The New Reality of Climate Politics

By Jim Miller

Now that the dust has finally settled after the midterms, we know that rather than a red wave delivering a hard right Congress, our fate is divided government and gridlock.  

This reality also means that barring a very unlikely extraordinary executive action by President Biden, like declaring a climate emergency, little else will happen on the environment outside of the good but not sufficient impacts of the infrastructure package and the Inflation Reduction Act, both of which help move the needle in the right direction if not nearly far enough.  

Where does this leave us on the climate politics front?  Are we heading for doomsday, or have we done enough to give ourselves a fighting chance to have a sustainable future?  In the midst of the run up to the midterms, one of the best journalists covering climate, David Wallace-Wells, whose seminal work is summarized in his stunning book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, penned a long essay in the New York Times, “Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality is Coming into View” that should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about climate politics and the future of humanity.  

In this piece, Wallace-Wells delivers some measured good news for those on the verge of despair.  Most folks studying possible climate futures have concluded that the “business as usual” projections of apocalyptic warming now seem unlikely due to a number of factors such as the decline of coal and the rapidly reduced costs of renewables.  This means the worst of the worst is unlikely, even though we have surely blown our chance to meet the targets set in Paris for 1.5 degrees of warming.   

Hence, “The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.”  That “well past normal” is more likely in the range of two degrees of warming rather than up to five, which almost all experts saw as a guarantee of a dystopian future of suffering and extinction.  

In Wallace-Wells’s view, this step back from the likelihood of the total nightmare future should reshape the discussion around climate politics: 

• Acknowledging that truly apocalyptic warming now looks considerably less likely than it did just a few years ago pulls the future out of the realm of myth and returns it to the plane of history: contested, combative, combining suffering and flourishing — though not in equal measure for every group . . .

• A lot, then, depends on perspective: The climate future looks darker than today but brighter than many expected not that long ago. The world is moving faster to decarbonize than it once seemed responsible to imagine, and yet not nearly fast enough to avert real turbulence. Even the straightest path to two degrees looks tumultuous, with disruptions from the natural world sufficient to call into question many of the social and political continuities that have been taken for granted for generations.

The new climate reality of a world with two degrees of warming that Wallace-Wells outlines will include constant upheaval, disruption, and intense suffering for millions of people, but that chaos and suffering will not be equally distributed.  Those in the industrialized north who benefited most from the technologies that changed the climate will be spared the worst outcomes, while inhabitants of the global south will not.  

This will lead, in Wallace-Wells’s estimation, to, “Normalization of larger and more costly disasters, and perhaps an exhaustion of empathy in the face of devastation in the global south, leading to the kind of sociopathic distance that enables parlor-game conversations like this one.”

One of the leading characteristics of the warming world of the near future will be displacement on a massive scale, both “internal displacement and cross border displacement.”  This movement of tens to hundreds of millions of people, Wallace-Wells notes, could result in various political scenarios such as a far right future dominated by “domestic” and “border policing,” militarization, and permanent global hostility played out on a north-south axis.  In short, a kind of global apartheid, that operates like the colonialism of old.  

Another possible near future that Wallace-Wells outlines involves the development of more “resilience and sustainability, along with innovation in energy and politics, agriculture, and culture” that produces much less displacement and a more humane outlook of adaptation to constant challenges.  We would still endure unimaginable loss of species and natural wonders, but not descend into neo-Fascism in the process.  

Reading Wallace-Wells’s extensively researched work, it is easy to forget the lead about the “good news” that we are unlikely to be heading towards doomsday.  It is sobering to hear that most of the experts studying likely climate futures have given up on the idea that we will actually keep warming down to levels that would prevent the kind of mass human suffering and devastation of the natural world that this middle ground scenario outlines.  

For many of us, the good news here is still a nightmare and cause for profound anticipatory grief.  That said, once one swallows the bitter pill that is our new reality, it is also a call to action to prevent the kind of dystopian global division of humanity into warring camps of climate change winners and losers based on wealth, geography, and luck of birth.  

This makes the task of defeating the American right with its climate denialism, ethno-nationalist leanings, and disdain for global cooperation a matter of life and death.  It’s time to start reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s dark yet simultaneously utopian science fiction as a guidebook for the future.