The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

My favorite and most meaningful class in college was Titans of Investing, a weekly lecture + dinner series under Britt Harris that focused on building a life of significance (not just success), wisdom, and engaging with the most pressing real-world issues – in Fall 2021, this was China, AI, and climate change. Our main product for the semester was an individual brief covering a top book related to these topics or about investing, and I was fortunate to be assigned Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future – a climate fiction novel that made me think deeply about not just the science of our environmental challenges, but the cultural navigation needed to address them.

The full Titans briefs collection (covering 200+ books and counting) can be found here.

Executive Summary:

In The Ministry for the Future, reputed climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson maps out the grim reality of our current climate trajectory from the perspective of an aptly named international organization built to save it – the Ministry for the Future, founded to defend “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves” at the 2025 COP meetings. While structured as a novel with all associated plot elements and romanticism, the book interspaces the psychologies of its main characters – policymakers, refugees, activists, and bankers – with thoughtful geopolitical and scientific detail as a variety of predicted environmental and societal disasters and movements happen over the next three decades.

The story starts in the early 2020s in a world where the only active climate policies are continuations of today’s mild and unenforceable efforts of loosely defined and weakly followed emission targets. Carbon emissions have continued to grow unchecked despite increased efficiencies in energy usage across the board, following Jevons’ paradox – discovered in 1865 by English economist William Jevons – which shows that efficiency in resource usage, rather than improving sustainability as promised by technologists and producers, will actually follow the overwhelming human tendency to consume and grow with increasing desires, violating the static desires used by macroeconomic models. Jevons’ mechanics underlie this near-future where increasingly nationalistic governments haphazardly prioritize short-term, industrial performance metrics despite risks of environmental calamity or unsustainable inequality, an apt characterization of the policy priorities of the highest-growth countries like China and India today.

Against this backdrop, the first major climate event occurs – a giant heat wave across central India that kills 20 million—mostly the poor—in under a week. The death toll is exacerbated by resource policies built on cheaper yet unclean fossil fuels, which caused such excess local pollution that remaining air zones had trapped increasing heat and left cooling and air conditioning devices dysfunctional. The concentration and scope of the heat wave tips climate risk to a new, defining kairos, starting in India where anger and zero-tolerance drives the removal of the last 40 years of political leadership in favor of climate radicals who no longer care about playing in the global economic game over protecting their people. More importantly, the sheer visibility of global warming’s ramifications pushes all global political leaders into panic mode, and the disparity of decision-making power between the common man and elite stakeholders across energy, finance, and political appointments is highlighted. Cynically but still reasonably, western countries believe they are immune and move lethargically, while developing countries adjust to the new downside.

The rest of the novel follows the Ministry’s role in converting these states from ignorant bystanders into real, economically-driven actors through exploration of both carrot and stick incentives at the highest level – central banks and peer-to-peer networks – that mitigate negative climate impact across carbon emissions, melting glaciers and ice gaps, and varying global approaches to resource allocation and consumption. More high-impact heat waves, droughts, and sea-level-related natural disasters are also interspaced across the next several decades to emphasize the physical severity of it all, alongside characterizations of the economy and population’s attitude in each key era. Robinson highlights the science of these geological entities and offers estimates of potential tipping points and potential solutions for each. A guiding and outsized force across these solution catalysts is also the active threat and acts of communal (eco-terrorist) and shadow government (black ops) violence for climate goals – targeting everything from flying and container shipping to excess personal consumption – they emphasize the shift in psychology needed on an individual, behavioral level to not just believe in the climate problem, but act against it.

As the severity of climate change is recognized, the novel elaborates on a cryptocurrency-based solution that is unique and palatable to tech individualists,  central bankers, and energy executives alike. The gist is a carbon coin, released for intentional acts of carbon sequestration and for intentionally not burning available carbon. The carboni ends up replacing most global currencies and eventually parallels the US dollar for reserve and globally trusted status. This ambitious proposal is rooted in a teardown of the contradictory psychology of how our world is financially structured today, and it redefines climate and carbon policy as not just another factor to economic processing, but the pillar around which economics should be redefined.

To defend this, Robinson doesn’t shy away from contrasting the growth-oriented processes of modern finance and capitalism with the incentives needed to control human climate impact. He challenges the reasonability of evaluating climate-level investments and projects in financial lens that seek return against risk, arguing that the blow-up risk intrinsic to our currently climate-positioned world justifies all needed levels of capital deployment. Fundamentally, he questions the current state of capital across layers of global leverage and concentration in the hands of rentiers as opposed to individual producers, and he proposes an application of capital digitization through crypto that could serve the vision of many current emerging movements like decentralized finance (DeFi), data sovereignty, and culturally – versus economically – defined countries.

                                 
Between these economic discussions, Robinson’s most potent message comes through vivid examples of the physical costs and sequences of climate change. While the technical details of crypto asset solutions or the feasibility of fostering buy-in to carbon-based currency have a lot of room for nuance, their uniqueness in addressing practical incentives, particularly for petrodollar-driven economies, show an understanding for how the financial system works and how it might ultimately be navigated. And through the medium of novel heroism, Robinson achieves an impressive duality­—keeping the apocalyptic threat of climate change factual yet digestible and encouraging proactivity in the financial world as not just contributors, but architects in its solutions. As per the novel’s protagonist:

“Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.”

Thinking About the Future

Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future follows the world from 2025 to the 2050s through the lens of Mary Murphy, a lifelong bureaucrat who is the leader of the United-Nations-backed Ministry for the Future. This organization was created to advocate and implement the interests of future human generations along a long-term timeline that is distinctly different from that of sovereign governments – election cycles and economic growth numbers. Her character matures from a hesitant and burnt-out policy recommender to the chief organizer of two solutions that jointly solve the climate change issue and are notably built around blockchain technology.

1. A new blockchain-based Internet free of centralization from current big tech platforms, where user profiles are built on the ability to own, profit, and transact your own personal data and equally importantly, financial transactions are fully integrated. This is a state-driven version of crypto-nativity which eases personal adoption of the carbon coin.
2. A new international monetary system based on a digital cryptocurrency allocated for both carbon sequestration and actively not burning carbon deposits, backed to a price floor by leading central banks. This carbon coin eventually becomes the world’s reserve currency.

An important influence on her transformation is also her relationship with Frank, a climate volunteer turned heat-wave victim who suffers from PTSD throughout the novel. While not relevant to the policy-level discussions she goes through, Robinson’s development of Frank’s character makes human the very real impacts of climate-related natural disasters and the second-order effects on mental health and rehabilitation that such a future could also entail. This also helps cement an underlying theme of the novel – that although many climate risks are currently unquantifiable in economic terms, their consequences are dire and worthy of mitigation.

Robinson builds up these ideas after several chapters of dialogue around moral and economic principles; these principles represent his fundamental beliefs sustained over 40 years of writing, including 22 different novels and most famously, the Mars trilogy. He is known to question modern capitalism from an incentive and sustainability perspective, and in this book specifically, he questions key financial concepts driving today’s capital allocation decisions, like discount rates (which he claims are largely arbitrary), acceptable levels of wealth and income inequality (which he claims have been far surpassed) and the idea of perennial growth (which he views as greedy and insincere). In the novel’s utopian end-state of countries including Spain and several historically agrarian sections of South India, he envisions alternative governance systems that address these issues because of their foundational principles of open admissions, labor sovereignty, and collectivism across asset ownership and decision making.

While these ideas are intriguing, they hold less depth than his analysis of climate science, proposed blockchain applications, and the inner workings of multinational organizations and related climate conferences. The bulk of this brief outlines the scientific realities of climate change, Robinson’s breakdown of climate incentives, and the merit behind the proposed solutions. A separate section highlights his cultural observations.

Climate Change is About Carbon

In the past decade, climate discussions have advanced past the term “global warming” to the full term “climate change” to best account for the myriad of second-order effects that rising global temperatures create, including accelerated precipitation cycles, land-water transformations, and rising sea levels. However, all of this warming is built around the increasing concentration of a single element in our atmosphere—carbon—which is thus the focus of all emissions discussions. Carbon is important because, in gas form, it converts and retains energy received daily from sunlight as heat, which has helped fuel the existence of complex life on Earth. However, as excess heat is retained, a key metric known as wet-bulb temperature, which accounts for not just heat but humidity and therefore is more sensitive for human and animal life, is also drastically increased.

At current rates, 40 billion tons of fossil fuel carbon is burned every year, and humans can burn 500 more gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) before irreversibly increasing the global average temperature by 2 degrees Celsius from the average temperatures pre-Industrial Revolution (when the vast majority of human-generated carbon emissions began). At a static growth rate of emissions, which is already ambitious, this gives humanity less than 13 years of continual burn, because as carbon emissions increase, so does the atmospheric retention of heat and subsequently, humidity levels. For humans, raw exposure to any wet-bulb temperature of 35 or higher is fatal because it simultaneously is too hot and humid, preventing the body’s natural cooling mechanisms like sweating. This has been historically proven with the deadliness of heat waves in tropical regions. Since 1990, there has been consistent global clocking of wet-bulb temperatures of as high as 34 Celsius, even in cities distant from the equator like Chicago. So, climate responses must account for the “remaining balance” of already extracted gigatons as well as the additional ~3,000 dormant gigatons identified by corporations and oil-states as incredibly valuable assets. Crossing the wet-bulb temperature threshold is effectively an irreversible tipping point in human time.

To directly measure carbon concentration, scientists use PPM, which stands for parts per million of the ratio of carbon dioxide (the most common gas carbon presents itself in the atmosphere) to other molecules. Pre-industrial revolution, the planet regulated itself to levels of 275-280 ppm, and the modern scientific consensus considers 350 ppm as the stable upper limit for human living. Today, this level is at 415 ppm and increasing by 2-3 ppm every year alongside emissions. Even in Robinson’s ambitious predictions that eliminate high carbon burning activities like flying and container shipping globally in the 2020s due to behavioral change, the 2032 ppm is still projected to be 451 and growing.

Returning to 350 ppm levels is aspiring to stability, but on the tail end, reaching and crossing 500 ppm also could be irreversible for the entire marine ecosystem that also regulates our land living as humans. Robinson discusses how that level of increased sunlight and heat as well as increased pollution exposure induces a form of “bleaching” in coral reefs, a condition where disturbed reefs will expel their major energy source of algae and are therefore left susceptible to disease as they don’t regrow or recover for decades, destroying their vibrant fish and shallow water ecosystems. This and the various water cycles across Earth’s climate show how carbon concentration is directly linked to the health of the ocean, which then directly affects global warming and biodiversity.

Carbon and the Ice Caps

After emissions, climate change is often visualized in terms of rising sea levels and their impact on water-proximate human civilization. While technically accurate, this visualization overlooks the severity of why levels are increasing and what natural resources the Earth is losing in favor of generic videos of water in the streets of places like Miami. The main impact of increased heat over the next decade isn’t in lost beaches, architecture, or even land, but in melting glaciers and polar ice caps.

At first human measurement in the 1950s, the Arctic ice cap was more than 10 meters thick, and it reflected between 2 and 3 percent of all the Sun’s incoming insolation, drastically reducing the heat trapped in the atmosphere. Today, the average thickness measurements are 4 meters. Like the equator, the poles have also undergone extreme variations of climate change, with NASA research documenting a rate of warming 8 times faster between 1981-2001 than across the full 20^th century. At this large a scale, even marginal increases in heat generate huge volumes of new seawater that disrupt local marine ecosystems, change ocean salinity, and increase sea levels. A sea level increase of one meter, quantified as an additional volume of 360,000 cubic meters of water, would eliminate all the world’s beaches and human coastal infrastructure.

The melting arctic permafrost also releases huge quantities of methane, a gas 20 times more potent in its ability to retain atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide despite containing only twice the carbon molecules. The amount of methane held by Arctic permafrost is equivalent to 600 full years of that produced by all the earth’s cattle – in other words, an irrecoverable volume that would immediately spike global temperatures and lead to further melting of the Antarctic ice caps and all glaciers, starting a vicious compounding of water level increases, carbon releases, and atmospheric heating that would start a jungle age of up to 6 degrees Celsius higher average global temperatures. Current rates of melting are at 13% per decade, giving us less than thirty years at an unlikely static pace before again surpassing fatal temperatures for large swaths of current human habitation. While reversing melting is unlikely, there are currently applicable methods to slow the pace of melting across ice caps and glaciers by an at least an order of magnitude.

Discounting the Future

By laying out the grim realities of the two major climate problems – emissions and glacial/polar melting – Robinson makes clear the lack of choice that we as a species have in addressing them. While apocalyptic and existential threats have been long paraded by climate alarmists, the granularity of data that shows causal relationships between said emissions, increased sea levels, and global temperature is hard to discredit. Therefore, he concludes that no level of resource allocation is too much stop these specific tipping points from being reached. At base logic, this makes sense – when faced with blowup risk, no cost is too high because if left alone, there is no payoff that can be collected. However, Robinson makes clear this common sense is in stark contrast to the active capital allocation decisions and frameworks being used today. He attributes this lethargy not to intellectual ignorance or denial of climate risks, but failure in translation to actionable incentives, which are his primary criteria of effective policy.

For example, when valuing an oil and gas company, whose biggest assets are the deposits of hydrocarbons they expect to extract and then sell or refine, nowhere in the cost of capital calculations is there  quantification of emissions increases or temperature disruptions. Yet, even in the mild case of assumed continued operation over the next two decades, the tipping point of acceptable carbon levels would be easily breached. This risk, which would crater the same energy demand fueling operating projections and beyond that, destabilize the economic environment under which these companies operate, must be included for such capital decisions.

Robinson says that the discount rate (cost of capital) for these kinds of destructive projects might as well be zero because there is no rate of return that justifies such environmental destruction. This is the key economic piece missing from climate change discussions and incentives, as currently microeconomic actors like companies and consumers are allowed to prioritize short-term individual return without regard to future systemic collapse, despite that consequence eliminating all future payoffs for all future actors.

Symmetrically, the cost of investing or experimenting with new climate solutions throughout the novel is touted as impossibly high, an allusion to the past decades of real-world climate conferences. Private capital is portrayed as highly interested, but unable to act because of the perennial need to seek short-to-medium term returns, loosely defined as in the next decade. What no one seems to understand, however, is the idea of necessary investment – if without investing, the end state is collapse, then no matter the return of investment, it must be pursued. But, without quantification of this risk into common financial terms, the world is shown to not care.

India, after its climate radicalization, acts as an exception and implements an alternative discounting method that follows its ancient tradition of being responsible for 7 generations before and after your own to discount not just capital, but the future itself. To make budgeting, environmental, or social decisions across government, they apply discount rates from a bell curve that steeply values immediate generations until the 7^th future one at a low, increasing rate that rapidly increases after that time frame, effectively giving higher value to future generations.

Understanding Incentives

Robinson’s discussion of discount rates stem from another civilizational observation – the world is ruled by money, and therefore by bankers/financiers. Decisions from an individual to governmental level revolve around the preservation and expansion of capital, and objectively bad decisions with regard to non-financial metrics like social welfare or independence get overwhelmed by capital decisions.

Robinson makes this case with the example of the US monetary system as the world’s reserve currency. Keynes, the economist whose principles still justify deficit spending and top-down economic stimulus, famously proposed an international financing currency called the bancor during the 1944 Bretton Woods conference which ultimately cemented the US dollar as the world’s reserve. This nation-agnostic currency, governed collectively by representatives in an International Clearing Union, would allow per-nation deficit spending in times of crisis to achieve greater employment and economic productivity, as measured by export value at the time. All bancor financing was proposed to be at a 10% interest rate, that was also to be charged on excess trade surpluses to prevent extreme wealth concentration on either end. This was in the collective interest of poorer and less developed states. Because the US at the time was best positioned in terms of gold reserves and stable USD currency, the US delegation vehemently vetoed the bancor and de facto became the sole creditor for postwar recovery across the world.

In Bretton Woods, the US acted on its position of strength with incentive to maintain this creditor status indefinitely. Robinson portrays the subsequent decades of global economic policy as a continuation of this incentive, highlighting another historical financial structure known as SAPs, or structural agreement programs as not benign, but highly incentivized tools of US dollar hegemony. SAPs were financing propositions enforced by the US-led World Bank that offered additional credit in last-chance situations to developing countries, but only on a strict set of conditions that ended up leaving the non-financial position of the country in shambles. These conditions were generally pro-free-enterprise and anti-government control, with a focus on investor rights and deregulation above government oversight. Robinson assesses the use of SAPs in the Italian and Greek debt crises as thinly veiled ways of economic dominance by Germany and France as creditors over the rest of the EU, which objectively was the end state of affairs.

After understanding this framework of financial incentives, Mary’s character finally understands her ministry has a duty to navigate it rather than be frustrated by it, regardless of personal views about its validity. This is an important psychological realization that then sparks the carbon coin idea – rather than attempt to apply top-down force in capital deployment and consumption habits via legislation, treat individual financial incentives as forceable. In other words, lasting macroeconomic change only happens through microeconomic nudges.

Blockchain as a Solution

Robinson’s world holds as its decision-makers in descending order of influence: central bankers, terrorists, corporate executives, elected leaders, intergovernmental agencies, and individuals (from rich to poor). In the revolutionary decisions needed to take the world on-course to sustainability and away from climate disaster, this influence is reorganized, largely because newly adopted blockchain-based economic systems incentivize processes differently at an individual level.

Terrorists in the novel are largely the relatives, survivors, or most angry citizens of countries disproportionately hit by physical climate emergencies (those near the Equator). In the novel, a mix of their random and vigilante attacks against symbolically climate-unfriendly processes, like passenger flights, container shipping, and public celebrations of wealth, end up curtailing these activities across the globe – showing blowup risk is as much a climate reality as a potential threat to curtail climate activity. Yet, the total carbon emissions reduction from all these pauses is marginal because it occurs too late. Reactive climate solutions are unaffordable.

To proactively address the rest, a proposed solution would have to fit mandates of shareholder value, full employment, stable inflation, and personal wealth creation, while still incentivizing carbon emission reduction and sequestration. Mary’s solution comes in this two part-sequence:

First, a version of crypto-nativity called YourLock prepares the global population to be  crypto-friendly. Like an endgame version of a “.eth” profile and wallet address today, the novel’s citizens each have a single, encrypted YourLock account through which their entire digital life gets conducted with ownership of personal data, including the ability to opt in to get paid for access to data streams. Because transactions are built into these blockchain profiles, citizens begin to transfer assets en masse from private banks controlled by financiers and governments and migrating to fully financing on YourLock itself. This triggers a collapse of the extreme overleverage in the financial system, causing private banks to quickly fail and propelling the previously stolid central bankers to discuss any solution, including Mary’s carbon coin.

Under the financial stress of exploding banking systems, Mary highlights the duty of bankers to no longer be limited to dual mandates and acknowledge their role as architects of society via its financial incentives. The coin is proposed as a banker-led solution, backed by century-long bonds in respective foreign currencies to ensure buy-in from all major governments, but distributed purely for carbon sequestration (removal of carbon gas from the environment) or active maintenance of fossil carbon deposits (not burning said fuel for energy and preventing others from doing so). The carrot here is the bankers being decision makers in this future, while the stick is the threat of just going straight to the public with the carbon coin since a vast majority had become crypto-native through YourLock. Another part of the threat is time, as bankers are also answerable to elected leaders who are demanding answers for widespread financial failure. The bankers eventually accept, and the combination of climate centralization in finance alongside widespread crypto nativity helps fuel a range of global movements, from political revolutions to new, sustainable economic systems.

The benefits of publicly accepted cryptocurrency in the novel are counterintuitive to its current real-world criticisms – a focus on tedious, immutable, and irreversible records essentially eliminate financial fraud and close most tax loopholes, whereas today, crypto is negatively viewed as a vessel for these activities. But, the focus on incentives is clear – even in this slightly post-capitalist world, private wealth in the form of carbon coins fuels mass invention for sequestration, rehabilitation, and efficiency technologies – and new businesses are forecasted to emerge in the anti-carbon economy. This carbon coin is the most direct manifestation of Robinson’s key thesis – without core alignment with financial incentives, climate change will never overcome the collective action problem currently holding it back from public priority.

Cultural Perspectives

Robinson is politically active and vocal as a democratic socialist, and throughout this novel he interspaces character dialogues with extracts discussing his political and moral views. Below are his most interesting takes – some are direct quotes and others are summaries of longer points:

• “Prosperity for all” is not actually believed by the modern elite (top 2%), and when type of lifestyle was reached by the wealthy that was clearly planetarily unsustainable at the scale of the rest of the world, the reaction was to become more tribal and protective about it rather than admit or reform it as such

• At current levels of production, he believes there are enough of the following resources that all human beings can and should have them: food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education, and therefore, “enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise.”

• The market isn’t a natural entity, but rather a legal system, like the one humans change every day. “The market was constructed by, and parasitic on, that structure of laws.”

• Capitalism as an entity is unsustainable because its modern implementation rides on fake concepts like perennial growth and denial of resource scarcity. Our current capitalism has transformed from indulgence to Götterdämmerung capitalism, which sees the end of the world and accepts it as a reason to continue indulgence rather than change course.

• After the basics like food and shelter, “everyone needs and deserves dignity, as part of being human.” Inhuman acts like terrorism come from those who have lost or never been accorded dignity, not from an inherent evil. As a human value, he believes dignity ranks above even money and freedom, though definitions for the latter are unclear.

My Thoughts

The severity of our climate problem hasn’t been taken seriously by any of our political or financial leaders, not because of a lack of information or authority, but because of a lack of audacity and incentive. Like Robinson portrays, real global decision makers today are distracted from addressing macro issues like climate change in favor of short-term feedback loops like elections, social media approval, and high-level economic metrics. On the other side, aspiring decision makers, including activists, get overwhelmed by the depth of incentives to navigate and resort to rudimentary tactics like demonstrations and demands, which make compelling headlines but again do little in terms of mechanical change. Serious action is broad in scope but specific in execution, and without it, there will be humanitarian crises at an unprecedented scale in our lifetimes.

However, while Robinson’s depiction of our grim climate reality is scientific, it isn’t necessarily the scientific consensus. Climate change is a widely agreed upon threat, but Robinson’s apocalyptic view of it as a human extinction event changes the timeline from centuries to decades while ignoring human adaptation to specific climate effects. For example, there are already hundreds of millions of people living below sea level using architecture like floating cities and sea walls. The global consensus is to actively encourage this kind of climate effect mitigation and pace reduction, rather than focus on other extinction-level solutions like mass migration.

Also, there are other existing key catalysts for climate improvement that largely go unmentioned. Primarily, his focus on carbon sequestration and transition to solar and wind energy completely ignores the most powerful energy source we have – nuclear – that has the potential to achieve zero-emissions on an even faster timeline given enough investment. Governments can build modern, digitized versions of legacy nuclear fission plants, and the world’s entire energy usage could be generated for decades for a total amount of waste the size of a small state in the US. In 2019, only 96 reactors with an average age of near four decades produced 20% of the US’s total energy at a total cost of $81 million. There is no other current energy solution that operates with such efficiency, environmental cleanliness, and safety. Also, while this novel ignores the optimistic scientific chance of breakthroughs in nuclear fusion or geothermal energy that could rapidly and safely offer alternatives, there should be continued R&D spend from the highest levels for these projects. We should never discount the impact of extreme improbabilities and instead be positioned to receive them.

Most intriguing beyond the energy discussion is Robinson’s proposed application of emerging cryptocurrency technology to climate action. Crypto’s overwhelming appeal is the ability to recreate interactive systems from the ground up, starting with the financial world, using immutable but transparent code that can be evaluated and chosen based on personal alignment by willing actors. Because it is so individualistic, use cases for macro problem-solving to the extent of climate action can seem far-fetched. However, Robinson’s pitch of using blockchain technology as not only a logistics tool, but as a layer of incentivization, is incredibly compelling. Direct financial and social rewards for participating in greater social good is any government’s dream. A mature crypto protocol defines and preserves what “social good” means for something like climate action. Then, it measures and distributes rewards, creating the necessary governance layer to make climate action meaningful at the individual level. This crypto solution also only makes sense once Robinson cements the workings of our modern financialized system.

While I fundamentally disagree with his cultural conclusions, including his utilitarian worldview, I respect his ability to recognize and apply microeconomic incentives to achieve meticulous collective action. I think the engine of capitalism that drove rapid innovation and human growth for the last centuries can and will similarly help us build out of a climate crisis, but it must be approached with a seriousness of duty (a prime example being deep-tech venture firms) alongside the necessary, catalyzing pursuit of economic return. This way, we can truly go long civilization.