The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
In World War II, the United States and its Allies rallied their citizens to labor, sacrifice, and produce like never before to defeat fascism. Ecologist Paul Gilding expresses hope in The Great Disruption that, as the depth of the climate crisis hits, the world will in like fashion launch into wartime-like mobilization to avert ecological and socioeconomic catastrophe.
Resource depletion and altered climate patterns will universally wreck economies, threaten public health, and spark violent social tensions, Gilding argues. The world community will face system stresses severe enough to end civilization as we know it.
And the world will respond in force. People will unite to transform economic life, erase carbon pollution, and tackle consumerism, poverty, and conflict. Like their ancestors in World War II, they will accept new taxes and rationing of electricity and gasoline. They will also participate on some never-before-seen changes: shutdowns of fossil-fuel industries and their replacements with renewable-energy alternatives.
There is no sense passively waiting for all of this to happen, however, Gilding warns: We can spare future civilization much pain by taking the initiative now. He calls for a groundswell of action to cut carbon-dioxide emissions in half by 2023, move to net-zero emissions worldwide by 2038, and rebuild a new economy over the decades that follow while deploying geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He foresees that these efforts could limit warming to a manageable 1°C by 2100.
The home front in World War II is a real memory to many of today’s senior citizens. In The Great Disruption, Gilding takes a unique approach to the climate-change dilemma, one that applies this older generation’s historical perspective, and in so doing makes an eloquent call to global action toward sustainability that readers of any age can appreciate.
Like us on Facebook
WorldFutureSoc on Twitter