Time to co-operate or disintegrate

Climate change is an existential threat to the human race. This may seem an absurd or alarmist statement, since we have been conditioned by unparalleled growth to expect that there are no catastrophes that are insurmountable. Even apocalyptic science fiction deals with bands of survivors who have, by definition, survived. And we always imagine ourselves as among the survivors.

But the threat is real. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that there are only a dozen or so years in which to change our economies radically if we are to keep the effects of the warming already under way to manageable proportions. Hundreds of millions of people may die through droughts on land, and flooding at the coasts, through the loss of marine species due to acidification of the oceans, and probably through the disruption of long-term weather patterns around which the world’s agriculture has been shaped. It is not those direct effects of climate change alone but their indirect effects on the political and economic structures of the world that make it a genuinely existential threat. As individuals in the rich world, we should all eat less meat and use less fossil-fuel energy.

But individual action will never be enough. We must also work to strengthen the kind of political structures that will enable the co-operation that is the only alternative to destructive anarchy.