How does the climate crisis, rogue AI, fertility decline, fake news and Elon Musk all fit together?

It's collapse! Part 2 of Chapter 4: Collapse

This is the next section from my book about how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning, dive into this post straight up, or go and check out the rest of the book using this Table of Contents.

Quick recap: I’ve started the section that outlines how collapse works. This instalment continues the explainer, bringing all the clusterfuck of crises going on into a picture I think we can better understand. This one is a lot. Strap in.

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COLLAPSE (part 2)

There are a number of collapses happening around us, or about to happen, and they all feed into each other. However, it probably makes sense to start with climate collapse.

Much of the world is already in climate, or ecological, collapse. This (wide sweep of hand to the back-to-back fires, floods, heat waves, cyclones, plagues, famines, species extinctions and mass migrations) is what it looks like.

I mean, we messed with the finely balanced systems, seasons and tides, we engineered and poked and interfered and abused, didn’t we? And now the world has got the wobbles. Last year was the hottest ever and recorded the highest number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, and a recent and extensive survey of climate scientists found 77 per cent believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above preindustrial levels; half think it will be more than 3C. There will be no more winter in Australia by 2050, we are told. The key ocean current – the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in the Atlantic (its fictional collapse made famous in the movie The Day After Tomorrow) was assessed four years ago to have only a 44 per cent chance of collapsing before 2300. Three years later the prognosis is that collapse will likely occur by 2050, with a 95 per cent confidence interval of 2025–2095.

Readers: It’s hard to know what significant and irreversible changes - that are super tangible for people - to plonk here. Thoughts on a better example or two? I don’t want to dump a kitchen sink in here…it’s just to paint a picture of how the world is wobbling from our poking and messing with systems.

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And just look at the language I’m using here. I used to talk and write in the continuous past tense. We were unleashing, we were in the process of potentially ruining our planet. Now I write in the present definite. It’s no longer going to happen to us. It’s happening. Or happened.

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So….We are in overshoot. Which is to say, we consume natural resources at a rate that exceeds Earth’s regenerative capacity. We now, as a globe, overshoot our annual “budget” by early August. Australia and the US hit it in March, the UK and much of Europe in April and May.

We’ve also smashed through the bulk of the planetary boundaries, including the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, biosphere integrity and land use boundaries. I was in Stockholm in late 2023 at a degrowth conference and a representative from the Stockholm Resilience Centre got on stage to make a big, embargoed announcement. We’d just surpassed the sixth of the nine boundaries, he said. And two of the remaining three were about to tip. The room went quiet. The poor guy blinked out into the audience. Then the moderator bounced back onto stage. “Wow, that’s so interesting!” she bubbled before introducing us to the “next exciting guest”. Never have I felt more like Dr Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) from Don’t Look Up.

This overshooting and boundary over-stepping, and the complex interfering and overlording characteristic of our post-industrial civilisation, means we have gone beyond the earth’s carrying capacity – it’s ability to feed and house us.

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Of course, you could simply say we overdid it. We pushed and pushed our friendship with the planet. We dialled up the complexity. We thought we knew better than nature and the Earth. The Earth did her best to hold and hold, she tolerated and she bent.

Until we just went too far. 

*

In 1972, a group of esteemed thinkers and economists from around the world that called itself the Club of Rome got together to chew over a thorny question: What would happen if humanity continued to consume the world’s finite resources as if they were limitless? If it pushed infinite growth on a clearly benevolent but finite planet? They ran comprehensive mathematical modelling of future growth and resource use, which resulted in the now-famous “The Limits to Growth” report, initially published by MIT and then produced as a book that sold more than 30 million copies (before mysteriously going out of print). It is often said that the report spawned the modern environmental movement and my Dad tells me just now that it played a big part in his moving my family out to the country to live semi-subsistently in the early 1980s.

TL;DR: The report warned that if we continued business as usual (BAU) - consuming energy and resources indiscriminately, expanding the population, etc - we would hit the planet’s limit to hold us all in its spinning embrace, in, oh, about the mid 2020s. That would be now. And our civilization would descend into collapse shortly thereafter, around about 2040. The authors detailed what they meant by collapse: “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”  

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Now cut to 50 years later. In late 2022, Gaya Herrington, a Dutch economist and senior director at KPMG crunched the numbers to see if the report’s forecasts held. Was everything going to come to a head around about… now? The predictions were spot on. There have been a number of peer-reviewed follow-up studies done, the most recent in late 2023. All confirm the original predictions, as well as the fact that we are indeed running to the perilous BAU model.

We didn’t stop. We didn’t heed the warnings.

I spoke to Gaya on a podcast episode not long after her findings hit headlines. “It brings me no joy telling you this,” she said. “Collapse will be forced on us.” Which is to say, the projections show it’s now too late for us to heroically slow the growth trajectory ourselves, to simplify or “degrow” (to orchestrate a sort of “collapse-lite” scenario) voluntarily via various global action measures that were recommended to us 50 years ago.

But Gaya added that she often finds that this truth brings “a sense of relaxation” to many, especially young people. “I think we are relieved to have to let go of the growth imperative. To be forced to live within limits - there's a peace of mind in that. “

Oh, yes. There’s that eerie relief again!

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I don’t know if you’re the same, but until recently existential risk began and ended with the climate crisis. I think to some extent this myopic focus eased the cognitive load. If we could just do this one thing – cool the atmosphere – then everything else would fall into place!

To be fair to all of us, climate collapse was something that we were told we had some control over. You know, if we rallied together – and clung to hope - we could put a break on its downhill slide. There was also urgency to it, a small window of a few years in which to “fix things”. It made sense to triage it.

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But then, and I really don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say this, everything started to collapse.