The science on emissions and climate change has been fairly accurate since at least the 1970s, and internationally known and acknowledged since the early 1990s. The UN’s climate framework, which makes clear what needs to be done, has been in effect since 1994. States have spent the three decades since essentially wasting time, trying and failing to make sustainability more immediately profitable than destruction.

It may have been possible at the time to save both capitalism and the planet, in theory. But this would require directly assaulting fossil fuel fortunes, making them unprofitable or even worthless by means of state intervention. Capitalism as a whole could have continued, perhaps, simply using different sources of energy and different avenues for investment. But theory aside, this was never practically attainable within the liberal order.

Despite the liberal pretension to enabling reasoned debate to set public policy, this kind of action was – and still is – deemed unconscionable, because the liberal system is in fact set up to allow those controlling massive wealth to protect their property. Wherever public power threatens private profits, the wealthy can mobilize their wealth in the legal, political, and public realm, and nip the threat in the bud.

These battles have gone on for decades while all of the “reasonable,” “serious” people insisted that only gradual, market-based efforts could ever work, pinning much hope on future technological innovations. But the market has other priorities, above all to make whatever profits can be made; rather than pave the way to a sustainable future, energy-related innovation has largely focused on better ways to locate, extract, refine, market, burn, and use fossil fuels – the market in its infinite wisdom has willed it to be so. And why should it not? As far as securing profits is concerned, juicing a tried-and-true source of revenue like fossil fuels is obviously a better investment than exploring avenues where profitability is just one of many open questions.

A world in flames

For decades, in other words, capitalism has been proving its inability to respond to anything but near-term profitability, while the political system supporting it has been proving its complete inability to temper this near-sightedness with reason or concern for the public interest.

And now we find ourselves in a world literally up in flames, with short- and long-term threats to civilization converging across all continents – and the liberal-capitalist system continues to display an utter inability to do what needs to be done.

The science, having been generally clear for half a century, is now more detailed and unassailable than perhaps any other area of science has ever been before.

Politicians, trapped in the mind-prison of Liberalism and the golden cage of capitalism, continue to mutter “but what do you propose?” And no wonder: any effective action would ultimately require pursuing the economically insane aim of preventing private firms and state enterprises from making profits from highly valuable natural resources, materials which are just lying there, waiting to be turned into money.

Whether fossil fuel reserves are owned by private individuals, corporations, or the state itself, denying their ability to do this would entail a massive showdown with vested interests, the kind of thing that prudent politicians generally avoid.

In this way, the intrinsic irrationality of an economic system predicated on infinite growth, along with the massive concentration of wealth and power it has promoted, now stand in the way of common-sense rational action based on an irrefutable scientific consensus.

Listen to the science!

If you did not already reject capitalism to begin with, you might at this point be irritated. I am obviously biased and presenting the story in a way that serves my pre-existing communist agenda. Be this as it may, the science is clear: just read the IPCC reports.

These reports, compiled by volunteer scientists based on thousands of studies, and approved line for line by hundreds of representatives from nearly every government in the world, spell this out as clearly as can be. In the crucial 2018 report, they call for “rapid and far-reaching transitions,” about which they say: “These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.”

On the pivotal topic of fossil fuels, they write: “Some fossil investments made over the next few years – or those made in the last few – will likely need to be retired prior to fully recovering their capital investment or before the end of their operational lifetime.”

The International Energy Agency – originally an oil industry lobby group – has since piled on, calling for an immediate global stop to investment in new fossil fuel supply.

How to strand an asset

If you believe this is possible within capitalism, without violating private property, let us think this through. Consider the fact that about a sixth of the world’s wealth is invested in fossil fuels. How do you suppose we are to retire these investments, across the globe, before they even recover the initial costs, let alone turn a profit?

Do you expect the owners of these investments – including fabulously wealthy individuals, royal families, democratic states, dictatorial states, and of course corporations bound to shareholder profits – to simply come to their senses now, after four decades, and voluntarily forfeit this wealth? The corporations in question are legally barred from doing so, while the individuals and leaders in question would be objectively irrational to do it – they would be, simply put, destroying billions and trillions of dollars in value.

Yes, I am a communist, and have been since before I started down the climate rabbit hole. Nonetheless, I truly wish this weren’t so. I truly wish capitalism could continue to exist without destroying the climate, if only to give the left more time to organize to overthrow it.

But unfortunately for all of us, whether left, right, or oh-so enlightened center, time is running out. The current state of things is utterly unsustainable, and if there is any way out still conceivable, even any way to significantly mitigate the damage – it is being blocked by liberal ideology and capitalist economics.

Seriously reviewing the science and the history of this crisis makes any other conclusion untenable.

I read the NYT Op-Ed Why, Despite Everything, You Should Have Kids (if You Want Them), by philosopher Tom Whyman, secretly hoping it would change my mind. It did not. Worse yet, it seems to espouse unrealistic expectations about climate change.

To begin with, I am not what you would call an avowed anti-natalist – I do not advocate for non-reproduction nor do I think having children is morally wrong as such. I am however one of those millennials Dr. Whyman mentions who do not want to bring new life into this world because in light of what the future has in store, it just seems cruel.

This conclusion is not an easy one. The desire to reproduce is one of the deepest drives shared by all living things, and I doubt how much rational discussion can override it. For myself, I once eagerly looked forward to parenting, and I hate disappointing my own parents’ desire for grandchildren.

Whyman’s argument, as I understand it, is essentially that the optimism involved in having kids must be independent of our concrete expectations. To put his point bluntly, we might say “things may look bleak now, but who knows what the future may hold. Today’s kids may fix it all somehow.”

He acknowledges that his position runs the danger of deferring all hope to an unknown future, or worse, idly waiting for future generations to solve present problems. This is important. Yet I fear that his piece still feeds into the widespread unwillingness to confront the actual prognoses of climate science.

Because although the future is inherently unknowable, we currently have a better guess than ever before. Climate science, the biggest collaborative scientific endeavor in history, gives us a detailed outline of what to expect in the next decades.

Desertification and rising sea levels will displace hundreds of millions of human beings by the end of this century. Falling agricultural yields and increasingly chaotic weather will likely result in famines. Covid-19 is likely to be followed by even worse pandemics.

The ecological crisis these are part of entails not only terrible suffering for many, many people, but massive societal and political upheaval. In many countries, the political response to these changes is already taking the route Naomi Klein has termed “eco-barbarism”: violently maintaining a semblance of stability in an increasingly destabilized world.

To turn around these catastrophic trends, we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half before 2030. Current government targets come nowhere close, not to mention reductions in practice.

It is not too late quite yet, and there is still much to be done. But we must confront the reality of what can be done and when, and also by whom: by the time children born today enter high school, runaway global heating could be locked in for good.

If we fail to reduce emissions in time, global heating will continue to worsen drastically throughout the lifetime of today’s newborns. Yet even if we succeed, global heating and its effects are bound to continue making things worse for years and decades before they get better. Children born today will live through the worst of it, an outcome they are simply born too late to prevent.

This is why deciding to bring new life into the world just seems cruel. But Whyman does get one important issue right: foregoing reproduction is no kind of solution, either.

As he writes, “it makes no sense to think of children as tokens of their parents’ carbon consumption.” Private consumption is only one driver of emissions – alongside military fuel consumption, for example – and no reduction in birth rates could put much of a dent even in consumption-driven emissions within a decade.

Ultimately, the fact remains that no matter how big the population is, the ways the world lives, eats, travels and works must be transformed in short order if we are to halt global heating.

What are we waiting for?

How then could a reasonable person hope for things to get better for the next generation? The main way seems to be techno-optimism: the belief that a future breakthrough may transform our dire situation. Whyman does not speak to this, but it is implicit in many positions like his own.

Indeed, if a new technology were to emerge, one which could provide clean energy or remove greenhouse gases on scale, at an efficiency far beyond anything presently available, rapid climate stabilization might suddenly become possible.

That is, however, a very big if. And as entrenched economic and political interests appear unwilling or unable to rapidly decarbonize our economies, it looks more and more like our collective survival strategy is beginning to hinge on just such ifs.

For those with a vested interest in business-as-usual, such beliefs are incredibly convenient. They suggest that decarbonization is not so urgent, perhaps altogether superfluous. Yet for the sake of future generations especially, this is a fatal gamble we should take care not to entertain.

Have children, don’t have children – that is your choice to make. But do not justify it by suggesting that maybe everything will just get better, somehow. For the younger generations alive today, and the ones after them, things are almost certain to get worse first.

If anyone is going to fix this mess, it will have to be those of us who are already grown up – and we are going to have to start fighting like hell.

In these troubled times, with hope and despair both our frequent companions, I’d like to share a bit about my experience in the hope (haha) that it might benefit others, might help you take better care of yourselves and of those around you.

Hope and motivation

I’m a highly political person who has also always been a highly sensitive person with a vivid imagination. If you’re anything like me, you’ll know what a difficult combination these things can be – I’m frequently off visualizing where our world may be headed, or what I know is going on in parts of the world less fortunate than mine, and it can be deeply troubling, to say the least.

In the last few months I have had the privilege of being paid to write regularly about the climate crisis, and this has had the unsurprising side effect of making me aware of more and more details regarding the unfolding tragedy, while also making it much harder to ignore that knowledge and enjoy any kind of blissful ignorance.

In my writing, I have found it important to tell the truth but also give hope – things may seem bleak, the prospects of improvement slim, but there’s a lot of important work to do nonetheless, and hope is an important motivator.

Considering the worst

Then I read an article titled “Deep Adaptation” and had a bit of a crisis. This is an article which dares to delve into the possibility that all is, in fact, lost, and the climate collapse can no longer be halted.

A note about the Deep Adaptation piece:
You really don’t have to read it. If you want to anyway, and you’re sensitive like me, be careful and take good care of yourself. Don’t read it on a bad day. Brace yourself for bad news and troubling thoughts. I won’t even link to it, so as not to tempt you to peek in (it is very easily googleable). Make time to read the whole thing in one go.

The Deep Adaptation piece raises an interesting point about hope: hope makes you dependent, and hence fragile. Your emotional wellbeing becomes contingent on events turning out this way or that, shifting your focus to the future (and often, to things beyond your control) and setting you up for a major psychic hit if they do not.

When I read the piece, I thought this point was logical, but hard to accept. I was still very emotionally invested in hope at the time, of course. It was only a few weeks later that I really appreciated the validity of this observation.

Turning point

In early December, I started getting very anxious.

The UK general elections were coming up, and from a climate policy perspective the two outcomes couldn’t possibly be farther apart. Labour proposed to set into motion the first “Green New Deal” type package of eco-socialist policies in a major economy – the only approach to halting climate collapse I find plausible (for reasons best explained by Naomi Klein). The Conservatives promised to plow ahead with Brexit, removing EU environmental regulations and most likely spelling a massive setback to the UK’s impressive sustainability gains.

Considering we have, at best, a decade to set massive policy shifts in motion to avert runaway climate collapse, I held this election to be the last chance to start doing so in the major economies before it’s too late. I further worried and hoped that the results would embolden, respectively, the Right or the Left the world over, setting the stage for the possibly even more crucial US elections in November.

The global stakes, as I understood them, could hardly be higher, and I was very anxious.

The morning after the elections, still oblivious to the awful results but knowing a Labour victory was unlikely, I braced myself for the bad news. Before going online, I took some time to meditate, and told myself that if Labour lost indeed, it would only mean we were the same place we were the previous day, heading in the very same direction, and nothing had changed. In other words, I let go of my hope.

Surprisingly, I managed to take the bad news quite well. More surprisingly, my mood only improved over the rest of that week. Not only was I free of the anxiety over an election I could not vote in, I was suddenly free of hope.

I still consider the Johnson victory a disaster, I still consider the upcoming US elections crucial, but my perspective has shifted deeply.

Beyond hope

I am no longer dependent on hope. I am not anxious to see who the Democratic nominee will be nor whether they beat Trump.

Instead I feel more focused on the here and now, on the immediacy of the tasks at hand. For me, these are to learn as much as I can about our collective situation – how we got here, where exactly we stand, and where we are headed; to share that information and help make it accessible to more people; to take care of myself and the people around me, as we all go through these terrible times; and to keep alive, and further develop, positive visions for a better world – because if anything matters at all, there will be a point where at least some of the people in this world are regrouping and organizing a new society out of the rubble of the old, and these visions could be an important source of inspiration.

Being free from hope makes it easier to focus on these tasks, to consider them in their immediacy, to carry through on them, one step at a time, without worrying about ultimate outcomes.

It also gives me more strength (or perhaps resilience) when dealing with the continuing onslaught of horrible news. In recent weeks this has included the unfathomably huge fires ravaging Australia and annihilating hundreds of millions of animals, and just today the news that Trump has essentially started a war with Iran.

I still feel, I still experience the shock as news arrives or details emerge. But I am no longer hanging on to the hope that things will stop getting worse. The bad news affirms my basic expectations, and hard as that sounds (and it is hard) I feel better able to handle it from this position of acceptance.

Be kind to yourselves, and to each other. And even if you give up hope, never give up the fight. If nothing else, let’s not let the bastards get away with it without a fight.