We Have Just One Decade Left To Fix the Future

Humanity’s Path Divides Into Irreversible Collapse and Ongoing Progress, Right Now

Umair Haque

We have, by my reckoning, about a decade. Until what? For what? To right humanity’s ship, my friends. Do you think we are anywhere near ready forthat task? Are we even undertaking it — let alone aware of it as the challenge of this century, this generation, this age?

It’s every bit as significant as a great world war. As a supervolcano. It’s even more dire than Covid. Its irreversibility, lethality, things that we can’t later change getting locked in, baked in, hardwired. Humanity’s three great existential threats are going to reach a point of irreversible lethality in a decade. A point where it’s game over — the future’s locked in, and it’s a horrific one. One decade. Maybe two, if we’re really generous.

Let’s start those three threats with climate change. Are you sick of hearing about it? Do you turn off your brain the moment someone like me mentions it? It’s OK — I do too, more than I should. But we need to talk about the state of the world, my friends, and we must begin there.

Recent estimates say we have about ten years left to limit global warming to “reasonable” limits, about an average of 1.5 degrees or so. More than that, and the effects start to become catastrophic — though even that level of warming is severe and ruinous. A decade.

We have just a decade left to prevent catastrophic climate change. One. Decade. Let me put that in perspective. That’s two presidential elections. That’s maybe two prime ministers. That’s two Olympics. It’s the blink of an eye.

What are we doing about it? So far, we are accomplishing precisely nothing. We might be pretending to be working on the problem, if we’re in the field, or it we support green politics like Green New Deals and whatnot — but the truth is that we are actually achieving precisely nothing so far. We’re just happily going on melting down our home. Global emissions continue to climb, and there isn’t a single carbon neutral country on planet earth yet. The first one? The EU hopes to be that — by 2050. It leads the world by a very long way. It’s a noble aspiration, but there’s just one tiny problem — we reach the point of irreversible climate catastrophe twenty years before that.

As a world, we are epically failing the challenge of climate change. We are failing it like an idiot fails his life’s biggest exam. We are failing our most obvious existential threat incredibly and massively, in a way that’s shocking, alarming, and literally a little crazy.

Do you really think that just ten years from now there will be any further progress than there is now? That there will be a single carbon neutral country in the world? How could there be? The problem, which I’ll come to, is that our paradigms and systems are stuck in the past. We can’t develop carbon neutral economies and societies not because of technology — but because our paradigms and systems literally give us no reason whatsoever to. They are built on colonial mentalities of pillage, rape, plunder, and domination. We treat the planet, in short, like a slave.

Hence, our economies and societies don’t count the planet, skies, rivers, and forests as inherently valuable to begin with — just things to be consumed and destroyed in the process of enriching their masters. So who’s going to stop capitalists and hedge funds and mega corporations from burning, boiling, draining, and depleting them? Who’s going to write the laws that give rivers the same rights as people? Who’s going to put them in their constitutions?

Exactly no one, so far as I can see. And yet a thing that has no inherent value is exactly like a slave: something that can be used and abused until its dying day. But we have made the planet our slave, and we are committing a kind of genocide upon it.

That’s not a metaphor. My second challenge is mass extinction. We are killing off somewhere between 50 to 80% of…all life on the planet. Think about that for a second. All life on the planet. Which is the only life we know anywhere at all. We’re simply killing it off. What’s wrong with us?

Yet the pattern of this genocide upon life itself is also a self-destructive one. We’re chopping away the roots of the ecosystems we ourselves depend on. The insects and fish and little birds and plants and trees are dying off first. When they go, a sudden collapse is likely to follow, as the whole chain implodes in on itself.

What are we doing about it? The truth is that we’re doing even less than we are about climate change. Nobody, really, considers mass extinction a problem yet — institutionally, meaning no political party, no government, no organization, no corporation. Literally nobody in the world cares yet, except you, me, and a handful of conservationists.

But how long do we have until our ecosystems begin to collapse? The truth is that nobody knows when — but we do know that it will happen suddenly, swiftly, and without much warning, just like ecological collapses tend to.

Let’s say that we have a decade left to stop, reverse, mitigate all that, too. Do you think we have a chance — a snowball’s chance in hell — of building global systems to protect life on planet earth? How would we begin? Who would write international laws to protect rivers and trees and little birds? Who would enforce them? Who will stop a global economy that thinks killing off all life on the planet is perfectly, as long as a few billionaires turn into trillionaires? The truth, so far as I can see, is that nobody really has the power, will, or insight to stop the collapse of life on the planet — let alone even think about it, or see it. Not yet, anyways.

Remember how we treat the planet like a slave, because our systems are essentially old supremacist ones in slightly more polite disguise? We treat all life on the planet as our slave, too. And I’m hardly some angry anti-fur protestor — I’m pointing out a cold analytical truth. We treat life itself as our slave — and so it’s no surprise whatsoever we’re killing it off, having abused and violated it, just like we did with slaves. But the problem is that we depend crucially on life on planet earth, for our own lives. It is not our slave. It is our mother and father and bread and soil and air and water. We are only its friends, its servants, its guardians — not its slavemasters, which is exactly what we still fatally wrongly and foolishly imagine ourselves to be.

So our second problem is even bigger and more tragic than our first — but we are even further away from dealing with it. So far away, in fact, that it has yet to sink into our consciousness at all. And yet we have just a few years left to begin solving it. Do you think we’re likely to get anywhere — in ten years?

That brings me to my third problem. What are we likely to spend the next ten years doing? Let’s take a hard look at America and Britain. Instead of dealing with any of their real problems — stagnation, inequality, institutional rot, corruption, malinvestment, greed, selfishness — what have they spent the last several years doing? Trying desperately to prevent the self-inflicted catastrophes of fascism and nationalism.

Instead of dealing with a single one of its problems, Britain’s spent half a decade in the quagmire of Brexit. Hence, life today is worse in every respect than it was just a half decade ago. Instead of dealing with a single one of its problems, America’s spent few months pretending everything is back to normal, even while Trumpism has a resurgence and the GOP is eroding democracy by the day. Hence, American life has simply fallen apart — many Americans, probably the majority in many regards, live like people in poor countries now.

Do you see the theme I’m trying to point out? Let me make it clearer.

We’re likely to spend the next ten years dealing with fascism, nationalism, extremism. All forms of self-inflicted political ruin. From kleptocracy to theocracy to oligarchy to authoritarianism. Why? Because the global economy’s stagnating — a new class of global super rich have emerged, who’ve essentially hoarded the gains from growth, which means that middle classes are either outright imploding, as in America or Britain, or struggling, like in Europe and much of Asia. In simpler terms — capitalism made capitalists rich, but everyone else is left to live at the edge of perpetual ruin. And yet here we are, failing to question capitalism, too — even while the capitalists literally become trillionaires, while the average prole in a rich country now grows a little poorer and more desperate and afraid every single year. How foolish is that?

People who live lives of ruinous fear, anxiety, and despair turn on their neighbours, friends, brothers, mothers. They turn to strongmen, to authoritarians, for safety, for worth, for validation, to feel respected and powerful again — by demonizing and dehumanizing the weakest and most powerless in a society, simply taking from them what is missing in their own stagnating lives. These problems are exacerbated in societies which, like America and Britain, are based on people feeling superior, supreme, above all the rest. Hence, the extreme idiot’s nationalism of Brexit and the fascism of Trumpism took root there first. But they are hardly the only ones — the extremist wave has spread across the globe, from Sweden to Germany to India. Nobody is safe, because economics determines the destiny of nations — when middle class struggle, implode, and fall apart, the inescapable result is the chain reaction of nationalism, extremism, and fascism. That was the great lesson of World War II — and we haven’t learned it yet.

My bet is that we are going to spend the next decade just trying to keep the fascists at bay. And if we can do that, we will count it as a victory. In a way, I suppose, it is. But the truth is more difficult.

This decade is a crucial turning point for humanity. It is the point at which our existential threats will all become irreversible. The point at which climate change becomes catastrophic. At which mass extinction will begin collapsing all the systems we depend on, from food to water to air to oil to soil. At which a stagnant global economy will harden into something like a feudal caste system — a new class of trillionaires essentially the kings and lords of a new world of peasants and serfs.

The decade is a turning point — the choice between irreversible forms collapse, and ongoing progress, between a new dark age and the continuing upwards trajectory of humankind — but so far, mostly, when we’re not in deep, profound denial, we couldn’t care less, because there’s Facebook and Instagram and Netflix to comfort-binge on. Our leaders certainly couldn’t care less. They are utterly incompetent. Mostly, as societies, we couldn’t care less. Who does that leave, exactly?

We have just one decade left. Just one decade in my estimation, to begin undoing those three existential threats. They aren’t existential threats in the cartoon sense — “the end of humanity!”. They’re existential threats in a real one, a genuinely dangerous one. They will take a world of peace and progress with them. They will reduce human civilization to charred ashes. They will lead to a new Dark Age.

There will be countries who survive and even prosper, sure. But they will be archipelagos of light in a sea of darkness. Every one will be a social democracy. They will be places, probably, like Sweden and Canada — which can distribute their gains better, and therefore invest more of their surplus in things of real worth, and therefore, can keep growing their surplus, their real wealth.

But the rest of the world is not going to survive the three existential threats of the 21st century. Yes, I mean that. My three threats are going to shatter countries apart like twigs. Do you think I’m joking? Please take a look at the “United Kingdom” — it’s not going to be one after Brexit, just England against its first three colonies. Think about what happens when Miami and Manhattan begin to drown — how “united” do you think the “states” will be, when they curse people in red states for their folly and ignorance?

The three existential threats of the 21st century — climate change, mass extinction, and capitalism, which drives them — are going to rip the world apart. They are going to fracture countries into different regions — ones which choose progress, and ones which cling to regress. As they do that, people will flee, just as they have in, for example, Syria. But where will there be to go? The world will be even more nationalist, thanks to stagnant capitalism.

The result will be a world of broken societies, refugees, waves of migration. It will be a world of shortages, of rationing, and of all the things that come with them — crime, profiteering, smuggling. It will be one where violence is increasingly considered a perfectly reasonable solution to all the problems above. It will be one where people’s thoughts, movements, and actions are carefully monitored and controlled, for the sake of eking out dwindling profits from dying systems. It will be a time when all the ignorance and folly of human history resurfaces, from war to genocide to concentration camps — just as in a collapsing America.

We have just a decade to prevent that blighted, ruined world from becoming the only one. From that path becoming the only path. From that trajectory getting locked into our futures.

Just. One. Decade. So far, my friends, we are doing nothing whatsoever to prevent all the above. We might think we are, we might imagine we are, but we are just flattering ourselves. We are just preening, for the sake of comfortably inflated egos. We are trying, sure, some of us — but we are not accomplishing anything, so far, and not nearly enough to change anything. The truth is that the world is losing the future by the day now. And not enough of us care or are even aware to really change the future from going dark. Not yet.

So let us start there. Just there. By recognizing how crucial this decade is for humanity. And treating it that way. Not wasting our time sharing celebrity selfies to escape the end of the world which our very folly brings about, through its negligence, selfishness, and shattering ignorance. Denial, negligence, and abandonment, after all, are choices, too.

Umair
August 2021