In “The Ministry for the Future,” the 2020 climate-catastrophe novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, a new financial tool helps pull the world back from the edge of a global ecological meltdown: the carbon coin.
Backed by the world’s central banks, this new currency is deployed around the globe to pay fossil-fuel companies and petrostates to leave their reserves in the ground. It’s also used to reward businesses and individuals for sequestering carbon. By the end of Mr. Robinson’s book, the global economy is largely run on carbon coins, with projects around the world rapidly drawing carbon out of the atmosphere.
