Cory Doctorow, in “Science fiction and the unforeseeable future: In the 2020s, let’s imagine better things”, says:
The stories we tell about our future affect what we do when the future arrives, so science-fictional tales of weathering the crisis have the makings of a movement that allows us to do so.
In this editorial, he goes on to imagine the foundations for a possible future, one where a “Canadian Miracle” occurs:
As the vast majority of Canadians come to realize the scale of the [climate] crisis, they are finally successful in their demand that their government address it unilaterally, without waiting for other countries to agree.
…
Canada goes on a war footing: Full employment is guaranteed to anyone who will work on the energy transition – building wind, tide and solar facilities; power storage systems; electrified transit systems; high-speed rail; and retrofits to existing housing stock for an order-of-magnitude increase in energy and thermal efficiency. All of these are entirely precedented – retrofitting the housing stock is not so different from the job we undertook to purge our homes of lead paint and asbestos, and the cause every bit as urgent.
How will we pay for it? The same way we paid for the Second World War: spending the money into existence (much easier now that we can do so with a keyboard rather than a printing press), then running a massive campaign to sequester all that money in war bonds so it doesn’t cause inflation.
The justification for taking such extreme measures is obvious: a 1000 Year Reich is a horror too ghastly to countenance, but rendering our planet incapable of sustaining human life is even worse.
This premise then became a short-story, “The Canadian Miracle”, published in 2023, which you can read in full.
This continues as a book, “The Lost Cause”, also published in 2023, about near-future Burbank, California.
I highly recommend reading this editorial, short-story, and book in full. They are without a doubt my favorite contemporary author’s take on science fiction.
I want to share excerpts from this future that are specific to the Village Kit vision: a modular system for building the practical infrastructure we need to live, amidst a climate crisis.
In this future, Blue Helmet peacekeeping operations have become climate crisis responders. When cities flood, sea levels rise, forests burn, and so on, the Blue Helmets are those who respond to support new waves of climate refugees. Except, rather than the temporary refugee camps of today, they developed systems to build new permanent refugee cities.
I want to share these Blue Helmet modular systems, as an inspiring view into a practical future.