In the past, I have ended the year with a post titled “My Year End Siege of Angers”.1 You might think that the oncoming onslaught of the Trump Presidency and government by his billionaire supporters would bring another round of angers.
But, this year, I find myself very afraid for the future of our species and the planet as a whole. Therefore, the new title.
Global warming is here.
2024 is the hottest year on record.2
Consumption of fossil fuels is at an all-time high.
We have effectively made no progress in decreasing our use of these CO2 emitters.
The exhaustion of the earth is underway.
Scientists and others are discussing changing the name of Earth’s current epoch from the Holocene (“wholly new”) to the Anthropocene (“age of humans”). This is because our species’ impact on the planet is so massive that it has changed its very character. In 10,000 BC, there may have been 1 million human beings on the planet. By 1825 or so, the population reached a billion. Today, there are over 8 billion people on the planet.
But the sheer number of human beings doesn’t capture the impact on the earth. The title of this article from the World Wildlife Foundation, “Catastrophic 73% decline in the average size of global wildlife populations in just 50 years reveals a ‘system in peril’” starts to sum up the situation. Our exploitation of mineral resources to support our ever-growing economy is so severe that we are now beginning to mine the bottom of the oceans. This is despite the fact that we know less about those regions than we do about the moon.3 See Mining the Deep Sea on YouTube and Visualizing Deep-sea Mining .
Global problems require global solutions
This is just to state the obvious. For example, if we could get every poor country in the world to adopt carbon-neutral economies, we would still face the fact that the developed world contributes the vast bulk of global warming chemicals. “More than 80% of the world’s emissions are produced by the top-half of the world population (high- and upper-middle income countries).”4 The world economy is more than ever dominated by global corporations that act with substantial impunity from regulation by nation-states.
Capitalism cannot be a part of the solution
Capitalism requires growth; there is no such thing as steady-state capitalism. Capitalist marketing drives the fetishistic consumption of more and more stuff. Capitalism concentrates income and wealth in a tiny fraction of the population. This leaves the vast bulk of the population suffering from many persistent insecurities throughout their lives. Capitalism also requires that its participants pollute as much as possible. A capitalist firm must pollute to maintain a competitive stance with its competitors. If it experiences higher costs because it doesn’t pollute, its competitors will have a price and profit advantage, and the lower-polluting company will fail. Don’t think that pollution in its many forms are the only costs imposed on society by capitalist production. Worker injuries and deaths are just another externalized cost. The exhaustion of the earth itself is similarly just a cost of doing business that our species collectively experiences.
Our institutions are controlled by nation-states and capitalism – the rich and corporations. These are antithetical to globalism.
To successfully confront our problems, we must evolve or develop a new economic system within a very short time frame.
Let’s examine the pace of change in our history across three domains.
First, in human culture – as a species, our present human culture evolved over some 300,000 years. Even our present mass societies have taken 10,000 years to evolve. By culture, I mean: “…… behavior peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behavior. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements.”5
Second, lets return to the history of the nation-state. Most histories of the development of the nation-state as a form of human organization date the initial phases to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 in Europe. By the beginning of the 20th century, the nation-state had become sufficiently widespread as an organizational form to drive two world wars. Today, there are 193 nation-state members of the UN. So, the nation-state has been evolving for more than 375 years.
Third, capitalism has been evolving for roughly 250 years (its beginnings marked by the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776). Even the most recent phase of capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, has taken more than forty years to reach its present form.
This suggests something about the speed with which human culture changes.
To meet our challenges. human culture must evolve a sustainable and equitable global economic system. This change in human culture must be global. There cannot be any space for nation-states to compete against each other for resources. This would require intentional action through government to institute a new, sustainable, equitable economy. This, of course, assumes that such a model already exists and that government can act globally.6
Second, based on current projections of the impacts of global warming and the exhaustion of the earth, the timeline for achieving real results in sustainability and equity is measured in decades rather than centuries.
Before we can envision an economic system that can act globally, democratically, and sustainably to sustain our species, an enormous array of social and political problems would have to be solved.
At this moment, it is impossible to see a way forward that will meet the timeline of impending environmental catastrophe and exhaustion of the earth’s resources.
From this vantage point,
the way forward
is very gloomy…..
Footnotes
- My Year End Siege of Angers – the list –the rerun – 2023, My Year End Siege of Angers – the addendum – 2022, My Year End Siege of Angers – the list – 2022
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-2024s-record-hottest-year-u-s-voters-will-decide-climates-path-forward/
- See: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/04/19/you-asked-moon-oceans/
- https://ourworldindata.org/inequality-co2
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/culture
- Global corporations plan and act at a global scale. In the US, 88% of all productive assets are owned by just 1% of corporations. This tiny slice are the planners of future economic activity. But, they act only for their own pursuit of ever greater sales and profits without concern about the consequences to life as a whole.
Was Malthus right?
We have been poo-poohing his version of the pie and exhausting the earth’s resources at the same time.