Ministry For the Future

Get It from  Hachette Book Group * Thrift Books * Goodreads * Amazon

We don’t usually do reviews of fiction, but Ministry for the Future is a story that tackles the two biggest existential challenges of our time—climate change and inequality—subjects which we often cover in our non-fiction reviews. We follow two main characters who are UN staffers–Frank May and Mary Murphy—over the course of their careers and the part each of them plays as humanity struggles with crisis.

The book starts when Frank is employed as an aid worker during a deadly heat wave in India. Frank invites people into the clinic where he works as he tries to keep everyone cool. The power goes out, shutting off the lone air conditioning unit on the top floor of the building. Frank cranks up a generator to keep the small AC unit going, but this too runs out of fuel. Frank calls a colleague in Delhi for help, but they are also overwhelmed by the heat. The very young, the very old and those who are ill or frail begin to die in the crowded clinic, so Frank and others wrap the bodies and carry them to the roof. As the temperature inside the clinic rises to life-threatening levels, Frank leads everyone to a nearby river, where people stand up to their necks in water to attempt to keep from overheating. Frank loses consciousness until a UN rescue worker finds him practically poached in the river. Some 20 million Indian people have died in the heat wave, and Frank is the sole survivor.

Frank recovers, but has a severe case of PTSD. On top of the traumatic experience is a form of survivors guilt. While there was a generally available supply of water in the clinic, Frank had access to a secret stash. Frank was able to keep himself hydrated after the water available to everyone else had run out. Frank had felt some guilt over this, but justified taking care of himself because he was charged with taking care of everyone else. One of Frank’s rescuers suggested he was able to survive while everyone else died because he was “better hydrated.”

Frank had mental health therapy to help him deal with his traumatic experience, but “therapy had made it crystal clear to him that he would never be cured…no more hoping that he would become normal again.” Frank becomes determined to either punish those who were responsible for the heat wave or ensure that such a thing would not happen again. Frank struggled to find something to hope for, and he came up with the following, which he posted in “shaky block letters” on this bathroom mirror:

HOPE TO DO SOME GOOD, NO MATTER HOW FUCKED UP YOU ARE.

Which is also an apt slogan for the time we are in now.

We next hear about the Paris Agreement, and its provisions for taking stock of global carbon emissions beginning in 2023.  Members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met at annual meetings of the Conference of Parties (COP). At COP 29 (which was held for real this year—2024—or four years after Ministry of the Future was published), a Subsidiary Body was authorized to work with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This new agency was “charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection.” Someone in the press gave the new agency the name, “Ministry for the Future,” which stuck and spread. The Ministry for the Future was established in Zurich, Switzerland January of 2025, shortly before the deadly heat wave struck in India.

“The problem with advocating for the future is that we can’t imagine the suffering of future humans, so the tendency is not to do much about it…What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solution to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead…”

Mary Malone was an ex-minister of foreign affairs in the Irish Republic, having previously served as a union lawyer. We don’t get a lot of detail about how and why Mary was selected to lead the Ministry of the Future. We do get a lot of detail about the physical layout of Zurich, along with some side stories about some of Mary’s co-workers as we follow her career as head of the Ministry.

We find out that India has become somewhat of a rogue nation following the heat wave. The Indians are frustrated when the rest of the world does nothing about climate change and seems indifferent to their suffering. The authoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is ousted.  India violates a UN treaty and releases sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and lower the global temperature. India makes every effort to confine the results of its “geoengineering” to its own country, and the world watches anxiously for unanticipated side effects. However, the experiment works (at least temporarily), and India is able to rebuild a society based on sustainable agricultural practices.

We hear tangentially about a number of “ecoterrorist” groups who take saving the planet into their own hands. India is, of course, home to one of the earliest of these, calling themselves “Children of Kali.” Seeking atonement, Frank connects with Children of Kali, offering to volunteer in their mission. The Children of Kali do not accept him, but they encourage him to take whatever action he deems necessary to further their cause.

Throughout the book, we hear of other ecoterrorist groups, and learn that they target for assassination the oligarchs and plutocrats who stand in the way of climate action. We never “see” these things directly, although we hear about planes (usually private jets) being shot down. There is one scene where Frank kills a vacationing plutocrat by striking him with a stone (not intending to actually kill him).

The only organized ecoterrorist act we see is when an unmarked and unflagged ship appears alongside a boat whose owners have inducted slave workers and are engaged in illegal fishing. The fishermen believe the ship is innocuous and allow its staff to board them. The slave workers are taken (almost by force) aboard the unmarked ship, which then leaves. The slave workers realize that they have just been liberated. As the ship is leaving, one of the slave workers sees explosions go off on the fishing boat, sinking it. The ship’s staff attempt to reassure him that the fishing boat owners had life rafts or other means of escape.

Frank and Mary meet when Frank kidnaps Mary and forces her inside her own apartment in Zurich. Mary keeps a level head and attempts to have a reasonable conversation with Frank, convincing him that they both want the same thing. A pair of Swiss police officers—having seen something suspicious on surveillance video—knock on Mary’s door. Mary answers, telling the officers that she is entertaining a “visitor.” When the officers leave, Mary discovers that Frank has also left. Still feeling scared, she calls the officers back and tells them everything.

Frank is eventually arrested and convicted for both the murder of the rich guy and Mary’s kidnapping. We see a more humane form of Swiss criminal justice. Frank is kept under some type of house arrest, and allowed to work in immigrant refugee camps during the day (a job he had done in the past). Mary visits Frank in his confinement, and the two begin a somewhat strange, but mutually respectful relationship. Mary visits Frank sporadically throughout his sentence and then even after he is released. They continue their friendship through Frank’s terminal illness. Frank introduces Mary to an airship captain (by now, air travel has been replaced by more carbon-friendly blimps) named Arthur Nolan, and we see this relationship beginning to blossom after Mary retires from her post toward the end of the book.

Throughout the story, we meet a few of Mary’s co-workers at the Ministry. A Russian lawyer named Tatiania represents the Ministry in International courts, suing polluters and making novel legal arguments about animals, trees and creation itself having standing. She is fierce, having had some prior connection with the Russian FSB. Tatiana is assassinated, prompting Mary to lament:

“They kill the good ones…The killers would prevail. This was how it always happened. This explained the world they lived in…In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won. The few took power and wielded it like torturers, happy to tear the happiness away from the many…The killers always thought they were defending their race or their nation or their kids or their values. They looked through the mirror and threw their own ugliness onto the other, so they didn’t see it in themselves.”

Badim Bahadur is Mary’s Chief of Staff. While discussing her kidnapping (by Frank) with Badim and the terrorist group he is associated with, he informs her that “all organizations have a black ops wing,” including the Ministry. Mary demands that Badim tell her everything, but he refuses. Badim offers to tender his resignation, but implies that someone else would take his place. He agrees to tell her only “what she needs to know” in order to give her plausible deniability.

Interspersed with Frank and Mary’s saga are subthemes about various geoengineering projects and the processes of political-economic change. We visit a group of scientists in the Antarctic who have devised a way of drilling holes in glaciers and pumping the water out from underneath. The theory of “Project Slowdown” is that keeping the bottoms of glaciers “dry” will slow down their travel into the oceans, mitigating some of the predicted rise and inundation of coastal areas. The project costs a fortune, and the scientist who came up with the idea is killed in an accident on a glacier. But the glacier is slowed—the theory works!—which we won’t know until toward the latter half of the story.

The biggest of the geoengineering projects is something called Half Earth Project—a plan to restore biodiversity by placing half of the Earth’s surface under protected status. What humans that remained in population-reduced areas were offered incentives to move elsewhere. Great swathes of Earth were “re-wilded” and re-populated with animals. Areas that had become inhospitable to humans were connected up by habitat corridors, where animals were protected and flourished. The belt went from The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, down to the Equator, and past it to the southern ends of the world. “This is the biggest forest on Earth, wrapping the world around the sixtieth latitude north, and all of it is being returned to health.”

In addition to environmental science and bioengineering detours, we also learn about economics and finance. The system as it currently operates would never allow all these positive changes to happen. We learn the banksters origin history, where the “Bank of England became the mechanism by which the financing of the state apparatus was monopolized by a small group of wealthy tradespeople [whereby] the state from then on was always indebted to private wealth.”

Mary visits the most powerful people on the planet—the central banks who “instruct the Legislatures on which financial laws to pass.” Her plan was to have the banks approve a blockchain-based “carbon coin” to replace fiat money. Carbon coin would be used to pay fossil fuel companies and other carbon polluters based on how much CO2 they did not produce and/or how much they sequestered. At her first meeting with the Federal Reserve Governors in San Francisco, she is received politely, but no one will commit to her proposal. At a second meeting some (unknown) years later—after the U.S. has experienced its own catastrophic flood in L.A. and hundreds of thousands of deaths during a heat wave—Mary’s proposal is accepted.

There are lyrical passages on inequality, some echoing many of the same messages of the Poor People’s Campaign:

“…there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise…”

“…few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them. No way, she said to the bankers; not a chance that would happen. Shorting civilization and imagining living on in some fortress island of the mind was another fantasy of escape, one of many that rich people entertained, as ridiculous as retreating to Mars. Money was worthless if there was no civilization to back it, no civilization to make things to buy—things like food.”

 

Psycho-social processes which lead to inequality are also explained:

“The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

 Narcissism is generally regarded as the result of a stunted imagination, and a form of fear. For the narcissist, the other is too fearful to register, and thus the individual death of the narcissist represents the end of everything real; as a result, death for the narcissist becomes even more fearful and disastrous than it is for people who accept the reality of the other and the continuance of the world beyond their individual end.”

We learn about the Hebrew tradition of Tzadikim Nistarim, sometimes called Lamed-Vav Tzaddikim, or the “Hidden 36.” The story goes that after God nearly destroyed humanity in the great flood, God placed 36 permanent human “pillars of righteousness” to maintain the continuing existence of the world. These 36 humans are “hidden,” and no one knows who they are, including themselves. Indeed, anyone claiming to be one of the “hidden righteous” is deluded, because one of the prime traits of these humans is humility. Any one of the Tzaddikim may emerge into temporary visibility to assume a necessary role in mending the world, and then drop back into anonymity. Some versions of this say that Tzaddikim are not just replaced when one of them dies (to maintain the constant number of 36), but that the job “rotates,” and anyone could play this role at any time. That is why we should always strive to do the right thing for the planet and each other because one never knows when it could be “your turn” to be Tzaddikim.

We learn about already existing measures which attempt to quantify human well-being in broader terms than GDP: the UN Human Development Index (1990), which combines life expectancy, education, and gross national income per capita (adjusted later to factor in inequality); the UN Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured, human and natural capital adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the New Economic Forum Happy Planet Index, which combines life expectancy and inequality divided by ecological footprint (along with the Global Footprint Network’s Ecological Footprint itself); and the Food Sustainability Index, which measures food security and ecological sustainability.

Mondragón-style cooperatives—a mode of collective production and ownership that has existed among the autonomous Basque people of Spain, began to expand from local production of goods to banks, credit unions, insurance companies and universities. These worker-owned enterprises grew into the tenth largest corporation in Spain, with billions in revenues and millions in profits. The success of the Mondragón model—with its ethos of democratic organization, participatory management, the sovereignty of labor and subordination of capital, universality, education, and social transformation—spread.

At the 58^th COP (in the year 2053), we learn that the “tide has been turned.” Population has been greatly reduced (we never find out exactly how), the world is burning less CO2 than in any year since 1887 thanks to conversion to clean energy, and the majority of folks have committed to limiting electric consumption to 2,000 watts per year.  The change is described as “the first big spark of planetary mind [and] the birth of a good Anthropocene.” Gini index numbers had “flattened considerably” all over the world.

This is not to say that humans have built a new utopia. The Ministry has enemies, and its offices are bombed (fortunately, while no one was at work). Swiss security have to get Mary to a “safe house,” which involves an adventuresome climb through the Alps. On the other hand, world citizenship is granted to everyone who applies, and all the refugees in camps around the world are released. Although many countries still had immigration quotas, the total quota numbers were sufficient to accommodate every person. This was accompanied by “worldwide universal job guarantees” along with transport and settlement subsidies.

We follow Badim as he meets one last time with the Children of Kali. It is unclear what his connection with Kali is—he might be a founder, a high-level operative, or an ally. At this last meeting, Badim informs the group that their services are no longer needed because now they are able to achieve the necessary progress through legal political operations. Badim assumes leadership of the Ministry when Mary retires (with her blessing.)

The story here is probably more hopeful about the future than is warranted by current reality. The science-fiction-y geoengineering projects are probably more believable than the notion that humanity has miraculously transcended its typical greed, selfishness and ethnonationalism. Moreover, where did the Ministry get enough money to pay fossil fuel producers to leave oil in the ground (the Saudis are one of the first to take the deal), buy out everyone who had to be moved to build the Half Earth Project, and resettle all the refugees in dignity? And what about the criminal acts that eliminated the oligarchs and plutocrats who stood in the way of saving the planet?

Should you read this book? The star-crossed stories of Mary and Frank are engaging in themselves, and there are a lot of good “what if” proposals and philosophies in the tangential side stories. There is (in my opinion) too much descriptive detail about the streets and landmarks in and around Zurich, but one can easily skip or skim-read through these. Yet, Ministry for the Future is more than a story with technical detail if it gets enough people talking about solutions to climate change and inequality.