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UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries
A landmark report by the United Nations concludes that ‘global collapse’ is becoming more likely. But was it watered-down before being published?
When the United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ (GAR2022) in May, the world’s attention was on its grim verdict that the world was experiencing an accelerating trend of natural disasters and economic crises. But not a single media outlet picked up the biggest issue: the increasing probability of civilisational collapse.
Buried in the report, which was endorsed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is the finding that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are escalating the risk of a “global collapse” scenario.
This stark conclusion appears to be the first time that the UN has issued a flagship global report finding that existing global policies are accelerating toward the collapse of human civilisation. Yet somehow this urgent warning has remained unreported until now.
The report does not suggest that this outcome is inevitable or specify how close to this possibility we are. But it does confirm that, without radical change, that’s where the world is heading.
Planetary Boundaries
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework are a set of social, economic, legal, political and institutional measures to reduce “disaster risk and losses” – both involve targets to 2030 which the world is in danger of failing to meet.
That failure, however, is directly linked to the rate at which human activities are interfering with natural systems, in particular, ‘planetary boundaries’.
The planetary boundaries framework was developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009 to provide what it calls a “science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilise the Earth system at the planetary scale”…
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GLOBAL BANKS PRIVATELY PREPARE FOR‘Dangerous Levels’ of Imminent Civil Unrest in Western Homelands
Nafeez Ahmed reports on financial institutions preparing for social breakdown as a result of energy and food shocks
Global banks and investment firms are bracing themselves for an “unprecedented” upsurge in civil unrest in the US, UK and Europe as energy and food price spikes are set to drive costs of living to astronomical levels, Byline Times can exclusively reveal.
The information comes from the head of a ‘financial institutions group’ – which provides expertise and advisory services to other banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions – at one of the largest investment firms in the US.
The senior investment executive, who spoke to Byline Times on condition of anonymity because the information he revealed is considered highly sensitive, said that contingency planners at top financial institutions believe “dangerous levels” of social breakdown in the West are now all but inevitable, and imminent. An outbreak of civil unrest is expected to occur anytime this year, but most likely in the coming months as the impact of the cost of living crisis begins to saturate the lives of “everyone”.
Well-to-do middle classes will find it hard to afford staple foods and pay bills. So we are anticipating dangerous levels of civil unrest that could spiral into an unprecedented social crisis
The executive works at a leading Wall Street firm which is considered a systemically important financial institution by the US Financial Stability Board. These are institutions whose functioning is considered critical to the US economy, and whose failure could trigger a financial crisis.
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OIL SYSTEM COLLAPSING SO FAST It May Derail Renewables Warn French Government Scientists
Forget ‘peak oil’. Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the oil and gas industries are cannibalising themselves as the costs of fossil fuel extraction mount
A team of French government energy scientists are warning that the collapse of the global oil system is coming so rapidly it could derail the transition to a renewable energy system if it doesn’t happen fast enough. In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.
But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming exponentially more and more energy just to keep extracting oil and gas. That’s why they’ve entered a downwards spiral of increasing costs of production, diminishing profits, rising debt and irreversible economic decline.
Hanging on for dear life to the old, dying fossil fuel paradigm is a recipe for civilisational suicide.
The implication is that global energy shortages and price spikes will be a taste of things to come if we stay dependent on fossil fuels. Yet a growing narrative has instead wrongly pinpointed the ‘clean energy transition’ as the culprit.
The Economist, for instance, describes the global gas price spikes as “the first big energy shock of the green era”, blaming inadequate investment in renewables and “some transition fossil fuels” (like gas). This could lead to “a popular revolt against climate policies.”
This implies that the fundamental driver of global energy volatility is the transition away from fossil fuels: but this flawed narrative has it exactly backwards.
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Gas Crisis Reveals Imminent End of Europe’s Fossil Fuel Age
Nafeez Ahmed sees the current energy crisis as a symptom of a deeper malaise – reliance on Russia and fossil fuels – which could lead to spiralling inflation and a perfect global economic storm
“… the problems we are seeing are temporary. We’re experiencing bottlenecks in all kinds of things – huge stresses – as the world wakes up from COVID. It’s like everybody going to put the kettle on at the end of a TV programme.”
But Boris Johnson is wrong.
The current price hikes are a warning sign of a deeper shift: a turning point of global proportions that requires a very different approach from business-as-usual. Though no longer rich in fossil fuel resources, consistently poor policy choices mean that the UK and Europe as a whole remain dependent on them. The failure to recognise the implications has set us up for increased geopolitical dependence on Russia, and a future of intensifying, intertwined cyclical climate and energy crises that will amplify the chance of triggering a series of shocks that could devastate the global economy.
To understand what’s happening, we need to go beyond banal headlines and simplistic reductions of the crisis to one or the other factor, and instead attempt to understand the crisis through a whole systems lens.
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How to Save the World in 15 YearsPart One
As the IPCC issues its direst warnings yet about an inevitable rise in global warming into the 1.5C danger zone, Nafeez Ahmed proposes a better way out of its dystopian vision
All five scenarios in the new report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published this month, show the planet on track to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius ‘safe limit’ for global warming within the next 20 years. Only one scenario, involving ambitious reductions of carbon emissions to net zero as well as a further withdrawal of the carbon already in the atmosphere, would see global average temperatures eventually dropping back down to 1.4C by the end of the century.
This is the direst warning ever received from an IPCC report, agreed by 195 countries, and it suggests that, on our current course, the climate danger zone is now unavoidable.
Even with the most dramatic emissions reductions possible, the Earth is about to enter a 1.5C world and set to stay within a 1.5-1.4C range for much of the century. Our best hope, in this scenario, is to be in a position to cool the planet while we are in the danger zone.
This suggests that the Paris Agreement, premised on the goal of reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change, is too little, too late. Further underlying the IPCC’s scenarios is the assumption that 1.4C will be significantly different to 1.5C. But there is mounting evidence that, due to the complexities of the Earth’s system, 1.4C will not be meaningfully safer.
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LEAKED HOME OFFICE CALL Reveals Government Wants Economy to ‘Continue Running’ As ‘We Will All Get’ COVID-19 Anyway
LEAKED HOME OFFICE CALL Reveals Government Wants Economy to ‘Continue Running’ As ‘We Will All Get’ COVID-19 Anyway
Nafeez Ahmed reports on Home Office private advice suggesting a ‘zombie herd immunity’ policy risking hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Leaked recordings of a Home Office conference call on Tuesday, exclusively obtained by Byline Times, reveal that the Government has all but given up in its fight against the Coronavirus and is intent on simply finding “a method of managing it within the population”.
The recordings show Home Office Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute stating repeatedly that the Government believes “we will all get” COVID-19 eventually. The call further implied that the Government now considers hundreds of thousands of deaths unavoidable over a long-term period consisting of multiple peaks of the disease.
Premature Defeatism
While urging the importance of reducing the burden on the NHS by staying at home, Shute downplayed the risk of people contracting the virus at work.
He said: “It’s perfectly okay to carry on around your business. And it’s vitally important that you do as there’s a whole bunch of supply chains and the economy that needs to continue running… So carrying on with your normal work is not putting you in harms way anymore so than staying at home or going out shopping. So I keep coming back to this point that we are all going to get this at some point. And it’s about making sure that we have a really strong NHS there to support us when we do get sick.”
The policy being communicated by the Home Office privately among Government staffers is at odds with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statement at a press conference three weeks ago that the next 12 weeks could “turn the tide of this disease”.
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