Climate Adaptation A Two-Phase Future
Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2025-02-05
Climate Adaptation: A Two-Phase Future
by Douglass Carmichael
This is a draft for my blog. Email Doug or Pete with ideas on where it might go.
Many efforts, mostly small, toward recovery from the bad effects of climate change are emerging with vigor. Yet many regions and populations are still, and will remain in rapid and consequential decline. Two major efforts will be important: the development of people, and the development of food and its contexts. Viability under existing and evolving conditions will be hard to achieve.
When trying to implement the needed agricultural and social development, it is much easier for people to understand what is being asked of them if we lay out paths forward that are already prefigured in their long-standing desires, and goals that don't require new language and living arrangements.
People talk about what to do after climate events as if we can get from here to a better world in one phase spread out in time. That step is often called “energy transition.” All versions of this trend usually have the goal of the hope that the rest of the economy remains functioning as is, with no substantive change in the legal structure of society. This is not likely as the first step is likely to be toward a resurrection of the culture, tech, and society we are leaving behind and is the cause of the social and ecological collapse through the over-extraction of wealth from the people and the land.
I am proposing that we think of redevelopment post-climate as a two-phase project.
In the first phase, we go along with the way things seem to be going - reorganizing work in projects using industrial techniques and highly processed insecticides and fertilizers. We can expect - and hope - that these efforts, facing very difficult climate conditions of varying mixtures of heat, drought, rain, and flood. The proposal goes along with the way people are already expecting a plausible positive future they can align with.
This attempt to reestablish old methods will face strong emerging tsunamis of climate extremes. These well-meaning efforts will run out of energy, and deal with crop (and human) failure because of drought...
If climate destruction comes on too fast, people will scurry to find short-term make-do projects. I have called these lifeboat strategies: take enough to survive. Because these are going to be the immediate chosen path, it is important for local leaders to work on provisioning the lifeboats now. We have some examples of this process underway, with very interesting sidebars.
For example, it is important to see that Bhutan's shift of national accounting from GDP to GNH, gross national happiness, is fairly well understood internationally, though depth is uncertain. The key to GNH is the understanding that people are better off than they think they are and that the difference is a shift in perspective as to what constitutes quality of life.
more coming
Related:
- Douglass Carmichael (author)
- 2025 (year)
- Topics: Climate and Environment