Are We Looking at the End?
Here’s an article in which some of our planet’s top minds predict the unraveling of human civilization sometime between 2040 and 2050, driven largely by the loss of biodiversity and climate change. According to these folks, the only way for our society to survive is not the deployment of technology, but the change in our behavior.
And that doesn’t seem likely, when the last Conference of Parties (to address global warming) was held in a petrostate (Azerbaijan), and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company. Moreover, the next COP will be essentially a reprise of the one that just concluded.
From the article:
In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox (see photo above) has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses (diseases that can be transmitted to humans from animals) expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.
They go on to point out that Darwin told us in 1859 that we thought the human race would not achieve sustainability, and would eventually go the way of all these other species, i.e., extinction.
These people aren’t optimistic, and their viewpoints are not childish, but neither are they set in stone.
Let’s go back that “behavior” thing. It seems perfectly possible that the 8+ billion people on this planet will do what the folks in Norway did, as an example, and simply stopped buying cars that run on gasoline and diesel.
It’s true that the zeitgeist here in the United States is rooted in a staggering level of ignorance and the indifference to the suffering of others, collectively referred to as “MAGA,” but that can fade as quickly as it came into being. The level of absurdity in today’s news could easily, at any moment, cause a watershed event in the American culture, away from the lunacy of 2024. How many alcoholic Fox News hosts can we put in change of things like national defense before we say Enough!
This isn’t over.
As we’ve discussed, all these challenges would be much simpler to address if there weren’t 8 billion of us, and if the paradigm of resource extraction and wasteful use established by the Western powers were not being fully adopted by the far more populous Eastern nations of India and China.
If we had begun in the 1970s to move away from fossil fuels as had been recommended at the time (people may remember Carter’s sweater speech), we’d have a much better chance of saving ourselves and our civilizations.
The impacts of digging and sucking up prehistoric sunlight and pouring the carbon into the atmosphere have been well understood since the beginning of the last century, and fossil fuel companies themselves have been well aware of the particulars for at least 50 years.
We’ve had the necessary tech for a couple of decades at least – in solar, wind, HVDC power transmission, molten salt energy storage, distributed generation, and battery storage.
We can also make safer nuclear plants than we have now, which are regrettably now necessary as of the urgency of transition.
What we need is a global moonshot attitude toward transitioning, and that we don’t have.
We also need a buy-in by the most exorbitantly wealthy among us, the top 1%, and we don’t have that either.
Of course, the least powerful among us individually have little sway over the direction of the paradigm, and the most powerful are disinclined to alter their behavior.
Any advisors they listen to are dependent on their good graces, and will wait until what they think is the last minute to advise change.
By then it will have been too late. It may already be now.
I don’t advise we give up, as potent action may still mitigate the worst of the consequences, and at least we will have tried.