“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.”
– Walidah Imarisha
By The Climate Underground
Let’s get real here. Catastrophic climate change is now ravaging the United States. Cities like Altadena, Lahaina, and Paradise have been reduced to cinders. Oklahoma is on fire. Also, as climate scientists have been predicting for decades, the Arctic Vortex has collapsed, causing winter storms to move further south. Poor people are freezing to death in their homes in Texas, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Puerto Rico is still without a functioning electrical grid after being hit by a devastating hurricane nearly a decade ago. This is what climate collapse looks like. We are in it. And if we continue on this path, things are going to get much, much worse.
Yet it is absolutely possible to turn things around. Scotland is already meeting 113% of its energy needs using renewables (there’s so much clean energy there, they are exporting it to other places). If we were to direct just 5% of U.S. steel production to the task, we could meet the entire planet’s energy needs using wind energy alone in just 5 years. (Frierson 2022). This rapid rollout of renewables could be accompanied by accelerated research into and distribution of rare-metal-free batteries (especially sodium ion batteries) — allowing us to fully decarbonize and electrify the grid while avoiding unjust forms of extractivism.
Right now, there are seven small island nations at risk of being lost to the sea if we exceed 1.5°C of global temperature change. We still have time to prevent this. If we start working in 2028 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by just 10% a year — with complete elimination of emissions by 2038 — we would just barely avoid breaching the 1.5°C mark. If you don’t believe us, check out this simulation we made with the MIT climate simulator: tinyurl.com/EarthWinScenario. It can be done. We still have time to reverse course and save billions of human and non-human lives.
Sometimes it can be difficult to envision a best-case scenario when we are bombarded with visions of doom by the corporate media. Even the scientific models used by world leaders to understand climate change lack feasible best-case scenarios. This has created a problem that LA-based climate educator Thomas Yount calls “doom bias.” Doom bias leads us to think we’ve already lost when we haven’t, which plays into the hands of fossil fuel interests.
Many exciting alternative visions of the future are emerging that are aligned with a new scientific and activist movement called “degrowth” or sometimes “postgrowth.” Right now, world leaders tend to pursue economic growth at the expense of all else, but GDP growth is a horrible measure of success: it leaves human well-being and ecological care out of the equation.
The postgrowth movement pushes back against the use of GDP measurements as a definition of success and urges leaders and policymakers to instead prioritize human and ecological well-being. Jason Hickel has defined degrowth as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.” A degrowth transition means moving beyond the myth of “green capitalism,” and instead working to ensure surplus is directed towards human well-being and ecological care.
This means scaling back useless work and overproduction, and reducing forms of inequality and inequity, while dismantling systemic forms of oppression. It also means we all get more time to spend on leisure, on building meaningful lives, playing games, pursuing life-long education, doing arts and crafts, and caring for each other and our communities — human and non-human alike. It involves ending forms of colonial and imperial exploitation through processes like democratization, delinking, demilitarization, and decolonization.
One great way to tackle doom bias in our communities is to circulate feasible visions of best-case climate scenarios rooted in social justice. Below, we’ve created two scenarios that do just that. As you read through these scenarios, you might be drawn to one scenario more than the other. That’s okay! And it’s okay if some of your friends and comrades gravitate towards a different scenario than you. An important part of movement-building is learning to understand and acknowledge that we often all have slightly different visions in our minds of what a best-case scenario will look like. Even if our visions differ slightly, it is important to find common ground, and to keep dreaming. As we’ve been saying in Berkeley since 1969: The trip belongs to whoever dreams.
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Two best-case scenarios for human and ecological well-being
In both of the scenarios below, humans succeed in limiting planetary warming to 1.5°C while improving human well-being and building a more equal, equitable, and just society. Here is what the scenarios look like when mapped onto an alignment grid:
Feel free to use this alignment grid and add a best-case scenario of your own. Let’s keep workshopping our visions and hold space for differently desirablebest-case scenarios. Note: The scenarios below are visions of the future rooted in the present, so they are written in present-continuous tense.
Scenario 1: Mycelial Eco-Social Healing (ecology-embracing, global cooperation is rooted in local participation).
Following the crises of the early 21st century, localized networks of care and resistance sprout up. These movements are united by a shared understanding: The wrong ICE is melting. United by a great love of neighbors that transcends borders, people everywhere begin to listen to the voices of refugees and immigrants, building understanding about the systemic forces that forced them to flee their homes.
A demand for “delinking and decolonization” emerges around the world, and soon all foreign debt of the so-called “Global South” is forgiven — that debt was only there because of capitalist meddling anyway. Freed from unjust foreign obligations, these regions rapidly shift towards caring for their own people, rather than letting capitalists tear up the ecology and society of the region so to pay off unjust foreign debts.
By the early 2030s, as a systems of transnational systemic racism are dismantled, a global grassroots transformation unfolds that centers the rise of more democratic, localized, and consent-based ways of doing things. Rape culture is replaced with nurturance culture. There is a rapid uptick in worker cooperatives, union co-ops, land trusts, commons, and neighborhood farms. Work becomes slower, more meaningful, and more social. Convivial technologies like the bicycle rise to a new level of social prominence.
People begin to focus more on living fully within their bodies, and cultivating the ability to connect deeply with others. The internet continues to play a role in supporting coordination, but communication is re-centered on face-to-face encounters: TikTok is out, storytelling at the campfire is in. The border between economics and ecology are blurred.
Ecosystems come to be understood as commons that must be intentionally and collectively managed. The next big trans-national project becomes the work of coordinating care of the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, soil, and biodiversity. The harvesting of wind and sunlight to make energy comes to be seen as cultural practice. World hunger is ended thanks to networked Regenerative Agriculture co-ops, guided by the principals of agroecology, Indigenous wisdom, and mutual aid.
Long-ignored treaties and agreements with Indigenous groups are finally respected, sparking the widespread return of land to Indigenous hands. Disability accommodations are prioritized, ensuring disabled voices can more easily stay active in guiding the transition. Cityscapes are transformed to be more walkable, accessible, inviting, and green. This transition occurs not because people wait around for collapse, but because they get proactive, draw the line, and build a global, mycelial economic network that is fully authoritarian-proof. They thought they could bury us, but we were seeds.
Scenario 2: Fully luxury Eco-socialism (technology-embracing, local power networked into global cooperation).
In the wake of the crises of the early 21st century, people begin to turn away from the agendas of the corporate elite, united by shared understandings that spread rapidly thanks to networked communication technology. Social media — valued for its role in fueling resistance by allowing footage of atrocities to circulate — comes to be owned and governed by co-ops and the public, putting an end to addictive algorithms and Cambridge Analytica-style election interference.
De-privatization unfolds rapidly: Private prisons are abolished, medical debt and student debt is forgiven, and the predatory systems at the root of all these things are dismantled. Guided by a global movement for energy sovereignty, locally-managed renewable microgrids appear everywhere — making it impossible for dictators to cut off a region’s energy supply. Patterns of strategic economic resistance unfold at every scale — led by unions and federated co-ops — giving rise to universal healthcare, free public transit, housing for all, and “library socialism.” Many regions adopt a program of “Democratically Coordinated Sustainability,” guaranteeing meaningful work for all who want it — work that often centers rebuilding public intuitions so they can truly be by the people and for the people.
Decentralized access to real-time Earth data allows everyone actively to monitor the health of the atmosphere, soil, oceans, and biodiversity. Monitoring the health of Earth’s systems becomes a popular pastime, thanks to games and media that make the monitoring of planetary health fun and exciting. Soon, the work of coordinating care for the planet gains the same level of attention and prestige once reserved for space travel. Earth systems engineers work hand-in-hand with Indigenous experts, farmers, artists, social scientists, and ecological economists to keep the economy in balance with the ecology.
Cities and workplaces are redesigned through participatory processes to center social well-being and ecological care, while upholding the values of infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC). Disabled people are actively included, and their contributions valued. Large monocrop farms are dismantled, and Regenerative Agriculture is subsidized. Vertical farms spring up in many cities with public supermarkets on the ground floor, allowing city people to easily access fresh food, locally grown in skyscraper-sized greenhouses. The prime directive of Free and Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC) takes a central role in guiding this transition to an environmentally stable, socially just economy.
The UNDRIP, a global declaration of Indigenous rights created as part of an Indigenous-led process, comes to bettered respected and upheld, and Indigenous people come to be better included in all spaces of decision-making, research, and creative expression. Profit incentives for war are dismantled, leading to rapid demilitarization. Exnovation, the deliberate winding down and phasing out of destructive industries, comes to be just as important as innovation.
The early 21st century is remembered as a tumultuous time, and the memories of those who died in standing up to tyranny live on for centuries. This transition to a more logical and socially just world does not come by waiting for collapse, but by taking initiative, using the technologies at hand, and boldly steering the planet towards the best future still possible.
Further reading:
• To learn more about how we could transition the grid to renewables in less than 5 years, check out the chapter “Blowing in the Wind,” in the free, open access textbook, “Climate, Justice and Energy Solutions: Radical Visions of 100% Clean Power for 100% of the People.”
• Energy solutions should probably be limited to wind and solar installed only with the consent of local people. To learn why this is, check out the online zine, “Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Climate Solutions.”
• Don’t let ecofascists mess up your movement. Check out the online zine: “Against the Ecofascist Creep” by the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative.