Confronting climate failure: How we dig ourselves out of the climate-catastrophe hole – Part 2

Humanity has dug itself into a hole. The first step to dig ourselves out is – much as an alcoholic or drug addict must admit their addiction to start the recovery process – to acknowledge the depth of our civilizational failure. If generations now living are to gain redemption in the eyes of generations to come, we must confess we have missed the mark, understand why, and do everything in our power to level up, knowing we are leaving them the legacy of a damaged planet and a future wrought with uncertainty.

This is not to say no progress has been made. In the past few years, solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have become cost-competitive alternatives to fossil fuels. In the first half of 2025, solar and wind additions exceeded world electricity demand growth for the first time. Low-carbon technologies are a substantial reason why China, source of around 90% of climate pollution growth over the past decade, peaked in April 2024. In the first quarter of 2026 its emissions declined for the first time. Solar with battery storage has cut use of California gas peaker plants. A global climate pollution peak may be on arrival.

In terms of creating sustainable materials chains for new technologies, electric mining equipment is eliminating diesel. Recycling of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines is making mining less necessary. New battery chemistries are replacing such troublesome materials as lithium, cobalt and nickel. Renewables land use has been critiqued, often for good reason. But studies show benefits from shading farm fields with solar panels. One projected increased production capable of feeding 2.1 billion people. A Chinese study even showed benefits to some desert ecosystems. But these findings need to be taken with caution since desert solar installations can harm many species.

To see some daylight in these trends is not hopium. New technologies are a necessary part of any solution. But so far they’ve only covered a portion of energy growth. We’ve barely moved the needle on the global primary energy share supplied by fossil fuels. It stubbornly hovers above 80%. We’ve hardly begun to swear off our addiction.

Though climate pollution growth has decelerated, it was still at a record level in 2025. Forty billion more tonnes of heat-trapping carbon were dumped into the atmosphere. The bathtub is still filling. In July atmospheric CO2 hit 427.87 parts per million, an increase of 1.25 ppm in the last year, around a 50% increase since humanity began mass fossil fuel burning around 1750. (In 1989, the first year I wrote about global warming, we were already at 353 ppm, now seen as the minimum to restore climate stability.) We are crossing into unknown territory where we risk triggering tipping points. So I resonate with skeptical voices who say that we cannot bolt wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and EVs onto the existing system and expect to avert climate catastrophe. The problem is lodged in the basic programming language of the economic system with its demand for endless growth.

Digging down to the deeper roots

Degrowth expresses a negative and is widely regarded as politically untenable. It is also a misnomer as it really is not about less in all regards. In return for lower rates of physical consumption, it envisions vast increases in social services, education, leisure time, community connection, and overall quality of life, all of which people desire. Jason Hickel, perhaps the world’s most prominent advocate of degrowth, often uses the more apt term ecological socialism. Yes, it’s the big bad S word, target of Cold War propaganda that continues to this day, ignoring the fact that vast parts of our economy are in fact socialist. Social Security and Medicare, publicly owned electrical and water utilities, farm subsidies, to name a few. And under the barrage of an unbridled and oligopolistic capitalism making life increasingly unaffordable, socialism is actually more favored by younger generations bearing the brunt. Even a few politicians will wear the label. So let us use the term ecological socialism to describe the positive direction we want to seek. Or at least hold it in the quiver of terms we use to describe a positive future that is in fact sustainable. A positive is so much more attractive than a negative.

Yet I wonder if we’re culturally and politically capable of achieving such ends. Can we dig ourselves out of the hole we’ve made for ourselves? Can we even comprehend the scope of what we’re confronting? I’ve used the term “we” broadly in this piece to express a general human reality. But here I must get more specific, focusing on the “we” I know best, that of the western countries, particularly my own United States. While Asia is rapidly catching up, we still hold the greatest collective responsibility for climate pollution. The U.S. alone accounts for nearly a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emissions since 1750, while North America and Europe account for 57%.

Gallup in April put the number of U.S. of Americans who worry a great deal about global warming at 44%, a near high level. The Yale Program on Climate Communication finds somewhat higher levels, 64% who are “somewhat worried” including 29% who are “very worried.” Yet there’s a huge disconnect. People are buying more pickups and SUVs. Some car companies are ending production of sedans. House sizes are growing larger. Aviation continues to expand. We go on living and enjoying our lives as if nothing is happening, at least nothing that will affect us immediately. Mass culture seems largely about diversion and distraction. Though the popularity of superhero movies perhaps indicates we know something is amiss and are subconsciously looking for someone to save us.

Some people more aware of what’s coming down the pike seek to “ruggedize” their lives and move to safer places. “Climate refuges” such as western North Carolina inundated by Hurricane Helene. Or Duluth, Minnesota recently choked by Canadian wildfire smoke that gave it some of the worst air in the world. Or Vermont, both drowned by floods and suffocated by smokes in recent years. Some project the collapse of cities but do not seem to consider that this would create Mad Max countrysides. If you have food when people are starving you may need guns as well. And rural areas are as subject to storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires as cities. There is no safe place in a climate-disrupted world.

The problem with politics as usual

In 2014, Martin Gillens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University published a study of 1,779 U.S. policy issues from 1981-2002. They found “ . . . it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same . . . whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change.”

When there is low support for a policy proposal, only one in five among the top 10% of income earners, which the authors say is a good proxy for the top 2%, it has only an 18% chance of being adopted. With support of four in five, the chance of adoption is 45%. The figures for low and high support among interest groups are similar, 16% versus 45%

Write Gillens and Page, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Did we ever have a chance?

They add that their research this “provides strong support” that the U.S. system is one of economic elite domination rather than majority rule. In other words, we in the U.S. live in an oligarchy rather than a democracy. It hardly comes as a surprise, and explains a whole lot across a range of issues from health care to Gaza.

The upcoming November midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election are critically important. We need to restore some balance to the three branches of government, continually trampled by Trump and his corporate gangsters. Polls indicating a Democratic blowout stir great optimism. The Republican Party truly deserves to be bound and cast into the outer darkness for its complicity in Trump’s rampant law-breaking. As well because of the almost uniform denial of the climate crisis by Republican politicians.

But political realities underscored by Gillens and Page tell us we can’t count on a Democratic Capitol Hill and White House to fully rise to the climate crisis. Substantial Democratic congressional majorities in the first Obama term were not enough to pass a climate policy. I was up close and personal with that debacle, observing the inadequacy of the climate bill, its many gyrations, and its ultimate demise. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act did offer substantial support for clean energy technologies (and some not so clean) but set no carbon limits and in the end only narrowly passed. It proved vulnerable to gutting by Trump. The Democratic Party has climate champions, but also many politicians sold to corporate interests. Climate hushing pushed by party consultants is another bad sign.

It’s going to take a whole lot more than Democratic victories. Minimally, I believe the climate movement should create groups based in congressional districts and states that are purely devoted to watchdogging the climate performance of individual representatives and senators, and dogging them relentlessly to support measures that meet the challenge. It should do the same for major media outlets, continually calling out where they fail to connect climate disruption to weather extremes and disasters.

Assuming 2029 will bring a Democratic congress and presidency, restoration of policies favoring renewables and EVs can be expected. But the climate trajectory virtually assures it will not be enough. It strains credulity to believe systemic change, the kind that draws us back within those planetary boundaries, will emerge from the political system as it is presently constituted. Not with the power that special interests have within it. We must think it more deeply.

The need for disruption

Here I arrive at the most difficult point. A very particular “we,” those 2% sitting at the top of the oligarchic system, are directly responsible for our civilizational failure. The broader “we” is mostly locked out. We’re being taken to planetary hell by a narrow, mostly self-interested sliver of the population and members of the professional-managerial 10% that directly serve them. Most of us go along because we feel we have no other choice. Even those of us who are aware and alarmed are largely wrapped up in day-to-day issues of survival. Something truly mass is required.

Civil resistance scholar Erica Chenoweth published an often quoted study based on 323 popular uprisings from 1900-2006. She found when at least 3.5% of a population participates in resistance they always win. Chenoweth notes such participation reflects a far broader consensus in society. That percentage might seem small. But in the U.S. it would mean 12 million people, compared to the 8-9 million who showed up for the most recent No Kings Day. Brought to my local level, it would take the sustained engagement of around 30,000 Seattleites. Even in my notably politically rambunctious city that would be a huge challenge.

Successful civil resistance entails more than showing up at one-day demonstrations. It requires campaigns that build over time, backed by organization and strategic leadership. They must include disruptive actions such as civil disobedience and general strikes. To dislodge the power of economic elites, it’s going to take disruptive action. Chenoweth notes that such mass resistance actually spurs defections among elites who don’t want to be left out.

Such a movement is going to have to extend beyond climate and other ecological challenges. It will have to connect to the conditions of people’s lives, to the increasingly difficult challenges of survival ranging from housing, food and energy costs to medical expenses. It will have to bring together a broad front of social and ecological movements, the often discussed movement of movements, with a vision for systemic change. That is where we can bring the issues of climate and planetary boundaries home in ways people can understand and connect to their daily lives. Ultimately, this movement will have to address who holds the economic levers in society, what an economy is for, and who benefits.

We can begin to shape that movement at the grassroots, in the communities where we live. That is what much of this site deals with under its theme, “Building the Future in Place.” It is meant as a response to the challenges communities will face with multiple crises coming down the pike. I wrote a two-part scenario for how a community accomplishes this beginning here. It centers on organizing to build community-based institutions in at least six areas:

• Public Banking
• Social and Community Housing
• Community Energy Cooperatives
• Sustainable Materials
• Local Food Systems
• Worker Cooperatives.

A civilization failing in so many ways is going to bring increasing ruptures and crises. We can see them piling on. Economic and financial turmoil looms. AI seems on the verge of going out of control. Nobody really can predict its impacts on jobs. Wars rage and more are threatened. The same economic elite that is steering the world toward climate catastrophe is behind these other emerging crises, and for the same reason. Self-interested pursuit of wealth and power trumping all other objectives.

In my gut I sense big breakdowns coming. A lot of other people do too. There seems to be a general foreboding about the future, and for many good reasons. In the foreground of my own awareness, triggering those climate feedbacks is the most serious and long-term threat short of a nuclear war, itself not out of the question. A system that has come to this point is bleeding credibility. That provides fertile ground for raising questions about who rules it and why, then getting to that 3.5%.

The most profound moral question humanity has ever faced

Bill Calvin theorized it was abrupt climate disruptions that drove our evolution, giving us these big brains capable of mastering the planet. The question is – Can we master ourselves? Will we plunge into catastrophes that might eventuate in collapse and dieback, realizing outcomes resembling those Exeter worst cases? Or will we slow down climate change enough to give the planet and coming generations time to catch a break and adjust to changes that are inevitably coming? Are we going to leave a world with which our children and theirs can cope?

These are political and economic questions. But above all they embody the most profound moral question in the long existence of our species. Can our next evolution be one of solidarity with our fellow human beings and the other species with whom we share this planet, rather than through the brute realities of collapse and dieback? Will we learn the most profound lesson taught by all of humanity’s great wisdom paths, that of compassion for each other and those who are to come?

All those questions are in vast uncertainty. I’ve lined out my best sense of the answers, by no means sure they will be nearly enough. But I’m not going to quit. I may be floored by events as I have been these past weeks, but I’m always going to get up and try again. There’s too much at stake. May this be encouragement for you to do the same.

This piece has been edited for length. Read it in full here.