It says nothing good about several tech billionaires that their response to the risk of a climate change apocalypse is to keep the private jet gassed up to enable a swift escape to the compound in New Zealand or other imagined safe haven while billions die.
Even worse are the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk indulging their adolescent space cadet fantasies. They seem to actually believe that the future of our species lies elsewhere than on earth, though we are physically adapted to no other environment than he one we are destroying.
Musk wants people to strap into his rockets to Mars even though the batteries in his cars have a habit of bursting into flames and a new glitch causes them to suddenly accelerate killing their users. Bezos imagines we will all migrate elsewhere allowing Earth to be repurposed as a kind of national park to be visited. Even crazier are the dreams of people like Ray Kurzweil to outrun death until it is possible achieve immortality by uploading their consciousness to the cloud.
On a less delusional level was a recent lecture I attended at NC State by sir Charles Godfray who leads Oxford University’s Future of Food program. His multidisciplinary team studies the question of whether billions can be fed as the climate changes without making the problem worse.
Much clever analysis suggests he answer is yes, in theory. If everyone on Earth were to eat what WHO recommends as a healthy diet (less sugar, animal fats and salt, more vegetables) greenhouse gas emissions could be cut substantially, millions of lives could be lengthened and trillions of dollars saved.
Since the most polluting crops are animals — especially beef — and staple crops thay release greenhouse gases and pollute or deplete water, we’d be eating a very different diet and farming in a much different way. Carbon would also be sequestered by more cleverly managing range and grasslands.
Unfortunately, such a transition to lamb and grasshoppers rather than Big Macs would be highly unpopular, so would a carbon tax to take into account the climate impact of producing foodstuffs. Beef prices might go up 35%, cooking oils by 25%, milk by 20% and so on.
Godfray also reminded that the climate catastrophe that looms will not impact populations equally. Those living in equatorial regions will find them increasingly uninhabitable. Water resources will dwindle in many places, and megacities will become deadly. In a crisis, tens of millions crammed into urban centers in Africa, Asia nd south America will be at the mercy of fragile commodity shipping infrastructure vulnerable to disruption.
Godfray of course, is a scientist not a politician so could only speak to the perils and notional solutions available, not how to persuade a global constituency to heed the warnings or to enact the needed reforms before it’s too late.
The work of some climate scientists implies Godfray’s analysis of how to feed eleven billion people by 2100 may be flawed in its central assumption. James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, predicted a decade ago that the human population would be closer to 550 million than 11 billion. He has since become only slightly more optimistic.
Studies from a variety of reputable institutions including the UN, the so-called Copenhagen Diagnosis, an Australian university, the National Academy of Sciences confirm that a rise of a few too many degrees could render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable for humans. In the worst case scenarios we might be forced to retreat to the remaining temperate zones in Canada, Russia, Scandinavia and Antarctica. Species extinctions could be expected to skyrocket, seafood would cease to exist, many food crops would no longer be viable, as many as two billion people could become climate refugees, and populations would plummet due to drought, famine, disease and food wars.
All the proposed solutions seem like tinkering around the edges of a problem too big for humans to address or even acknowledge. And none of the big changes in energy source or diet that would be required seem anywhere near attracting majority support. Even if an alarmed planet began to adopt needed reforms, there is another elephant in the room
The source of the planetary threat is too many humans consuming too much energy, food and commodities and thus causing too much irreversible damage to the only habitat we have. In short, population is the disease and decreasing it must be part of the cure. But at least one study shows how difficult it is to slow exponential growth once it gets rolling.
For example, even if a global edict calling for one child per woman could be enacted by 2045 and enforced the population would still be as high in 2010 as in 2013, roughly 8 billion. Even a scenario including a mass mortality event equivalent to all the deaths due to the 1919 flu pandemic, World War I and World War II taking place before 2050 still suggested world population would be back to 8.4 billion by 2100.
The fault is not in our stars but in our multitudinous selves. Like the scorpion that can’t help stinging to death the frog ferrying him across the river, our fatal flaw may be self-destruction due to a lack of foresight. It’s in our nature.