The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Sketching The Future In A World Of Trumpism & Climate Collapse
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The Democrats could have pursued another climate bill after Congress’s first cap-and-trade effort died in the Senate, but they didn’t. According to Obama White House insiders, then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was so angry about how the process had gone down on the first attempt that he swore off trying again. Emanuel reportedly told congressional leaders that large-scale climate legislation was off the table. It was, in essence, “You tried; you failed; we’re moving on.”
It was an almost laughably ridiculous position, given the stakes of the climate crisis as we know it. Judith Enck, who served as the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 2 administrator during the Obama administration, confirms the drastic gap between the unassailable research on the climate crisis and the failing political consensus on the most urgent existential issue of our time. “We knew a lot,” she said. “The science was definitely robust. But the federal government and the general public didn’t appreciate how serious it was.”
That excuse was pitifully inadequate in the first two years of the Obama administration; ten years on, it’s a recipe for civilizational collapse. Our opening dystopian portrait of the climate-ravaged global order of the next century is only partly a work of speculation. It’s based, in broad outline, on what the climate science community calls the “regional rivalry” scenario. In the suite of now-imaginable climate projections before us, it is known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3 (SSP3). It’s one of five carefully crafted pathways that climate scientists employ to game out what global society, economics, policy, and demographics might look like under longer-term pressures of climate change. Scientific forecasters use these political and economic pathways in climate models to inform their understanding of how greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures will shift amid shifting new geopolitical alliances and confrontations.
SSP3 is the worst possible pathway for the global climate and conflict, according to Bas van Ruijven, the co-chair of the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios, and a key analyst for the SSP narratives. “It is a world that breaks down on many dimensions,” he said. “Countries have their own interests first, with a narrow definition of what their ‘interests’ are.” Van Ruijven is understandably wary about handicapping the likelihood of SSP3—or any speculative future scenario—coming true, but he very much wants global leaders to have them firmly in mind. The whole idea, he said, is to get policymakers to understand that “if you keep going in a certain direction, [this is] where you end up.”
Some signs already strongly suggest we’re about to head down the SSP3 pathway. After all, the American Republican Party is far from the only political force presiding over the toxic fusion of climate denialism and hyper-nationalism: Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Narendra Modi’s India, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary are all countries now led by dismal Trumpian comrades in arms. Parties with right-wing authoritarian tendencies now govern or share power in seven European Union nations; such parties have achieved double-digit results in the most recent elections in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom, in addition to numerous former Eastern bloc countries.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/154953/climate-change-future-global-conflict-nationalism
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