Is collapse plausible?
Taking civilisational vulnerability seriously
After the Trump victory, ecological philosopher Rupert Read warned that we now have a small and rapidly closing window to prevent “uncontrolled civilisational collapse”.
This claim, in itself, might be a show-stopper for many. Someone might agree that the political situation seems increasingly dire. They might also agree that climate breakdown looks bad. But collapse? Never!
Some of this skepticism is justified. Prophets of doom have existed since the dawn of history, and they’ve often been wrong. In the past the environmental movement, too, has warned of disasters that never materialised: one example was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted imminent overpopulation and famine. So it’s right to be wary of false alarms.
On the other hand, human psychology (and social and cultural pressure) can block serious thought about collapse. This includes normalcy bias, the tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster. Social and cultural denial are also significant.
There’s historical precedent for such denial. The authorities failed to act despite clear signs of a dangerous eruption on Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique in 1902, which resulted in the deaths of 30,000 people. This failure to act was partly on the back of a report by civic leaders that concluded that “the safety of St. Pierre (the capital of Martinique) is completely assured.”
In this post I’m going to (1) discuss some cultural obstacles to collapse consideration and (2) then talk about why it’s important to take civilisational vulnerability seriously. I’ll also invite you to do your own thinking and research on the topic. This is because collapse is too important not to think about at this point. This seems doubly true if you have a family and children, or at the very least care about the human future.
First: what do I mean by collapse? An initial definition:
A collapse is ‘the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc) can no longer be provided [at reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by services under legal provision’. (Servigne & Stevens, 2020, p. 2).
That’s it. No apocalypse. No end of the world. Just a systemic breakdown of consumer industrial life.
This is not to say that more dire possibilities have been ruled out. They haven’t. A 2022 paper explored the possibility of cascading global climate failure. They concluded that there “is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic”. (Kemp et al., 2022). A diagram published with the paper gives a good graphical picture of potential pathways.
But if this is true, why isn’t it more widely known? There seem to me two significant cultural factors that are muddying the waters, and making the possibilities of collapse and catastrophe difficult to see. First, because collapse has become a taboo subject. Second, because climate breakdown has become enmeshed in the so-called ‘culture wars’. We’ll also see that these two factors have lately become entangled.
Taboo and culture war
In 2022, Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL published an article in the Guardian surveying a debate between what he called climate ‘doomers’ and ‘appeasers’. Basically, the ‘appeasers’ saw the ‘doomers’ as unnecessarily alarmist re climate breakdown and the ‘doomers’ saw the ‘appeasers’ as downplaying risk. McGuire suggested that while the more extreme scenarios were unlikely to be realised, that it was necessary to “hope for the best, while preparing for the worst”. (McGuire, 2022). This idea is backed by a paper by Davidson & Kemp (2023) that sees advantage in considering worst-case scenarios.
However:
This dispute has since become entangled in the so-called ‘culture wars’. In February 2024, the climate commentator Simon Clark put out a YouTube video that claimed that the ‘doomer’ movement was a new kind of climate denial. He relied upon a report by the UK Centre for Countering Digital Hate. ( This same organisation, BTW, is currently threatened by Elon Musk).
Clark suggests that, while the old tactic was just to deny climate breakdown, the new tactic is intended to move people to despair by suggesting that potential climate solutions won’t work. The new ‘denialist’ argument is that climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse are happening, but there’s nothing ‘we’ can do about it.
Clark does make a distinction between climate pessimism, which he sees as valuable and climate doomism, which he does not. However, this sort of nuance is easily lost in polarised online conflicts. Often when something gets claimed by one ‘side’ in the culture wars, it tends to get comprehensively rejected by the other just on principle. For example, during covid, opposition to lockdowns came to be seen as a ‘right wing thing’, and was often rejected in ‘liberal’ circles, despite the existence of ‘left wing’ objections to the practice (e.g. Green & Fazi, 2021). Similarly, the association of ‘doomism’ with right-wing factions in the culture wars might become yet another reason for collapse remaining taboo in ‘left wing’, progressive and radical circles.
This reflects a broader problem with online ‘culture wars,’ which is that they tend to dumb conversations down. Advocacy is prioritised over intelligent engagement with difficult problems. Slogans are prioritised over thinking. Nuanced, good-faith, systematic and open investigations become significantly harder. Cooperation becomes impossible. People end up divided, isolated in epistemic bubbles.
This division is perhaps the point. Thom Hartmann and others have argued that an intense negative focus on culture war wedge issues distracts from things like the mega-scale transfer of wealth from hard-working families to the super-rich. The journalist Matt Taibbi has even suggested the such polarisation is profitable. (Taibbi, 2019).
With climate breakdown the situation is slightly different. Here, the goal is to quell dissent and allow business as usual, which in practise means the untrammelled use of fossil fuels. One new strategy, as Simon Clark points out, is to encourage inactivity through despair. Another is to offer bromides that, (1) well, things aren’t as bad as all that and that (2) there are anyway more important things to worry about.
The Centre for Countering digital hate report in fact listed a range of ‘new denial’ tactics. These included widely-distributed claims that the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless; that climate solutions won’t work, and that climate science and the climate movement are unreliable. There are also frequent claims that acting on climate will be too expensive, or economically impractical.
Echo chamber shouts
Good old-fashioned climate skepticism is still out there. A few days ago, a thumbnail popped up in my YouTube sidebar advertising the launch of a new book: Climate Change: The Facts 2025. The book claims to contain work from “highly credentialed contributors” and to provide “a more complete answer and awareness to how natural variation influences the view of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis”. But as usual, things aren’t quite what they seem. Plimer is a well-known climate skeptic, with ties to the mining and energy industry. The Institute of Public Affairs is a private think-tank with funding from major corporations including mining and tobacco.
A different, newer strategy links climate skepticism with right-wing fears of “globalists”, “cultural Marxists” and “woke conspiracies”. This second approach is exemplified by the controversial professor of psychology Jordan Peterson, who also featured in Centre for Countering Digital Hate report. Peterson has been a climate skeptic for a while. In a spring 2024 talk promoting his book in Texas, he linked this skepticism with a wide-ranging “Culture war”. He accused green campaigners of following a “pseudo religion,” and of hypothetical climate scientists of making up their data. Peterson, meanwhile, has a religion of his own: his new book, We Who Wrestle With God, promotes a form of Christianity.
Peterson’s preoccupations reflect a nexus of far-right ideas that helped propel Trump to victory in November. There’s paranoia about “globalists” and a “New world order”. There’s the aggressively “anti-woke” element, coupled with a reassertion of traditional ideas about sex and gender. There’s an advocacy of hierarchies as “natural” and inevitable. This is bolstered by resurgent Christianity (and Neo-Stoicism). There’s also the claim that free (unregulated) markets are the best and only proper form of economics, forever. The latter claim goes hand in hand with attacks on environmentalism and especially any form of environmental regulation.
This ‘nexus’ of ideas has proved very attractive to a rising generation of young, mostly white men. They’ve also been broadcast far and wide. Peterson has also been a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world’s most popular podcasts, with a predominantly male audience. Rogan’s show has become a major hub of the right-wing media ecosystem and the manosphere. This is the same manosphere that is now saluting the Trump victory.
It hardly seems coincidental that the Trump administration will shortly be pushing the strongly anti-environmental, fossil fuel binging agenda outlined in Project 2025. At the very least, there’s a remarkable convergence between Peterson’s accusations of ‘technocrats’ pushing “false data” and the anti-environmental policies outlined in Project 2025.
We should also anticipate an uptick in climate misinformation as Trump and MAGA push to demolish environmental protections. The main aim—as ever—will be to seed doubt, confusion, anger and outrage as environmental protections are demolished. Once more, the goal is distraction. This fog of misinformation will make it harder than ever to make a realistic assessment of where our civilisation now stands in relation to possible collapse. Yet there’s a danger that we will continue to squabble while the ground crumbles beneath us.
Let’s talk about infrastructure
When Jordan Peterson appears on YouTube, making claims like the collapse of values is more important than climate change, he is wearing clean, ironed clothes. He’s sitting in a room that is heated or air-conditioned. The lights are on. The carpets are vacuumed. Wifi works. When he goes to the bathroom, the taps have hot and cold running water. Most of his viewers will also be sitting in comfort, probably in urban or suburban settings. Bills and rents might be high, but basic amenities will be available. In these circumstances, talk of collapse might indeed seem a little unreal, even preposterous.
Still, a vast infrastructure underpins every one of the contemporary amenities we in the Global North tend to take for granted. Transport systems work. Road and railways are more or less maintained. There’s food in the supermarket and lattés in Costa Coffee. When we order something off Amazon, it will very often arrive the next day.
Despite our remarkable technologies, this infrastructure requires the vast and continuous input of human labour to keep functioning. Similarly, if one crucial piece of this infrastructure were to fail, we’d swiftly feel the results. One example: the total dependence of US infrastructure on trucks. This is discussed in Servigne & Stevens (pp. 81—2), from a 2006 report by the American Trucking Association. This report points to multiple vulnerabilities in a supply chain dependent upon trucks.
Just to focus on food and water. If the trucks stopped, significant food shortages would occur in as little as 3 days. This would likely be exacerbated by consumer fear (which we witnessed in the COVID crisis). The study also suggested that supplies of clean drinking water would run dry in two to four weeks. This is because trucks deliver purification chemicals to water supply plants every seven to 14 days. After this, water must be boiled to drink, which will lead to increased gastrointestinal and other illnesses.
So that’s supply chain vulnerability. Now think about threats to the food supply itself. A 2023 paper looked at the possibility of simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions. This paper examined the possibility that concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream might trigger such failures. The authors of the study concluded that “multiple breadbasket failures under climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty in part due to the insufficient representation of the underlying climate impact drivers in models”. (Kornhuber et al., 2023). But this uncertainty is not a good thing, as people like Peterson might like to claim. It is evidence of how underprepared humanity is for such systemic shocks.
Start thinking about infrastructure and suddenly paranoid fears about ‘globalists’ seem rather trivial.
Collapse: do your own thinking
So, collapse. Why should you take it seriously?
I think that there are many reasons to take the possibility seriously, but I’m not going to outline them here. Instead, I’m going to make some source recommendations that should help you with your own research. I’ve tried to stick here with works by researchers working within academic inisitutions who have worked on the topics in a professional capacity. A prime source of reference material is the Collapsology portal, which keeps an up to date list of collapse related publications.
Two book recommendations to get you started:
The first is Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. This is still a good source for an historical perspective. In this book, Diamond surveyed a number of civilisations that collapsed in the human past. His conclusion was that human cilivsations are very vulnerable to political and ecological disruption. In the final chapter he applies the lessons from the past onto the present. A chilling takeaway for me was a Diamond’s claim that in collapse situations the rich tend to buy the privilege to starve last.
Collapse is now somewhat dated: a 2024 paper has refuted one of Diamond’s key examples of historical collapse, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) (Moreno-Mayar et al, 2024). This correction is part of a larger debate over resilience and collapse in prehistoric societies (see Cumming & Peterson, 2017, for a review). Nonetheless, Diamond’s broad discussion of historical collapse remains useful.
The second book is Servigne and Stevens’ How Everything Can Collapse. If you were to pick one book to read, this would be it. Servigne and Stevens spell out the human dilemma of being trapped in the “ever more fragile vehicle” of civilisation. As you read the book, the precarity of many systems and infrastructure on which consumer industrial civilisation depends becomes obvious.
But where do we stand now? For this, I’d read the 2024 state of the climate report (Ripple et al., 2024) and also look at the January 2024 Doomsday Clock report, which was set at 90 seconds to midnight.
I’m willing to bet that the doomsday clock will be moved forward in January 2025, just in time for the presidential inauguration.
References
Cumming, G. S., & Peterson, G. D. (2017). Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 32(9), 695–713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2017.06.014
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking.
Green, T. & Fazi, T. (2021). The Covid consensus: The global assault on democracy and the poor — A critique from the left. Hurst & Company, London.
Joe, & Kemp, L. (2023). Climate catastrophe: The value of envisioning the worst‐case scenarios of climate change. WIREs Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.871
Kemp, L., Xu, C., Depledge, J., Ebi, K. L., Gibbins, G., Kohler, T. A., Rockström, J., Scheffer, M., Schellnhuber, H. J., Steffen, W., & Lenton, T. M. (2022). Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(34). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119
Kornhuber, K., Lesk, C., Schleussner, C. F., Jägermeyr, J., Pfleiderer, P., & Horton, R. M. (2023). Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections. Nature Communications, 14(1), 3528. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38906-7
McGuire, W. (2022 22 August). Whether you’re a climate ‘doomer’ or ‘appeaser’, it’s best to prepare for the worst. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/22/climate-emergency-doomer-appeaser-precautionary-principle
Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Gregg, J. W., Rockström, J., Mann, M. E., Oreskes, N., Lenton, T. M., Rahmstorf, S., Newsome, T. M., Xu, C., Svenning, J.-C., Pereira, C. C., Law, B. E., & Crowther, T. W. (2024). The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087
Servigne, P. & Stevens, R. (2020) How everything can collapse. Polity.
Taibbi, M. (2019). Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. OR Books.
Víctor Moreno-Mayar, Sousa, B., Higham, T., Klemm, S., Moana Gorman Edmunds, Jesper Stenderup, Miren Iraeta-Orbegozo, Laborde, V., Heyer, E., Francisco Torres Hochstetter, Friess, M., Allentoft, M. E., Schroeder, H., Olivier Delaneau, & Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas. (2024). Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature, 633(8029), 389–397. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4