After carbon-neutrality was declared an official goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement it became fashionable for governments and corporations to declare their intention to become carbon neutral by 2050 or soon thereafter. This was never more than an empty promise, however. The deadline was set far enough in the future to make immediate action unnecessary and few if any governments or corporations ever accepted a realistic plan to actually achieve carbon-neutrality. A decade later, they have largely given up pretense. Some have officially given up the goal; others have silently voided or discarded it.
Of course, carbon-neutrality by 2050 was never a realistic goal anyway, and even if it could have been achieved, it wouldn’t be sufficient to avert global disaster. I have written about this before. But with the official goal out of the window, prospects for the future have gotten even worse. Before we get to that, let’s recap what I wrote about the idea of carbon-neutrality by 2050 by quoting the tl;dr version from that article’s introduction:
Carbon-neutrality in 2050 is hypothetically possible, but it would probably require something like global nuclear war to wipe out most of human civilization. Due to problems like residual emissions and socio-political inertia, it is extremely unlikely – and probably even impossible – to reach carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or even by 2070) by less destructive means. Furthermore, even if we would somehow magically manage to reach that target (without exterminating most of mankind in nuclear war), this would commit us to between 2°C and 3°C of average global warming (depending on how we’d get to net zero mainly). The effects of that much warming will be devastating. It will lead to droughts, famines, natural disasters, many hundreds of millions of refugees, civil wars, and possibly collapse of the global trade system and economies dependent thereon, among other mayhem. However, it cannot be emphasized enough that this is not a reason to give up on climate action. It is never too late for action, because every tenth of a degree matters. Even if we’re destined for hell, we can still “choose” (at least in principle) how bad it is going to get.
Now, with carbon-neutrality out of the window, the 2~3°C average global warming mentioned is gone to. With less effort to reduce carbon emissions, global warming will be higher. In fact, there is reason to believe that it might be significantly higher. In the past years, new plans to expand fossil fuel extraction and the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation have been drawn up. Instead of bending the curve of our carbon emission downwards, it now seems more likely that our emissions will keep growing for a while. One major driver of growing emissions is AI. The currently dominant form of AI, based on large language models, uses stupendous amounts of energy and the expectation is that this energy use will only grow, perhaps even exponentially, in the foreseeable future. It’s no surprise then, that companies investing in AI are calling for more fossil-fuel-burning power plants.
Furthermore, AI interacts with the climate crisis in other ways. With the growing capabilities of various AIs, some human jobs will be taken over by AI. In the next decade(s) this will lead to a growing number of unemployed people, whose jobs have been eliminated by AI. Not all jobs will disappear instantly, of course, but the larger the number of unemployed the more disposable and easily replaceable human workers become. Wages will go down, and working conditions will deteriorate. How fast and how much is hard to predict, not in the least because it is hard to predict how these developments will interact with the climate crisis and with other things happening in the world.
One thing that seems relatively easy to predict, however, is that we can expect a further rise of fascism. The US has been taken over by a fascist clique, many other countries are ruled by fascists or other reactionary authoritarians, and far right political movements seem to be growing in strength everywhere. Mass unemployment (due to AI) is likely to throw oil on the fire, as it did in the 1930s (but then not due to AI, obviously). And climate change has been linked to rising fascism as well.1 Secondary effects of climate change, such as growing numbers of climate refuges, will probably only further strengthen the fascist trend. Furthermore, the rise of fascism is supported by the spread of disinformation and other lies on the Internet by the far right. Once dominant centrism has collapsed and surrendered to the fascist onslaught – usually not explicitly, but by sliding further and further to the (far) right, with formerly moderate left-wing movements sometimes trying to take over the vacated political center, thereby moving to the right as well.
These social developments will interact with the climate crisis in more and less predictable ways. A predictable immediate effect is a further deterioration of support for environmental and climate policy, which brings us back to this article’s main topic: the death of carbon-neutrality as an (official) goal. The question, of course, is: with that goal out of the window, how hot will it get and what will stop climate change?
I have tried to answer this question before, but I’m just a single philosopher/geographer and questions like these should really be explored by large teams of scientists from a variety of disciplines and with the help of supercomputers.2 What I found in an economic-geographical model of links and feedbacks between warming, disasters, economic damage, social unrest, climate policy, and more, is that it is unlikely that global warming will come to a stop peacefully. In that model, it turns out that there are no remotely plausible parameter settings that lead to a peaceful reduction of emissions to near zero (even when taking carbon capture technologies into account). Instead, emissions are always brought down by a combination of economic collapse and widespread civil war (which are themselves caused by the effects of climate change). How hot it will get is hard to say, but the model suggests that it will probably be in the 3~5°C range, although there is significant uncertainty in this respect. This model does not include demographic variables, however, which is a major deficiency, as climate-change related migration (i.e., climate refugees) and mortality will have very significant impacts on socioeconomic and political developments.3
One may wonder whether we really need such models, however. Some aspects of the evolving climate crisis can be easily predicted without millions of calculations. For the foreseeable future, carbon emissions will continue to rise, which means that – with a bit of lag – we will continue heating up the planet. That heat is producing increasing numbers of “natural” disasters, which will produce economic damage and climate refugees/evacuees, among others. At some point, the damage will be too much for a society to handle, and that society collapses. How much pressure is needed for collapse depends (among others) on the (mostly economic) strength of a society and the local severity of the effects of climate change. Many weaker countries will also be affected more, so that’s where collapse will start. The effects of 2°C of average global warming are already so severe that there will be many millions of climate refugees and many countries that have fallen prey to societal collapse or civil war. Rich countries that are better capable of mitigating the effects of climate disaster will be able to function for longer. However, unless global warming is stopped or sufficiently mitigated in time, tens or hundreds of millions of climate refugees, collapsing global trade, and ever-increasing “natural” disasters will lead even the strongest/riches countries eventually to collapse. As Christian Parenti warned in 2011:
There is a real risk that strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse. By that course, developed economies would turn into neofascist islands of relative stability in a sea of chaos. But a world in climatological collapse – marked by hunger, disease, criminality, fanaticism, and violent social breakdown – will overwhelm the armed lifeboat. Eventually, all will sink in the same morass.4
How long a country (or part thereof) can persevere in the face of climate change is a function of economic strength and independence, direct climate-change vulnerability, and social stability. “Economic strength” here refers to wealth and economic growth, but also to private debt (which is bad) and the size of the financial industry relative to the “real” economy (see Rent, Debt, and Power). Economic independence refers to the extent that a country can (and actually) does produce the most important commodities it needs. The more a country relies on imports, the weaker it is in this respect. “Direct climate-change vulnerability” refers to a country’s vulnerability to natural disasters and direct effects of climate change such as increased heat or drought, and so forth. “Social stability” has to do with the extent of acceptance of the sociopolitical status quo and the likelihood of acts of violence committed by citizens. The more people accept the government’s authority and the less likely they are to commit violence, the more stable a society.
We can’t really estimate the nature of the function mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph, as we lack the data to do the necessary statistical analysis. And consequently, even if we had sufficiently certain and detailed climate predictions, it is impossible to say (with any significant level of confidence) when different countries are likely to collapse into chaos. Presently, it seems likely that we’ll reach about 2°C of average global warming around the year 2040 (or maybe a little bit later, if we’re lucky), and there are some reports suggesting what kinds of effects that is likely to have,5 but there are large uncertainties with regards to tipping points and effects on smaller geographical scales, which matter a lot if we want to know what’s going to happen to specific countries.
So, we cannot make specific predictions, but the general pathway is fairly clear. If carbon emissions continue, global warming continues, and countries will collapse into chaos one after the other like dominoes. AI is likely to affect how this plays out, but this introduces further uncertainties. And there are, of course, many other things that could happen, drastically changing the future. To give the most obvious example: global nuclear war would lead to nuclear winter, which could kill most of humanity (if it lasts long enough) and almost completely terminate carbon emissions (thereby leaving a more inhabitable planet for the survivors than continuing carbon emissions would). Such extreme events are highly unpredictable, however, so it’s probably more useful to focus on developments with more foreseeable effects. AI is undoubtedly the most important among those.
As mentioned, AI will do (at least) two things that matter greatly here. It will lead to more energy consumption, and therefore, more emissions. And it will lead to more unemployment, which deteriorates social stability (one of the variables mentioned three paragraphs back). AI is likely to strengthen a division in society between a small class of economically and powerful owners of the means of production (i.e., factories, machines, software, patents, and most importantly, AIs), and a very large class of disposable, expendable humans who do the remaining work (that can’t yet be done by AI) for very low wages and in terrible conditions, if they have work at all. The powerful elite will probably organize something to stay in power (i.e., to avoid revolution), some kind of combination of violent repression, propaganda, and very minimal social welfare (such as some kind of universal basic income). Privately, however, they will mostly invest in fortified safe havens for themselves to survive social unrest and the effects of climate change. So, while you and me and our children are struggling to survive climate disasters, unemployment, hunger, and social unrest, the owners of AI systems and other major means of production will hide in their fortresses, waiting out the storm of climate change.
Whether they actually survive that storm remains to be seen, of course. There are very many ways in which things could go wrong for them, but unfortunately, most of those “things” only affect their chances of survival, and not the general trend described in the previous paragraph. To avoid that, we’d need (among others!) a set of policies that increase social stability rather than deteriorate it. We’d need to restrain AI, improve social welfare, support climate refugees and other migrants, prevent disinformation and fascist propaganda, and much more. Policies like these are not in the immediate (financial and political) interests of the powerful elite, however, and will, therefore, be obstructed by them, and since they have the power to do so (by their control over the media and their ability to buy elections, for example), the dystopian scenario sketched above is far more likely than its prevention.
Hence, while the actions by Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and similar movements are cute and inoffensive, if they want to have some significant impact, they should start assassinating members of the global elite and their fascist allies instead, starting with the most powerful ones. If you go to prison for climate activism anyway (which is increasingly the case), then you’d better go to prison for doing something that actually might have an effect.
I have written a lot about climate change on this blog. Not all of those posts are currently available, as I haven’t had time to re-upload all of them after a hosting move in the beginning of 2024. Among what’s available, there are several blog articles that are closely related to the issues addressed here. Carbon-neutrality by 2050 is an obvious one, but most important, perhaps, is Capitalism and Climate Collapse. See also the category “Climate Change”.
While climate change used to be one of the main topics of this blog, I don’t write much about it anymore. I don’t think this will change. Increasingly, I feel that there isn’t much (if anything) left to say about the topic anymore. The content of this post isn’t significantly different from what I have been saying/writing for years. And while I continue to follow new academic publications on climate change, I haven’t seen any really important research findings for a few years. Or at least, I haven’t seen anything that suggests a more positive outlook.
I’m not a “doomist”. I don’t believe that we are somehow doomed by climate change or that we cannot avoid catastrophe. Rather, I am convinced that we won’t avoid catastrophe, because trying to do so would not be in the financial and political interests of the rich and powerful. We can avoid catastrophe, at least in principle, although it would be very hard and require very significant sacrifices, but the people who rule us don’t want to make sacrifices, and they seem to believe that they will be able to avoid the worst of what is to come and don’t care about what happens to the rest of us. We’re being ruled by psychopaths, who are now turning to fascism as a tool to safeguard their interests.
I’m not a “doomist”, but I’m powerless to do anything to avoid “doom”. Maybe others will. Maybe others who are less cowardly than me will take up the fight and start a revolution. Those who oppose so-called “doomism” often argue for hope. We should – according to them – have hope that there will be solutions, that there will be an active effort to combat climate change. This hope has always been a deception. But I do still have hope. I’m hoping for revolution.
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Notes
- e.g., Joshua Jackson et al. (2019). “Ecological and Cultural Factors Underlying the Global Distribution of Prejudice”, PLOS One 0221953.
- At the moment, only the last episode in my series of posts on this topic is available. I need to re-upload the rest, but haven’t had time to do so yet.
- An earlier model was demographic rather than economic-geographical, and also suggested widespread societal collapse as an effect of climate change. Ideally, the two kinds of models should be combined.
- Christian Parenti (2011). Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books), p. 20.
- The IPCC reports Climate Change and Land (2019) and Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) are probably the most important.