Настроение:	peaceful
Музыка:	Toy -- Songs Of Consumption (2019)
Entry tags:	climate, fascism, future prospects

The view from Nuuk in the year 2070. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
With sea levels up by more than a meter, and a lot more to come, communities were beating a chaotic retreat inland, especially in nations with large, heavily populated deltas such as Egypt, Vietnam, Nigeria, India, and Bangladesh. Once China’s premier export zone, the Pearl River Delta lay abandoned.

In the United States, rising seas and storm surges had swamped cities including New Orleans, Miami, Virginia Beach, and Atlantic City.

How had it come to this, with prospects of the planet reaching 4 degrees of warming and a carrying capacity of perhaps no more than a billion people?
Researchers at the institute in Nuuk had many answers:

- The might of the fossil fuel industry, the most powerful of all industry sectors in its time, had been deeply entrenched, and money buys political power. State subsidies had sustained the industry for several decades of the 21st century, with fatal consequences. Just when emissions needed to fall fast, they had been propped up by a corrupt political system. And there was the short-term logic of neoliberal capitalism: In 2018, an eminent scientist had recounted a conversation with a Shell CEO who said he recognized climate change as an “intractable problem, ”so his strategy was to “get rich quick, while we can.” Perhaps that was the story of big business more broadly: the power to ignore the common good.

- The global climate policymaking processes that had been devised in the 1990s were grossly inadequate to deal with global catastrophic risk: Corrupt governments and vested interests had held veto power over a fragile consensus process that was exclusively focused on government and business, with the rest of civil society and the most vulnerable excluded

- There had been a long-term, chronic incapacity of social structures and leaders to respond to the big issues, and climate was not the only big failure. Back in 2016, a report based on interviews with top leaders around the world, Thinking the Unthinkable, had found a failure of imagination and “group think” stifling their capacity: “A proliferation of ‘unthinkable’ events ... has revealed a new fragility at the highest levels of corporate and public service leaderships. Their ability to spot,identify and handle unexpected, non-normative events is ... perilously inadequate at critical moments. ”The study found what might be called “executive myopia” – a deep reluctance among top leaders in both the public and private sectors to see and contemplate even the possibility that “unthinkables” might happen, let alone how to handle them (Gowing and Langdon2016). This analysis was prescient, given the leadership failure on climate that had played out.

- The science made available to policymakers had been unsuitable for the task, often out-of-date, too model-dependent, and excluding important climate system processes. Consistently, the consequences and costs of future warming had been underestimated, the proximity of tipping points downplayed,and climate–economy models infected with neo-classical economic assumptions completely unsuitable for dealing with existential risks.

- Perhaps most crucially of all, societies had completely misunderstood the risks and how to think about them. The risks were clearly existential for human societies and civilizations, though not so immediately for the human species. Special precautions were required that would go well beyond conventional risk-management practice, because the consequences of the lower-probability, but higher-impact, events would be devastating for human societies. Planning for the worst, and doing everything within one’s power to make sure it did not happen, had been everyday practice across society for more than a century in engineering and safety systems. Yet this was precisely what did not happen with climate change. For some inexplicable reason,both climate scientific reports and policy documents had focused on“middle of the road” risk outcomes – the 50 percent and 66 percent chances–and ignored and downplayed the existential risks.

How had this happened? Were high risks of failure accepted in order to stretch targets and timelines, and to make profound, fast action less necessary so as to not disrupt the functioning of the economy in the short term, or strand the assets of the fossil fuel industry and the global financial system invested in them?
More than anything else, it was this catastrophic risk-management failure in the face of an existential threat that had produced a civilization collapse that could have been avoided.