CHAPTER 1

Imagining the End

A PERSONAL JOURNEY

Staring at Catastrophe

It is my profound belief that humanity is on a suicidal course, headedstraight for catastrophe. I speak of catastrophe in the singular, not to designatea single event, but a whole system of disruptions, discontinuities,and basic structural changes that are the consequence of exceeding criticalthresholds. Feeding on one another and growing in strength, the calamitieswe are witnessing today herald an age of unprecedented violence. Myheart sinks when I think of the future that awaits my children and theirown children. Anyone who hopes that the present century will escape thehorrors of the previous one will already have forgotten the inconceivablebrutality of that gruesome September day in 2001. There is a widespreadexpectation that science and technology will come to our rescue, as theyhave always done in the past. When I was a child, we were taught in schoolthat the misfortunes of humanity were all due to the fact that scientificprogress had not been accompanied by a comparable advance in moralwisdom. Science is pure and noble, but human beings are still weigheddown by evil and sin. The naiveté of this lesson beggars belief.

I owe to Ivan Illich, that great critic of industrial society and oneof my mentors, the insight that humanity has always had to be on itsguard against three types of threat, and not simply the two that immediatelycome to mind: the brute force of nature and the brutality ofhuman beings—the earthquakes that reduce glorious cities to rubbleand the barbarism that massacres, mutilates, and rapes their inhabitantsin time of war. By learning more about nature, human beings havepartially succeeded in taming it; by better understanding the mechanismsof hatred and vengeance, they have come to see that it is possibleto live in peace with their enemies, and in this way to build lastingcivilizations.

But there is a third front on which it is much more difficult to fight,for here the enemy is ourselves. We do not recognize this enemy, though ithas our own features. Sometimes we suppose it to be the agent of a malignand treacherous Nature, sometimes of a malevolent and vengeful Nemesis.Yet the evil that besieges us from this direction is a consequence of our ownfaculty of action, which is to say our ability to irreversibly set in motion processesthat are liable to turn against us, with lethal effect. As a great admirerof the work of Hannah Arendt, Illich was well aware that this faculty operatesfirst of all upon human beings. Words and deeds, separately or in combination,create stories for which no single person can claim authorship,and that sometimes end in tragedy. It is from the primordial experience ofaction acquiring autonomy in relation to the intentions of actors that notonly the idea of the sacred, but also religion, tragic drama, and politics—somany real and symbolic systems that serve to set limits to the capacity toact—were born. The wholly novel character of modern societies foundedon science and technology derives from the fact that they are capable ofunleashing irreversible processes in and on nature itself.

Fifty years ago, with extraordinary prescience, Arendt analyzed thistransformation of action in her major work, The Human Condition. Thedroughts, hurricanes, and tsunamis we are now witnessing—and indeedthe weather itself (which has always served as a metonym for nature)—areincreasingly the products of our behavior. We will not have made them,in the sense of fabrication, for this activity (called poiesis by the Greeks),unlike action (praxis), has not only a beginning but also an end, in bothsenses of the word: goal and terminus. Instead they will be the unanticipatedresults of a sequence of events that we have initiated, often withoutknowing it or intending it.

One of the chief threats weighing upon the future of mankind, it iscommonly said, is the energy crisis. The crisis is real: our civilization isfounded on the proliferation of mechanical devices designed to satisfy ourmany needs, and soon there will not be enough fuel to keep them going.But in fact there is no energy shortage; indeed, the very phrase ought tobe banned—as energetically as possible! It is quite true, of course, thatfossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) are nearing exhaustion, and that they will havedisappeared well before the end of the century if emerging powers suchas China, India, and Brazil persist in blithely following the same path ofdevelopment we have chosen. It is also true that alternative energies arenot yet at hand. Dark clouds can already be seen gathering on the horizon,portents of a merciless war between the great commercial nations, whichcan be counted on to fight one another with desperate ferocity for possessionof the last barrel of oil and the last ton of coal. Increasing pressureon prices, amplified by a major financial crisis, may well degenerate intowidespread panic. Libertarian and other conservative economists, placingtheir faith in the efficiency of market mechanisms they trust to makewhatever substitutions are necessary, discount the prospect of catastrophe:new reserves, as though by a miracle, will rapidly grow in number, forit will now be profitable to mine deposits that are not easily accessible,both on land and beneath the sea; energies that used not to be economicalto produce, such as solar energy and biofuels, will suddenly becomeeconomical, and so on.

But this faith merely conceals the extreme gravity of the threatposed by climate change. Allow me to cite a figure that every citizenof the world, every person in a position to decide policy, even at a verymodest level, ought to know and reflect upon. The technical advisorsto the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cannot sayprecisely what the average rise in global temperature will be betweennow and the end of the century. They do know, however, that halfof this uncertainty results from an unknown, namely, which policiesfor reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will be adopted in the comingyears and decades. This situation presents an interesting case of circularcausation from the philosopher's point of view, since the policiesthat are adopted will themselves depend upon the way in which theseriousness of the threat is analyzed—and this analysis depends inpart on the uncertainty that hampers forecasts of the extent of globalwarming.

The same experts fear that climate change will have dreadful consequences.I do not wish to dwell on this point, for anyone who wishes toinform himself—and it would be either criminal or insane not to do so—isable to choose from among a large number of excellent studies. I should likesimply to emphasize the following aspect of the matter: if the trends so farobserved continue, the climate system will enter into a chaotic state thatwill cause a set of key variables to reach critical values (popularly known astipping points). Exceeding these thresholds will trigger in turn a series ofirreversible and catastrophic events, amplifying a self-reinforcing dynamicthat may be likened to a plunge into the abyss. The deep circulation of theAtlantic may be altered, for example, bringing about a secular cooling trendin Europe that would have dramatic implications for agricultural production;or the permafrost that covers much of the Arctic regions may melt,releasing gigantic quantities of methane, one of the most dangerous greenhousegases; or the Arctic ice cap may shrink further, causing sea levels torise throughout the Northern Hemisphere. We do not know exactly wherethese thresholds lie. When they are discovered, it will be because they havealready been exceeded, at which point it will be too late.

I now come to the figure that I promised to reveal a moment ago: one-third.If we wish to avoid the irremediable disaster that an increase of threedegrees Celsius (fractionally more than five degrees Fahrenheit) in the averageglobal temperature by the end of the century would represent, humanity mustforce itself not to extract from the earth more than one-third of its presentlyknown carbon deposits, in the form of oil, gas, and coal. It is not scarcity thatshould concern us, then, but an overabundance of fossil resources: we have threetimes too much. If more than a third of this supply is used up, the spontaneousdynamics of the market will produce an uncontrollable stampede inwhich the weakest will be trampled in a mad rush by governments and corporationsand individuals to claim the last remaining resources for themselves.

Popular opinion has begun to show signs of a growing awareness ofthe mounting peril, but there is little sense of urgency. Official reports suchas the Stern Review, issued by the British government, and films such as AlGore's An Inconvenient Truth have shaken public complacency, the first byshowing that it would be much less expensive to fight climate change thanto let the world economy collapse under the effects of environmental degradation,the second by playing on emotions and fear. This joint appeal to theheart and the wallet notwithstanding, one often hears it said, by the highestgovernment officials, that two dangers threaten the survival of the humanrace: the growing scarcity of fossil resources and a warming climate. Theuse of the conjunction here reveals a logical error: if the climate is becomingwarmer, then resources are not scarce; they are overabundant. There is nobetter illustration why the various elements of what at the outset I called thecatastrophe must not be considered in isolation from one another. In doingthis, one risks concluding the opposite of the truth.

It is a remarkable fact that many—though by no means all—scientistsare far more clear-sighted regarding these matters than the general public.It is remarkable because they courageously confront a truth that is ever soinconvenient for them: the civilization they have helped to create, basedon the unrestrained development of science and technology, is in dangerof dying. In January 2007, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking,renowned for his work in cosmology, and Martin Rees, Astronomer Royalof Great Britain, advanced the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock by twominutes. Three years later, it was pushed back by one minute. In January2012, it was moved forward again by a minute, so that we are now only fiveminutes from midnight—the moment when humanity will have annihilateditself. The Doomsday Clock was established in 1947 by a group ofphysicists who were shocked, somewhat belatedly, by the dropping of atomicbombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The clock was to be administered bythe governing board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal devotedto warning the public of the dangers posed by this new and incomparablypowerful weapon of mass destruction. In the first year of its existence, at thebeginning of the nuclear age, the hand of the clock was set at seven minutesbefore midnight. Since then it has been moved forward and pushed backtwenty times. In i953, when the United States and the Soviet Union testedthermonuclear devices within nine months of each other, the needle cameclosest to midnight, separated from it by only two minutes. In 1991, withthe collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it was pushedback to seventeen minutes, the earliest setting since the clock's inception;then advanced to seven minutes, in 2002, following the terrorist attacks ofthe previous year in New York and Washington.

We stand today five minutes from midnight, which is to say twominutes closer than in i947. Three arguments are put forward to justifythis sinister prognostication. First, there is the fact that humanity hasentered into a second nuclear age, in which the dangers of continuing proliferationare now aggravated by terrorism. Additionally, the taboo againstusing the bomb that prevailed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki has begunto lose its force—a result of the passage of time and creeping forgetfulness.Finally, and for the first time in the history of the Doomsday Clock, areason has been advanced that has nothing to do with the nuclear threat.It has to do instead with the risks associated with climate change.

Some of the greatest scientists of the age therefore recognize thathumanity can do away with itself in one of two ways: either throughinternal violence—civil war on a global scale—or through destructionof the natural environment necessary to its survival. These two methodsare evidently not independent of each other. The first tragic manifestationsof a warming climate will not be a rise in the level of the oceans,the increasing frequency of heat waves and other extreme weather events,or the drying up of entire regions of the planet, but rather the conflictsand wars caused by the massive migrations that anticipation of theseevents will provoke. The Norwegian Nobel Committee laid emphasis onexactly this point in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Al Goreand the IPCC in 2007.

The destruction of nature produces violence, and violence destroysnature in return. Human beings do not destroy nature because they hateit. They destroy it because, in hating one another, they fail to take duecare to protect the third parties that are liable to be injured by their conflict—foremostamong them the natural environment. Indifference andblindness kill many more living things than hatred alone.

Some scientists mention a third threat to the survival of humanity:the unrestrained competition to develop advanced technologies and tobring about their "convergence." It is remarkable that they should takenotice of such a threat, for it is precisely on this technology race that theworld is counting in order to be able to cope with the other threats. Butwhat if, as we may well ask, the cure were to prove worse than the disease?

Scientists cannot avoid being the bearers of bad news: they have, asMartin Rees makes clear, special obligations. Alas, their warnings have notbeen heard. Signs of the catastrophic future that awaits us, of the chaoticdisruption of the climate to come and the unprecedented violence that willresult from it, remain largely unheeded. The prophets of doom are mockedand jeered. In a world dominated by economic rivalry, the relationship tothe future is conceived in terms of price movements that anticipate futurescarcities. This is why imaginary energy shortages have overtaken the climatethreat in the popular mind: the climate threat is too abstract to comprehend.Even when we see catastrophe staring us in the face, we do notbelieve what we know to be the case. In part this is because the willingnessof a community to recognize the existence of a risk depends on the degreeto which it is convinced that solutions exist. Many, if not most, businessexecutives and political leaders today understand that radical changes inour way of life are the price that must be paid for avoiding disaster; butbecause this price—amounting to a renunciation of "progress"—seems tothem exorbitant, they inevitably succumb to what the philosopher GüntherAnders called "blindness toward the Apocalypse."

The problem, then, is that catastrophe is not believable: it is held tobe possible only once it has occurred, and by that point it is too late. Thisobstacle can be overcome, I believe, only if an utterly new metaphysicalconception is adopted of our relationship to time, which I have calledenlightened doomsaying. One cannot help but be struck by the fact that,in France at least, the technocracy is by and large much more alert to theseriousness of the problem than the general public. But its role is to proposesolutions, not to play Cassandra. The admirably rigorous work of onesenior civil servant in particular, Henri Prévot, has shown that if Francewere to commit itself to a program of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions bytwo-thirds in the next thirty or forty years, it would benefit from doingthis, even if it were obliged to act alone; and, what is more, that such a programcould be carried out without either excessive expenditures or majorchanges in the way people are accustomed to live today. It neverthelesswould require a drastic overhaul of the country's economic infrastructure,and therefore could succeed only if there were an unwavering politicaldetermination to put it into effect without delay—which brings us backonce more to the question of the state of public opinion.