Is The Collapse Of Civilization Boring To You?

We should probably talk more (again?) about the fact that a child born today may live to see the collapse of global civilization.

Perhaps like me you have the sense that talk of civilizational collapse became boring, or fell out of fashion.

Well I hate to tell you it’s still on.

Not according to me, or climate doomers, or conspiracy theorists. According to scientists.

Scientists from numerous disciplines, from numerous countries, from numerous research centres, including NASA.

The trajectory we are on is unsustainable and we will, more likely than not, descend into a uncontrollable spiral of societal breakdown unless urgent revolutionary changes are made.

Once again, this is according to some of the world’s best cross-disciplinary scientists.

I was thinking about this when a bunch of environmental groups came out in support of Kamala Harris just two days after she renounced her previous anti-fracking position.

She did this because she wants to win pro-fracking votes in Pennsylvania.

Maybe no one has told her that there probably won’t be an entity called Pennsylvania at some point in the next few decades if fracking continues.

Or that Trump has a lock on the pro-fracking bloc and no one she wants to convince of her new anti-fracking stance will believe her.

Fracking, of course, has seen the US surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer.

Fracking initiated by Obama and continued by Trump, then by Biden and will continue under Harris or Trump 2.0.

How thin the politics. How meagre the demands of some activists have become.

I was thinking about this when I sat outside every evening for four nights on an island in southern Europe, on a well-lit patio at the end of quiet, carless street expecting to see moths swarming the lights. I know well the trouble insects are in, but I still expected to see moths. I saw one.

Moths are critical night-time pollinators, an essential part of the ecology that supports our food chain.

In Australia, a type of moth that you could find by the tens of thousands in individual caves suddenly disappeared in the space of a few months.

How quickly things can collapse.

I was thinking about this when I woke up in the morning and checked the forecast to see how hot it was going to get that day as a heatwave rolled over the Mediterranean.

I was thinking about this as I dodged the coughs and sneezes in my well-fitted mask on the longish journey to see my friend on this island. So. Many. Sick. People. Everywhere. A pandemic virus being fully ignored despite a summer wave, years after we were sold the end of the pandemic.

I was thinking about this as my friend’s friend, who once helped manage a hotel in Dubai, told me disgusting stories about the utter greed and wastefulness of the super rich. About how hundreds of bottles of the world’s most expensive champagne were regularly popped and spilled without being drunk onto dance floors for the pure decadence. About how caviar was ordered by the tonne not to eat, but as a photo prop.

Lots of money is spent, lots of influence is bought and lots of people are side-lined to make sure the probable collapse of civilization doesn’t lead the news headlines every day.

To make sure the tales of super rich excess are kept from our eyes and our ears.

I have written before about how the system cannot survive the truth, how its very survival has become contingent on turning away from the truth.

A truth that people are now being jailed to supress.

In Britain last month, five activists who planned to block a road to protest the inaction leading to the probable collapse of civilization were given longer jail sentences than rapists and other violent criminals.

Many people would rather everything die than anything change.

But let’s get to those studies.

In 2014 a team of social, natural and climate scientists drew on past civilizational collapses, including ancient Rome and the Mesopotamian Empires, and modelled a range of future scenarios for global society. The study, which was partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, concluded that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.”

The primary drivers of collapse, they found, are social and natural. Inequality and resource hoarding by the elites leads to collapse, as does climate change and over-exploitation of Earth’s resources.

The scientists of a decade ago also made an eerily prescient prediction in light of the recent jailing of climate activists. They said:

"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."

Sound familiar?

These scientists weren’t freak outliers.

In 2020, Australia’s pre-eminent climate scientist, the late, great Will Steffen, concluded that “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse.” His belief, along with colleagues, was that 9 out of 15 tipping points that regulate the state of the planet, including the melting of sea ice, shifts in ocean currents and the health of the Amazon rainforest, had been dangerously compromised.

But how, really, does a civilization collapse because of climate change?

In 2015, scientists at one of the world’s best sustainability schools said that food - who has it, who doesn’t - is the key.

Their study also modelled a variety of scenarios and found that “without significant changes to policy, global society will collapse by 2040 due to catastrophic food shortages.”

The lead scientist on the study said that: “based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption."

Food is now under threat.

Just in the last week we had news that Japanese rice yields are down 25%, French wheat yields are down 28% and a quarter of a million livestock died in South Korea’s heatwave. The UK’s wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape production is projected to fall 17.5%.

Things are not going well.

It’s important to note that all of the studies about future collapse were equivocal. They said these outcomes could be avoided with far-reaching and urgent changes, from the rapid end of fossil fuel use to major changes to food systems and the equitable redistribution of planetary resources.

I probably don’t need to tell you these things aren’t yet happening.

Fossil fuel use reached a record high in 2023.

(One piece of good news is that so far in 2024, more electricity in the EU was generated with clean power than fossil fuels. The less good news is that overall EU emissions remain stubbornly high and the bloc is not on track to meet targets).

Wealth hoarding is out of control.

In 2022 the world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, owned nearly half of all the world’s wealth. People with more than $30 million, just 0.003% of the world, hold 6.5% of total global wealth.

Sales of private jet sales have reached record levels.

The number of super yachts on the seas has gone from 800 in 1995 to close to 6,000 today.

Seas that are heating and rising at record levels, becoming inhospitable to the life in them and the people that live at the edges of them.

There are no limits, no controls. If you have the money, you can buy it, go there, do it. No matter the cost in pollution, the cost to the planet, or the mark your decision makes on the ledger that edges us closer to collapse.

And so the ice melts, the crops whither, the moths disappear and the heat builds.

And the heat builds.

An astonishing number of heat records have fallen this year across the globe, a year which will likely be the hottest in recorded human history.

The 22nd July was the hottest day on the planet since measurements began in 1940.

There are fewer than six degrees between the body's optimal core temperature - 37.7C - and the critical thermal maximum that can bring the body to absolute collapse.

To avoid catastrophe, governments should be hustling, planning and working to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. Because fossil fuel infrastructure needed to stop being built yesterday. Quite literally.

A 2019 study said that any new fossil fuel infrastructure on top of what existed then, five years ago, takes us over 1.5 degrees.

Governments should be removing subsidies and introducing punitive taxes on fossil fuels and ecologically damaging industries. They should be stripping assets from the super rich and shutting them down.

Instead they are still expanding fossil fuels.

Instead they are encouraging the excesses of the super rich.

Governments also endlessly parrot the mantra of growth, as if after 200 years of growth in the rich world, there still isn’t enough to around. As if wealth generation rather than distribution is, after all this time, still the problem.

I wanted to write this because sometimes it’s good to come back to first principles.

Good to look at where we are in the civilizational arc, what the future might bring and what we might do to avoid it.

I wanted to write this because, as Rosa Luxemburg said, ‘The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.’

And what is happening is the destruction of the conditions for life on the only planet we know that can support life.

I wanted to write this because I have the sense that since the explosion of climate activism in 2018-2019, the end of the world has fallen out of the headlines.

I don’t find doomism to be revolutionary.

Which is why, if we agree with the scientists that the trajectory is collapse, we must agree with them that there is a way out of this death dive. We can stabilize the global system and ensure a decent future for everyone on Earth.

1.5C is done. 2C is probably done. But we aren’t yet committed to the worst futures. Because how we respond to conditions plays a huge part in what the future looks like, even with lots of greenhouse gases in the air and a far more dangerous climate.

But there is absolutely no evidence that we can do this solely within the confines of liberal reformism.

Because liberal reformism, alongside its environmental failures, is leading us to fascism.

Whether in the US or UK, we are seeing what happens when you don’t stand up to fascists, when you indulge them rather than take away any route they might have to state power. You must starve them, not feed them.

How do you feed them? With Brexit, with border walls, with duopoly support for genocide, with anti-immigration rhetoric.

We won’t pull out of this dive by indulging the fascists, or the super rich, or the oil industry, or the weapons industry, or other highly polluting industries.

We won’t pull out of this by backing the politicians that support these industries.

But we can’t view this all through the lens of a solely systemic analysis.

We need to change our own behaviours. And we don’t need to, nor should we wait for the system to change to make those changes.

That realization can be empowering.

As can the reminder that revolutions happen.

Because of all the things there is no evidence for, there is no evidence that we are at the end of history.