The Unthinkable: 3.1°
“It was unthinkable to say this even 10 years ago, but today, as we become increasingly aware of these crises, it seems all too clear: our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.”
– Jason Hickel
As the new youth-led direct action group Climate Defiance writes of the new ’emissions gap’ report:
“There is no easy way to talk about this. This week the UN announced we are on track to reach up to 3.1° Celsius of warming. We are slated to blow past the goals of the Paris Accords. Here’s what this means…
“As it stands we are on track to “plunge headlong into climate disaster.” This is not according to a leafletter on the sidewalk. This is according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, commenting on the newly released Emissions Gap Report.”
“The report does not mince words about who is at fault: it’s the largest and wealthiest countries. G20 members drove a shocking 77% of emissions last year, according to the report. The six largest emitters alone spewed 63% of worldwide total emissions.”
“The numbers get so much more damning. The per capita emissions in the US are TWELVE TIMES higher than those of the Least Developed Countries. We have the most time, money and bandwidth to decarbonize yet we have failed massively. This is an atrocity of unspeakable scale.
It gets worse: under current policies, global emissions will reach 57,000,000,000 tons by the end of this decade. That’s above the current level, which is itself existentially threatening.
*This is the graph from the new report. Sear this into your memory. The green line represents how fast we must cut emissions to stay below 1.5 degrees. The top line represents current policies. The bars on the right show the gap between where we are and where we must be.”
Under current policies, we have only a 50-50 chance of staying below 2.9 degrees. We have only a 2/3 shot of staying below 3.1 degrees. These are BOTH death sentences and it is beyond unconscionable that we put ourselves on the path to reach them.
Not all is lost. We can still turn this around. We have the technology we need, on hand, RIGHT NOW, to fix this. We just need the political will. Here are the places we can close the gap, starting with the energy sector.
“The elites of Davos have failed. The elites of Brussels have failed. The elites of Washington DC have failed. We must peacefully rise up. We must save ourselves. Our leaders have wasted precious time. We can stand by no longer. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Soil Sun and Rain
It’s understandable that people find this new reality very difficult to get their heads around. But endless denial reaches new levels of absurdity as the climate reality reaches your doorstep.
One of the greatest lies being told to people by the populist right is the idea about Net Zero, itself a meaningless and wholly inadequate set of measures being against the common man. As we know – and as Climate Defiance and others repeatedly point out – the richest 10% are responsible for 50% of emissions. The poorest 50% are responsible for 8% of emissions.
Despite this, the populist right on this side of the Atlanctic and the other has flooded the public discourse with anti-ecological propaganda demonising the humblest / sanest climate policies and railing against 15 minute cities, improvement of cycling infrastructures, renewable energy and home insulation (!)
This is, in part, about the far-right exploiting people’s post-pandemic fears, all painted on a wider canvas of conspiracism and dark whispering about a secret government, ‘globalists’ and the power of the state. But it is also due to the failure of liberal environmentalism over a thirty or forty year period to either descend into mystical spiritualist eco-babble, or to contain the critique of what’s actually driving climate catastrophe away from the root cause of capitalism economics, colonialism and empire. Instead we have been served up an illusion that the ecological crisis can be overcome by recycling, replacing plastic straws and taking our cups to the coffee shop. Writ large this grand illusion / trompe l’oeil takes place at the COP meetings, now useless, moribund global summits which celebrate sanitised failure on an epic scale.
This sense of a grand illusion is pointed to by Dougald Hine in his new book At Work in the Ruins: “Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress but it might be wiser to call it an illusion. All that food in the supermarkets is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of ‘going back to the land’ because we never left, we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far that we lost sense of what lies at the other end.”
Everthing is outsourced, externalised, displaced, subject to some form of colonial exploitation. Now everything is coming back home, to paraphrase Malcolm X ‘chickens are coming home to roost.’
It may be too late, but the task ahead is to ‘join the dots’ between exploitation and extraction, between endless consumption and production, between the war and violence being played out against the people in Palestine, and the colonial exploitation that has been played out through history and across the world. This time the techno-fascism of the IDF has the highest most sophisticated (and barbaric) technology at its behest, but it is only a culmination of the patterns of imperialism and settler colonialism over hundreds of years. We talk about ecology when what we really should be talking about is capitalist imperialism. The task is not just to recognise the common roots of socio-ecological crisis but to recognise the common solutions.
The danger is that, as aspects of the global polycrisis become more apparent (such as displacement of millions of people through war and famine and parts of the world becoming uninhabitable) this situation becomes just more fodder for culture wars, conspiracism and the movements of the hard-right and neo-fascist. This is exacerbated and amplified by the failures of the centrist political class, who still cling on to the outdated notions that the orthodoxy of capitalist economics can be salvaged and used to ‘save the world’. As Henry A. Giroux writes:
“As the social sphere is emptied of democratic institutions and ideals, apocalyptic visions of fears and fatalism reinforce the increasingly normalised assumption that there is no alternatives to existing political logics and the tyranny of a neoliberal economy.” (from ‘Depoliticisation Is a Deadly Weapon of Neoliberal Fascism’ Truthout, 2019).
Thus the dynamic between a useless hollowed-out set of political stories and ‘solutions’ that are routinely trotted out by the liberal grandees of the ‘electable’ Democrats and Labour parties, and the grotesque politics put forward by what’s left of the Conservative and Republican parties, is a reductive one, and one that will lead us to further ecological disaster and social collapse.
Some of these myths and redundant stories are so hard-wired into our thinking that they are almost impossible to even discuss. One such is the idea of forever growth, almost universally seen as a positive force that cannot be questioned, that generates equality and reduces poverty, and has no end nor consequences. This is Magical Thinking. Jason Hickel writes:
“When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels – it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system. If we don’t keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year, it plunges into crisis. That means we have to double the size of the economy every 20 years, just to stay afloat. It doesn’t take much to realise that this imperative for exponential growth makes little sense given the limits of our finite planet.”
Now you can continue to cling to these myths and stories if you like. You can, if you choose, cling on to the notion of perpetual growth and extraction on a planet of finite resources, and you can look around you at the culmination of those stories piling up around you, but it is clear that this planet cannot sustain this system.
We could usefully try to think – together – about what processes and capacities might be facilitative in helping people – us – to begin to find ways to bring about the revolutionary change needed, first of all, in ourselves and how we work together, organise ourselves, to exert the necessary pressure on the so-called world leaders. Find the examples and spread the word. Find the good news, probably at the local, city or regional level, and spread the word.
This is, first, a psychological and social revolution: let’s find the existing strategies where we see action making a difference: from the local and the small-scale that can be scaled-up and leveraged towards the global. Show, don’t tell.
A fundamental problem for the political right is that British history has been one of fairly relentless maldevelopment, which explodes the myths of white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, superior European rationality etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/oct/30/robert-jenrick-former-colonies-debt-of-gratitude-britain-slavery-colonialism-legacy-brutality-and-exploitation
But secular, leftist politics without a base in the natural world is likely to fall into the bigoted speciesist pit of humanism.
Science and technology are providing ever more insights into our natural world, its systems and means of governance just as we threaten its existence and stability. Tipping points are being located in our biosphere, our political systems, and potentially in the ideascape of public opinion.
Perhaps the most obvious lacuna is the absence of public debate about universalist-irreligious good life philosophy (that is, being and doing good, not having goods). I wouldn’t mock lifestyle changes as long as they are holistic, integrated, rational, scaled-up, and collectively help bring about the collapse of consumer capitalism (which corporations have been worried about since before planned obsolescence). That is, after all, the power of boycotts. At some point, the advertising model will collapse (a pernicious resource-devourer itself, and effectively a bad-life philosophy aimed at the opposite of Eudaemonia).
You’re quite right. Some of that is explored here:
https://enough.scot/remembering-the-tuath/
and here:
Bringing degrowth into conversation with Buen Vivir, an indigenous principle and decolonial practice of ‘Good Living’ from Latin America, Katherina Richter explores the need for a metaphysics adequate to address the metacrisis: “We can see that changes to our consumption, production, and working patterns alone won’t be enough to sustain a profound transformation towards a just and sustainable world. To understand the deeper shifts that are required, we need to look at cultural aspects of socio-ecological transformations. So what would it mean to put a cosmological limit to growth?” Read Why we need cosmological limits to growth here:
https://enough.scot/why-we-need-cosmological-limits-to-growth/
@Editor, well, broadly yes. Indigenous people have presumably always ‘done science’: observed, experimented, shared information etc.
However, there are good reasons why Tom Mustill began his book How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication with van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes. Much of nature lies beyond human senses or unaided access (the ultrasound of bat echo-location, the infrasound of whalesong, the microscopic world, the solar system and outer cosmos, atomic theory, genetics, deep ocean etc). It was technology as much as a spirit of enquiry that drove modern science, aided by the idea communism of printed book culture. Mustill does later go on to cover indigenous interspecies communication like the Killers of Eden, and speculates that indigenous people would have learnt to interpret all kinds of natural signs, even the communication of crows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_New_South_Wales
From a scientific perspective, the scala natura of ancient Greek philosophy and Descartes’ view of animals as natural automata are steps backwards into superstition and ignorance.
A problem with indigenous societies is sometimes Shamanism, or the privatisation of knowledge and promotion of mysticism (which if the views of an author I’ve read are correct, was also pushed back on in popular culture, just as anti-clericalism rose in opposition to doctrinally-based abuses of power, or indeed the discrediting of alchemy in the face of chemistry). However, the global position appears to be changing and insights are being pooled.
Buen Vivir or sumak kawsay in Ecuador is exactly the kind of good life philosophy codified in constitutions that I was referring too (I suspect it does not go far enough in reconstituting government, but it is a vital start). I hesitate to use ‘cosmological’; I think ‘planetary’ is about the right size model (until we discover life elsewhere, or prepare to settle on or seed other worlds). It would be useful to have a summary of other indigenous good life philosophies for comparison.
Well I do hope ‘not all is lost’ and I applaud those like yourself who are the truth tellers.
Thanks Mary, the tragic thing is that we have all of the tools and capacity to make all of the changes needed to avert catastrophe. None of it is impossible.
Thank you Mike for this article. This is a terrifying situation we have made for ourselves.
Why are governments not focussing on massive reductions in our energy use? I’d gladly endure a radical re-shaping of my lifestyle to allow my kids to live on a habitable planet.
Thanks Wul – yes its incredible there’s no serious Energy Descent Plan across all sectors of society. But then if energy is owned (and sold) for private profit rather than as a public need/utility then there’s no chance of this.
I remember as long ago as the early 80s thinking how can you have infinite economic growth based on finite physical resources? This was not linked at the time to climate change but was to the idea of a model that seemed mad and headed for disaster. I remember discussing this with more wordly types who scoffed at the suggestion but had no actual answer to the basic point other than some economic gobbledygook that was designed to give them impression they knew best and I was being simplistic.
It was not an original idea of course but one I had picked up from the old Ecology Party, a party that actually stood for proper green politics at the time (unlike its current form).
The idea stems from The Limits of Growth (1972). If you listen to many of the key editors / columnists such as for eg Alex Massie or Iain Macwhirter they wail and gnash if anyone challenges the concept of perpetual growth. It’s at the heart of orthodox economics – but also the driving force behind ecological catastrophe.
Very true about the old Ecology Party. That takes me back about 40 years! And pay heed to what Mary says in the first post above. She seems to see that this is about more the just “the politicians”. It is about nearly all of us, and how we seek and find and manifest meaning in life.
I helped write the news release for the launch of the Scottish Ecology Party during the devolution referendum campaign in 1979. The party’s founders had a good grasp of environmental science.
Any government pursuing degrowth won’t last long because almost no voter wants it even in rich countries.
Humans have been very good at extraction, fabrication and consumption but few have really understood the scale of global growth in recent decades. Humanity has added 1000 Scotlands of population since 1950- with consumption also rising everywhere.
EVs and renewables are just attempts to keep the party going a bit longer.
No amount of moralising or sounding warnings will be enough- people will not vote themselves poorer.
Messages around resilience and self sufficiency will probably play best with the public at home. Much of the world is too busy trying to develop economically to pay any attention such long term concerns.
It’s an interesting idea that ‘people will not vote themselves poorer’ – and if framed like that of course they won’t. But the question is: does growth make you richer or societies more equal? It does not.
Will people ‘vote their planet uninhabitable?’ Only when they are conned into continuing the system that works for the 10% as outlined in the piece.
And people won’t vote for higher taxes but still want better public services and infrastructure and complain bitterly about them, day in day out. People are not stupid, they understand this but they are massive hypocrites.
I don’t entirely agree with either yourself or Oserver’s comments. People iike to moan certainly eg the weather but this negativity is reinforced by media coverage on a daily basis but they also are not as stupid as many commentators give them credit for. They are concerned about impact of climate change not only on themselves but their children and grandchildren but what is lacking is real leadership. I do not mean a strong individual but a leadership narrative that explains both sides of climate change coin openly and honestly.
Observer – the developing countries are probably going to be worst hit initially by the effects of climate change so despite your cynicism I am sure many people in these countries are concerned about it as well.
In addition climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and the effects of these events are coming closer to home eg Florida, Valencia in last month.
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels
“…failure of liberal environmentalism over a thirty or forty year period to either descend into mystical spiritualist eco-babble, or to contain the critique of what’s actually driving climate catastrophe away from the root cause of capitalism economics, colonialism and empire. Instead we have been served up an illusion that the ecological crisis can be overcome by recycling, replacing plastic straws and taking our cups to the coffee shop.”
This is spot on. The liberals have failed, again.
You cannot triangulate your way out of this crisis.
There is no compromise position.
We don’t have time for faux-spiritual-eco-woo and tedious consumer tinkering. Sure, if you want to do these things, work away and I hope they make you feel better, but stop deluding yourself that they will make any material difference.
@Doug Haywood, by far the most lucid and compelling anti-slavery pamphlet coming out of Britain that I’ve read was Elizabeth Heyrick’s Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824) in which the author calls for, among other things, a sugar boycott:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Heyrick
and argues we are all implicated in, and guilty of, “supporting and perpetuating slavery”, by buying its products, so choose your side. The reality of slavery, the knavish propaganda, has been exposed. Proposal for West Indian produce like sugar boycott (‘abstinence’); but buy free-labour produce.
Heyrick’s ambitions for a sugar boycott may have largely failed, but I wouldn’t call her efforts ‘tedious consumer tinkering’.
Certain limitations and tipping points of the material world are being reached and possibly transcended by the technological move to digital services. Smartphones often get a bad rap, but they’ve replaced a vast number of other consumer devices in a tiny package which hardly needs further improvement. It’s not a coincidence that in the face of our polycrisis UNESCO is talking about ‘intangible cultural heritage’.
The more our culture becomes represented virtually, instead of being displayed in steel and stone, the less requirement for material underpinning (up to a point; and with often out-of-picture costs, but the important thing is that the nature of consumerism is changing). This is not by any means an even picture, as the rise in SUVs shows, but there are generational trends (owning a house or car is less appealing in the face of supercharged floods, hurricanes, wildfires, coastal erosion and uninsurable properties).
The thing is though a sugar boycott, (possibly with rum added) would have hit the main product of the West Indian plantations. Plastic straws, recycling and taking our own cups to the coffee shop are not hitting the main product of the oil and gas industry.
(For the record, I would fully support a boycott of petrol stations.)
But the real problem with this sort of argument, focus on individual consumption choices, is it individualizes a collective problem. We cannot get out of the hole we’re in by changing our consumption patterns in a system that will continue to rape the biosphere. We need a collective solution to a collective problem.
For those wondering what 2C or indeed 3C looks like – Valencia and its environs. It may seem a long way away but something similar will happen in the UK. My bet is the Thames valley – but equally could be the South Downs (and the towns/villages lying at the foot of these downs). Key point: now is the time to build resilience. Won’t happen, politicos far too stupid and pre-occupied so its the serfs and peasants that will suffer – like in Spain, now. Lots of building of houses on … flood channels – worked out well didn’t it? Saw the same in Belgium in 2021 – houses built on a … flood… plain (clue in the 1st word) inundated (“but it’s never happened before”…gee really? well get used to it cos it will happen again & again & ..). Meanwhile right whinge chimps claim its not happening.
Thanks for this article.
Perhaps in a parallel Universe we come to our senses and turn things around, but i sense in this one we’re in for a world of trouble in the coming decades and centuries.
Short sighted people that we are. Rudderless ship heading for the rocks, and so on.
Though, I agree with Mary. Do what we can do, and do it well.
Great article. Net Zero is a zombie idea. The problem in age of inequality, and global warming for the proposal of limiting growth for our finite planet , is it means massive redistribution of wealth. The rich certainly aint having that, thats communism.. … so the inevitable outcome of the coming climate chaos is collapse of everyhing we know, , which will be like the extinction of the vikings in Greenland, the rich will, like the Yarls die, die last, isolated-alone-starving-mad, but they will die just like the rest of humanity.
Thanks Don.
The Planet will be fine once we have ‘expired’. All human civilisations in the past pettered out once they grew to a point where they weren’t able to feed their ever expanding populations and all the topsoil eroded away to desert. Currently we are no different, it’s just world-wide instead of localised. Humans are basically parasites. There is not much history of us being anything else as far as I can see? Though examples such as the Native Americans, the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines and others, knew how to live off the land and not destroy it. ‘Peak-Human’, when we the tallest, and had the largest brain size was just before we started using agriculture. Physically we seem to be in a steep decline right now. Most humans today are metabolically broken. Meaning all our aliments are lifestyle choices, chronic and long-term. Brain size and longevity in decline too. People seem willfully blind to this.
Thanks again, Mike, you reliably write well and thoughtfully.
“Collapse”, the important, though somewhat contentious, book by Jared Diamond, was published almost twenty years ago in 2005, it was a very good and sobering read. . I say contentious not because I found anything particularly contentious myself, but various experts have weighed in to state some of his examples of societal failure are wrongly framed, or the actual facts are wrong etc. However, reviews were generally favourable. I haven’t heard much of Jared Diamond more recently – but checking this out, he’s still alive in his late eighties and wrote a book called Upheaval, exploring a similar theme in relation to societal crises. He boils this down to the principle that individuals will mostly overcome or deal with their crises, but countries rarely do so. . Might be worth a read as we stagger from one crisis to another.
But I found “Collapse” a very thought provoking book. and in regard to what is happening now, prescient. The main thing I took away from the writing was the importance of a stable and modest population. That societies can exist in modest comfort within their local ecology indefinitely, if their demands remain stable and the population remains so and some other society doesn’t arrive on the scene to spoil the show. . I forget now which Pacific Island was described but infanticide was one of the methods of population control in this small, vulnerable but stable society over many generations. Edo Japan was also cited as an example of long term stability.
The root problem in all but one of Diamond’s factors leading to collapse is overpopulation relative to the practicable (as opposed to the ideal theoretical) carrying capacity of the environment. One environmental problem not related to overpopulation is the harmful effect of accidental or intentional introduction of non-native species to a region.
This is a copy of a letter I wrote to the local newspaper of my small rural town in the Wairarapa, New Zealand. An expanding population over many years has produced a situation where the local sewage system has inadequate capacity, and most unusually, indeed I can’t think of another example here, the local council has banned further “subdivision”, as they say here, for a two year moratorium. This is an anathema to towns in NZ, for whom growth, and rates revenue, is the underlying ethos of their very existence, it seems to me. The result of this has been some dismay, and in response to this I wrote this letter. It’s too long to be published, but it’s my public record of my thinking. I have also written many times in regard to the non-sustainability of neoliberal economics and its likely catastrophic ending, but I don’t examine this here.
Hello Ray
So, Martinborough’s sewage woes continue, and have seriously clogged up the council’s and town’s plans for continued growth. Sewage and the matter contained therein does clog things up, true. Studies will “help the council decide the level of growth they wish to enable”. Karen Krogh goes further with this dire warning “A town which cannot grow will inevitably decline”. It could well be true that one sign of possible decline in a town is a declining population, but is it equally true that a non-growing population must thereby mean a decline in its coping, its happiness or its wealth? What evidence is there for such a claim? Many successful small towns in rural Europe have not grown significantly in a hundred years. What is self-evidently true is this, that Martinborough’s growth must be a major cause of the town’s inability to manage its waste – the population approximately doubling in fifty years, along with its ordure. And you might well think too that this extra population and their extra money all contributing to the rates should mean individual household rates declining, yet rates here have rocketed astronomically. So down the toilet goes that fond imagining, along with the sewage.
It seems to me at least that growing populations, far from being a supposed boon to a town, or country, bring considerable difficulties to communities who have then to provide, within the ability of local landscape, for the basic human needs of this growing population. What are Wellington’s woes but a similar example? Though of course the present government is trying to cure this problem by making much of the town redundant and assuming the affected folk will just move along.
The same growth fetish certainly applies to the entire country. Rates of growth of the New Zealand population over the past thirty years have averaged around 1.3% (at times over 2%); this average if continued means a doubling of the population within fifty-three years (the population has indeed doubled in the last sixty years). Let’s consider power, the most important single factor in any advanced economy. New Zealand says it promises to see “net zero” emissions (meaningless weasel words) by 2050 and to achieve 100% renewable generation. Now, to supply the whole of New Zealand homes, agriculture, transport and industry when divesting from fossil fuels we will need an approximate doubling of our power output. As renewables are around 87% of present generation capacity, we will need to see a greater than doubling of all our renewable assets to accomplish this. More than two Waikato Rivers, two Manapouri schemes, two Benmores, two Aviemores, two Clydes, two Wairakei thermal plants, two Tararua wind farms, two etc etc. But that’s just to stand still, in fifty-three years with a doubled population we will then need FOUR Manapouris, four Benmores, four Aviemores, four Clydes, four Wairakeis, four etc etc etc etc.
Does anyone apart from me see the problem?
We live on a planet of finite and fixed size, already too small to meet humanity’s burgeoning material appetites. Our future energy demands, which are massive, will have to be provided by the continuing bounty of the sunshine (and its winds and rains), the tides, the Earths deep heat and for some countries, its fissile elements – we can no longer burn the many million-years’ old sunshine and its buried carbon and keep a survivable planet. Indeed all our future needs will have to be judged on the same logic. I was born in 1946, the planet’s population then was about 2.5 billion. It is now over three times this figure at 8 billion. Yet many folk, including many environmentalists, still refuse to accept that the world is seriously over-populated. According to some calculations, New Zealand is also over populated – it gained this dubious status when our population rose to five million people, our combined ecological footprint then started to exceed our native ecology to provide for us. To deny overpopulation today must then imply that in 1946 the planet was seriously underpopulated. Yet would anyone reading this who can go back to those days freely accept the premise that this was the case? There were certainly enough people to fight a terrible world war and kill around 70-85 million (presumably surplus) people, and invent an atomic bomb that could yet kill the rest of us. I am part Scottish, the Scottish enlightenment, which helped change the world, took place in a population of one and a quarter million souls.
Martinborough’s faecal woes may appear as an ironical parochial storm in a toilet bowl but as a salutary exemplar of a truly existential issue, it does the job (pun intended).
Just stop this nonsense now; incontinent, thoughtless, relentless population growth, allied as it inevitably is to humanity’s exponential growth in our material demands, is the logic of the cancer cell and the ultimate result will be the same; we will kill the organism, Gaia, on which we live and, for the present only, appear to thrive.
Yours faithfully
Dr John K Monro