The first chapter of this book is one of the most brutal and visceral things I have ever read. It describes, from the perspective of the sole survivor in a particular town, a devastating climate change induced heatwave in India that kills 20 million, and in the process, I think, captures the prevailing mood amongst those who understand the urgency of the situation we face.

After that it calms down a bit, and has a quite unusual narrative structure. Some chapters are like snippets of a political manifesto, others are vignettes about unidentified characters and groups and how they are responding to the climate crisis. The main through-line concerns the head of a UN agency, the titular Ministry for the Future, their efforts, and her interactions with the sole survivor I mentioned above, who was radicalised by his experience.

It is more a book about concepts than it is about action or plot. The main concept it explores is what we could probably call Longtermism, if that name hadn't been hijacked by transhumanist tech-bros to justify their disregard of people living today, supposedly in favour of the interests of billions of hypothetical future people, but really in their own selfish interests. In the book, the concept (though unnamed) concerns future generations whose existence is threatened by our actions today. Their interests are defended by the Ministry.

Does the threat represented by climate change to people living today, and the existence of future generations, justify violence? Does it justify geoengineering? This book says yes, and yes. The mass deaths of the heatwave spur action on multiple fronts, including grassroots campaigns of assassinations, bombings of polluting modes of transportation like airplanes and container ships so intense that it makes them economically unviable, black ops campaigns of violence and intimidation by the Ministry, and several massive geoengineering projects to slow sea level rise, reductions in the Earth's albedo, and other things. While we see a lot of the geoengineering stuff up close, it is one of the books weak points that the violence mostly happens in the background, and is all a little too neat and efficient. Even as it threatens the main character's life the players on both sides remain unidentified, and is mostly used as a pretext to justify radical, but technocratic, reforms to the financial system. I think it would have been better if we were down in the trenches a bit more, with a little less abstract villain than the agents of unidentified reactionary fossil capitalists and elites.

Another problem I have with this book is that it is way too enthusiastic about the liberatory potential of blockchain technology. At least it is clear that that potential lies in it being a tool of surveillance to prevent the wealthy from hiding their money and doing whatever they want with it, rather then the sort of digital goldbuggery, private money nonsense that most proponents embrace. But, given what we have seen so far of how it is used in the real world, I have my doubts that it will ever be a tool for anything other than enabling scams, corruption, and wealth concentration.

Overall a very interesting read that is both an intimate exploration of the trauma and anxiety caused by climate change, and a detached and ultimately optimistic analysis of some of the political and technological possibilities for addressing it.