We Can't Get There From Here

The thing about deciding to write a story set in the future is what to make of the present and how it creates a trajectory of plausible events, scenarios, and themes projected into the future. At the moment, dystopian futures seem to be the most likely setting. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given the gap between the promises made to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the results achieved. Every year, representatives of the world's nation-states gather to confirm that something must be done to stop the planet from sliding towards global climate catastrophe, while emissions increase every year.

In what has been hailed as a landmark agreement, 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in December 2015 signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change that aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. To achieve this, GHG emissions must peak by 2025 at the latest and fall by 43% by 2030.

That ain’t gonna happen. We can’t get there from here.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2023 will already be the hottest year on record, with September 2023 being the hottest September ever. The Copernicus Climate Change Service also reports that on two days in November 2023, the global average temperature exceeded two degrees above pre-industrial levels. Finally, ahead of COP 28 in Dubai, the United Nations released a "chilling" report stating that the world is heading for a temperature rise of around 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, even if countries fully implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or action plans to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases.

Obviously, something is amiss. It’s as if the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. Or maybe it does and doesn’t give a shit. For example, the United States is on pace to extract a record 12.9 million barrels of crude by the end of 2023, which is more than double what was produced a decade ago.

Here’s the thing.

We can’t get anywhere near the GHG emission targets as stipulated in the Paris Agreement as long as we remain in the existing global political economy. Following four hundred years of imperial conquest and the war that was supposed to end all wars, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of creating a peaceful global order. It failed to do so. Less than thirty years after its birth, the world was plunged into an even greater bloodbath, the Second World War. Out of the ruins, the United Nations took over the mandate of the League of Nations and sought to become the center where member nations could work together to solve international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian nature. As could be expected, it is failing miserably in the fight against catastrophic climate change.

The problem arises from the fact that the UN is a collection of sovereign nation-states that retain the right to govern themselves without external interference. As a result, the member nations can choose to simply ignore whatever UN resolutions they feel impinge on their right to self-determination, such as the USA’s desire to increase its oil and gas production, regardless of what this means for the likelihood of meeting agreed upon GHG emission targets. The same goes for the other major climate change culprits, China and India.

The crux of the problem is that the sovereign nation-state is a historical anomaly, born on European soil and then transplanted to the rest of the world with disastrous consequences. As an organizing principle, it came into being in a world that no longer exists.

Looking back, it's worth remembering that the rise of the nation-state coincided with the expansion of corporate capitalism and imperial conquest. This was because the return on investment was greatly enhanced by the capture of natural resources, and then emerging markets on foreign soil. In other words, corporations and nation-states co-evolved because they needed each other to expand their reach, economic power, and profits. For example, the rise of the British Empire was made possible by the unscrupulous practices of the East India Company, imitated by the Dutch and the VOC (United East India Company), and perfected by the Americans with their numerous corporate giants ranging from Coca-Cola, General Motors, Exxon Mobil to Microsoft and Apple.

Although in the eyes of the United Nations each member nation remains sovereign, in the realpolitik of the 21st century, the power of big money rules the nation-state. People elect their representatives, but big money calls the shots. In this political economy, the role of government is limited to providing the physical and social infrastructure that allows for commerce, as measured by each nation’s GDP, to grow and to keep the locals happy enough to continue working at their soul-sucking jobs that create incredible wealth for those at the top.

Indeed, when it comes to the power of big money to accumulate capital, nation-states and their governments have become a hindrance. So much so that huge corporations now register themselves in the jurisdictions that have the lowest corporate taxes. Likewise, their shareholders whisk their portions of the earned profits to offshore tax havens located in the "nations"—in reality, former or current colonies, like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands—in order to take advantage of the low or zero-income taxes, strict secrecy laws, and easy access to global financial markets.

In a sense, the legal fiction we call the corporation has evolved to the point where it no longer needs its host, the nation-state, and in the process has dragged its shareholders to live and function on a different playing field from those parties limited to toiling away in the landlocked nation. As a result, big money is free from the physical and social constraints normally experienced by most people.

Therein lies the problem. The global economy was built and continues to grow on the basis of extracting and burning fossil fuels from geographical locations located in spaces governed by nation-states in their various forms: democratic (Norway), pseudo-democratic (Canada, USA, UK, and Australia), family dynasties (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates) and the despotic (Venezuela and Russia). However, the companies that grew and prospered while protected by their national interests, British Petroleum, Shell, and Exxon Mobil, have become cash cows for private investors living in their havens, soon to be armed lifeboats, around the world.

In short, climate change creates catastrophic weather extremes that have the biggest impact on people living in land-locked nations with no means of escape, but limiting the probability of their occurrence means reducing the enormous wealth created by the global fossil fuel economy. Without oil and gas, the global economy will collapse, and with it, the revenue streams that flow to the richest .001% of the earth’s population.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The ultra-rich are not going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Instead, they will organize media events like COP 28, a global conference on fighting climate change, hosted by the oil-exporting United Arab Emirates and presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is currently the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, at which the keynote speaker was King Charles, the hereditary monarch and head of state of the UK, a nation that has recently approved yet another coal mine, expanded oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, and delayed a ban on the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles. WTF? It’s like hosting a Weight Watchers meeting at an all-you-can-eat buffet where the guest speaker is the CEO of McDonald’s.

This does not bode well for the future.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the power of big money has an institutional lock on the way the world's political economy operates. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called end of history, there are no alternatives to the way life is organized on the planet, notwithstanding the continued existence of indigenous communities in the remaining isolated bio-diverse regions where, for one reason or another, corporate invaders are not allowed to exploit the natural resources there.

So, it looks like humanity, or at least most of it, is royally fucked.

As I sit down to start my next novel after Christmas, I can only foresee a future setting in which the current global industrial consumer civilization collapses, leaving behind a few scattered individuals trying to pick up the pieces of what remains, while trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Inevitably, my audience will be dispersed in space and time. Hopefully, my grandchildren will read the novel and say that Grandpa’s heart was in the right place.