Climate Change is Over. Not in the real world, it is not, but in the public eye and politics. Western industrialised countries face a severe hit by inflation, recession and exploding energy prices. The consequences are not yet fully felt by average people, but they will, latest after this winter. Should the conflict with Russia not change dramatically over the next months, we will see large numbers of people whose moderate wealth will be gone in half a year. They will be barely able to pay their energy bills, food prices are rising and industries are closing. This will likely kick off a feedback loop of unemployment combined with rising prices. Even though most German and Austrian media decide not report week long and large scale farmers-protests in Holland, protests all over Europe and the US will be harder to ignore.
Let's hope that I am wrong about this prediction.
What will be the consequence for »climate change«? In the last decades, climate activism was largely a western elite project that never really took off, even though it got a lot of air time. Nations that actually count: China, Russia, India did barely participate in the conversation, the poor countries in Africa were on occasion bullied into submission to their disadvantage.
In Europe and the US it was fashionable to be »for climate« as long as there were no real costs involved. At least no costs that were easily seen or experienced by those elites. One apocalyptic message followed the next, albeit mostly not backed by science. »Follow The Science« was the slogan from people who neither understood what science actually is and who followed only that part of science they liked.
More importantly activists and many politicians did not understand that there is not one biggest problem — climate — but that we actually face a number of potentially catastrophic problems. Climate change is one of them, but probably not among the top three. Nuclear weapons, pandemics (especially considering the developments in synthetic biology), collapse of infrastructure that supports or modern society (energy, IT, supply chains) would be my top three.
Many still do not understand that »problems« like climate change are not problems you can solve. Even the word problem is a misnomer. They are dilemmas (or polylemmas, to be precise). Any action that mitigates the one tends to create issues in others. They require skilled political navigation not to improve one and create a worse problem on the other side. We were really bad at that in the last years: the energy crisis in Germany (and Europe) is a a consequence of an incompetent attempt to change the energy production in Germany too fast and in the wrong direction. This lead to an energy mix that does not work in a modern society and a geopolitical dependency on Russia on top of that.
Obviously war itself can be a consequence of resource and energy problems. War or conflicts among nations that include the US, China or Russia — as we see now on all fronts — increase the risk of nuclear exchange. And after an nuclear war, climate change will be the least of our problems. And the risk of such an exchange we increased!
A lot of other compounding factors could be mentioned: people should not eat meat in Europe (when the developing world increases their meat consumption steadily) and should buy organic products, which are a wild mixture of reasonable ideas with esoteric nonsense and practices that increase the environmental impact or collapse, if applied globally. On top of that, climate activism got entangled with one sided political aspirations (»against capitalism«). This is activism at its worst: once you are »against climate change« you had to be automatically »against capitalism« (in its crudest form of critique). This is hardly a winning strategy you will find societies stand behind.
Sensible environmentalists warned for a long time from this type of strategy. Climate actions that (1) have no real effect because major nations are not participating but (2) ruin the wealth of participating nations and (3) are driven by obscure political ideologies will backfire. They work as long as they are a useful moral grandstanding tool for educated elites (»educated« in the sense of, having passed our higher-education system) and companies that can put a pledge on their yoghurt. As soon as systems are actually collapsing due to these inept measures, climate change is over. No one wants to hear that they should protect »the climate« when they are jobless and cannot pay for their energy bill, as far as the lower class is involved. For the middle class, the fact that flying to Greece, London or New York, and a number of other recreational activities are off the table, should be sufficient to suffocate their aspirations. Now it would be the real deal, not just virtue signaling.
India, China and many other countries Africa and Asia are learning the lesson by observing Europe and California: the richest, and (at least on paper) most capable nations entirely failed with their energy transition: they got poorer, are on the verge of collapse and did not even show a noteworthy effect (check the carbon intensity of the German energy production of the last five years):
Climate change is over. It was never really on the table in China, India, Russia or Africa, soon it will be off the table in the US and Europe. This is obviously not a good thing.
How should we go forward?
The situation is bad for Europe and the US, but not necessarily globally. We learned how not to do an energy transition. We have to stop listening to the inept branch of environmentalists that dominated the scene over the last decades. I think environmentalism is supposed to tell a story, where human flourishing is not an afterthought at best. We have to talk about resilient societies, urban communities with high living standards (for instance due to fewer cars and better local supply), affordable and reliant energy, which is incidentally also low carbon, especially nuclear. We should discuss diversification of supply chains, thus bringing jobs back to Europe and the US, without becoming xenophobic. Now is also the time to kickstart new industries like vertical farming, lab grown meat (not veganism!), improve our capabilities in genetic engineering to reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment.
This is also the chance for Europe to (1) have a real impact on climate and environment globally while (2) saving its economy. We can show (and sell the tools to) the world how to make tasty lab grown meat, nuclear reactors that scale from container ships to cities, create modern agricultural practices that adapt to changing climate while producing more with a smaller footprint (without the esoteric stuff we see today in many organic practices), build vertical farms, show how liveable cities without reliance on cars could look like, to mention just a few examples.
We have to show the world that we can live well while at the same time reducing out impact on natural systems, not trying to reduce the impact while destroying societies. A very ambitious goal, but one with a chance to succeed, opposed to what we currently do.
Update 22.09.2022
United Kingdom: Mr Rees-Mogg (business secretary of Liz Truss) said: »In light of Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and weaponisation of energy, strengthening our energy security is an absolute priority[…]«
Update 13.12.2022
... and the German electricity production emissions keep getting worse.
In the last month Germany produced electricity with nearly 800g CO2 per kWh. France about 120g. 6,6x more Emissions than France after twenty years of “Energiewende”.
