Climate Change, the Anthropocene, and the Crisis of Humanity
Dr. Steven Best – Author, philosopher, speaker, public intellectual. Professor at the University of Texas, El Paso. Presidium member and academician
of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Civilization and the Holocene
So here’s what I think is the most significant what’s going on in the world right now, and it could not be more epic and consequential. Because of the relentless pressure of human activity, which most importantly includes the prodigious release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humans have brought about a new geological epoch. Notice I said geological, not historical, we’re talking about earth history, not human history, or rather the point where these two histories collide catastrophically.
Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new “postmodernity” pale in significance to the fact that humans have brought about the end of the Holocene epoch that began 11,000 years ago, with the end of the Pleistocene epoch and the last Ice Age. What we call “civilization” emerged within the new climate conditions of the Holocene epoch, with the emergence of agricultural society, and its entire history unfolded in this epoch. But humanity now faces an entirely new planetary reality with climate change and its severe threats to the so-called civilized order. So we’re not simply talking about a cultural paradigm shift such as postmodernism or a historical rupture such as modernity or postmodernity, but rather the dawn of a new geological epoch and the end of civilized life as we know it.
Standard definitions of civilizations are celebratory and mark the leap of human culture from savagery and barbarism to the norms, technologies, and order of advanced societies. Eurocentric visions of history equate change with progress and view the modern Western capitalist world as the apex of human evolution.
More adequately, we can define civilization as a radically novel social form that emerged some ten thousand years ago in numerous world regions. This new social form, known as agricultural society, quickly spread to become the dominant social organization. The small, mobile, hunter-gatherer societies that comprised all prior human history were displaced by large farming and pastoral populations that settled in one territory. Rather than taking what nature provided, agricultural societies began to alter nature through the domestication of plants and animals.
The shift from food gathering to food production allowed significant population growth, advances in social complexity, and led to the emergence of the first hierarchical societies. Agricultural societies were also the first growth-oriented societies, requiring ever-more land and resources, a dynamic that led to warfare, slavery, and the first political empires. Fast-developing skills for altering nature spawned anthropocentric worldviews. These ideologies defined humans as radically distinct from the natural world, which they and all Western societies since view as something to exploit and control for human purposes.
The Anthropocene
Civilization evolved in, and was made possible by, the post-Ice Age conditions of the Pleistocene, as the new Holocene epoch brought warmer weather and a stable climate. Human possibilities greatly increased with the advent of agriculture, but the dangers latent in the development of hierarchical, expansionistic, and unsustainable social forms are now fully manifest. By mid-20th century, just 70 ago, humanity crossed into a radically new epoch in earth history, commonly known as the Anthropocene epoch. Literally, Anthropocene means the “new” or “recent” “age of man.” The term was coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen to mark a rupture in history – not in the “narrow time” of human history, but rather the “deep time” of geological history and identify the cause of this change.
Crutzen and others argued that human-induced changes in the earth system were of such deep impact and long duration that one could speak of a new epoch in Earth’s history that humans themselves have brought about. The human impact on the earth is no longer confined to local ecosystems, but rather has metastasized into a force altering the earth as a whole. As disruptive as human impacts were over the last fifty millennia, however, humans did not become a destabilizing planetary force of change until the mid-twentieth century, a mere 70 years ago, in the post-war world of exponential population growth, consumerism, and rapidly expanding global capitalism. This critical juncture in both human and earth history is known as the “Great Acceleration.”
The concept of the Anthropocene is vital to mark an epochal change in both human and earth and challenges approaches that rigidly separate environmental and social histories. It alerts us to the fact that we have become geological agents driving tremendous planetary changes and thus to carefully consider the consequences of our actions. In normative forms advanced with urgency and passion, it is meant to awaken humanity to the severe dangers and crises they confront in this new epoch and to respond decisively and collectively.
On the many ways humans have disrupted various earth systems, human impact is most dramatically evident in two momentous changes. The first is that humans have brought about a sixth mass extinction event in the history of the earth. The last one occurred 66 million years ago when a meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of all species. But unlike all past 5 major extinction events, this new mass extinction is caused by humans, through means such as hunting species into extinction, destroying their habitats, and so on. The second major shift humans have brought about on a planetary level is global warming and climate change.
Before turning to this discussion, I must pause to make a necessary qualification: terms such as “humanity” or “the human impact on the world” are misleading abstractions that conflate vast differences in responsibility for ecological destruction. References to “humanity” must be qualified to emphasize the social forms, corporations, states, regions, and economic classes of people most responsible for ecological destruction. Clearly, affluent Western societies leave a far greater ecological footprint than poor “undeveloped” nations. China, the European Union, and the United States contribute 41.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom 100 countries account for only 3.6% of total emissions. The carbon dioxide emissions of the average US citizen are over 100 times that of the average Ugandan, and in just one or two days a typical US citizen creates more emissions than someone from the Democratic Republic of the Congo would produce in an entire year. And so on ….
The staggering scale of human impact on earth systems is well-documented by the best scientific organizations in the world, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change – or the IPCC. Here are a just a few documented facts:
- In less than a century, from 1927 to 2022, the human population grew from 2 to 8 billion people, as we add 200,000 more people each day
- Humans have altered 75 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface, destroyed over 85 percent of wetlands and 20% percent of coral reefs
- Glaciers, permafrost, and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are dissolving, causing sea levels to rise, and the Arctic is likely to be ice-free in summer before 2050
- In the last 50 years, 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down. Over 200,000 acres of rainforest fall each day
- Rising temperatures and acidification in the world’s oceans threaten a level of die-off of marine life not seen since the Permian Period 252 million years ago, when over two-thirds of all marine life perished
- 1 million species are now facing extinction, many within decades. Incredibly, humans and cattle now constitute 96% of all mammals on earth (60% are livestock, 36% are humans), and wild mammal numbers have fallen to a mere 4%. Humans – 0.01% of all life — have wiped out 83% of species off the face of the earth in their disastrous tenure on this planet
- In April 2018, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached an average of 410 parts per million, the highest concentrations in four million years during the Pliocene Era. The last time the concentration was this high, was 3 million years ago, during the Pleistocene period, when the Artic and northern Artic and Greenland were ice-free in summers. average sea levels were 50 feet higher that today and the Arctic was covered in forests, not ice
- In the last 50 years, global average temperature has risen at 170 times the natural background rate, and humans are releasing 100 billion tonnes of carbon into atmosphere every ten years.
The Climate Crisis
Although the ongoing sixth mass extinction of life and the effects of radical biodiversity loss is not evident in our everyday, climate change is.
As I mentioned, civilization evolved in, and was largely made possible by, the post-Ice Age conditions of the Holocene epoch, with its warm and stable climate, much unlike during the Pleistocene. For the last 11,000 years, a stable, life-supporting climate prevailed, but in the Age of the Anthropocene the earth’s climate has become extremely unstable and hostile to humans and all life.
Since the rise of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century, a social order powered by burning fossil fuels, humans have spewed sufficient tonnage of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere to initiate global warming and climate change. The relentless release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere continues to climb to record levels. More than half of all carbon emissions that we have ever put into the atmosphere have come in just the last 30 years. In 2021, emission levels totaled 36.3 billion tones, the highest level in history. Carbon dioxide levels are now 50 percent higher than the preindustrial average and greater than at any time in 4 million years. In just two centuries, this system of fossil capitalism has increased average global temperatures by 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-Industrial Revolution times. This increase may not seem like much, but it is more than enough to trigger tremendous changes such as extreme heat waves, megadroughts, massive wildfires, melting of ice caps, sea-level rise, and increased flooding.
Since the 19th century, scientists have understood the direct role that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases play in heating up the planet. Today, the scientific evidence for anthropogenic warming is overwhelming; there is a 99% consensus among scientists — virtually every scientist not on the payroll of Exxon.
Since the 1950s, scientists have warned humanity of the risks of global warming. In the 1990s, they identified a 2-degree temperature rise as the critical threshold point not to cross to avert runaway climate change and its catastrophic social consequences. By 2009 nearly every government in the world endorsed this 2-degree benchmark and pledged emission cuts to keep warming under that threshold point. With little or no progress to show, nearly 200 nations joined together in 2015 to sign the Paris Agreement, each pledging sufficient reductions to keep global temperatures under 2 degrees, and ideally under 1.5 degrees.
It’s now been 7 years since the landmark Paris Agreement, and one could expect a responsible group of world leaders would have made notable progress by now, right? Wrong.
- The Paris pledges were flawed from the start and would lead to 2.7 degrees warming at best. Moreover, their models depended upon the development of carbon-capturing technologies which are far from realized.
- No major country is meeting these goals; in fact, all are on target to far exceed them. In the period between 2010 and 2019, for instance, total net anthropogenic GHG emissions were higher than in any previous decade.
- All too often, climate pledges and rhetoric are merely used to greenwash corporate crimes, and aspirational net zero targets distract from the urgent need for immediate deep emissions reductions
- World economies are growing, not shrinking, and emissions will therefore continue to rise. The world’s two most populous nations, China and India, are rapidly modernizing and adding millions of people to the middle classes with growing consumer appetites
- World meat consumption continues to rise. The global meat industry is a major contributor to virtually all environmental problems such as deforestation and very much including global warming. Global meat and dairy industries create 7.1 gigatons of greenhouses gases annually—14.5% of total man-made emissions.
2 degrees, once a top limit not to exceed, is now a bottom line and utopian dream.
In the last two years, the IPCC has issued 3 reports that in effect are final warnings to world leaders. The IPCC urged industries and governments to immediately make “deep, rapid and sustained emissions reductions” or we are on the path to at least a 3-degree warmer world by the end of the century. The IPCC argues that the world must halt continuing emissions peaks by 2025, reduce them by half before 2030, and reach net zero emissions by 2050. As if this is not challenging enough given the “business-as-usual” mindsets of industries and states, reaching the net-zero mark requires massive amounts of carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, but no such technology yet exists.
The Climate Action Tracker website states that “Without increased government action, the world will still emit twice the greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 than is allowed under the 1.5-degree limit of the Paris Agreement. The world is heading to a warming of 2.4 degrees with 2030 targets and even higher, 2.7 degrees, with current policies.” And, again, we could reach 3 or even 4 degree by the end of the century.
Clearly, climate change is not a problem for future generations, it is manifest now in dramatic ways. The extreme weather events we have all witnessed and experience in the last few years are the result of “only” 1.3 degree warming. Imagine a world of 2, 3, or 4 degrees of warming. Even a 2-degree world will create hundreds of millions of climate refuges, mass starvation from drought, surging disease rates, mass fatalities, and unprecedented strains on social systems. It will lead to social unrest, chaos, increased terrorist attacks, and resource wars among nations fighting for the last scraps of resources. This will require policing of populations, and inevitably lead to the rise of authoritarian governments. Increasingly, laws and morality will give way to Social Darwinism and a Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all will take root. The world will be divided into a “climate apartheid” of the few elites who can survive the changes and the billions of people who succumb to them.
And yet, incredibly, corporations and nation state drive us further and faster toward the abyss. A study by the Guardian earlier this year uncovered plans for dramatic increases in oil and gas production by energy giants and leaders of both developed and developing countries. In a frenzied global “gold rush” for new fossil fuel production, industries and states have moved to expand fossil energy increases rather than moving to decarbonize their economies. This will lock the world into another decade of fossil fuel reliance, and quickly exhaust the remaining 1.5-degree emissions budget, and destroy any chances we have of limiting catastrophic global warming.
It gets worse still. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of this year has caused panic in nations like Germany and legitimated the continued dependency on fossil fuels. The disruption of energy supply along with soaring prices has incentivized many countries – including the US, the UK and the EU — to ramp up fossil fuel production. Here in the US, a republican-controlled Congress has rejected bills to address climate change for the past three decades. Biden has done nothing but give lip-service to climate change, and has just journeyed to Saudi Arabia to beg for more oil.
Prognosis: The New World Order
10,000 years of unrestrained social expansion, population growth, consumption of finite resources, and misguided schemes to conquer and master nature have dramatically altered the planet. And just 200 years of industrial capitalism dealt the death blow to the equilibrium of the earth. But in the Age of the Anthropocene, these delusions are being refuted by an awakened Earth system fighting back against parasitical social orders — with increasingly devastating consequences to biodiversity and humanity itself.
We are sleepwalking toward disaster on a melting and burning planet. The climate is changing must faster than we are, and time is running out. We have only months, not years, and certainly not decades, to respond decisively to the climate emergency and stay under a 2-degree threshold at best. Even if by some miracle the world stopped spewing all earth-warming emission, the changes and impact of human beings on the earth will persist countless millennia into the future.
This is not “alarmist” thinking, it is sober realism rooted in scientific fact. The most dangerous outlook on the climate emergency, besides denialism, is optimism and the naïve faith in human ingenuity, such that climate change is just a bump in the road of Progress and limitless growth.
The obstacles to change are not scientific or technological. We know what the problem is, what caused it, and how to solve it. The problem rather is political, in a two-fold sense. First, global elites are aggressively blocking the transition to a post-carbon world. They are hell-bent on denial, delay, and disinformation tactics. They will burn every last lump of coal before relinquishing their power and privileges. They are nihilists and sociopaths.
We cannot rely on elites to solve the problem because elites are the problem. 25 years of global climate conferences, treaties, and broken promises that brought no significant change is proof of this. Economic hegemony is inseparable from political hegemony, because corporations require states, politicians, and courts to be fully subservient to their interests. Their massive financial might and lobbying power guarantees compliance.
We cannot solve the crisis in the natural world without solving the crisis in the social world, which is a crisis in democracy. Reason, science, common sense, and the will of sane people cry out for urgent change, but they are meaningless to irrational and ecocidal powers. And here we have the second aspect of the political nature of the crisis – there is too much public ignorance of and apathy toward the climate emergency and not enough mass resistance to the fossil fuel industries and their political puppets. Whatever social movements currently exist, they remain impotent to bring about systemic change. We must awaken and galvanize millions of people throughout the world and organize them into radical social movements. Every defense of democracy is a step in the right direction and every fraction of a degree of warming we can prevent is worth fighting for.
There are no technofixes for climate change. We need radical social and psychological changes. We are standing at the crossroads of earth and human history. We are facing irreversible tipping points of ecological and social collapse. The actions that humanity now collectively takes – or fails to take – will determine whether our future, and that of biodiversity itself, is redeemable or tragically bleak and not worth living. The greatest challenge in the history of our species is staring us right in the face: How can we overcome our dominator mentalities, our alienation from the natural world, and our unsustainable social systems to harmonize our existence with one another, other species, and a gravely wounded world before our actions are all too little and too late?
The challenge before us is nearly as unimaginable as the consequences of not meeting it. And clearly there are no guarantees that we are up to this task. We might fail and flail about pitifully in the detritus of ecological and social breakdown. It is sobering indeed to compare the magnitude of the threat posed to life; the little time left to effect decisive change; the feebleness of world response; the pervasive denial of the existential threat climate change poses to humanity; and the power of fossil fuel industries to block change and tighten its death grip on humanity.
Human evolution is not a given – neither in the naïve modernist sense that social life will increasingly improve over time through limitless prosperity, nor in the literal sense that it will continue at all. Rather than becoming the “promising primate” trumpeted by humanist anthropologists, we are on the verge of becoming a failed species — a species that has mishandled its intelligence, squandered its evolutionary potential, failed to confront objective realities, and is proving unable to change and adapt right now – this decisive moment of do or die, breakthrough or breakdown.
While the result is horrible to contemplate from our perspective, Homo sapiens may not have the will, intelligence, or solidarity to meet the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene. We might thereby succumb to the same oblivion that engulfed our many hominid and Homo ancestors, and into which humans have dispatched countless thousands of other species. In the Age of the Anthropocene, humans are the meteor that strikes the planet with a gigantic force, but we keep hitting it, over and over again, never allowing biodiversity and ecosystems to heal and reach equilibrium. Quite probably, one writer muses, “[t]he long-term evolutionary restitution of the natural world must await our own demise.”
If we consider the current planetary crisis from the perspective of animals and the Earth, the demise of human beings could be the best imaginable event possible. It would allow healing and regeneration that in time could bring about a new Cambrian explosion of biodiversity. “Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared,” John Gray surmises, “many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.” Indeed, I would add, if humanity as a collective whole cannot learn how to live properly as good citizens within the planetary biocommunity, it has no right to live at all, for its existence is merely parasitic and destructive.
There is no telos or destiny to which we will arrive in glory, however tardy, tattered, bruised, and blackened. There are no guiding angels to protect us from failure, no God to save us from total darkness, and no technofix (such as geoengineering or carbon capture) to avert catastrophic climate change and social collapse. But nor are there inexorable laws or wheels of fate that pre-determine disaster and demise. We must change our course, and we can – if a critical mass of people throughout the world can grasp the crisis and respond with the level of urgency, solidarity, organization, and militancy necessary to overcome the forces of chaos and destruction and steer society along the radically different path as stand at this critical crossroads in Earth and human history.
That’s a big if. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing, and our choices, options, and chances narrow as the ominous cloud of the Anthropocene grows darker and closer.