The diffusion of new technologies tends to be self-accelerating, as greater efficiencies, economies of scale and industrial synergies reinforce each other. The paper points out that the transition in the US from horse-drawn carriages to cars running on fossil fuels took just over a decade. Sudden shifts in energy systems have happened before. We could use this property to detonate positive change. This is how the global financial crisis of 2008-09 happened: a relatively minor shock (mortgage defaults in the US) was transmitted and amplified through the entire system, almost bringing it down. It points out that “cause and effect need not be proportionate”, a small disturbance, in the right place, can trigger a massive response from a system and flip it into a new state. Our last, best hope is to use those dynamics to our advantage, triggering what scientists call “cascading regime shifts”.Ī fascinating paper published in January in the journal Climate Policy showed how we could harness the power of “domino dynamics”: non-linear change, proliferating from one part of the system to another. Like natural systems, if they are driven past their tipping points, they can flip with astonishing speed. They have self-reinforcing properties – that stabilise them within a particular range of stress, but destabilise them when external pressure becomes too great. Our social and economic structures share characteristics with the Earth systems on which we depend. For just as the complex natural systems on which our lives depend can flip suddenly from one state to another, so can the systems that humans have created. So does this mean we might as well give up? It does not.
Without massive and immediate change, we face the possibility of cascading environmental collapse, as Earth systems pass critical thresholds and flip into new and hostile states. Instead, powerful governments sought a compromise between our prospects of survival and the interests of the fossil fuel industry. What we needed at the Cop26 climate conference was a decision to burn no more fossil fuels after 2030.
A fair chance of preventing more than 1.5C of heating means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 7% every year: faster than they fell in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. After so many squandered years of denial, distraction and delay, it’s too late for incremental change. The Glasgow Climate Pact, for all its restrained and diplomatic language, looks like a suicide pact. Our last, best hope of averting systemic environmental collapse is to use the peculiarities of complex systems to trigger cascading political regime shifts.īy George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14 th November 2021.
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