GAD, MAD, Evolutionary Traps and Other Evils of the Anthropocene Urging for Degrowth, Gradual Abandonment of Fossil Fuels and Limitation of our Ecological Footprint

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate writers, Mr. Alexandros K. Liakopoulos. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

In less than a week the COP28 meeting starts its workings in Saudi Arabia, bringing together the global political and scientific leadership in its effort to mitigate the Climate Emergency in which we have found ourselves after 50 years of global inaction. The UN Emissions Gap Report 2023, titling “Broken Record”, states that “[the] world fails to cut emissions (again) [and] finds that the world is heading for a temperature rise far above the Paris Agreement goals unless countries deliver more than they have promised.” At odds with this report comes the IPCC’s Report of the UN, titling “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report”, which finds that “The report outlines that the 1.5°C limit is still achievable and outlines the critical action required across sectors and by everyone at all levels.” Obviously, something is not working quite fine with the IPCC’s models, while the month September has been the hottest month on record, hitting – and heating – an extraordinary 1,8 C above pre-industrial levels, while the 17th of November has also been the hottest day ever recorded in the last 125.000 years according to Copernicus – or in the last 3.000.000 years according to NASA – hitting 2.06 C above pre-industrial levels. 

Other reports that have seen the light of publication while we head for the Global Stocktake Summit paint an even grimmer picture: the “State of Climate Action 2023” of the Systems Change Lab which brings together 8 different independent research institutions finds that we fail in 41 out of 42 parameters connected to CO2 emissions that they monitor each year. Their findings include the result/fact that we lose the equivalent of 15 football stadiums of forest per minute globally. To make things even worse, the report of the Post Carbon Institute’s title goes as follows: “Welcome to the Great Unravelling – Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown” and finds that we have already exceeded 6 out of 11 planetary boundaries, we are at the verge of exceeding another 2, we do medium well in 2 and absolutely well only when it comes to atmosphere aerosol loading. However, this last is not that a nice thing that someone would imagine, Professor James E. Hansen, the so-called “father of Climate science” explains, as it reduces the formation of clouds that would reflect the incoming sunlight, leading to a massive uptick of the energy insertion to our atmosphere, which creates an Energy Imbalance. This Energy Imbalance – of an order of magnitude of on Watt per square meter, which is a huge number – further increases the heat of the planet, leading our planet to a future of an exponentially growing heating: it’s like we are into electro-waves already. 

Dr. James Hansen et. al. have recently co-authored a paper arguing that “Global Warming [is] in the Pipeline”, where the scientists argue that “global warming will likely pierce the 1.5°C ceiling in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050. Impacts on people and nature will accelerate as global warming pumps up hydrologic extremes. The enormity of consequences demands a return to Holocene-level global temperature. Required actions include: 1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions, 2) EastWest cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs, and 3) intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance to phase down today’s massive human-made “geo-transformation” of Earth’s climate.” In a follow-up paper of his titling “How We Know that Global Warming is Accelerating and that the Goal of the Paris Agreement is Dead”, to make his point even more clear, he states: “The proximate cause of ongoing global warming is Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI). Earth is now absorbing more energy incoming from the Sun than the planet is sending back to space as reflected solar light and emitted thermal (heat) radiation. As long as that imbalance is positive – more energy coming in than going out – Earth will continue to get hotter. Factors that alter Earth’s energy balance are called climate forcings. There are two large human-made climate forcings: changes of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and changes of aerosols. GHGs reduce heat radiation to space; thus, an increase of GHGs causes a positive energy imbalance, more energy coming in than going out, which causes warming. Aerosols reflect sunlight to space, which is a negative contribution to EEI that causes cooling.” Due to all the above, the global warming is in the pipeline and we are heading for an accelerated heating: we ‘ll boil, the doctor essentially says. 

To all the above parameters, one has to add our ecological overshoot. The ecological overshoot is calculated by the reduction of our ecological footprint as a species from the ecological capacity of the biosphere to sustain us, without counting any other species that is. Let’s say that it is only us, humans that are going to survive this century. What are the natural resources we need in order to feed ourselves and have enough water in order not die of thirst on the one hand, and what is the needed land that Gaia should use to recycle our wastes in order to sustain us in life? This is the question. According to the most accurate estimates of Dr. Bill Rees, specialist of the Ecological Footprint, the 2022 Ecological Footprint based on world population is 20.6 billion hectares, while Global Biocapacity based on remaining irrigated and arable land is 12.0 billion hectares. This means that Ecological Overshoot is 72%. Economic growth today is “financed,” in part, by the liquidation of nature — natural resources and ecosystems — and the destruction of global life-support systems. This is a living proof neoliberalism is a failed economic paradigm, which is philosophically a no-brainer argument: one cannot have infinite development in a finite planet, as neoliberal economic theory stipulates (see Samers, Simon, etc.).

Should we not change the course we are heading, it will lead to Global Assured Destruction, aka GAD. As Ecological Footprints are exclusive environments and it is quite foreseeable that we humans will fight for the last arrable land to the end of days, it is also foreseeable that GAD will directly lead to MAD, mutually assured destruction through nuclear wars, kinetic wars, cyberwars, AI wars, or all of them together. What should not be expected is that the Last Men Standing will fall without some fights between them. History is quite indicative of how Homo Sapiens behave under extreme stress. And its ecosystem falling is expected to deliver him the most extreme stress ever, a shock no generation has ever faced in the past. In such circumstances we could opt for collaboration and engineering of the necessary solutions to save the more lives we can, as a population “bust” is also foreseeable after the long run of the “boom” we have been living during the last two centuries due to the fossil fuels energy, which created the imbalance between the positive and negative population feedback checks globally on the one hand, leading to population overshoot, and the overexploitation and degradation of nature as a result on the other. Now comes the time for us to pay the bill: the “bust” part of the cycle. 

Further, the environment and nukes are not the only problems we are facing. In a recent paper published at the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B under the title “Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability”, the authors identify “14 [evolutionary] traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps. An assessment reveals that 12 traps (86%) could be in an advanced phase of trapping with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being. Ten traps (71%) currently see growing trends in their indicators. Revealing the systemic nature of the polycrisis, we assess that Anthropocene traps often interact reinforcingly (45% of pairwise interactions), and rarely in a dampening fashion (3%). We end by discussing capacities that will be important for navigating these systemic challenges in pursuit of global sustainability.”

As it becomes apparent from all the above, we have entered an Era of Metacrisis, or Polycrisis, where what is politically possible will more and more be ecologically inadequate to produce any kind of meaningful result, if not lead directly to chaos and collapse, while what is urgently needed will seem like politically impossible. Strong leadership is more needed than ever, along with urgent decisions. The decisions have to comprise the following:

1. Adoption of a degrowth paradigm and mentality. We need to “decapitalize our minds”, as Erin Remblance has brilliantly written: this is the key to addressing Climate Change. And the first who have to do it is world leaders. If not them, who? If not now, when? Fortunately, a new consensus have started to be forming towards this agenda, as it is the only sane choice remaining on the table, based not just on resilience, but on anti-fragility.

2. Gradual transformation of our energy resources in the same time we make the Oil Barrons and Super Polluters pay for their share on our dark current predicament. A recent Oxfam study found that the richest 1% is responsible for 16% of global emissions, which equals the global emissions of the poorest 66% of the global population. So, taxing the super-rich heavily makes good sense. Then, these money should be used to assure global social justice and the gradual green transition, in parallel with other geo-engineering initiatives aiming to reduce the Energy Imbalance. Unavoidably, these initiatives have inherent risks, so we need to be careful; nevertheless, at the point we stand inaction is much worse than careful experimental action with heavy oversight of an international body under the auspices of the best minds the global community has. 

3. Making war an impossibility: should war remain a possibility for states to solve their differences, all other solutions will fail, for sooner or later one desperate leader will opt for the worse, triggering all others’ response and leading the world to MADness before GADness even becomes a reality.

As leaders head for their meeting in UAE only some days after camels died there due to hail blizzards (!), let them have in mind that the world is watching them, while the world scientific community already knows what it expects in very large numbers: degrowth, reason, logic and cutting-throat decisions. Shortcuts and saving face just won’t do anymore.