I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

Frase argues that we are facing a paradoxical crisis of both scarcity (ecological catastrophe) and abundance (AI & automation) at the very same time. Under these twin pressures, he argues, capitalism is going to end. The question is what will replace it. On intersecting axes of scarcity/ abundance and hierarchy/equality, he maps out a 2 × 2 gri

So: Unfortunately. . .we’re going to collapse. But: Fortunately. . . it’s not all at once. This is an incredible boon. It’s like finding a magic fossil- fueled lamp, rubbing it, and having an all-powerful genie come out, and instead of ripping you to shreds on the spot (I mean he is all-powerful and you, in your fossil-fueled lust and greed, did ro

In The Five Stages of Collapse, Dmitry Orlov lays out five increasingly dire stages of collapse — financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural.

. . . a steep winding-down of the size of the industrial economy. It strips away its burdens and complications, nurses the human ecology back to health, builds local competence and discovers a sense of place. . . . This is managed descent. . . . The shock is as gentle and as survivable as foresight can make

predicament effectively forever, but all the while we’ll never agree on exactly what in fact it is or how best to resolve it. Finally, we have to accept that our predicament is a moving target that we are simultaneously causing even as we try to disentangle ourselves from it, and all our attempts to resolve it are irrevocable experiments done in re

Ultimately, we learned (or at least some of us did) that if we look after each other, we can get through these kinds of things together. We learned the lesson that humans learn again and again about ourselves (and seem to need to learn again and again): that “the worst of times can often bring out the best in us.”56 We learned that resilience isn’t

One such think tank is Oakland-based Movement Generation, a grassroots laboratory that has devised an influential Just Transition organizing model and is thinking through (and, maybe more importantly,

exacerbate the inequitable distribution of suffering. There is no question that the climate is going to change, and bring with it a lot of suffering. The question is how we navigate it.

Bill McKibben has put some very precise numbers on our remaining carbon budget. You’re saying we’re going to need to safeguard some portion of that budget for some of these critical transitional steps? Gopal: We need to be very smart about how we use our carbon budget. We should absolutely not be expending any fossil energy exploring for more fossi

So, in our work, we talk about Shocks, Slides, and Shifts.