This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
You can hardly miss the news about climate change anymore, or perhaps what I mean is that you (yes, you!) can hardly miss feeling its effects. It's been startling, to say the least. It doesn't matter whether it was the month (the last 10 set global heat records, one after another) or the year (2023 was by far the hottest on record); whether it was the northern hemisphere (hottest summer ever), Canada (extreme fires), Europe ("extreme heat stress"), the Middle East (record rainfall), South Asia (massive rainfall and a potentially unprecedented monsoon season), or the United States (warming faster than the global average). Globally, there have been increasingly massive weather events like the recent unprecedented deluges in Dubai and Pakistan, record rainfall and massive floods in China, or -- at the other extreme -- record drought and "acute hunger" in southern Africa, it's everywhere and getting worse in an all too tangible fashion.
In fact, last year, for the first time in recorded history, the planet broke the ominous global ceiling for a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius set at the Paris agreement. Oh, and so far I've only focused on land, but the world's oceans have been setting their own startling heat records. As the New York Times reported recently, "The ocean has now broken temperature records every day for more than a year. And so far, 2024 has continued 2023's trend of beating previous records by wide margins." Yes, global waters are only getting ever hotter. And, of course, all of this is just to begin down a longer list of horrors that are clearly going to multiply in the years, not to speak of decades, to come.
With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond, consider a world (ours!) in which no country -- certainly not the United States, which has been a "drill, drill, drill" nation not just under Donald Trump but, all too sadly, under Joe Biden, too -- seems to be moving in the right direction faintly fast enough (and not just when it comes to climate change either) to stop a hell of a future from descending on us all. Tom
Eco-Collapse Hasn't Happened Yet, But You Can See It Coming
Degrowth Is the Only Sane Survival Plan
By Stan Cox
Something must be up. Otherwise, why would scientists keep sending us those scary warnings? There has been a steady stream of them in the past few years, including "World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency" (signed by 15,000 of them), "Scientists' Warning Against the Society of Waste," "Scientists' Warning of an Imperiled Ocean," "Scientists' Warning on Technology," "Scientists' Warning on Affluence," "Climate Change and the Threat to Civilization," and even "The Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future."
Clearly, there's big trouble ahead and we won't be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.
In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth's and humanity's vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet's ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits -- resource depletion, pollution, crop failures -- that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.
In what they called "business-as-usual" scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn't collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.
Growth and Its Limits
Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we're now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we're perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.
This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that "the excessive consumption of resources" is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable." Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:
"As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society."
What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
