Title: Peak Propaganda
Approx. Reading Time: 9 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley
The rise and rise of propaganda, in all its forms, is one of the defining crises of the age. In the run-up to multiple elections, highly orchestrated misinformation campaigns—some powered by autonomous artificial intelligence systems, with no human in control and that no-one understands—are in full swing. Fact, truth, reality, human rights and justice are the first victims, and with that comes the question: will social and political systems—of all varieties—descend into toxic chaos and anarchy? Or have we seen ‘peak propaganda’?
Read EssayClimate change has caused extreme heatwaves, droughts, rainfall and floods to increase in severity and regularity around the world, creating ideal conditions for what mosquitoes—responsible for 1 million deaths and 700 million disease infections each year—like to do most: breed and bite.
Low birth rates have exploded from a fringe issue to one at the centre of the culture wars. The left has called for more socialist-inspired policies to support young families, such as free childcare and help with housing, and even a shift to “de-growth” economics. The far-right has taken aim at women’s advancement and the “breakdown” of the traditional family. One thing is clear: Just like the climate crisis, the population crisis will force us to have tough conversations on what we want our society to look like.
Marxist-Leninists tend to argue that communism did not fail but rather was never really tried properly. When challenged on economic performance, mainstream economists are at increasing risk of sounding like Marxist-Leninists. If economics is to remain relevant, it needs a much more sophisticated understanding of power, efficiency and human well-being. However, it needs to do this without giving too much weight to ‘how people feel.’
Picture this: January 2050. Time to look back—to 2027, to the moment when, after years of crisis, the focus on long-term resilience and regeneration of the natural world gained momentum. To a time that marked the beginning of mass-scale global action to reverse the decades of industrial destruction and the ecological disasters. Hope was in the air after years of relentless crises, pandemics, wars and economic stagnation. In just one generation, the world’s geostrategic and environmental landscape is now transformed.
Title: What Happens if Trump is Re-elected President?
Approx. Reading Time: 11 minutes
Author: Mat Burrows
US elections have always mattered, because small shifts in US policies can have a significant impact elsewhere. However, for so much to now rest on who sits in the White House is new, uncharted territory. Mat Burrows explores the far-reaching implications of a second Trump Presidency for America itself, its allies and enemies, and its future role in the world. The country’s increasingly dysfunctional politics now mean that it is not only a source of in-country risk, but of geopolitical, global economic and climate risk. These could interact in ways that lead to inter-systemic failure.
Read EssayTitle: Walled Gardens: towards 2050
Approx. Reading Time: 38 minutes
Author: Peter Kingsley, Simon Tilford
January 2050. The world is no longer ‘globalised’. Nor is it entirely localised. Faced with existential risks, the major powers look inward, self-sufficient and resilient in a hostile natural world. As many predicted decades ago, climate change has divided the world’s geography into islands of relative stability and security to the north and south. In stark contrast, millions of people along the coasts of equatorial regions are still facing existential battles and fighting for survival.
Read EssayTitle: Antarctica Succumbs
Approx. Reading Time: 10 minutes
Author: David Drewry
The Antarctic sea ice belt, almost the last preserve of the climate status quo, appears to be melting in similar dramatic fashion to the Arctic. The consequences will be far-reaching. Professor David Drewry explains how this will disrupt global ocean circulation, nutrient cycling and ocean productivity; accelerate ice sheet melt—and with it sea level rise—and reduce the amount of heat absorbed rather than reflected back into the atmosphere. Bar a dramatic reduction in global temperatures, the process is irreversible.
Read EssayTitle: Adaptation: the long-term climate change strategy
Approx. Reading Time: 8 minutes
Author: David Drewry
Professor David Drewry argues that governments are dangerously fixated on climate mitigation to the detriment of adaptation. National mitigation plans have unrealistic projected emissions reductions that assume highly ambitious infrastructure transformations in a short space of time. As result, there is next to no chance of keeping global temperature increase to 1.5oC, with 2.5oC being more likely. It is now essential that we start preparing our societies and economies for what will be far-reaching climate disruption.
Read EssayMainstream media continues to battle against the defacto information giants of Big Tech and machine-dominated social media. Artificial intelligence is the latest wrecking ball to threaten business models and editorial standards. Flawed large-language models, released too early, have opened Pandora’s box and undermined media, national security and democracy. As we put it as far back as 2017 “facts, truth, public trust and privacy are the victims”.
Held in the United Arab Emirates, COP28 was always going to be controversial, but it confounded sceptics in one crucial regard: it was the first COP to officially acknowledge that fossil fuels are the root cause of climate change, heralding the beginning of the end for the fossil fuel era. Unfortunately, it failed to get countries to agree on more ambitious emissions cuts, leaving the world on track for a temperature rise of 2.8˚C.
There is a perfect storm emerging at the intersection of social media, generative artificial intelligence, elections and global security. There have been warnings, but policy, regulation and technological ‘guardrails’ lag the rate of innovation. Disinformation has won. Digital platforms may ultimately split into two: the ‘toxic swamp’ of the public internet and myriad ‘communities of trust’, where accuracy and information integrity rule. The split may be too late to protect democracies.
Every era has a time signature. For decades, the neoliberal Western consensus was based on a cultural belief in progress and hope—a linear narrative. This consensus hangs by a thread. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the Russian invasion of Crimea, growing alarm about climate chaos and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the time signature has changed. Fear and nostalgia-based nationalism is creating the system conditions for global conflict and war.
Record-breaking temperatures since early 2023 have led some scientists to warn that global warming is accelerating. Others are sceptical, arguing that what has happened is within the range expected by climate models, while many believe it is too soon to tell. Disagreement over the climate outcomes should be of critical concern to policymakers. We cannot afford to wait to find out who is right.
Scenarios are models. They describe alternative possible futures. At their best, they explore extremes, because history tells us one thing about the future: failure of imagination is a primary source of risk and catastrophic failure. In this update of Dark Ages, one of our reference scenarios, we explore a descent into chaos, a story of climate and biosphere collapse, state failures, economic crisis, mass migration, humanitarian disasters and perpetual wars. Too little, too late. Like Orwell’s 1984, it serves as a warning, not a prediction. This story has momentum. Is this the world we want?
War in Ukraine and the Middle East. Tensions over Taiwan. Pervasive state and non-state conflict in cyberspace. ‘Everything wars’ spilling over into proxy attacks on corporate interests, trade, financial markets and core infrastructure. Despite warnings of fundamental threats to security and the international order, world leaders may be sleepwalking into catastrophe as they fail to imagine the systemic impacts of multiple, interconnected crises on their own future.
The climate and nature crisis fundamentally threatens global health. Rising temperatures and nature loss have direct human health impacts, such as increasing heat-induced mortality, as well as indirect ones, such as damage to food and water security. Framing the climate and nature crisis as a health emergency would be an effective communications tool and a good basis for policy-making.
Expectations for the annual UN climate conference—COP28—are low. Nations must agree on new global greenhouse gas emissions reductions plans and how to provide support to the most vulnerable nations. Yet a host of issues—the power of fossil fuel interests, the cost-of-living crisis, strained national budgets and weak international cooperation—continue to obstruct progress. Escalating climate impacts promise to create further obstacles.
Governments should not assume that the only solutions to technological problems are ones we already know, especially when these have fatal flaws. There are potential solutions to hard-to-abate sectors that we are yet to explore, and that are not technological and environmental dead ends. Similarly, there could be ways of capturing and storing carbon dioxide that do not involve punitive costs and almost impossible timeframes.
The ideology of ecofascism can be traced back to the Nazi concept of ‘blood and soil’: a belief that the Aryan race was somehow tied to the land, and that manifested in a romanticisation of rural life. As environmental issues become impossible for far-right politicians to ignore, we can see it raising its head again.
Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 short story
Throughout the 1980s, industrial policy fell out of favour as developed market economies embraced the long era of globalisation and neo-liberalism. That era is now com-ing to close in the face of competitive challenges posed by China, global supply chain instability, and climate change and insecurity. Industrial policy is back.
The UK is dangerously unprepared for current levels of climate change, let alone those made inevitable by continued global temperature rises. The government has consistently failed to spearhead adaptation and no sectors can comfortably handle current changes. Transformational adaptation—which simultaneously protects populations while reducing emissions—must become a central strategy.
Amid the growing chaos and uncertainty pervading everything, from climate risk to geopolitical instability and runaway artificial intelligence, resilience is the concept high on many leadership agendas. Yet resilience is a contested, ambiguous, and in some ways outdated word. What constitutes resilience in a future of chaos and catastrophic—even existential—risk?
In the face of worsening climate crisis, more people are questioning whether the world can afford economic growth. However, ending growth would be unlikely to put the world on a more environmentally sustainable course. Conversely, assuming that growth will simply turn green as the price of renewable energy falls is misplaced. Growth can be green, but the world is a long way from making it so.
