The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action
to save us
George Monbiot
Climate breakdown could be rapid and unpredictable. We can
no longer tinker around the edges and hope minor changes will avert collapse
@GeorgeMonbiot
Wed 14 Nov 2018 06.00 GMT Last modified on Wed 14 Nov 2018
16.11 GMT
‘Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have
passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no
continuity can be safely assumed.’ Illustration: Ben Jennings
It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press
conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us
journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They
have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by
2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?
A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t
spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly
compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to
accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing
extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?”
We had no answer.
Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are
physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our
existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism,
tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get
us out.
Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will
be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex
systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact
(because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit
placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to
change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly.
Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We
could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be
safely assumed.
Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend
– soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents,
pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to
slide. For example, when Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the
positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat,
melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render
runaway climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended
11,600 years ago, temperatures rose 10C within a decade.
I don’t believe such a collapse is yet inevitable, or that a
commensurate response is either technically or economically impossible. When
the US joined the second world war in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with
a military economy within months. As Jack Doyle records in his book Taken for a
Ride, “In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from
scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft … Barely a year after Pontiac
received a navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering
the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.” And this was
before advanced information technology made everything faster.
The problem is political. A fascinating analysis by the
social science professor Kevin MacKay contends that oligarchy has been a more
fundamental cause of the collapse of civilisations than social complexity or
energy demand. Control by oligarchs, he argues, thwarts rational decision-making,
because the short-term interests of the elite are radically different to the
long-term interests of society. This explains why past civilisations have
collapsed “despite possessing the cultural and technological know-how needed to
resolve their crises”. Economic elites, which benefit from social dysfunction,
block the necessary solutions.
The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public
discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us
towards disaster. Think of Donald Trump and his cabinet of multi-millionaires;
the influence of the Koch brothers in funding rightwing organisations; the
Murdoch empire and its massive contribution to climate science denial; or the
oil and motor companies whose lobbying prevents a faster shift to new
technologies.
It is not just governments that have failed to respond,
though they have failed spectacularly. Public sector broadcasters have
systematically shut down environmental coverage, while allowing the opaquely
funded lobbyists that masquerade as thinktanks to shape public discourse and
deny what we face. Academics, afraid to upset their funders and colleagues,
have bitten their lips.
Even the bodies that claim to be addressing our predicament
remain locked within destructive frameworks. Last Wednesday I attended a
meeting about environmental breakdown at the Institute for Public Policy
Research. Many people in the room seemed to understand that continued economic
growth is incompatible with sustaining the Earth’s systems.
As the author Jason Hickel points out, a decoupling of
rising GDP from global resource use has not happened and will not happen. While
50bn tonnes of resources used per year is roughly the limit the Earth’s systems
can tolerate, the world is already consuming 70bn tonnes. At current rates of
economic growth, this will rise to 180bn tonnes by 2050. Maximum resource
efficiency, coupled with massive carbon taxes, would reduce this at best to
95bn tonnes: still way beyond environmental limits. Green growth, as members of
the institute appear to accept, is physically impossible.
Yet on the same day, the same institute announced a major
new economics prize for “ambitious proposals to achieve a step-change
improvement in the growth rate”. It wants ideas that will enable economic
growth rates in the UK at least to double. The announcement was accompanied by
the usual blah about sustainability, but none of the judges of the prize has a
discernible record of environmental interest.
Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing
has changed. As if the accumulating evidence has no purchase on their minds.
Decades of institutional failure ensures that only “unrealistic” proposals –
the repurposing of economic life, with immediate effect – now have a realistic
chance of stopping the planetary death spiral. And only those who stand outside
the failed institutions can lead this effort.
Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing
ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is
doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for
the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks
require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet.
Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting
oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against
environmental breakdown are one and the same. Do not allow those who have
caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those
whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be
done.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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