Imagine, as many people do, an all-seeing eye in the sky, looking down on planet Earth. Imagine seeing what it sees. It watches, over the course of decades, ice caps shrinking, rainforests retreating, deserts expanding, ocean circulation slowing, freshwater dwindling and sea levels rising, and it thinks – for it has been there since the beginning – “this is familiar”. All the signs are there, of an Earth system sliding towards collapse, as it has done five times since animals with hard body parts first evolved.
But this time, it knows, is different. Not only is one of the life forms causing the collapse, but it shares some of the eye’s supernatural abilities: it too can see what is happening. So, with heightened curiosity, the eye zooms in, to see what this well-informed being is doing to avert catastrophe.
It looks first at the centre of global power, the United States of America, a nation possessed of all the scientific and technological tools required to anticipate and prevent the greatest disaster the species has ever faced. It watches meetings in the capital and other cities. It can scarcely believe what it is seeing: a plan to stand down the defences. The most powerful people in the nation are seeking to stifle knowledge, roll back beneficial technologies and appease the interests pushing Earth systems towards their tipping points.
It notes that the industries causing this catastrophe were the real winners of the recent election. Their reserves of fossil fuels, on which their value depends, are seven times greater than the carbon budget the world’s governments pretend to have agreed on. These industries know that if the policies required to prevent Earth systems from tipping were implemented, the great majority of their assets would be worthless, and the value of their companies would collapse. So they used a small part of their profits to support the candidate who would defend their interests. Even before they won the election, these interests, uninhibited by the current administration, were rapidly expanding their extraction of oil and gas. They were already dominant; now they are in charge.
The eye blinks with astonishment, then sweeps around the northern hemisphere, to a small wet island in the north-east Atlantic. Here, with some relief, it finds decision-makers saying what people would say if they were seeking to avert the collapse of Earth systems. The prime minister has noted that “the threat of climate change is existential and it is happening in the here and now”. He has pledged to strengthen the country’s climate targets, cutting emissions by 81% by 2035. He is also among the few leaders of the most powerful nations who can be bothered to turn up at international talks.
But as the eye watches more closely, it finds that what he and other powerful people say and what they do are not the same thing. In fact, his government has embraced the same lobbyists from the same Earth-tipping industries. But in this case it presents the lobbyists’ demands as solutions to the problem: a situation, if anything, even more remarkable than what the eye witnessed on the other side of the ocean. If the eye were the religious kind, it would assume that the devil now reigns on Earth. Perhaps it would not be wrong.
But maybe only governments have been possessed? After all, the eye can see that there is tremendous global support for climate action: on average, it notes, a big study suggests that 89% of the world’s people want their governments to do more to prevent climate breakdown. Perhaps other powerful people are filling the gap?
So the eye seeks out some of the greatest minds of their generation. It peers into the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The first person it sees is completing their PhD thesis about someone else’s commentary on the Dithyrambs of Pindar. The second is working on the eighth biography of a lesser-known member of the Bloomsbury group. The eye rolls. As it peers over shoulder after shoulder, it finds almost every brilliant mind engaged in anything except the issue that will define their lives. In fact, everywhere it looks, it notices that those with the greatest capacity to act are the least engaged. It cannot help comparing this remarkable situation with what it saw 85 years earlier, when almost the entire country bent its collective genius to defeating another, though lesser, threat.
The eye roams across the planet, seeking, in vain, actions commensurate with the scale of the hazard. It alights upon a capital of one of the industries driving this disaster, Baku in Azerbaijan. It finds, to its great surprise, that representatives of almost every government on Earth are gathering here – of all places – to discuss the great predicament. At last! But again, as it looks more closely, it notices weirdly conflicting signals. It sees a process that could scarcely be better designed to fail, and no serious attempt to reform it. It discovers that the event is chaired by a former executive of the oil industry. Well, at least this could be seen as an improvement on last year’s meeting, chaired by a serving executive of the oil industry. It finds that, yet again, this meeting looks more like a trade fair dominated by the interests it is supposed to curtail than a serious attempt to address the species’ greatest threat. Indeed, the Azerbaijani government has used the event to try to arrange new fossil fuel deals. It notices that some of the governments gathering in Baku are using the unravelling in the US as a licence to downgrade or abandon their own feeble efforts.
It discovers that the governments meeting there are prepared to consider any policy except those that might actually succeed: leaving fossil fuels in the ground and ending most livestock farming. Now they are betting on carbon markets: a futile, impossible attempt to offset with contemporary withdrawals from the atmosphere the hundreds of millions of years’ worth of carbon being brought to the surface.
The eye concludes that this is a species, beset by a lethal combination of conformity, distraction and a fear of offending powerful interests, actively collaborating in its own extinction. It sees a species dominated by Lords of the Desert: people prepared to destroy everything as long as they can command the ruins. It wonders whether the species has a survival instinct at all, or whether, instead, it has only an instinct to obey.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
