How and how fast China manages its own transition from industrial to postindustrial economy, how and how fast it “greens” the industry that remains, how and how fast it remodels agricultural practices and diet, how and how fast it steers the consumer preferences of its booming middle and upper classes away from carbon intensity—these are not the only things that will determine the climate shape of the twenty-first century. The courses taken by India and the rest of South Asia, Nigeria and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, matter enormously. But China is, at present, the largest of those nations, and by far the wealthiest and most powerful. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, the country has already positioned itself as a major provider, in some cases the major provider, of the infrastructure of industry, energy, and transportation in much of the rest of the developing world. And it is relatively easy to imagine, at the end of a Chinese century, an intuitive global consensus solidifying—that the country with the world’s largest economy (therefore most responsible for the energy output of the planet) and the most people (therefore most responsible for the public health and well-being of humanity) should have something more than narrowly national powers over the climate policy of the rest of the “community of nations,” who would fall into line behind it.
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All of these scenarios, even the bleakest, presume some new political equilibrium. There is also, of course, the possibility of disequilibrium—or what you would normally call “disorder” and “conflict.” This is the analysis put forward by Harald Welzer, in Climate Wars, which predicts a “renaissance” of violent conflict in the decades to come. His evocative subtitle is What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century.
Already, in local spheres, political collapse is a quite common outcome of climate crisis—we just call it “civil war.” And we tend to analyze it ideologically—as we did in Darfur, in Syria, in Yemen. Those kinds of collapses are likely to remain technically “local” rather than truly “global,” though in a time of climate crisis they would have an easier time metastasizing beyond old borders than they have in the recent past. In other words, a completely Mad Max world is not around the bend, since even catastrophic climate change won’t undermine all political power—in fact, it will produce some winners, relatively speaking. Some of them with quite large armies and rapidly expanding surveillance states—China now pulls criminals out of pop concerts with facial recognition software and deploys domestic-spy drones indistinguishable from birds. This is not an aspiring empire likely to tolerate no-man’s-lands within its sphere.
Mad Max regions elsewhere are another matter. In certain ways they are already here, where “here” is parts of Somalia or Iraq or South Sudan at various points in the last decade, including points when the planet’s geopolitics seemed, at a glance from Los Angeles or London, stable. The idea of a “global order” has always been something of a fiction, or at least an aspiration, even as the joined forces of liberal internationalism, globalization, and American hegemony inched us toward it over the last century. Very probably, over the next century, climate change will reverse that course.
History After Progress
That history is a story that moves in one direction is among the most unshakable creeds of the modern West—having survived, often only slightly modified, the counterarguments made over centuries by genocides and gulags, famines and epidemics and global conflagrations, producing death tolls in the tens of millions. The grip of this narrative is so tight on political imaginations that grotesque injustices and inequities, racial and otherwise, are often invoked not as reasons to doubt the arc of history but to be reminded of its shape—perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so agitated about such problems, in other words, since history is “moving in the right direction” and the forces of progress are, to indulge the mixed metaphor, “on the right side of history.” On what side is climate change?
Its own side—its own tide. There is no good thing in the world that will be made more abundant, or spread more widely, by global warming. The list of the bad things that will proliferate is innumerable. And already, in this age of nascent ecological crisis, you can read a whole new literature of deep skepticism—proposing not only that history can move in reverse, but that the entire project of human settlement and civilization, which we know as “history” and which has given us climate change, has been, in fact, a jet stream backward. As climate horrors accumulate, this anti-progressive perspective is sure to blossom.
Some Cassandras are already here. In Sapiens, his alien’s-eye-view account of the rise of human civilization, the historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that this rise is best understood as a succession of myths, beginning with the one that the invention of farming, in what is often called the Neolithic Revolution, amounted to progress (“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us,” as he pithily put it). In Against the Grain, the political scientist and anthropologist of anarchy James C. Scott gives a more pointed critique of the same period: wheat cultivation, he argues, is responsible for the arrival of what we now understand as state power, and, with it, bureaucracy and oppression and inequality. These are no longer outlier accounts of what you may have learned about in middle school as the Agricultural Revolution, which you probably were taught marked the real beginning of history. Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, but farming for only about 12,000—an innovation that ended hunting and gathering, bringing about cities and political structures, and with them what we now think of as “civilization.” But even Jared Diamond—whose Guns, Germs, and Steel gave an ecological and geographical account of the rise of the industrial West, and whose Collapse is a kind of forerunner text for this recent wave of reconsiderations—has called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
The argument does not even rely on anything that followed later: industrialization, fossil fuels, or the damage they now threaten to unleash on the planet and the fragile civilization briefly erected on its slippery surface. Instead, the case against civilization, this new class of skeptics says, can be made much more directly as a case against farming: the sedentary life agriculture produced eventually led to denser settlements, but populations didn’t expand for millennia afterward, the potential growth from farming offset by new levels of disease and warfare. This was not a brief, painful interlude, through which humans passed into a new time of abundance, but a story of strife that continued for a very long time, indeed to this day. We are still, now, in much of the world, shorter, sicker, and dying younger than our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were also, by the way, much better custodians of the planet on which we all live. And they watched over it for much longer—nearly all of those 200,000 years. That epic era once derided as “prehistory” accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making—the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history—look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe.