Yesterday, world leaders descended on Glasgow for COP26 to discuss our impending doom.
Over the next two weeks, most of us won’t be in the room. We’ll watch on as our leaders play games of 4D geopolitical chess with our collective futures.
I’m sure I won’t be bursting anyone’s bubble to say that the conference is bound to be a disappointment. Even the nation’s cheerleader of a Prime Minister has been playing down expectations, while the Chancellor’s decision to cut tax on domestic flights is yet another example of governments failing to take the necessary action (don’t get me started on Modi).
COP26 will come and go, and the eco-anxiety afflicting my generation will remain.
We’re young, the future should seem a long way off. Instead, we’re pommelled by memory trips of a future trauma at every turn.
Gen Z’s eco-anxiety is rooted in a rational fear of the future. The tone of reports from the world’s foremost climate scientists has become apocalyptic. From the IPCC’s “code red for humanity” to the UK Environment Agency’s “adapt or die”, experts have come to resemble a backseat passenger screaming and shaking the unconscious driver of a car about to plunge off a cliff.
While today’s pensioners grapple with falling annuities, the challenges facing my generation in retirement will be existential.
Brace yourself, we’re going in a time machine to a world in the not too distant future, entirely of our own creation…
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He said, “I’ve been to the year 2070, Not much has changed but they lived underwater”.
Predicting the future is a difficult game. It’s one thing to know what will happen, but quite another to know what people’s priorities will be. Bill Gates received great credit for his 2015 TED Talk warning of the devastating impact of a flu like virus, yet is also widely believed to have said, “640K ought to be enough for anybody”, referring to computing RAM, just 41 years ago.
Some things, however, feel like a sure-fire bet. Humanity will continue to pump greenhouses gasses into the atmosphere for the foreseeable future (along with committing a raft of other climate sins), and as such, we will suffer.
A short article isn’t enough to describe ‘The Toxic Event’ in any detail, it’s best left to the IPCC’s most recent report, but it can be reasonably summarised with David Wallace-Wells’ chapter titles in his apocalyptic The Uninhabitable Earth as: heat, hunger, drowning, wildfire, disasters longer than natural, freshwater drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, plagues of warming, economic collapse and climate conflict.
This ‘new normal’ will shape nearly all aspects of life. For business, an ideology of ambitious green pledges becoming hygiene factors – with net zero taken as a given – will already be decades old. By 2070, the challenges humanity faces will be so obviously existential that businesses will have to be seen to innovate towards meaningful solutions. This will be their purpose, not just part of a mission economy, but a mission humanity.
There will also be a range of social challenges unrelated to the climate crisis, though no doubt extenuated by it. Some will depend on where you live. In Europe, low and falling fertility rates will lead to an increasingly aging population which could make the maintenance of basic state functions unviable. Conversely, Africa’s booming population will catapult its economies towards the top of the GDP rankings. However, the regional inequity of the impact of climate change may mean they are ill-equipped to provide for these colossal populations. It is not farfetched to imagine a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, where the victims of the climate catastrophe flee towards the perpetrators, who are no longer capable of caring for themselves, let alone tens of millions of others.
If this isn’t dystopian enough, we could also be contending with Artificial General Intelligence. Read Max Tegmark if you want to think we could align AI with our goals, and in doing so achieve a quality of life previously unimaginable. Read Nick Bostrom if you think the road to technological singularity is likely a forgone conclusion. The implications of this would be, by definition, unimaginable – but almost certainly bad. Perhaps Stanley Kubrick didn’t have it right, maybe Hal 9000 will have the last laugh. Then we’ll really be busted.
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