Opinion - We’re not all doomed and need to act, says Stratford Climate Action group

There has been a lot written about the rise of the climate ‘doomer’. Particularly among young people, there is a startling tendency to a kind of despairing cynicism. One poll found that 56 per cent of young people agreed with the statement that ‘humanity is doomed’. More than 45 per cent said their feelings about climate change ‘negatively affected their daily lives’. This shows that climate change – or perhaps the failure of politicians to adequately respond to it – is having a massive impact on the mental health of young people. One young person I spoke to told me that her friends have adopted the attitude that, as they haven’t caused the climate crisis, they shouldn’t be the ones to fix it. To a degree, they have a point.

But I’m talking about older people, and my impression is that it’s more likely I’m simply bumping up against small ‘c’ conservatism and a reluctance to change. If there’s nothing that can be done, if everything is hopeless, then there’s no point in making any effort, either individually or socially. This attitude is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people adopt it, the more ‘doomed’ we will be. And given that we’re facing a climate emergency, doesn’t it seem a bit… gutless? Our young people deserve better.

So, are we ‘doomed’? We’re currently said to be on track for 2.7C of warming. According to the author Mark Lynas, this would expose around half the global population to temperatures exceeding the ‘deadly’ threshold for around 20 days a year. Combined with flooding, desertification, wildfires, hurricanes and food collapse, this would lead to billions of climate refugees, as well as large-scale extinctions and derangement of species habits. However, even if 1.5C of warming is now difficult without some ‘overshoot’, it is still a winnable fight to stop warming short of 2C.

We can also consider the tipping points, which scientists have identified as potentially being triggered beyond 1.5C degrees of warming: sudden transitions of one earth system to a different state, which are not easily reversible. Tipping points particularly at risk near 1.5C include the death of warm water coral reefs and the collapse of west Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets; at 2C of warming, we could see the transition of the Amazon rainforest to grassland.

These transitions would lead to devastating rises in sea level and impacts on biodiversity, with knock-on impacts on human life. But, although they would accelerate global warming, they would not of themselves set in train a process of runaway warming that would take us to 3C or higher, regardless of what we do. The 2023 Global Tipping Points report cites an estimate that the combined effect of passing those tipping points could be to increase global warming by around 0.13C in 2100. Even if this isn’t definitive, it’s indicative of why scientists consider our emissions the key determinant of end of century temperatures.

In short, looking just at the science, we are flirting with a future filled with catastrophes, which could become bad enough to threaten civilisational collapse. But there is space to fight, space to realise a better or a worse future. And there is no reason to consider ourselves ‘doomed’, or to give up and do nothing. We have agency, and with it, responsibility.

Perhaps the problem people have in seeing a way forward is social, or political, rather than scientific. It’s true that the current failures of our political leadership make concerted social action difficult. But I think we have a tendency to think of social change in overly simplistic terms, to pin all our hopes on just one form of activity, whether political leadership, consumer change, some miracle technology, or as with Extinction Rebellion, on civil disobedience. When the chosen vehicle for our hopes fails, we can fall into despair.

I think that instead, we should conceive the transition as a multifaceted process, moving concurrently through all channels of a complex social system, in which successive phases of political action, consumer change, technological innovation, activist breakthrough, capital transfer, and so on, can intertwine and push each other forward. In that way, when one route seems blocked, we can look to another for hope.

Currently, as our politicians fail us, it is the new technologies on the markets – renewable energy, electric vehicles, batteries – that are moving quickest, disrupting incumbent industries through quickly falling prices (one in five new cars sold in the UK in 2022 was an electric vehicle). But this isn’t simply a triumph of the self-regulating market: the new technologies only reached maturity due to German and Chinese state support. And these decisions were made possible by activist campaigns, and ethically-minded consumers.

To recover a sense of what we can do, we need to understand our location within this complex process, even if we can’t expect to exercise full control over it, or to fully predict where it will end up. We should accept that, as a hybrid process, it will involve compromises, and probably won’t fully accord with anyone’s values or preferences. Moreover, the transition will carry its own risks: a rapid collapse of the ‘carbon bubble’ could result in a new financial crisis, even bigger than in 2007/8.

It’s going to be a deeply challenging process, and we won’t be the same at the end as at the beginning. But there’s no cause for faint-hearted ‘doomism’.