Conflicting Narratives of Climate Breakdown
Finding the truth
Next week I'll be heading in the Penrith direction to the Sacred Space Foundation for a few days of rest and contemplation. Boy do I need it. I’ve been through a period of super stress. This is partly overwork, partly a bout of severe depression, partly the awful situation in the US, partly an ongoing family health crisis. Partly also an awareness that the worsening political situation in the US and elsewhere significantly increases the danger of rapid civilisational collapse.
We’re at the point where collapse is being openly discussed in the mainstream news: an article by George Monbiot had the headline: ‘There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse’. (The Guardian, 18th February 2025). Truly, we are living through some very dark times.
As a result, I’ve had to distance myself from engaging with collapse-related material for a bit. A couple of things pulled me back to this blog. The first was a very kind endorsement by Rupert Read for an earlier blog post on social media. I remain a sucker for compliments.
The second was Mark Lynas’ announcement that he’s launching a new podcast called Saving the World from Bad Ideas. The guests include Steven Pinker, Hannah Ritchie and George Monbiot. The ‘bad ideas’, discussed in the first podcasts include: “no such thing as progress”, “everything is getting worse” and “we shouldn’t even talk about geoengineering”. This puts Lynas’ podcast firmly in what might be termed the ‘ecomodern’ camp, which is, advocacy for high-energy futures achieved through technological solutionism.
This announcement triggered thoughts about a significant, ongoing conflict over climate breakdown and the future. I’m not referring to the fight between climate change advocates and ‘skeptics’. As far as I’m concerned, climate change skepticism has pretty much zero credibility these days.
The conflict I’m talking about is between the following two propositions/scenarios:
Climate breakdown and mass extinction are serious and increasingly severe but are still at least potentially manageable with the right political, economic and technological solutions.
Climate breakdown and mass extinction are baked in and irreversible and we are possibly decades into collapse and mass extinction.
The scientific aspect of this debate revolves around uncertainty. It concerns questions about the short, middle and long-term trajectory of climate breakdown and the sixth extinction. There is still a significant degree of uncertainty over just how bad things are likely to get, and how fast. However, as I’ve argued before, such uncertainty is not a ‘good thing’. It’s a very bad thing. A 2022 paper by Luke Kemp, Tim Lenton and others pointed out that the possibility that anthropogenic climate change could result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction remained “dangerously unexplored”.
More fundamentally, we can’t know the future. This uncertainty gives some room for debate between advocates of scenario (1) or scenario (2). We can’t totally know whether or how fast collapse or still less human extinction might occur. We can’t know what practical actions might be sufficient to prevent either. It seems also difficult to be totally certain about what aspects of this predicament fall under human control and what don’t. Because of this uncertainty, it is still just possible to argue that some kind of managed transition to a post-carbon future is possible, even if such a transition is no longer plausible.
To put it another way: even if human global civilisation is now as some claim in the early stages of collapse, supply chains, industrial communications, infrastructure etc. are still currently sufficiently intact that scenario (1) cannot be totally ruled out. On the other hand, there are good reasons to take scenario (2) seriously.
This uncertainty, by the way, also gives no room for complacency. I would concur with the researchers Rodolfo Dirzo , Gerardo Ceballos and Paul R. Ehrlich who suggested that humanity is now “circling the drain”. From where I’m standing ecologically induced collapse looks a highly plausible near to middle term outcome of humanity’s current trajectory. The question is whether this is at least potentially partially avoidable through organised political action and technological innovation.
The Political Dimension
We’ll look at the two scenarios in greater detail in a moment. First, I need to highlight a ‘confounding variable’ in the debate which is basically a political split. The disputes over these scenarios are not only over facts. Often, they are over political ideology and ways of life. This is understandable. Basically, if you advocate the transition from a high-energy, fossil fuelled present to a high-energy post fossil fuel future you are tacitly endorsing what we might call the industrial consumer way of life. This is tacit backing for a certain mode of existence that looks very much like business as usual, and which is supported by ideological notions like ‘progress’, which is at the heart of a ‘modern’ point of view. (See episode 1 of Saving the World from Bad Ideas).
Conversely, those who find scenario (2) more plausible often, for understandable reasons, tend to reject the claims of modernity. The idea of ‘progress’ especially comes in for critique. This is because if scenario (2) is true then ‘progress’ is overtly a bad ideology and belief in progress has been one of the factors that has led to likely future collapse and perhaps extinction.
This political split, by the way, is not simply between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. The split is between those who believe in high-energy futures with powerful centralised states and growth and those who favour low energy, decentralised futures and de-growth. There exist ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ versions of both ideological positions. See this essay by Chris Smaje for more details.
This political subtext is significant but often obscured by rhetoric about ‘science’, ‘reason’ and ‘facts’. For example, on the podcast blurb, Mark Lynas describes himself as “once a self-proclaimed eco-activist turned science advocate”. There are a couple of problems with this sort of description. The first is the implication that ‘science’ and ‘eco-activism’ are necessarily opposed. Actually, quite a few ‘eco-activists’ are scientists. The second is the rhetorical use of the word ‘science’. This implies that ‘science’ is unified and monolithic with no dissent. ‘Science’ also has high status as a beacon of reason and evidence. This, again, is contrasted with the implied irrationality and faith-based approaches of ‘eco-activists’. It’s as well to be alert to this kind of rhetoric, because it crops up all over the place in these sorts of public debates.
Next, we’ll look at the two scenarios in slightly greater detail. I — or rather Google Gemini — will offer a brief description of both, and then I’ll suggest some sources for further reading. My aim here is not to offer a comprehensive assessment but to help you do your own thinking on this difficult debate. I’ll offer my thoughts at the end.
1. Climate breakdown and mass extinction are serious and increasingly severe but are still at least potentially manageable with the right political, economic and technological solutions
To avoid personal bias, I asked Google Gemini to write a summary paragraph for this perspective. My prompt was: “write a 1 paragraph argument that ecomodern approaches are the best way to tackle climate change and the sixth extinction”.
Response:
Ecomodernism presents a compelling approach to addressing climate change and the sixth extinction by advocating for strategic technological development and intensification. This philosophy posits that through innovations like advanced nuclear energy, precision agriculture, and synthetic biology, we can decouple human well-being from environmental impact. By intensifying resource use and transitioning to high-density energy sources, ecomodernists argue that we can minimize our ecological footprint, freeing up land for conservation and mitigating the pressures driving biodiversity loss. This approach prioritizes human ingenuity and scientific advancement, offering a pathway to both ecological preservation and continued human prosperity, contrasting with approaches that call for de-growth.
Research resources for scenario (1)
Start with:
Al Gore’s 2022 TED Talk ‘This Is the Moment to Take On the Climate Crisis.’
QUOTE: “We have the technologies, we have the solutions.”
Mark Lynas podcast Saving the World From Bad Ideas looks to be a showcase of ideas supportive of scenario (1).
Paul Hawken:
Paul Hawken’s 2020 talk on the New Great Transformation at the Long Now Foundation
Book relating Hawken’s Drawdown plan to end climate breakdown in 1 generation:
Hawken, P. (2021). Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Penguin.
Hannah Ritchie:
Hannah Ritchie’s 2024 TED talk ‘Are We the Last Generation — or the First Sustainable One?’
Her book:
Ritchie, H. (2024). Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Chatto & Windus
Michael Mann’s 2023 book:
Mann, M. (2023). Our Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis. Scribe.
The website of ecomodernism: ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto.’
Zeke Haufather’s substack The Climate Brink is generally full of useful charts and has an essentially ecomodern perspective. However, see my critique of some of his claims in an older blog here. New Scientist magazine frequently cites Hausfather’s work and views.
2. Climate breakdown and mass extinction are baked in and irreversible and we are possibly decades/centuries into overshoot, collapse and mass extinction.
My Google Gemini Prompt: “write a 1 paragraph summary of plausible scientific evidence suggesting that global civilisation faces near term collapse from climate breakdown and even possibly short term human extinction”.
Gemini’s response:
Scientific concerns regarding near-term civilizational collapse center on the accelerating impacts of climate breakdown, particularly the potential for cascading effects. Evidence indicates that rising global temperatures are triggering more frequent and intense extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods, which can destabilize food systems, water resources, and infrastructure. Furthermore, the risk of crossing critical climate tipping points, like the rapid melting of ice sheets or the release of methane from permafrost, raises the possibility of abrupt and irreversible changes. Combined with factors like biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and increasing social instability, these climate-related stressors create a scenario where the interconnected systems that support global civilization could be overwhelmed, leading to widespread societal disruption and, in the most extreme projections, posing an existential threat to humanity.
Research resources for scenario (2)
To start, read Chris Smaje’s blog posts here:
‘Business-as-usual porn – or, We need to talk about collapse’.
and the sequel
Collapse: a helpful guide for the perplexed
Also look at
Servigne, P. & Stevens, R. (2020) How everything can collapse. Polity.
….as recommended in my previous post on collapse.
A talk by Guy McPherson, a professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology who believes in Near Term Human Extinction. His ideas are condemned as ‘fringe’ and ‘pseudo-scholarship’ on Wikipedia. These are unhelpful slurs, and questionable. McPherson is rightly drawing attention to a possible worst-case scenario that cannot currently be ruled out — see the Kemp et al. paper above.
McPherson’s mistake seems to me to offer overly short timescales for his forecasts, such as his 2018 prediction of human extinction by 2026. The state of knowledge is such that these sorts of predictions are always likely to be wrong. However, if ecological destruction continues, McPherson might prove to have been more right than wrong in the longer term.
And the papers and sources he uses to back up his arguments are for the most part anything but pseudo-scholarship. I include McPherson’s work because Michael Dowd, who was a promotor of collapse acceptance, cited him as a major influence.
The late Michael Dowd supplied ample resources on his Postdoom website making the case for collapse and possible human extinction. Working through these resources should give you a thorough grounding in the arguments for (2).
Tom Murphy’s blog Do The Math outlines in some detail why our current fossil fuel era energy splurge is likely to be a blip in the low energy long term.
Finally, Jem Bendell’s work. In 2018 he wrote a paper that went viral claiming that collapse was inevitable, and in 2023 published a book detailing why he (and a research team) think collapse has actually already started:
Bendell, J. (2023). Breaking Together. Good Works.
His key ideas, the resulting controversies, and the initial Deep Adaptation paper, can be read here. Jem is also going to appear on my What Lies Beyond podcast in May, where we discuss the controversy over free will in nature in the context of collapse.
Bendell argues that the ecological problems we face are culturally generated and not generalised flaws of the human species. He claims that what he calls imperial modernity, which relies on an expansionist monetary system, has locked us into a program that is eating the world.
Finally: I would strongly advise you to do your own thinking and work on this. Don’t take my word for anything. But equally, be mindful of rejecting arguments because they are painful or inconvenient or because they conflict with your values. This is true whether you favour ecomodernism, anti-modernism or some other political ideology. But in addition to looking at data and rational arguments, I would urge you to listen to your own instincts, listen to your body, and to listen to the natural world. Think also about how things like the weather have shifted over the last twenty years.
So what do I think?
So what do I think?
Scenario (1) seems to me to face increasingly severe and possibly insurmountable challenges. I think that the advocates of scenario (1) also need to be more honest about the past failures of this sort of approach. I offer the chart above as evidence. It tracks climate treaties against emissions. As you can see, the signing of various treaties did nothing to slow, let alone halt, the annual increase of emissions. And in 2024, emissions reached a record high. This fact alone casts significant doubt on the ability of techno-managerialism to work, especially with the rise of fossil-fuel binging disaster nationalism.
I say this with a full awareness that countries like China are already using techno-managerial methods to adapt to climate breakdown. I also think that people like Paul Hawken have provided a valuable service by providing maps for a potential transition to something significantly more sustainable than we have now. I applaud such efforts. It’s just that I don’t think they will be enough at this point to offset what’s coming down the line. We already live, as Rupert Read has suggested, in an era of consequences.
So unfortunately at this point the facts, not to mention the ongoing geopolitical situation, seem to me to point more strongly in the direction of ecologically-induced collapse and just possibly even human extinction. And just to make things clear: this is a situation that I’m sorry to have seen arise in my lifetime. It’s something I would have liked to have seen us avoid. It is tragic — a waste of human potential.
I do not say this lightly. Nor did I always hold this view. Nor do I think that ‘we’ should ‘give up’. No, ‘we’ need to do everything ‘we’ can to mitigate this unfolding predicament, reduce suffering, and foster regeneration, as Paul Hawken puts it. (I’ll leave aside the question of who ‘we’ are for a later blog, because it implies that ‘we’ have the agency to effect change in a desirable direction. This begs a lot of questions!)
Why think this? What has happened is that especially since 2016 or so, several factors have for me significantly reduced the plausibility of scenario (1).
These factors include: the acceleration of climate breakdown and advent of regular bouts of increasingly severe weather; increasing doubts about the general plausibility of an energy transition; the abject failures of various treaties to limit emissions and to prevent biodiversity loss; the mass loss of ice from the poles, mountaintops etc and the knowledge that once the last ice is gone, climate breakdown can only accelerate; the arrival and spread of ‘disaster nationalism’ that locks countries into untrammelled fossil fuel use; growing awareness of the serious cultural bias and anthropocentrism of the eco-modern perspective; the knowledge that 1.5°C of heating was breached in 2023 and was exceeded in 2024; personal experience of extreme weather events including an unprecedented 40°C day in the UK; growing awareness that there is a lot of self-censorship and tacit censorship of the severity of our situation in the corridors of power; and finally a growing impatience with narratives that urge us to have ‘hope’ when things are getting worse, faster.
But yes, this shift has been a very reluctant one. I was basically an ‘ecomodernist’, before the term was invented. I had some confidence that, provided sensible political choices were made, we could transition to a high-energy post-carbon society and also avoid mass extinction. For example, around 2010, I found the arguments made by Stewart Brand in his TED talk and book Whole Earth Discipline compelling. Brand argued that (1) cities should be used as population sinks (2) powered by nuclear energy and (3) fed by GM so we could avoid the mass-extinction by (4) what he called ‘mega-gardening’. I’ll freely admit that Brand was selling me a story I wanted to hear, because I wanted humanity to expand into the solar system, and this requires a high-energy civilisation.
Even then, however, I was aware of counter-narratives that I found difficult to dismiss. One was the arguments presented by Jim Lovelock in his books The Revenge of Gaia and the sequel The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. In these books, Lovelock warned that global heating would likely have catastrophic consequences by the end of the 21st century. In the scenario he presented, a few breeding pairs of Homo sapiens might just cling on at the poles of a superheated globe. In the past I’d found Lovelock an insightful if contrary thinker, and so I couldn’t dismiss his fear outright.
To cut a long story short, and to simplify somewhat, ‘ecomodern’ arguments began to lose credibility for me over the 2010s. A lot of this has been a growing awareness of the sheer destructiveness of consumer industrial society. (Well illustrated in David Attenborough’s 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet). Basically, I found myself no longer able to turn a blind eye to such destructiveness, and as a result I no longer found stories of ‘progress’ very plausible. This is the key point: it was the failure of ecomodernism’s central arguments, and not some ‘irrational impulse’ that triggered a painful and difficult shift in my values.
But to sum up; we’re in uncharted territory and for me this renders the narratives of ecomodernism, which imply a certain level of control over the situation, ever less plausible. I get the sense that humanity is not in control of this situation and that nature really does bat last.
I found you searching for Jem Bendell. Thanks for the read.