The End We Start From
The Future of Humanity, Part 6
This is the sixth entry in my modestly-titled series of posts on “The Future of Humanity”. The initial post is here.
The argument so far
In these posts, I have highlighted reasons why humanity is unlikely to muster the necessary political will to confront the climate crisis that is cooking our planet. Yes, we have made some important progress developing solar and wind energy sources, but our overall progress to date has been far short of what is required. After 50 years of increasingly dire warnings, we have failed to lower our greenhouse gas emissions, we have failed even to lower our rate of increase in greenhouse gas emissions (source), and we are still dependent on fossil fuels for powering 80% of the world’s energy needs.
I believe we need to take these failures seriously. At the core of our inability to change course has been our addiction to a single, uniquely powerful energy source that we discovered, exploited, and will soon use up, all in less than 200 years. The dependence we have formed on nonrenewable, cheap, and energy-rich fossil fuels has enabled us to increase our numbers to almost 8 billion people. It has generated unimaginable wealth for a small number of us, but at an existentially high cost for the rest of us. We know all this.
Our failure to act in the face of mounting evidence and increasingly strident warnings is not simply a function of wrongheadedness or ignorance. We know what we’ve done. We know what we’re doing. We know what the stakes are. Yet we continue to fail, year after year, to make meaningful progress.
Why? In previous posts I’ve highlighted four reasons:
- While we want to transition to an energy infrastructure based on renewable sources like solar and wind, we cannot build out that infrastructure without continuing to burn fossil fuels.
- We have not yet found renewable energy solutions for the 80% of energy consumption that still depends on fossil fuels: aviation, ocean shipping, mining, and high-temperature manufacturing of critical materials like steel, cement, and fertilizers.
- We know that for many of the things we need to do, we don’t know how to do them yet.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our efforts to change course have faced and will continue to face unrelenting and powerful opposition from political parties on the authoritarian right, particularly the American Republican Party. These parties represent the interests of those who continue to profit (or expect to continue to profit) from the status quo, one fiscal quarter at a time.
Much of the intractability of our current predicament stems from the deep inequality we have allowed to grow over the last several decades, both within and between nations. Today, much of the world lives in relative poverty, and even in the richest countries, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow (source). As we saw in our discussion of planetary boundaries in Part 5, the world is vastly over-consuming its renewable resources and depleting its nonrenewable resources. But the bulk of this over-consumption is occurring within the highest-income nations (source), enabling their citizens to enjoy a quality of life that the planet simply does not have the carrying capacity to extend to the rest of the world (source).
In order to create a sustainable human presence on planet Earth, scientists tell us the richest among us will need to accept a smaller slice of the global resource pie. We have to ask:
- Will the rich voluntarily give up the perks of their over-consuming lifestyles today in order to curb climate change decades from now?
- Will the rich voluntarily reduce their resource consumption by up to 70%, as the Planetary Boundaries scholars estimate, in order to give the world a fair shot at avoiding climate catastrophe (source)?
- Will any political leader in any of these countries voluntarily make this case to his or her citizens, and not expect to suffer immediate political suicide as a result?
The answers, I fear, are no, no, and no.
All of our happy talk about voluntarily taming climate change is merely that, happy talk. We’re not going to do it. The rich will not give up their gains voluntarily. We will continue burning fossil fuels to serve their demands (“needs”) until the system breaks down due to fossil fuel shortages, strategic mineral depletion, extreme warming, or a combination of all three. As one team of climate scientists has diplomatically put it:
“the affluent proportion of the human population have disproportionate global environmental impact (resource use and pollutant emissions), but cultural factors (wealth accumulation, consumerism, etc.) make the necessary changes to lifestyle unlikely to occur.” (source, p. 3)
This is where I believe humanity is heading. We have just passed the voluntary exit off-ramp on the highway to a hotter, more volatile, more dangerous world. We are on our way to a 2–4°C hotter world by the end of the century. We will continue to pretend we can solve climate change without major sacrifices on the part of the wealthy, but this will simply delay and deepen the inevitable reckoning.
This is the end we start from
Confronting climate change will require withdrawal from our addiction to a fossil fuel-based economy and civilization. Withdrawal from any addiction is ugly and painful. This will be no exception. Indeed, it will be the mother of all withdrawals. Here is how it might play out.
Initially, extreme heat will render much of the tropical South unproductive and uninhabitable. Heatwaves, fires, floods, droughts, coral reef die-off, sea level rise, and disease will depopulate large regions of Africa, Asia, and South America that currently support billions of people. Runaway feedback effects will most likely destroy the Amazon and other critical carbon sinks. Rich countries will offer aid and sympathy, but it will always be too little, too late. Those same rich countries will draw the line at accepting climate refugees, resulting in ugly and deadly confrontations at many borders (source). Fragile governments and weak infrastructures will inevitably collapse as countries run out of food, water, and survivable shelter. The rich North will look for “workarounds” allowing it to continue its over-consumption of the Earth’s resources, even as the tropical South burns.
The fate of the rich North will follow that of the tropical South, but the severity of its energy descent will depend on how much progress it has made in transitioning to renewable energy solutions before fossil fuels run out. Will scientists find a solution for carbon-neutral industrial heating, for aviation, for shipping, for manufacturing? Will nations have these solutions in place, at scale, in time? Probably not, because rightwing anti-science governments and uncooperative publics will make progress sporadic at best, possibly even violently resisting the required adaptations. But there will be some progress, particularly in the electrification of passenger vehicles and long-haul trucks, and possibly in finding substitutes for fossil fuels in industrial and manufacturing processes that currently require them. Based on the extent of this progress, we can expect some decrease in the amount of greenhouse gases released by these nations (source), although probably not enough to achieve an actual reduction in the overall concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
As long as the rich North continues to burn fossil fuels, temperatures will continue to rise. More tipping points (discussed in Part 4) will likely be breached, adding additional complexities and dangers to the task of maintaining a viable global economy. Over time, global supply chains will become more brittle and vulnerable to disruption and breakdown. As noted in Part 1, we are already seeing the first symptoms of this breakdown: shortages and disruptions in the availability of many critical materials and commodities, decreasing consumer demand due to inflation and skyrocketing debt, and disruptions in delivery and fulfillment of basic consumer goods and industrial materials.
This is how over-consumption in the rich North will come to an end: not through voluntary contraction of demand, but through involuntary contraction of supply.
As fossil fuels become less available and more expensive to extract — an inevitable consequence of the Hubbert Curve discussed in Part 2 — oil-producing countries are going to start hoarding the remaining fuel for themselves. Countries that depend on imported energy, some of them currently quite wealthy, are going to find their access to that energy source cut off. This will result in a new era of isolationism as nations with the ability to sustain their populations domestically will retreat from the international order, leaving countries that lack domestic energy resources, manufacturing capabilities, or agricultural infrastructure to fend for themselves. Regional conflicts, as nations fight over dwindling resources and access to arable land and freshwater, will become more common, more desperate, and more deadly.
Only when the global economic system can no longer satisfy the demands of the rich will the values and behaviors of humanity begin to transform.
Governments in the rich North will begin to either adapt or fall as their citizens react angrily to the consumption limitations now imposed on them by extreme heat and depleted resources. We are already seeing the first examples of this dynamic in post-Brexit Britain, where a former “rich” nation is essentially devolving — right before our eyes — into a third-world country unable to provide its citizens with the basic living standards they used to enjoy (source).
In addition to escalating financial disruptions like those we’re seeing in Britain (and starting to appear in other industrialized nations), global warming impacts will become more severe as the world gets hotter: recurring and escalating waves of floods, droughts, wildfires, and food and water shortages will begin draining the economic capacity of the industrial North. In the US alone, sea level rise and extreme heat will begin to make large parts of the country uninhabitable, including most of the Southwest, Southern California, Texas, Southern Florida, and the Gulf Coast. Breadbaskets to the world, like California’s Central Valley, will become too hot and too dry to produce food anywhere near their previous outputs, if at all. Similar scorched-earth scenarios are expected to befall Southern Europe, Southeast China, and Australia — all currently major players in the global economy.
These titanic disasters will eventually bring even the most powerful nations to their knees. Nation states are exceedingly complex and interconnected systems that themselves are fully dependent of fossil fuels to maintain control over their populations. It could be argued that their prime directive is to keep the goods and services flowing in an increasingly complex system of international trade, laws, institutions, agreements, and investments. In pursuing this purpose, nation states are essentially in the business of translating global energy stocks and flows into a decent life for their citizens. When they can no longer provide that function, due to climate-related disasters, resource scarcity, or both, their ability to command the loyalty and obedience of their citizens will quickly dissipate.
Fossil fuels are the essential glue that holds our deeply interconnected and globally-distributed world economy together. Powering extraction, manufacturing, transport, and delivery, they are currently indispensable. When they are depleted or abandoned at some point over the next 50 years, our options for replacing them will be determined by how far we have gotten in building a renewable energy infrastructure that can provide substitutes — at scale — for the 80% of global energy that is currently powered by fossil fuels.
This makes our longer-term future highly speculative and uncertain. We’re in a race that too many of us still don’t even acknowledge, but that is going to determine what energy options we have available in the over-heated, population-depleted, post-fossil fuel world we are creating for ourselves.
