The political & social cost of climate crisis
We are fully aware of the consequences of advancing climate change on our planet's ecology, on our economies and our energy, health and food systems. The political and social consequences of unabated climate change and irreversible global warming are less understood and appreciated. These consequences are already changing societies. They are changing political dynamics.
Both within countries and beyond, climate change is exacerbating income and wealth inequalities. There are increasing differences in the capacity to cope with higher temperatures, for example, through expensive air-conditioning, the ability and wherewithal to move from more inclement to relatively less affected regions and to corner increasingly depleted resources to maintain unsustainable lifestyles longer, even if eventually a ravaged planet will sink all humanity.
Some assume that the use of artificial intelligence will find a way to tackle climate challenge. This is hubris of the worst kind. Time and again, the forces of nature have overwhelmed human artifice and will continue to do so with even greater intensity as the delicate threads that hold life together on our planet are snapped by human exploitation.
Our earth is a tiny speck in the vastness of our Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy is a speck in the unbounded vastness of the cosmos. Planetary extinction will be an insignificant episode in cosmic time. It is the humility that this should engender among humans which is missing and this lies at the heart of the ecological crisis, of which climate change is only an acute manifestation.
How does climate change alter societies? Climate change is changing weather patterns and vast areas of productive farmland. For example, farmlands in Africa, are becoming arid deserts. This triggers large population movements within countries and across borders. Families are disrupted, children suffer from malnutrition and irreparable psychological damage and the whole social fabric begins to disintegrate.
Their vulnerability exposes them to violence and exploitation by a powerful minority, which itself is contested by other such groups. Coercive power becomes the only instrument for holding a community together through fear.
Those who migrate across borders are no less exposed to violence and exploitation and the migration issue becomes, as it has in many western societies, an instrument of political mobilisation through fear of the "outsider." The stability of societies in both source countries as well as target countries, is disturbed. As families disintegrate and scatter, their members lose their anchor and identity.
Unstable societies are unequal societies; they are victims of oppression and injustice, they are often violent and cannot sustain a democratic polity. Stability does not mean stagnation. It means orderly change and aspirational societies. A sense of threat from the unfamiliar and fear of the outsider justifies authoritarian governance.
People become complicit in the limitation and even suspension of their own rights even as they applaud the violation of the rights of those they consider "outsiders". Populism is an expression of this pathology.
There is no doubt that the climate crisis — as also the larger ecological crisis the world confronts today — is the inevitable consequence of the fossil fuel-based pattern of economic development spawned by the industrial revolution of the 18th century. This has progressively become more resource- and energy-intensive and is mainly responsible for accelerating global warming and the larger ecological crisis.
Climate change is the result of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, accumulated in the earth's atmosphere, since the dawn of the industrial age. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for over a hundred years, diminishing only slowly and current carbon emissions add to that stock.
One measure of the stock is the concept of particles per molecule (ppm) of air. The higher the density of the ppm, the greater the extent of global warming. Before the industrial revolution, there were 260-280 ppm of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. The figure today is 422. A rise in ppm is associated with a corresponding rise in the global average temperature.
According to the International Panel on Climate Change, which is a gathering of climate scientists from across the world, a level of 450 ppm must not be exceeded in order to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 °C by the mid-century. Any rise beyond this would result in irreversible and catastrophic consequences to the planetary ecology. The ppm level is still rising at the rate of 2 ppm per annum, implying that the 450 limit will be breached in 17 years' time.
A special IPCC report in 2019 had warned that even a 1.5 °C rise would result in several irreversible and dangerous impacts and should not be crossed. But this implies an immediate capping of greenhouse gases, which is no longer a realistic possibility. 2024 was the hottest year on record and this year is expected to set another record.
The impacts are the most severe on ordinary people who cannot afford air-conditioning, have to travel and work in the open and cannot escape to milder locations. Inequality increases in our societies and this undermines the egalitarianism and sense of fraternity, which is the foundation of any democratic polity.
At the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC held in Dubai in 2023, the outcome document acknowledged for the first time that to deal with the climate crisis, we must "transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner."
This landmark decision raised hopes that, finally, the world would adopt the radical measures necessary to prevent further climate change. That hope has been swiftly belied. At the very next COP in Baku in November 2024, oil-producing and -exporting nations were successful in preventing the reaffirmation of the energy transition commitment.
Since then, Trump has become the US President and he has once again walked out of the Paris Climate Agreement and promised to allow unrestricted oil and gas exploration and production in the US. The world's most powerful corporate entities, which had signed on to promoting the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, have all walked out of their commitments.
The looming ecological crisis and the ravaging of the global commons will spare no country, neither rich nor poor. But, in the meantime, the underpinnings of a democratic polity with its commitment to equality, justice and fraternity are becoming its biggest casualty.
