by David Spratt
This article appears as the concluding section of Collision Course: 3 degrees of warming & humanity's future, recently published by Breakthrough.
“The problem is that the status quo is a suicide. Those (Paris) commitments, even if fully met, would lead to an increase in temperature […] above 3 degrees which would mean a catastrophic situation.”
— UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, May 2019
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In 2005 James Hansen, sometimes dubbed the “godfather” of modern climate research, warned that humanity was “on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption”. Nineteen years later, we are heading for eye-watering social and ecological disruption, and civilisational collapse. Cities and regions and nations will drown and desertify. There will be an unrelenting global food crisis. Billions will be displaced and the global economic and governance systems of contemporary society will not work.
In practical terms, the world has reached 1.5°C of global heating, the rate of warming is accelerating and will likely continue on that path for several decades, especially given the failure so far to bend the emissions curve down fast. That means 2°C by 2040 or shortly after, and the emergence of vast zones of unlivable heat two decades after that on the present course of grossly inadequate action. Tipping points have been passed or are close at hand for some of the biggest elements of the climate system, including polar ice sheets and vast forest and permafrost carbon stores; and system inertia and hysteresis make preserving and restoring those systems very challenging. Scientists are increasingly alarmed that we may be heading towards AMOC collapse by mid-century.
Any rational response would be an emergency “All hands on deck” rallying cry. Reducing emissions, even very fast, is not enough to stop the systemic changes that are under way. Drawing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels back to safe, near pre-industrial levels, is a necessary but slow process; and in the meantime actively cooling the planet must be on the agenda if it can be done safely. This is what the Climate Crisis Advisory Group has termed a “Reduction, Removal and Repair” strategy. This approach is also discussed in our briefing paper Accelerating climate disruption and the strategy to reduce, remove and repair.
Avoiding civilisational collapse means governments and nations making climate the first priority of economics and politics, especially for the world’s largest and high-polluting economies. It would mean making human security, not national security, the focus of geopolitics. It would mean the rich providing the capacity for developing nations to make a fast transition. It would recognise that disruption is inevitable, dislocation is necessary and this is not a period for business and politics-as-usual.
But instead of honestly facing this truly existential threat, nations are all-in on a process of sustained collective denial via the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, and its annual hi-viz global meetings known as the Conference of the Parties (COP), where thousands of the global policy-making elite — both government and corporate — have gathered every year for three decades. The process has failed, as it is designed to do. Every country, including the petrostates, has a veto over every outcome, and it shows. The original goal of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate system” has been left by the wayside.
The COP climate policy-making paradigm, the “official future”, is crafted to fit the desires of global capital and the fossil fuel industry. Change paths must be incremental and non-disruptive, and certainly should not strand large amounts of capital. Action is delayed with long-term, non-enforceable goals such as “net zero by 2050”, which remains common currency despite the evidence that such procrastination is facilitating a path towards collapse, not preventing it. The “net” in practical terms means “not” zero.
The primary emphasis is on carbon-price or emission-cap market mechanisms which have devolved into rorted offset schemes and the like. Cheating occurs by systematically underestimating national emissions, and sectoral ones such as gas industry methane emissions. Plus the technological cargo cults, such as carbon capture and storage which Prof. Kevin Anderson calls ”a rhetorical device for maintaining business-as-usual and delaying real-world emission cuts”.
Behind the scenes, rhetoric rarely matches reality. The New Republic reported that: “An October 2020 email exchange between Shell executives — unearthed as part of an investigation by the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform — noted that the company’s net-zero talking points had ‘nothing to do’ with the group’s business plans.”
Then there is the quasi-scientific excuse for continuing with high emissions: that of “overshooting” the goal and later getting back to cooler conditions, except the path back may not be possible in the way imagined by policymakers. And the economic models — Integrated Assessment Models — used to justify this procrastination which are barely credible and make leaps of faith and assumptions at odds with real-world conditions.
This “official future” is one of confusion, delay, fake solutions and fake news carefully manicured by the fossil fuel industry over many decades. Many governments — in Australia, the UK and the USA, for example — remain captured by fossil fuel interests. In Australia, recent egregious example include the Northern Territory Chief minister telling anti-gas protestors that “you are wasting your time”; South Australia’s energy and mining minister telling an oil and gas industry conference that his state government is “at your disposal”; Western Australia’s environment watchdog stripped of power to assess big polluting projects; and the Australian Government’s strategy that “new sources of gas supply are needed”.
The “official future” which is performed each year at the COPs, and every week of the year in parliaments and markets, is a fig leaf for state and corporate failures of imagination and the need to think the unthinkable. The most unthinkable proposition is that large-scale disruption is now inevitable because markets have failed on climate risks. When all is said and done, the choice is social collapse and economic disruption due to the failure to act fast enough, or economic disruption as a necessary consequence of emergency-level fast change, no matter how politically unpalatable that may appear to be. There is no third way.
This is a structural problem, because the physical changes in the climate system are often non-linear and hence difficult to project, but markets crave stability and fear disruption. Climate damages are radically uncertain (basically, unquantifiable) so that cost-benefit analysis — a basic tool of private-sector risk management — breaks down. The risk cannot be priced. In circumstances where the climate risks are global and existential, markets are unable to fully assess the risks and mitigate them. Just as they can’t for other large-scale and unquantifiable risks, such as war, pandemics, and the threat posed by AI.
In 2011, Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption concluded that it was an illusion to think the contradictions can be resolved within the current economic frame and that disruption and chaos was now inevitable as system failure occurs. It laid out the reasons to “address the emergency with the commitment of our response to WWII and begin a real transformation to a sustainable economy.”
Five years earlier, Nicholas Stern had said that "paths requiring very rapid emissions cuts are unlikely to be economically viable" and disruptive because “it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than about one per cent per year except in instances of recession.” Analyst Alex Steffen concludes that:
It is no longer possible to achieve [an] orderly transition, to combine action at the scale and speed we need with a smooth transition and a minimum of disruption [...] We are not now capable of designing a future that works in continuity with our existing systems and practices while producing emissions reductions and sustainability gains fast enough to avoid truly dire ecological harm. This is an option that no longer exists.
And the risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft assesses that "there is ‘no longer any realistic chance’ for an orderly transition for global financial markets because political leaders will be forced to rely on ‘handbrake’ policy interventions to cut emissions.”
Even though Sir Nicholas Stern named global warming as the “greatest market failure” in history, governments have been ideologically reluctant to act sufficiently to correct this greatest distortion of the market. Our political leaders, who should be honestly assessing the risks, and initiating or joining their populations in a difficult but necessary conversation about why climate heating is driving us towards unimaginable levels of social breakdown, are instead looking the other way. The public conversations about looming social collapse are avoided at all cost, so a discussion about necessary disruption never happens.
In Australia’s case, the current government has locked away the nation’s first climate and security risk assessment because its public release would make a mockery of their dance of death with the fossil fuel industry to expand coal and gas production.
Twentieth century history teaches us that economic crises leading to sustained stagnation is fertile terrain for authoritarian politics; a lesson reflected in events this century too, where authoritarian leaders including Donald Trump have downplayed or denied the climate crisis. China is the notable exception. And there is evidence that global heating disruption creates fertile ground for political strongmen to come to power. As a deepening climate crisis leads to a deepening economic crisis, what is the path to avoiding the rise of authoritarian political leaders and their climate denial in a feedback loop that will only quicken collapse?
In such circumstances, the primary responsibility and leadership role in any nation must be shouldered by government. Only the state apparatus has the whole-of-nation, whole-of-system powers and capacity to respond with the interests of the people as a whole at heart. But the biggest polluters and sources of fossil fuels are either petrostates or governments captured by the fossil fuel industry.
Instead of state leadership, writes George Tsakraklides, we have reached a point where “the full-time job of government, corporates and the media is now to simply keep everyone convinced that this self-annihilating civilisation is somehow supposed to make sense. Well, it doesn’t, as we are all finding out... as we enter a bumpy, bruising, bloody descent towards an economic, cognitive and spiritual abyss.”
Boris Frankel, in his Fictions of Sustainability, has pointed out that in the present economic circumstances — low growth, stagflation, disruption — the material needs of decarbonisation cannot be absorbed by growth, but only by reallocation of financial and physical resources. He says that if there are no major technological breakthroughs in the next decade (especially regarding decoupling), then climate disruption and resource depletion will force governments to take emergency action and scale back production in the face of systemic breakdown.
Climate disruption and resource overuse will also destabilise markets, resulting in continuing low growth and growing inequality. Markets have and will likely continue to fail to respond to the twin crises, and instead creeping financialisation — credit-fuelled consumption, speculation in everything from shares and real estate to NFTs and crypto currencies, and an increasing burden of debt and debt servicing — will continue to be the hallmark of neoliberalism’s pernicious hold.
If resources are to be redirected to economic transition and equity needs, there is a crying need to curb the power of financial capital and rechannel current economic behaviour away from speculation to socially-useful ends: a liveable and biodiverse planet. Against this possibility, business has strongly opposed state intervention as a guiding principle of its behaviour, and succeeded in blocking state leadership of the climate emergency.
Australian financial commentator Alan Kohler once quipped that that politics is a sideshow, as central banks run the global economy and Silicon Valley governs society. The 2024 victory by Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley-annointed Vice President JD Vance fits the bill. Their agenda absolves governments of climate responsibility, and is a direct assault on global efforts to prevent and mitigate the crisis.
In this time of great political volatility in America the challenge to mobilise the world in time to avoid the collision is set to be severely hindered, leaving our future hanging in the balance.
The urgent need is to take back and rebuild state institutions destroyed by neoliberalism in order to redirect production to socially-necessary goals — decarbonisation and cooling, and basic public needs including secure food and water, and health, education and transport — to plan and manage the transition and adjustment, and to curb the destructive path of financialisation. This would be a massive politically-directed reallocation of resources not only in the OECD, but in China, India, Nigeria and more. In the first instance this is a question of what needs to be, and can be, produced within resource sustainability and safe-climate boundaries.
There is a battle for the role of the state, with democratic community movements worldwide — including citizens, students, the labour movement, grassroots organisations,, and a myriad of other diverse constituencies — demanding that the state act to overturn deregulation’s hegemony. And just as proposals focussed on Green New Deals and market-driven growth have failed to deal with systematic market failure on climate risks and resource depletion, so also enhanced social expenditure will also fail if state leadership does not provide a path out of the climate and ecological crises via an emergency mobilisation.
