. So this is a kind of Delton Chen idea, but it’s also, I see, almost everywhere now. Or it’s a new idea that’s getting a lot of traction fast, let’s put it that way.
Yeah. So, and I thought, as a science fiction writer what I see is, it’s like terraforming in the Mars books: a nascent scientific idea that has suddenly popped in the scientific community, that’s beginning to get general traction in the culture at large. If you as a science fiction writer can catch that early, it’s like catching a wave as a surfer. You can surf that wave and you can be like the person that tells the rest of the world about this new idea that’s generated.
And so in a way I’m only working as a reporter. I mean, it’s not my idea, I’m not an idea guy. As a novelist and an English major, I’m trying to concoct novels that use other people’s ideas out of the sciences or the social sciences or out of politics. And so that’s very typical, what I’m doing is what science fiction has always done. But in this case, I think the central bank is crucial to the story. The central banks and finance in general.
Paul Gambill: So calling yourself, like, a reporter I think is really interesting. When you said that, I was thinking, okay, you’re a reporter from the future and you’re trying to describe what is happening or what will be happening. I think of, to me, like, the most well-known example of science fiction making reality here now for us is, like, looking at the tablets in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how they’re—
Ross Kenyon: You’re going to go for Cryptonomicon? Really, you’re going to go for—
Paul Gambill: Well, yeah, I could go to that direction too, but just, the original designs for the iPad were absolutely influenced by this artistic representation of a tablet computer from a movie 40 years prior. And then going back to, you know, your interest in and focus on rhetoric too, it just seems like there is a tool that you have as a writer to be able to, like, push people in the direction of something that hasn’t already happened, could happen, but by writing it you’re making it more likely it will happen.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, I would hope that is the action. That’s a precise description of the action that I would hope for, that a science fiction novel that is intent on making an intervention, a utopian science fiction novel, you might say — that’s what you hope for. So then, I mean, I think it’s kind of accidental, the capturing of a phrase or an image out of design or something. Then you’ve got a situation where the science fiction writer seems to have made a prediction that came true. Well, yes and no; a lot of the predictions will have been based on something like Bauhaus design, there was already inherited culture.
And also, if you make 100 predictions — then if you make a hundred predictions and two of them come true, people will focus on the two and say, oh my God. I mean, Jules Verne, you know, he predicted the submarine. Well, there were already submarines. And a nuclear submarine, wow, that’s cool. But he also predicted that the rocket to the moon would be shot off with, you know, an explosive power behind it, and that would have squished everybody like a bug. So we kind of don’t worry about that one. And he was pretty great at what he did. And that’s, I think, what you want to hope for in science fiction: it’s kind of Vernian, hitting a high batting average of predictions out of your own culture that catch a vibe that people were already going to do, and then you look prescient.
And then the other thing would be Wells, and that’s where I’m more interested: the utopian thing of, there’s a political movement that’s pushing you in a certain direction that looks to be good for people, let’s pretend it already happened. And with Wells, I find this super interesting: that at Bretton Woods a bunch of young men — they were almost all men, diplomats from winners of World War Two — they gathered at Bretton Woods: well, we’ve got to make up the post-war order, the international order, what the hell are we going to do? Wells had been stubbornly writing utopian novels about the technocracy, the meritocracy. It wasn’t usually democratic, but in any case it was a model of things going right by paying attention to scientific principles et cetera. And that was in the back of their head as a mental template of what would be good.
And so H.G. Wells’s utopian novels, as weird and funky as they look now, they had an impact on the post-war world because he caught that vibe, and he caught it out of the Fabians and Fabian socialism. It’s not like he made it up, he was just reporting a strand that he saw.
Ross Kenyon: My association coming out of Bretton Woods: this is where the end of the tie of money to precious metals really began, sort of, in earnest. I guess bimetallism ended earlier, but then gold was still the international standard, but then it slips away until Nixon, right?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah. And after Nixon broke off the gold — I think it’s ’71, I think it’s ’71, ’73, maybe ’73, something, somewhere in there.
Ross Kenyon: So then, this for the audience’s benefit, if this is esoteric to you: fiat money. I think of the Latin for fiat, I think of the Annunciation from the Vulgate Bible, right? Mary says, like, let it be — fiat — when the angel tells her she’s going to give birth to Jesus. So it’s sort of like acquiescence, almost, like it’s just a declaration. So the government declares that the money is now the standard that one must use, that it’s legal tender, that you have to accept if someone tries to pay you in it, something like that. And that’s basically where we are right now. Is that fair?
Kim Stanley Robinson: That sounds good to me. And now we’re, you know, we’re skating off into the space of my semi-comprehension, but that seems right. But I’m saying, and then also what you may be leading us toward, and I’m interested to learn more about, is that with the power of the internet — the kind of global village is the wrong word, but an interconnected world by internet — and the powers of blockchain where you can keep track of things reliably, then you get into a system of mutual IOUs. And there were always contracts between individuals that promised each other to recompense each other with time or goods or money and stuff.
So there were individual contracts outside the governmental system of fiat money. Although always, to my mind, what’s your securitization if somebody absconds? Security, it seems to me, would be — you would still be holding onto some fiat money. So that’s my understanding of the situation as it exists now.
Ross Kenyon: So one way of understanding money — Paul, you can chime in here too if you’d like — sort of a mutual web of obligations or debt, and ultimately backed up by nothing strictly redeemable in physical terms. And then you’re imagining a future where money is not based upon debt in the same way, but actually the removal and storage of carbon dioxide, or the avoided emissions of carbon dioxide.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes. Well, this is what struck me about the Chen plan, this notion of the carbon coin. If you could count on it, if you were just as certain that it was real as you were certain that the US dollar was real — which is kind of, the dollar, this is one of the ways America is still the big superpower, it’s the ultimate backstop currency on the planet. Everybody ultimately would like to have dollars, and they’re exchangeable with the other currencies that float up or down on it. If you could be certain that you would make a living, that you could make dollars by sequestering carbon, and then you would get a carbon coin going — for a tonne of carbon sequestered you get a certain amount, and that would float on the currency markets.
But the reason that I brought the central banks in, and you can teach me more about this, is that the central banks could back it in a way that you could never do a speculative run on it. It would always have a floor value that the central banks guarantee. Maybe this is more, again, by way of super-long-term bonds that were guaranteed, so that in a way you would be able to go long on the future in the way that current finance likes to short the future. I have no doubt that you can begin to hear me skating off the edge of my zone of comprehension here.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s true even for experienced economists. That’s the risk in talking about this stuff.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, yes, I have been noticing that, and I’m glad that you said that, in that economists were fighting over whether the quantitative easing was going to create inflation or deflation or have no effect at all, and that made me laugh. So I thought, and these are the experts, and they have no idea. So they still have no idea.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Kim Stanley Robinson: And, you know, obviously — what I think is going on there is that part of this has to do, ooh, with — and it relates to science fiction — when you begin to speak about the future, like what will happen from the now, you are doing a science fiction scenario, you are effectively writing a science fiction story. That means that it’s just like the rest of science fiction: it can’t predict the future. Well, it’s a guess and it might or might not happen, but it’s likely not to happen, something else will happen instead.
So demographic predictions or stock market or bond values, these are all disguised as pseudo-nonfictional science fiction stories, and they suffer the same structural insufficiency. They can’t do what they would want to do. So you have to make a prediction and then maybe you can try to make it happen, but you are not going to be calling out what really does happen.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think would happen if we did base the economy on captured carbon dioxide? Do you think that would be enough to — well, let me nest that with another question. Does that exist inside of broader capitalist property relations, or is this something that would take us entirely out of that paradigm?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it’s a good question, because it puts your finger right on one of the crucial points. It seems to me that one of the things that’s going on with the attempt to sequester carbon and dodge a mass extinction event faster than capitalism would do it in the normal replacements of technology with better technology — and I mean machines — is the return of the commons. That if the atmosphere is a commons, then it’s immediately — there’s going to be enclosure, attempts at enclosure.
So there’s a vicious, wicked battle going on between privatization, private power, typically the richest ten percent on the planet, and the public commons, the sense of the common, the sense that we’re all in it together, that things like air and then things like water belong to everybody together and you shouldn’t have to pay for them, that they are public goods that the public has to create for itself by work. And you still have to be able to make a living.
So I would say that for sure, for civilizational survival, we need a return of the commons and a heavy assault on capitalist property rights as they exist now. So how do you do that? Well, maybe Georgist estate taxes, maybe progressive taxes. And the Henry Georges of England thought they should be land-based: that the value of land should just be intensely, progressively taxed, so that rich people couldn’t just buy land and then sock away their value in something that really doesn’t devalue, because it’s real estate and it’s not subject to that kind of devaluing, especially if it’s where people really want it, like in cities.
If you tax that at a progressive enough rate that you were actually losing money when you bought property that you didn’t really need, people wouldn’t do it anymore, and the commons would kind of return. So, yes, it could be that the carbon coin, or paying people to sequester carbon, is a kind of judo, or even a frontal assault on notions of private property trumping everything else.
Ross Kenyon: George is a great example too, although I remember reading some quote that Marx hated Henry George and thought he was a great deluder of people who would have otherwise been on the road to communism. But Henry George is also claimed by classical liberals as being a market-friendly person and coming out of the Lockean tradition. He just likes the proviso, right, where you — as long as you leave as much and as good for others, if you take anything out of the commons — whereas, like, modern libertarians who like John Locke, they sort of have a different take on it. But yeah, George is not a part of the socialist tradition in that kind of way. Although what I just said might mean angry Georgists are going to write me emails now.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, that’s all right.
Ross Kenyon: It’s nice to have him back into the conversation, because ever since Thomas Piketty and his work on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the focus on taxes — we’re in a current world order that is very entrenched and massive and legal. How can you change it quickly and cleanly and legally without revolution, or trying to change the names of the days and going into the whole overthrow-of-everything type schtick? What can you do in a kind of reformist, stepwise manner that will be quickly effective for what you really want in the ultimate horizon, far off hundreds of years from now, which is a stable biosphere?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, taxes are a great instrument because people already believe in them. And of course the one percent and the top 10% don’t like them, because it’s their value — they really need to take a big honking haircut.
Ross Kenyon: The big haircut — that’s a short story idea, or maybe a novel idea. Maybe another 600-page novel. [unclear] your book contains a quote that comes up a bunch of times about the euthanasia of the rentier, euthanasia of the rentier class.
Kim Stanley Robinson: I mean, this is Keynes at his funniest, because he is pretty damn funny, often slyly and with a stone face, like Buster Keaton. Yeah, the euthanasia of the rentier class by taxes, if there were strong progressive taxes that were on assets as well as on income. Because you can fake your income as being zero by reinvesting in various tax dodges, but if it’s a tax on your declared asset values that is quite progressive, then the bigger the company the more massive the tax; the more land you have, the more massive the tax. People will begin to devolve, companies will break up. A big company like Apple or Google, or any big monster company corporation like they exist today — the metanationals, as they call them in the Mars Trilogy — they would break up on purpose in order to reduce their tax load. And then you’ve got somewhat of a horizontalization of power.
And one thing I would say here is that all these are ideas. None of them are sufficient, none of them are pure, and in my case, speaking personally, they aren’t even all that coherent, but they may be parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe there isn’t a coherent solution. Maybe it’s a — this is where your project comes in. It’s not the total solution, it helps, it’s a step, it’s one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that you lock into a larger place.
And this is why I wrote about the central banks as the kind of global mechanism to lock all the good littler pieces into place and reward them as a global effort, as a kind of a UN project that we’re all on together. It’s not that I think that top-down solutions are the only way, it’s just that we need a global solution where all the pieces kind of coordinate, or loosely coordinate, in reinforcing each other.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. It’s like the underlying substrate of everything in our society is money. And so if that’s the unifying factor, then that’s a really strong lever point to affect large change.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes. What can you get paid for? Like, I’m going to get paid for the cabbages I grow, or even more interesting, for the cows that I pasture. And when they grow up, I’m going to send them off to get killed and I get paid a certain amount per cow because they’re beef. But at the same time, I’m adding to the carbon in my soil, I’m sequestering carbon in my soil by my farming methods — regenerative agriculture, or, more controversial as to whether it’s possible or not, but I think it might be, regenerative or carbon ranching. Well, then you also need to get paid, but the market won’t pay you for that. You need at that point, I think, a government intervention, a bit of quantitative easing. You get paid for that by the public as having done a public good.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. What’s interesting right now is that there does seem to be a turning of the tide. Like, by no means are we at a point where the market is fully dealing with its externalized costs of emissions or anything like that. No, nowhere near that. But it does seem like there is a turning — there was a turning point, I believe it was in 2018 when the last IPCC report came out, that now there is attention and direction on this, and there are large emitters, large companies, starting to at least say the right things, even if their actions aren’t really following through on that, which is a marked change from where we were in even, like, 2015 when Paris happened.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yep.
Paul Gambill: So that’s interesting to dig in on. And for us, we’re not a central bank, we can’t impact people on that scale and we can’t force people to use our currency. But we can try to create a new currency that tries to solve a lot of problems in similar ways, and just from a bottom-up rather than top-down approach. And it’ll be interesting to see how these things evolve over time, because everything is influenced by everything else too. So if Nori were successful in creating this sort of bottom-up pseudo-decentralized cryptocurrency for carbon, does that impact the future potential central banks and how they may go after a carbon coin type plan?
Kim Stanley Robinson: I don’t know, I can’t suss it out. There are a whole lot of private contractual financial arrangements in this world, and it seems to me that one that looked like it would provide an advantage in purely economic profit-and-loss terms — so still in the old corporate paradigm of, can we make more money by doing it this way — that it would be another tool to use, another mechanism, and it might influence the central banks’ thinking, because mostly big government investment projects do like to work through private industries.
So there would be two things. If the central banks were interested, they might like to have a private verification apparatus that is attesting — people like, like bond rating agencies, which are not public, they’re private, and they perform a public service, that they sometimes are quite bad at, by rating bonds for their solidity. And so, I guess, I could imagine. But here once again the waters are rising above my head, I’m beginning to drown in my own ignorance as to how that might work. And so here I would really need to read more and have more explained to me. But actually, I read on your website, Ethereum — I’m being taught constantly by the so-called Economic Space Agency, the ECSA, a kind of parallel effort going on that is not just for carbon sequestration but for good social work, as a private cryptocurrency.
And so, but one thing I’ll say is, those guys have tried to explain it to me multiple times, and I’m failing to get it, out of my own disabilities probably. At a certain point when you’re thinking finance and combining that with thinking computers, like the blockchain, my head explodes. I mean, if I start speculating on it, somebody else will have already thought these thoughts and realized that they’re wrong or they’re simplistic. So I hesitate to say much more on that.
Ross Kenyon: But you’re writing about it all the time, seemingly, the last couple books. It’s in there, this last one. Although — Paul, to add to your comment too — it seems like the central banks mostly set a floor price and maybe also a ceiling price, so that the speculation is kept within some reasonable bounds and can’t be manipulated. But that’s also compatible with private efforts, too, seemingly.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, it’s pretty market-friendly. Market makers, as opposed to them just saying, like, this is the only thing that you’re allowed to use, or this is exactly — yeah.
Ross Kenyon: But okay, let’s talk about blockchain, cryptocurrency. Right now we’re recording — what, January 25th? So by the time you hear this, your Uber driver will have told you about the latest coin to get rich by that you probably should not buy. But what has attracted you to it? It plays a prominent role in The Ministry for the Future. Why?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it kind of doesn’t, it kind of doesn’t. But here’s the why: I’ve been convinced by some of my friends who know more than I do, and so these are really personal conversations more than my reading. The blockchain is interesting for its traceability, and it does not necessarily involve the proof of work by computer churning that Bitcoin is famous for. And the amount of electricity burned to create one Bitcoin is a scandal and a travesty, and indeed it has thrown all ideas of cryptocurrency into heavy disrepute, so that when people hear cryptocurrency, or even blockchain, they think, oh, Bitcoin.
But Bitcoin, to my way of thinking, is like a gold rush. You’re trying to make value out of nothing by finding something pointless like gold, that doesn’t actually do anything except stand for value in the culture. And then hopefully you can get to real money by a kind of a trick of speculation. So I’m thinking of it as a bubble, it’s like tulips, and I quite hate Bitcoin per se for the burn of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to make a currency that you effectively have to hope you can Ponzi someone into buying from you for a real fiat currency, at which point you’ve made your 20,000 dollars by doing nothing but burning two thousand dollars worth of electricity, and no value added to the real economy, as they sometimes call it.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, Bitcoin rentier class. Is that what you’re kind of getting at?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I think it’s just a scam, or a bubble, a concocted bubble, that if people believed in it, there’s going to be a group of people left holding the bag. What you want to do is cycle through. Bitcoin, it’s failed as a medium of exchange, so now it’s a storage of value. This is my read of the situation. And I think I’m right that this proof of work, by burning tons of electricity — even if it’s hydro, it’s something like 1 or 2 percent of all the electricity created by human beings right now, it’s as much as Israel, 37 million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. Yeah.
And for what? For a number, that if you can sell that number to somebody else for dollars, then you’ve got dollars and someone else has got X number of Bitcoins. And they have to sell it to somebody else for dollars before the whole thing collapses, like a soufflé, or like the tulip craze.
Paul Gambill: What about — I sort of think of Bitcoin maybe as, like, a loss leader for the concept of blockchain, in that Bitcoin is here to stay even though it is by far the least useful of all of the cryptocurrencies out there, and it is the most wasteful as well. But there are so many efforts out there to build alternatives. You’re absolutely correct that it has failed as a medium of exchange. It is now just a store of value, and that was a conscious decision that the developers who controlled the core code made a few years ago. And so we saw forks off, like Bitcoin Cash, from people who wanted it to still function as a medium of exchange.
So there have been so many attempts to create new networks, new cryptocurrencies, new forks off of Bitcoin, to try to improve and fix these problems, and the staying power of it is just outlasting all of them. And yet many of these are also simultaneously successful, so that’s why I propose that the idea of Bitcoin is a loss leader. Like, it was the first blockchain platform and it was proposing to solve a specific problem — I mean, specifically in response to quantitative easing — and now we’ve spawned all these other different blockchains that don’t harvest as much bad effects. Like, we wouldn’t have carbon-neutral proof-of-stake platforms that are specifically for social impact projects if it were not for Bitcoin. So I guess I’m kind of wondering, like, how bad does Bitcoin have to be to make that trade not worth it?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, maybe loss leader is a good way to think of it. But the thing is, the first iteration of this, of the idea of cryptocurrency — it’s very unfortunate that it was presented to the world as the way to do it when there was such an intense carbon burn. And what I understand from blockchain experts and from computer people that I’ve talked to is that you can authenticate and secure the cryptography, the code involved in making sure that someone just hasn’t made it up, the authentication and the distributed authentication, without that massive burn of energy as proof of concept. So that’s the distinction that has to be made.
And to me it’s a very unfortunate loss leader, in that you say, oh, we’ve got a new technology, it’s a great way to scam money from people. And then the next thing you say to the world is, actually that technology is a really good way to secure contracts and to know where money really is and where it isn’t, and so it’s actually a building block of civilization. So it was a crappy loss leader in that what it did was it destroyed the reputation of an idea that is much bigger and more powerful and more useful.
And of course the people in the know know this. It’s people like me who don’t know this, who develop — or even less informed than I am, which is very common — and what they’ll say is, well, that’s just bogus, that’s just people trying to make bucks without doing anything. But meanwhile the banks of the world, the governments of the world, and people like you all are saying, now wait a second, there’s a real, useful technology here for making secure contracts and knowing where real money is, and for storing value, and even for a medium of exchange in a contractual way. The reason that I got excited about having the central banks do it is that their securitization is the strongest, given the current order of things.
Ross Kenyon: There’s also a technological generational gap, too, where Bitcoin is very, you know, consciously Austrian, free banking in its orientation, but the next generation, especially with Ethereum, a lot of the projects are much closer to Kate Raworth’s vision of how we should design economies and think about economies. And a lot of those projects tend to be less of exactly what you would expect from what I just told you about Bitcoin and those early generational iterations of it.
There are problems though with Ethereum too, such that proof of stake, which will replace proof of work in many of these blockchains, has to be designed very carefully. Because staking is when people put a certain number of coins up for grabs by saying, I promise to validate these transactions legitimately, and if I fail to, I will be penalized by having my stake slashed or taken away entirely. But one of the classic criticisms of proof of stake is that it’s an oligarchy, right? It just goes to the people who have the most. The more you stake, the more you earn, and therefore it’s concentrated as well. So then there’s all these other design proposals for how to get around that. So there are also concerns for someone with leftist sensibility such as yourself about some of those proof-of-stake systems, which maybe you’re already familiar with, I’m not sure.
Kim Stanley Robinson: No. I just heard whiffs of them because of my associations with the people at ECSA — Environmental Space Agency, or whatever, they call it Economic Space Agency. I’ve heard these discussions without fully following them. It’s not — as a leftist, but also I’m convinced that getting us through the climate crisis is such an overriding problem, that I’m fine with the nation state system. And in fact, I wish it was even more internationalized. I wish there was greater power at the global level too. I wish there was a sheriff for the Paris Agreement, for instance, and I hope that the nation states of the world will sheriff each other in a way that they never did for, say, the Antarctic Treaty.
And so in that context of my sort of statism — let’s keep the state and support the state and use the state, the nation state system and the international laws, to get ourselves through the climate crisis — I’m not seeing immediately the need, except in this sense: that governments work through private organizations that are companies, that the public-private — it’s not, it can’t be all public. First of all, it’s not clear that that would work better, it’s not clear it would work at all. It’s always been a public-private amalgam. And now, how would private carbon coin companies work? Maybe like bond agencies. When I search for analogies for this new thing, that’s what I come to.
Ross Kenyon: But there’s also simply, like, private banks, in effect. Every time a private bank gives out a loan that they themselves can’t back, which happens all the time — aren’t they quantitative easing?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. So, and in, like, orders of magnitude larger than the Fed is.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, exactly, orders of magnitude, such that when you get into that fictional-but-not-fictional economy of finance, you get your mind blown, and you think, no wonder nobody knows anything, because I’m not even sure you can calculate all the private [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Kim Stanley Robinson: So, yikes. In that ecology, if you can find a way to be useful to the carbon reduction effort in a private way, well, more power to you, fantastic. Because one thing’s for sure, I have to fight against this, everybody does: monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. I love that term. But it doesn’t explain everything. But it definitely is a good way to talk about people like myself who are saying, well, the solution is X. And really what you do is you fall into an ecology where there are literally thousands of solutions. And it’s just a matter of finding your niche in that larger cultural ecology.
Ross Kenyon: Stan, we can’t let you get away with only receiving praise. We have a couple of hard questions about your latest book too.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, you sure? I’ll just — yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a tough guy.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a tough guy. Okay. So one that caught my eye — and I know this has been said since the debate originally happened nearly a century ago — but it’s the socialist calculation debate. Do you think computers will eventually be able to make markets obsolete?
Kim Stanley Robinson: I don’t actually know that. No, it could replace it. Yeah, I don’t know. And I think the market is a fraud and a con game in general, a power play. I think that not only are there market failures, but that the market is a failure. But, however, that said, there’s no obvious replacement for it, especially given the world that we’re in right now. So let’s run timelines. If you go out a thousand years, could we just kind of assume that we’re going to get what we need, and then we make what we want? So that you have a kind of post-market economy of automation and red plenty, where the computers just calculate how many shoes we need and what sizes they need to be, and blah, blah. Maybe so. But that’s a thousand years out.
In the meantime, what happens next from where we are now? I think regulation of the market, of essentially banishing the market to the margin, to the toys and the games and the innovative areas of speculative innovation, so that the necessities — food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care and education — that all of these are simply public goods that you have a right to as a — and you do some work, there’s full employment, you work, you get those things at adequacy. If you want more, you go into the market system, and it’s like rugby, or, you know, it’s like one of these hard-guy testosterone games: people go into the market in order to take risks and get a shot of adrenaline, and then come out either big winners or big losers, a win-lose game. But the necessities, your health care, should not be a win-lose game.
So, yeah, I’m a leftist, I’m anti-market, that’s what I’d say about that. But also I’d like to make interventions that could be acted on now. So that’s why I go to taxes or to quantitative easing, because there are many people who think of themselves as being to the left of me — which means they are very, very left-handed, because I’m literally left-handed — and like to think of myself as, you know, fully automated luxury communism, which I think is a joke. I like to think of myself as, let’s keep moving leftward. I’m public/private. But nevertheless, what I’m saying is I’ll get attacked for even talking about tax policies or Georgist taxes, from the left.
Ross Kenyon: From the left, of course. Well, yeah, because don’t we need to overthrow everything right now?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I don’t believe in that. I am actually a creeping reformist, stepwise. I’d be really happy to see Keynesianism back, and then maybe socialism, and then maybe democratic socialism. And then in some far future, if we get to perfect horizontalization of wealth and power, I could call that anarchy and then be totally in favor of it. And many anarchists think that I’m on their side, and maybe, if you take the really long view, maybe I am. Total horizontalization of wealth and power across all humans, that is a worthy long-term goal. So I never say poo-poo to that. But I just think right now what we need is, you know, anti-austerity, no joke.
Ross Kenyon: I almost was going to ask if you’re a fully automated luxury communist. I had that thought this morning.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, the thing about that is, no, because you cannot fully automate — the world of labor is intensely human. And full automation is a bad science fiction story, it’s a hand-waving fantasy. We are really good robots, really good labor units, and the idea that you could have full automation is just silly.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, that’s sort of what I was asking with the socialist calculation debate: human intentionality seemingly will play a role for the foreseeable future. But yes, one, okay. By the way, links to all of these obscure political-economic debates and terms are in the show notes in case you want to follow up on any of that. Paul, I know you have a doozy yourself here. Why don’t you take it away?
Paul Gambill: Yeah. So while reading Ministry, my question is: do you believe that, like, a UN agency could really create, like, a social network or an app that, like, actually dethroned Facebook or something like that?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I’m not sure. I’m not good on this stuff, and a lot of my more well-educated and experienced social media people have told me that that’s not quite possible. And even the idea that you sell your own data, that you have privacy of your own data and then you sell it in a marketplace where you get some money back, is regarded by many as being a bad idea. That’s in my novel. So what I was thinking when I postulated that was, I’m just thinking of Linux and of open source, and open source has a gift economy. Programmers worldwide have given — it’s probably millions of hours of human labor time — in a gift economy of, let’s make an open source platform on which we can do these things so that privatization doesn’t happen.
So the question was earlier, is the internet a commons, or can you enclose it and turn it into private property? Well, we’ve seen since the ’90s that indeed it can be made into private property rather simply. I don’t have a Facebook presence — my publishers do, my fans do — but I refuse to participate. Don’t do a Twitter account, stay off of social media. I figure, if that’s private property, why not stay out in the commons? And by that, typically I mean my garden, which is owned by — well, the land’s owned by all my neighbors. So there’s enough screen time in this world for all of us, and especially under COVID. But at the best of times, people are delinking themselves from the real world in unhealthy ways and spending a lot of their time looking at their screens.
A few decades before, everybody would be called a couch potato, and that’s why people are beginning to look like couch potatoes: it’s the lack of physical exercise outside in the real world. So this gets into my old hippie, you know, get outdoors and do outdoors things — that throwing a rock at a bottle on a fence post, you know, that’s been set some 40 yards away, is way more fun than anything that you can do on the net in a video game.
But the problem is that people are so screen-oriented now that they’re not good at three dimensions. They can’t hit that bottle with a rock anymore, they can’t play pool, they can’t play ping pong, they can’t play badminton, they can’t play volleyball. The third dimension defeats them, because their expertise as athletes has been reduced to their thumbs and two dimensions. And you do need practice for your brain to develop these natural skills that are there if you practice them.
So this is why I’m thinking — this is, I’m bad on this issue. I don’t understand the attraction of Facebook relative to the people that you could walk out and meet, your neighbors. So actually, Gary Snyder taught me a lot about this. He says, look, Stan, you’ve got your community, you’ve got your network. Your community are the people that you walk outdoors and you run into them and you have nothing much in common with them, you talk about the weather or what the kids are doing. And that’s your community. And you can get quite close, your family maybe, if they’re nearby. And then you have your network, and that’s worldwide, and they’re intellectual. You have more interesting conversations with them, but they’re mediated by the media. And you need both.
He said, if you try to make your network into your community, you have the worms-in-a-bottle phenomenon and it doesn’t really work in your home life amongst people. I mean, the science fiction community is really a network, and that’s a problem if you don’t have a true community and you try to make your network into your community. It’s a loss. On the other hand, if you have a community and you completely give up on the network, well, you’re not taking advantage of this global citizen opportunity, the high-tech world that we’re in, a skillful surfing of it. You’d want to be doing both. And then if there was a public platform, if you manage to make your network a commons, like many scientific organizations — you get into them, yeah, and those kinds of things — and you skip the big privatization efforts.
And then people will say to me, and I have no answer for this: well, what’s the harm? You go on to Facebook, you’re not actually paying for it, advertisers are, but you’re not, and so it’s an attention economy, you give your attention to that. You see people you didn’t know, or that you haven’t seen for 20 years, it’s worldwide, it is the global village. What’s the harm in it? And I don’t have a good answer for that. I mean, many times in this conversation I will have been revealing myself as what I am. I’m 68 years old, about to turn 69. I’m a Southern California boy, I’m a white American male, Mr. Mom, suburban hippie. I still hold to hippie values, you know, California New Age Buddhist with a heavy, heavy emphasis on staying outdoors as much as I can. So from that subject position, there’s lots that’s mysterious to me.
Ross Kenyon: What advice would you give to people working on developing assets based upon carbon dioxide?
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, I sort of see that you guys are doing this already, linked up with the other organizations doing the same. Find ways to collaborate with the worldwide network of people who are essentially engaged in the same project, and see if it can scale by way of linkages of many small units doing the same thing. I think I see that happening already in the list of your network of colleagues, and I see it happening all over.
One thing that’s made it visible to me is a lot of people have read The Ministry for the Future and feel that they are already engaged in the work of a ministry for the future, one way or another. So they read that book and they go and they get in touch with me: hey, we’re doing this kind of work, you know, thank you for writing about us, because it doesn’t get written, because it’s kind of amorphous and hard to fit into a novel plot, which I can definitely testify to. So that’s what I’d say, though, is connect up and network with the other units doing the same kind of thing.
Ross Kenyon: We do try to do that. We’re very influenced by the open source ethos. We run a weird line — I’m sure you can tell from listening to the thinkers that we’ve referenced on this show, Stan, that we’re influenced by thinkers from all around the spectrum — but we try to be non-competitive, or pre-competitive as people say. We try to work with people as much as we can. We don’t think that the model of having one super-large dominant, the only carbon removal entity, is probably the best model for scaling this globally in time. But also want to be a successful company, too. It’s weird to walk that line. But we do lean the direction that you’re talking about. I hope that’s on the right road, at least.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah. Well, you are dealing with factors that I’m entirely ignorant of, so it’s best for me just to say I don’t know, I’m ignorant on these matters. I will say this: maybe I’m not completely ignorant. My frisbee golf partner, one of my best friends here in Davis, a neighbor and one of my closest friends — he has been working for many years as CEO of an ethanol production company, and he’s moved on from that now and is interested in carbon sequestration at the physical level. So, not how do you pay for it, but how do you get it in the ground? Sort of like the way his ethanol company was producing a non-fossil-fuel liquid fuel. And he had me well indoctrinated as to the advantages of ethanol as compared to fossil fuels, and I think he’s right, and we do need liquid fuels as a bridge technology going forward.
So now he too is doing carbon sequestration, and the interesting questions come up. Like, okay, you grab a tonne of CO2, maybe you freeze it, maybe you’ve got it, it’s dry ice, who the hell knows. Where do you put it? How much does that cost? Can you link up with this? It seems to me there’s a chain, a vertical chain of people up and down the line of this process, and in the midst of it is indeed the financialization and the verification, which I take it is where you are looking.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot of that. I know that you have a part of your [unclear] — I don’t even know if I want to bring this up, because it’ll send us down a giant rabbit hole — but part of the modern monetary theory work that you discuss is a jobs guarantee, and it’s just carbon verification, and that’s sort of the baseline for the world’s population that are unemployed, as they get jobs as verifiers.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, you are right. Verifying carbon, especially in soil — not that simple, not that cheap. There’s work there, there’s work there and everywhere, such that full employment. And there’s definitely more jobs than there are people, even at our big number. So, and I love that part of MMT. I think it’s not just a matter of talking about money, but the way that they foreground jobs guarantee, talk about it by its initials. Really, they’ve got two platforms that are co-equal in importance for them: QE, quantitative easing without fear, and then JG, the job guarantee, that absolutely reorients the capitalist economy.
Because if government gives you a job when you say you want one, then suddenly wage pressure goes away, the fear of destitution goes away, and all private industries would have to match whatever adequate salary the job guarantee from government is giving you. That would change so much that, to me, I see why they emphasize it. And to the extent that you can get involved with that — and going to carbon, it is a big rabbit hole, but I want to slip out of it to the side by talking about carbon sequestration verification, that you’ve done it.
Friends — and, you know, UC Davis is one of the leading agricultural schools on earth, a research center, kind of inventor of the Green Revolution, and now they’re trying, somewhat lamely and slowly, to get to the post-Green Revolution that would be better, because it isn’t so fossil-fuel-based as the Green Revolution was — and my friends here say, well, okay, sequestering carbon in the soil, you can do it for two or three crop cycles and then you kind of max out and you need to look for other places, because they are not seeing the kind of ag that will continuously add more and more carbon. They think it tops out pretty quickly, and it’s a reserved space.
So this is just another wrinkle, right? Regenerative agriculture can do part of it, but can’t do all of it. It’s cool what it does, because you’re growing food and sequestering carbon at the same time. So any time you see these double goods, you want to follow them robustly.
Ross Kenyon: But I’m wondering if people will be running into limits of places to put the carbon, and that that might be a financial offering in the end. Not just verification, but new spaces to sequester carbon that really work.
Kim Stanley Robinson: I think that’s the case. I’m sure we’ll discover new ones that we don’t even know about yet, and I hope we do.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Your comments too — I’m going to say it and then we’re going to move on so you can finish at a reasonable time — but the quantitative easing without fear, Paul, I’m going to put words in your mouth too, sort of makes me worry a little bit that there’s not a concern about printing money to that extent. I feel like we should at least be somewhat worried about money creation and being somewhat conservative about it. But I’ve never heard an answer. I just feel dumb learning about it, in the same way, like, you have to admit, like, I don’t know. I’m told that managing the economy is different from managing household finances. I don’t exactly know how, but it hurts my head. I can’t say I fully understand modern monetary theory, even as a lay person, right now.
Kim Stanley Robinson: So, well, let me give you my take on it, which again is just a bit educated by others, but I feel like I understood them. Keynes was saying that when liquidity dries up in a depression, and people are scared and money goes away and turns to vapor — paper, because it was promises rather than cash — that’s when government should spend like crazy and stimulate the economy and re-lubricate the gears. Okay? And Keynes also added that when times were flush, the government needed to tax progressively, grab some of that money back and hold on to it so that they had it in reserve, and people would trust them when they started pouring it out again at the next bad time.
Now, what happened historically, I am told, is that actually when flush times hit — the glorious thirty, you know, 1945 to ’73 — governments did not grab back money. They didn’t do this stimulus-contraction model that Keynes had modeled after World War One and through the ’30s. They simply just continued to spend, and there was war spending and all the factitious wars, the United States et cetera, military-industrial complex spending. They never did suck the money back in, and yet the economy didn’t tank and you didn’t get massive inflation, deflation. Nobody even seemed to notice. So MMT is pointing to actual history rather than theory, and they’re saying it didn’t matter a damn.
And then they’re also saying, the economy is cranking on the surface, 75 trillion or so per year as gross world product. If you tack in and say, well, we just made up one trillion, two trillion, three trillion that year, who’s going to notice, when it’s a 75 trillion dollar gross world product? And it doesn’t matter a damn. And that’s another MMT point. Is that — you wouldn’t want, say, suddenly, okay, everybody gets a billion dollars in their bank account, and therefore a billion times a billion, that might cause a certain distrust that that money means anything. And we still want it to mean something.
And there are quite leftist economists who say you cannot detach price and value. They basically are against MMT — that’s magic money tree people talking. There is a real relationship, and this comes from Marxism, between price and value: it’s based on labor, it’s labor value, and you can’t invent zillions of hours of human power and put a money thing on it. So I’ve heard both sides of this debate and I don’t have the competence to decide.
But one thing I’ll say about that, as compared to when people talk about, say, blockchain, is that I think I understand the basic sentences when people talk about that level of macroeconomics. I see what they’re saying, and it’s something that I can comprehend maybe by analogy or metaphor. When it gets into the details of programming, or what’s really going on in blockchain, well, then I have to take it on faith, and none of the metaphors have actually sparked in my head as something that I fully understand.
I think I’m like many people in this world. I need to understand by a story made up of sentences and metaphors that clarify for me in kind of physical-world tangibilities that make it clear. And when it gets down into the abstractions of math, which is programming or finance or economics or true math and physics — then, like, same, quantum physics. And I mean, it’s absurd how the quantum mechanics people, they’ll do their math, then they’ll try to tell you what it meant in the real world. Well, you have to believe in their metaphors, and they have to be good at metaphors, because the math itself, they themselves have to shrug, it doesn’t seem to add up.
So I would say finance is weird and hard, and there are elements of it that have been better explained to all of us than other elements. And one project for you guys and for Nori and for your project, I think, would be: can you make explanations of what’s going on in that world that people intuitively understand, or that are persuaded that they understand by your explanations?
Ross Kenyon: We certainly aspire to something like that. That’s the name of the game, really. Yeah, it’s part of what we’re doing right here. You tease us a little bit in Ministry about a new religion, and I imagine it’s relatively pantheistic, maybe Gaia worship, leaning that direction. To what degree do you think social change will come from some sort of spiritual revolution like that, versus something more mechanical about the money system or something like that?
Kim Stanley Robinson: There’s something going on in this notion that we are all on this planet together, a one-planet feeling, that the social media, the internet, the revolution in information technologies generally, that we know that everybody on the planet alive knows the basic situation. And this is even people whose cultures have kept them illiterate. They still know, because they talked and they’ve got their phones. There’s many more phones than people. So I’ve been thinking about Gaia religion, the sense of, where’s your allegiance? Where do you feel devotional? To the nation state system? Well, this is concocted by power groups, and I think that it’s a little bit fictitious at all points. Very, very seldom do I feel like an American, and when that happens I feel like I’ve perhaps been conned, or that it’s not a real thing.
And that’s what nation systems historically were: the nation was a concoction, and they had to quash and bury the dialects linguistically. They had to make a national language and kick the crap out of dialects, et cetera. And it’s been a bad thing in general, nationalism. But what about planetarism, what about world? We are in one biosphere, we are in one world. What happens to the people on the other side of the globe gets into your air and into your lungs, and vice versa. So I keep thinking that the possibilities are there for a Gaia-type religion, a sort of shamanism.
I got really interested in shamanism because it appears that there was a religion when humans left Africa. There’s a big part of our brain that is clearly religious. It lights up like a Christmas tree when you have religious thoughts, and so it’s evolutionarily very deep in us. So, okay, what was it? Well, there’s shamanism in every corner of the globe, tip of South America, top of Siberia. Probably we walked out of Africa with a form of that religion, and where you connect with otherworldly [unclear].
But maybe the sense of this planet as body, as your body, that we share with everybody else, and sort of the beehive feeling: that these bees, when they’re dancing around in the air, are they in a religious glow of, oh my God, I’m doing the right thing, this is such a devotion, I’m praying as I live my daily life as a bee gathering stuff to take back to the hive? And so could humanity have that?
As opposed to any of the — Iain Banks used to talk about those cruel desert cults, and he meant Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and I would throw in Hinduism, with these cruel desert cults from about, say, 600 BC or 2000 BC. That when humans got out of the Paleolithic, got the agricultural technology, immediately split up into power bases: men oppressed women, there was the warrior-priest caste oppressing the serfs and the artisans. And so you got the big class system immediately, got these religions that enforce the class system. Well, I hate them all. So what about the, you know, post-capitalist religion? That feeling? I think it’s needed, I think it’s hanging out there in a kind of imminent way.
So in my book, it was [unclear], it’s right, I was teasing, it was like a joke. Let’s have a day, like, for that, or like New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve, where everybody in the same moment turns on their phone and shouts to each other, all eight billion of us, kumbaya. Well, it’s like the guy who’s trying to do it says, you can’t schedule it, it comes on you as a moment of grace, unbidden. But maybe you can talk about it and kind of set the ground for it. People don’t recognize mystical experiences when they come out of left field and you’re not prepared for it. They just feel like they’ve gone crazy. You need to talk about it first. So that’s kind of what I was doing. I think it’s better to get to finance first.
Paul Gambill: It feels like maybe it’s like a return to our roots kind of thing. And I’m so glad that you mentioned shamanism, because [unclear] we’re not going to let you out of here without remembering to say that my favorite book that you’ve written was Shaman. I think maybe, Ross, you agree.
Ross Kenyon: I love that book.
Paul Gambill: I wonder why there isn’t more prehistoric fiction out there. And I looked, after I read that — like, I wanted more of that, I couldn’t find any. So if you know of any, I would love to know. But so, Ministry for the Future — you’ve kind of painted the picture of, like, how we can deal with climate change, and this is so important to you. But what’s next on your plate?
Kim Stanley Robinson: I’m writing, and nearly done with, a nonfiction book about backpacking in the High Sierra. It’s a kind of love letter to the High Sierra and to my wilderness life, which has been so important to me as a side activity through my whole existence, from my hippie youth. So it’s somewhat memoir, so much geology, so much history, and really kind of trying to talk about what people do in the mountains and grab it back away from the death-and-glory mountain climbing stupidities, you know, about the Into Thin Air, the notion that people go up to the mountains in order to be on top of the tallest mountain. This kind of abstraction, love of abstractions and of death and glory and all that. I’m trying to take it back for just simple backpacking and walking around up there, as I will.
Yeah, yeah. Looking at, looking at marmots and rocks and lichen. And so I’m nearly done with that, it’s been very absorbing. It’s freaking me out. I’ve realized that I’m a novelist because novels are a game where you are never fronting yourself. It’s like a persona for Greek theater, you’re behind a mask and telling a story. It’s not about you. When you write nonfiction, you’re supposedly talking about yourself. Well, I can’t do that. So I’ve been having a great time with it, but it’s deeply confusing, and I won’t do much more in the way of that. I mean, this is as close to memoir as I’ll ever get, Paul. Nothing else interesting has ever happened to me. But secondly, I don’t like the form, I don’t like the genre.
So that’s what I’m doing, though. It’s a lot of fun. And then after that I hope to do extremely short novels. I have an idea for a play. It’s an idea that really is almost a science fiction idea, but it has to be done as a play. I know nothing about plays, I’ll give it a try. So I have a bunch of — I mean, it’s not wrong to talk about me changing gears and going into late style.
The Ministry is the end of a road for me that began long ago, maybe with the Mars Trilogy: big fat novels that try to do the whole social totality and talk about history. I think Ministry is like a mic drop moment, I’m done. And so after that I want to keep writing, I love novels, but I’m thinking about these novels that are 120 pages long and yet they still give you a novelistic buzz. How do they do it, and can I do it? So that’s what I’ll be working at, something like that.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds good to me.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. I’m trying to think of any of those short books I’ve read that made a big impact. I’m sorry to cut you off, Stan.
Kim Stanley Robinson: No, no, no, that’s me too. I’m reading short novels and I’m looking at them in awe. They can — I love that. And so this is like form without content, but the world gives you the content, and really the form choice is the crucial. I found this by doing it wrong.
Paul Gambill: Speaking of form, can I say one thing for listeners? You should read The Ministry for the Future. I think — Ross, did you do the audio also?
Ross Kenyon: I think that I listened to the audio, but I had the hard copy [unclear].
Paul Gambill: That was really cool. I’ve never listened to an audiobook that had this many different narrators, and I really liked that each narrator had the particular accent already for the different perspectives that you were sharing. So it felt more immersive. I enjoyed that. So I would recommend listening to The Ministry for the Future if you are an audiobook person.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, I can back that. I listened to it just because I was interested in the accents, because it was an international cast, but everybody speaks English as a lingua franca, and we have so many beautiful accented Englishes. It’s one of the glories of our language, the different vocal apparatuses and accents that come into it from different dialects. It’s like dialects, almost.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. It felt more, it felt more real, like hearing the discussion of the Indian heat wave from an Indian accent. Like, I believe the anger and the voice and the fear and everything else. It just made me feel more real.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, very intense, that one. Many times — I mean, I can’t read my own work because I memorized it, and it bounces, it goes through my eyes and out the back of my head. I don’t read my own work, because I can’t. But if I only listen to it, it hits a big different part of my brain. I’m not a good listener. I listened to it, and then sometimes those voices, it just blows my mind. It’s as if — I can’t read my own books, and a good performance will just knock me right on the floor.
Ross Kenyon: Well, if you have 70 or 80 hours, you can do the Mars Trilogy.
Kim Stanley Robinson: That’s right. Yeah, I know. I’m a bad man.
Ross Kenyon: I love that you’re still challenging yourself. I look forward to reading your shorter, somehow shorter, novels. That’s going to be a fun one to experience, a play. Stan, I think this might be our longest, or nearly so, that we’ve ever done, and we loved it. We’re so happy that you got to come hang out with us. Thank you for doing so.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, thank you, Ross, Paul. Good luck with your efforts. Edit the hell out of this, and hopefully we’ll do it again someday and see where we’re at.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, we both really liked that. And thank you again for that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, right on. But thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, we all three certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at Nori.com, where there is a newsletter — that’s Nori.com/subscribe — there’s podcasts, there’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com/noripodcast, if you’d like more content, engagement and community. And thank you so much for your support.
