The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science

Although a lot of the attention is on electric cars, e-bikes are the real unsung heroes of electric transportation. They do much more heavy lifting than electric cars and take up far less space. Their use is already growing at more than 20% per year in many countries, including the US, China, India, and much of Europe.49 Even if you charged one wit

Across a wide range of indicators, consumption growth is outpacing population growth. To get a feel for how this consumption may increase in the future, we need to look at resource and income inequality today, and at how the gap between materially rich and poor communities might narrow.

Those people who have most interest in addressing the problems have the least say in furthering solutions.

In previous civilization collapses, environmental decline often came first. By the time ancient peoples realized how bad things were, it was too late. (In fact, elites were often the last to find this out, since they were less exposed to damage and had the resources to maintain their lifestyles for longer.)

As nations with weaker institutions suffer greater damages and food prices rise, climate breakdown will be a catalyst for existing grievances, facilitating war and conflict. Connections between climate, conflict and forced migration have already been made, and experts think these connections will only deepen towards mid-century.

Where increasing globalization of production hit industrial towns hard, the automation revolution will hit the service-oriented companies of central business districts around the world, not to mention Indian call centres, Chinese factories and German car plants. Dystopian scenarios could play out, in which control over the automation software and r

It will decide whether the millions suffering today will become billions. It will decide whether malaria-carrying mosquitoes will recolonize areas of the world from which they were eradicated. It will decide how many people will fall ill from other diseases. It will decide how deep crop losses and food shortages will be. It is all in the balance.

We could be facing the existential collapse of everything we know, and yet no single person or organization is the culprit. Can we blame the fossil fuel companies? The super-rich? All of the consumers in ‘the West’? Or would it be better to blame the Chinese for building coal power plants on such a massive scale in the early 2000s? The Republicans

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable… It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics.