Capitalism is terminally unsustainable and guarantees global extinction from climate change – its try or die to develop a new socioeconomic system

Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director emeritus and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, believes if we go much above 2°C we will quickly get to 4°C anyway because of the tipping points and feedbacks, which would spell the end of human civilisation.

“There is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation”: Professor Schellnhuber

Johan Rockström, the head of one of Europe’s leading research institutes, warned in 2019 that in a 4°C-warmer world it would be “difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that … There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world”.

Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, said that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.”

Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we could stay below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5°C was no longer achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society.

If we don’t bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then keeping temperatures under 2°C becomes unavoidable. The “carbon law” published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold warming below 2°C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.

Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to humanity – climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the growing inequalities between and among countries – were “just different facets of the same fundamental problem”.

This problem was the “neoliberal economic system” that spread across the world through globalisation, underpinning “high production high consumption lifestyles” and a “religion built not around eternal life but around eternal growth”.

“It is becoming abundantly clear that (i) this system is incompatible with a well-functioning Earth System at the planetary level; (ii) this system is eroding human- and societal-well being, even in the wealthiest countries, and (iii) collapse is the most likely outcome of the present trajectory of the current system, as prophetically modelled in 1972 in the Limits to Growth work,” Steffen told Voice of Action.

Eternal growth is not possible

The Limits to Growth model released by the Club of Rome in 1972 looked at the interplay between food production, industry, population, non-renewable resources and pollution.

The basic findings were that you can’t grow the system indefinitely as you will cause environmental and resource issues that will ultimately cause the whole global system to collapse (ABC’s This Day Tonight program covered it here). At the time of the model’s release it accurately reproduced the historical data from 1900 to 1970.

A 2008 study by Graham Turner, then a senior CSIRO research scientist, used three decades of real-world historical data to conclude that the Limits to Growth model’s predictions were coming to pass: “30 years of historical data compare favourably with key features of a business-as-usual [BAU] scenario called the ‘standard run’ scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century.”

Former CSIRO scientist Graham Turner has been warning about collapse for decades

Turner ran updated figures through the model again in 2012 for another peer-reviewed paper, and again in 2014 when he had joined the University of Melbourne’s Sustainable Society Institute.

“Data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario,” Turner concluded in the 2014 paper.

“It is notable that there does not appear to be other economy-environment models that have demonstrated such comprehensive and long-term data agreement.”

Turner semi-retired in 2015 but runs a small organic market garden on a rural property in the NSW south coast’s Bega Valley.

He and his wife grow most of their own food and live off grid powered by a solar energy system. Turner said this saved him during last summer’s catastrophic bushfires as his power stayed online but most people in the area lost power for weeks.

Turner has continued tracking the data as best as possible since his last official report in 2014, and last year he helped a Harvard masters student update the data for their thesis.

Turner told Voice of Action that under his modelling the business as usual scenario “ends up resulting in a global collapse from about now through the next decade or so”.

It was difficult to predict a timeline but Turner said he believed “there’s an extremely strong case that we may be in the early stages of a collapse right at the moment”.

“Vested interests and corrupt politicians combined with a population happy to deny problems overwhelm those that are trying to promulgate truth and facts,” said Turner.

Fossil fuel emissions continue to rise

‘By 2030 we’ll know what path we’ve taken’

Steffen told Voice of Action that it’s “highly likely that by 2030 we’ll know what pathway we’ve taken”, “the pathway towards sustainability or the current pathway towards likely collapse”.

“I think the ‘fork in the road’ will come in this decade, probably not a single point in time but as a series of events,” said Steffen.

Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse “will likely not come as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall deterioration in many features of life, with regional collapses occurring here and there”.

“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event.

“With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander.

“Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is terminal.”

Alexander, who studies the economic, political and cultural challenges of living on a full planet in an age of limits, believes the future will be “post-growth / post capitalist / post-industrial in some form”.

“The future will like arrive in part by design and in part by disaster. Our challenge is to try to constitute the future through planning and community action, not have the future constitute us,” said Alexander.

Alexander said that it would never be “too late” to act sensibly as whether we’re trying to avoid or manage collapse there is lots of work to be done (“a 3 degree future is better than a 4 degree future”).

Steffen believes the current US mass uprisings are not a sign of collapse but one of “growing instability”.

Alexander said it was a sign of “steam building up within a closed system”. Without bold grassroots and political action we were “likely to see explosions of civil unrest increasingly as things continue to deteriorate”.