The Latest IPCC Report on Climate Change Is Like a Dystopian Novel: Can We Write a Better Ending?

It’s a bleak Earth Week. 

These days it feels as if we are getting deeper and deeper into a dystopian novel.  If the first chapter was the false hope of the end of the Trump administration, the second was the failure of the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress to seize the historic window to accomplish the kind of transformational change we all know is needed.  

This all leads to chapter three, where the forces of reaction are reinvigorated as the ones who failed to address the key crisis of our time turn to recrimination and blame those who called for the much-needed bold changes for their political failure.  

All the while, in the next few chapters, the crises continue unabated as our leaders effectively surrender on the pandemic and cross their fingers it won’t get worse, the forces of reaction successfully turn up the heat on divisive culture war distractions, economic inequality continues to grow and foster misdirected rage, a nightmarish war erupts in Ukraine promising a new era of conflict as global fears of nuclear annihilation are chillingly refreshed, and the slow moving disaster of catastrophic climate change chugs forward toward the point of no return.  

What is most disturbing about all this is that it’s not just a figment of my apocalyptic imagination.  

As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report notes, our time is rapidly disappearing to address the biggest crisis of them all, and our leaders and vested interests are driving us off a cliff.  According to the Guardian: 

• The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, said some governments and businesses were “lying” in claiming to be on track for 1.5C. In a strongly worded rebuke, he warned: “Some government and business leaders are saying one thing – but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic.”

• Soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine have prompted governments to rethink their energy policies. Many countries – including the US, the UK and the EU – are considering ramping up fossil fuels as part of their response, but the IPCC report made clear that increasing fossil fuels would put the 1.5C target beyond reach.

• Guterres said: “Inflation is rising, and the war in Ukraine is causing food and energy prices to skyrocket. But increasing fossil fuel production will only make matters worse.”

Simply put, precisely at the time when we need to abandon what the report calls “incrementalism” and start a “now or never” dash toward “a massive effort by government and business” to engage in a bold and transformative effort to get off fossil fuels, we are blithely speeding in the other direction.  

As a Washington Post article on the report observes:

• “The science has been ever more consistent and ever more clear,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview.

• What’s needed now is “political courage,” she added. “That is what it will take — the ability to look beyond current interests.”

If we don’t, the same Post article reminds us that the consequences will include: 

• Collapsing ice sheets [that] would raise sea levels at rates not seen in human history. Coral reefs could vanish, along with a growing number of animal species. Intensified disasters would wreak deadly chaos, especially in the poorest and most vulnerable communities. Parts of the Earth that currently slow the pace of warming — such as oceans that absorb excess heat — would become less able to help.

Nonetheless, the top 10% of the world’s population who are responsible for over 40% of greenhouse gas emissions seem perfectly willing to sacrifice the poorest 50% who will continue to suffer the most while only being responsible for 15% of the problem.  

So it goes.  

Here we are, about halfway through the novel, knowing that there is still sufficient time to act and transform our economy to a low carbon one, but what the report calls “incumbent fossil fuel interests” are obstructing action and pushing for a suicidal doubling down on more oil extraction using Ukraine as an excuse for their deadly profiteering.  We have the means to change but lack the political courage to do what needs to be done.  

We scroll through a local publication like the Voice of San Diego that publishes a good piece after the IPCC report before this latest one on how to deal with “climate despair” and then read in the same publication a few weeks later that only 1% of our fellow San Diegans put climate change at the top of their list of concerns.  

It’s tough reading and the urge is to put the novel down and distract oneself.  We’ve heard it all before, over and over, but, as Nicolas Goldberg puts it in his excellent Los Angeles Times column on the “end of the world”:

• That’s why such reports can seem counterproductive: People grow inured. They compartmentalize. They get depressed, vow not to bring children into the world. 

• Or they flip to the sports pages, tell themselves other news is more urgent: six people shot to death in Sacramento; Ukrainians massacred as Russian soldiers pulled out of Bucha; the Grammy highlights.

• But let’s not kid ourselves. We can click past the IPCC report, but the facts remain. Serious trouble is coming and we’re not doing nearly enough to stop it.

The question is, will we put the novel down and surrender? Or will we realize that we aren’t reading about someone else’s future but our own and try, despite the odds, to write a better ending?  

As energy policy expert Catherine Mitchell says in the Guardian, “Unless we have social justice, there are not going to be more accelerated greenhouse gas reductions.  These issues are tied together.”  That’s why all people of good will need to tie their activism and political work to climate in a way that can help us turn the tide before it’s too late.  

Everything is at stake.