New Year’s Day 2030

The future, as they say, starts here: as climate change kicks in, the decisions we make today will resonate 20 years on. James Goodman unveils a new Forum for the Future project mapping out possible scenarios for a world wrestling with a new climate – in every sense.

It’s New Year’s Day, 2030.
Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge which, sensing your intention, slides open, and you pull out a packet of pig-free bacon – the stuff that’s artificially grown in vats. You look absentmindedly for the eat-by date before remembering that, with today’s preservation technology, it lasts forever. The kitchen is awash with smart technology, all running on a tiny amount of energy, most of which comes from the solar paint on the roof. You look out of the window (which imperceptibly adjusts its tint to deflect glare). It’s another warm, sunny day, and by chance you spot a sulphur-plane passing over the slums in the distance. It’s almost invisible, but the craft is emitting a fine spray that helps keep the planet from boiling over. Still holding the bacon, you turn to the oven and ask it what else you want for breakfast.

Alternatively…
It’s New Year’s Day, 2030. Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge and yank it open. You grab the purple nutrition bar you’ve been saving, slump down on the sofa and call up the movie channel. Just a couple of minutes’ viewing proves it’s another propaganda film, featuring the valiant efforts of the ‘global volunteers’ in Antarctica who are helping to run the refugee settlements. But viewing is interrupted quickly by your Monitor, which announces that you left the fridge door open and are wasting too much energy. The broadcast is closed down and you’re docked several credits for the climate violation. Much more like that and you’ll be heading for the refugee settlements yourself.

Then again, it could be…
New Year’s Day, 2030. Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge and pull it open. Inside, almost everything is red, white and blue. As you grab a carton of English orange juice, you laugh to yourself about how, way back, local sourcing was so middle-class-aspirational. Now it’s almost impossible to get anything from outside the UK – and quite right, too. We can feed ourselves, thank you very much. You switch on the box and call up the King’s Speech you missed on Christmas Day because you were on duty. It’s inspiring stuff about pulling together as a nation. He still looks pretty youthful and vigorous in his Home Defence uniform. As you stand listening respectfully, you notice through the window defence patrol jets streaking across the solid blue sky.

Three versions of a possible future – each the result of decisions we start taking tomorrow. They may sound far-fetched, but in a world where global weather patterns are shifting almost as fast as the markets, we’d be unwise to plan for things staying the same.

They are among a range of scenarios emerging from expert opinion and analysis canvassed as part of Climate Futures [see box, opposite] – a joint venture between Forum for the Future and HP Labs. The aim: to provoke fresh thinking over the likely consequences of global warming itself – and of the varying strategies we might choose to tame (or adapt to) it. It’s far from an academic exercise. The way we tackle climate change won’t just shape the weather of the future; it will change everything from the way we do business to the way we are governed. The years to come will be defined as much by climate change as the 1930s were by depression or the 1950s by the Cold War. It will be everywhere in decisions and discussions, whether we are on the way to solving it – or not. We should, in short, plan for a climate-changed world, and not just climate change.

Worlds away

So, what might take us to one or other of those very different mornings?

Our opening scenario, Efficiency First, is a world in which market mechanisms have been redesigned to value carbon at exactly the right level to unleash a storm of low-carbon, high-tech innovation. It all began in the 2010s when, faced with increasingly gloomy scientific projections of climate impact, the EU pushed hard for more draconian measures – only to find itself outflanked by India and China. They were unwilling to sacrifice economic prosperity “to solve the West’s problem”.

But as it became clear that climate change posed a major threat to their own people, they brokered a new agreement: one based firmly on incentives and markets – not caps and restrictions. In this they had the enthusiastic support of the US which, with its vast renewable resources, saw a low-carbon future as an opportunity to rebuild its shattered economy. Together, they shared a resolute determination not to sacrifice economic growth for environmental gain, but to maintain the world’s drive for development through growth.

“Solar arrays cover mile after mile of the Sahara”

Processes and products began to achieve startling efficiency gains, all in the name of profit. Super-computers took system design to a new level of sophistication – and even took over a range of decision-making and strategy-setting tasks. Cars went electric – and two-car families became more common around the globe. Energy generation was massive and bold: huge nuclear reactors sprang up, concentrated solar arrays covered mile after mile of north African desert, and a new generation of computer-controlled clean coal power stations piped their exhaust straight into empty gas fields. Striking new geo-engineering projects sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and deflected sunlight to reduce global warming.

Growth in carbon dioxide emissions flatlined in 2020 and began to fall slowly. When the news broke, there were celebrations all around the world. Yes, the effects of climate change were still being felt, and from Bangladesh to Florida the world’s poor were still suffering. But the impetus to ‘grow the solution to climate change’ gained ever more momentum, despite misgivings in some quarters about the ‘ethics-free’ economy it had created. In 2030, global warming is starting to feel like yesterday’s problem. Now countries debate the merits of returning the world to pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gas concentrations.

Too good to be true? Perhaps – but there are some serious downsides to Efficiency First. A drive for growth at all costs has widened the gap between rich and poor, and prompted growing social conflict. Meanwhile, nature is in headlong retreat. Ecosystems everywhere need close management or risk collapse. Wilderness is all but vanished from the planet, and natural resources are in short supply. The world is in a deadly race to develop new technologies, materials and processes before the whole house of cards collapses.

“The Carbon Monitor keeps your watts under surveillance”

By contrast, another set of predictions leads to the Environmental War Economy world. This is a world that woke up late to climate change. It’s one where governments fought shy of a global agreement until 2017, by which time the accumulated evidence of catastrophic shifts in weather patterns meant they saw no choice but to take draconian action. Out went the soft talk of incentives and persuasion; in came hard policy and tough regulation. As time went on, the state took a stronger and stronger role, rationalising whole industry sectors to reduce their climate change impacts, and even putting Carbon Monitors in people’s homes to watch their energy use. And so in 2030, greenhouse gas emissions are at last beginning to decline dramatically – but the cost to individual liberty – and that of business, too – has been severe.

Such a vision might seem alarmist – but some of our climate futures experts saw elements of it, at least, as inevitable. According to this view, we currently have a window of opportunity – perhaps for just a few more years – to use markets to combat climate change. Miss that window and we’ll be forced into more immediate, sweeping measures. For business, it will become a question of complying, or facing the consequences.

Both these worlds assume that there is some sort of global consensus for action, sooner or later. Given the snail’s pace of progress so far, that can’t be taken for granted. Which might leave us living in our third scenario: Protectionist World. This suggests what could happen if national interests start to take priority over any global drive to mitigate climate change.

"Even the food flies the flag"

It’s a world where governments have turned their back on burdensome treaty obligations, and poured resources into protecting themselves from the consequences of climate change running rampant. They’ve effectively pulled up the drawbridge: raising trade barriers and even going to war to secure water and food supplies. Climate mitigation is cast aside in favour of a flurry of selfish adaptation measures, producing a ‘tragedy of the commons’ of gigantic proportions. By 2030, world trade has shrunk dramatically; the UN is on the point of collapse and globalised civilisation as we know it today is facing a very uncertain future.

This is a world that nobody wants and many fear. Even greater, then, is the need to understand what might lead us down this road – and do whatever possible to avoid it.

Room for optimism

These aren’t the only outcomes imaginable: the Climate Futures project identified several more scenarios, some more ‘optimistic’ than others – but all designed to get people thinking seriously about what a climate-changing world might be like.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The challenge of mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may be looking tougher almost by the day – but the process of thinking about future directions of policy, business, technology and individual attitudes leaves a lot of room for optimism. Four out of five of the worlds we explored were certainly on their way to accommodating climate change in one way or another by 2030. Major change is needed, yes, but even small steps taken now can open up previously unimagined paths of hope.

13 October 2008

James Goodman