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Fintan O’Toole: Five big questions for the coming decade

Can we decarbonise the global economy? Will democracy die? Could Ireland unite?

We are not at the start of a new decade. We are at the start of a new era. We can say for sure that the 2020s will be epoch-making. What we do not know is what kind of epoch we are about to make.

Humankind is at a turning point every bit as significant as the Neolithic revolution about 12,000 years ago, when people began to adopt agriculture, and as the industrial revolution of the 18th century when new technologies and processes created the great boom in mass production and urbanisation.

The end of the decade, 2030, is the deadline that humanity has set itself, both in the United Nations sustainable development goals and in the Paris agreement on climate change. We must, by then, have transformed the global economy to make it radically more equal and have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 per cent compared to what they were in 1990.

This is not a utopian agenda – it is a dystopian threat. In the past when people have talked of a new epoch, they have been religious believers or political revolutionaries waiting for the Kingdom of God or the workers’ paradise or the Third Reich. Now, the new epoch is not a dream. It is an urgent reality.

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The stakes in the 2020s could not be higher. We have no idea which revolution is about to happen

The revolution we require is not like the Neolithic revolution or the industrial revolution. Those great changes were not forced on humanity – in principle, we could have gone on living as hunter-gatherers or subsisting in an agricultural economy. Now a new era is coming, much faster than the previous ones, whether we choose it or not. All we get to decide is what kind of transformation we are going through.

Climate change means that we must rapidly decarbonise the economy. If we do, it will be because have transformed our civilisation in positive ways, changing our relationship to the natural world, our ways of producing energy, our capacity to share the benefits of a new economy equally. And if we don’t, a transformation will happen anyway but it will be catastrophic.

We can already see the forces that the climate crisis is unleashing. They are visible not just in the dramatic weather events caused by global warming, but in the political chaos that is making supposedly settled democracies in the western world much more like the underdeveloped countries they used to look down on. And these two aspects of change are entirely interrelated: climate change destabilises politics and unstable politics cannot meet the challenge of climate change.

So the stakes in the 2020s could not be higher. We have no idea which revolution is about to happen – the positive transformation or the catastrophic consequence of a failure our species to adapt in order to survive. But if we do not know the answers, we can say with some confidence what the questions are.

1. Can we rapidly decarbonise the global economy?

There is no doubt that the 2020s will be a decade of huge turbulence and climate-related disasters. It is far too late now to stop the effects of what we have already done. Since 2005, total global greenhouse gas emissions have matched the very worst fears of scientists looking forward from the previous decade. This trend is so bad that if it were to continue, we would be facing a rise in average temperatures of 4.9 degrees, with apocalyptic consequences. We will be experiencing the effects of the failures of the last decade in the next one – whatever happens.

Those effects will certainly include more political instability and mass migration from parts of the world that are being rendered uninhabitable. We know that climate change is already interacting with other environmental disasters.

The scarcity of water, the erosion of productive land and the collapse of marine fisheries, combined with a rapidly expanding human population – there will be another billion-and-a-half people by 2030 on top of today’s 6.7 billion – mean that the numbers of environmental refugees are sure to grow. Since the democratic world is already struggling to manage the political consequences of mass migration, it seems unlikely to cope well with this new influx.

Yet in the midst of this instability, we also need co-ordinated, consistent and radical action on a global scale greater than anything in human history. This is the great crux: the same forces that make it imperative for humanity to have serious, stable, rational, transnational politics, capable of implementing immense long-term changes to the economy and society, are working against just that kind of politics.

2. Can democracy survive?

At the heart of the reactionary turn in global politics over the last decade is climate change denial. It is not the only factor in the rise of demagogic nationalism. (Demographic change, economic inequality and challenges to male supremacy are also large components). But it is the single most important one.

The need to halt runaway climate change makes the continuation of the current models of capitalism impossible. This threatens specific parts of the capitalist system, the vastly wealthy polluters and carbon producers.

But it also destroys the wider rationale of the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal revolution – small government, light regulation and the fetishisation of “free market”. The climate crisis demands big government making huge public interventions both on a national and on a transnational scale. It demands very heavy regulation: effectively the dismantling of the carbon-based economy. And it recognises that the short-term maximisation of profits that drives the so-called “free market” is incompatible with the survival of civilised societies.

Hence the sustained and so far remarkably successful effort by domestic commercial interests and by carbon-producing countries (Russia most obviously) to support climate deniers such as Donald Trump, who now governs the world's biggest creator of greenhouse gases, and Jair Bolsonaro who controls the literally vital carbon sinks of Amazonia.

Hence even a country such as Australia, which has been experiencing some of the most dramatic effects of global warming, has elected a prime minister who waves a lump of coal as a badge of honour.

As the climate crisis gets worse, these political forces will become more extreme, using nationalism to block international co-ordination, using economic protectionism to weaken the global sense of a communality of interests and ramping fears of immigration ever higher. The logic of this powerful reaction is towards authoritarianism. One of the key questions of the decade is whether this logic can be reversed. The 2020 elections in the US will be a crucial early indication of the answer.

3. Can inequality be reversed?

Democracy cannot be saved and climate change cannot be contained if the fruits of economic growth continue to go in a grossly disproportionate way to a very small minority of the super-rich. Gross inequality does two obvious things that have a huge bearing on the great challenge facing us.

First, it creates an immensely powerful and staggeringly wealthy elite that can hope to save itself from the common fate of humanity. The super-rich have a hugely disproportionate influence on politics and public policy. But they can sustain the fantasy that they will be able to buy their way out of the disaster.

Second, it creates a resentful mass of people who do not believe they will benefit from the green economic revolution necessitated by the climate emergency. Why should they? They haven’t benefitted from the technological revolution of recent decades in which, to use the US as an example, the income of the top 1 per cent has tripled since 1980, that of the top 0.001 per cent has risen sevenfold and the income of the bottom 50 per cent has stayed the same.

This is why climate change will not be tackled without a global Green New Deal in which the economic benefits of the new epoch are shared equally.

4. Can we control technology or will technology control us?

Feeding in to all of this will be the continuing advance of the digital and data-based economy. It has produced many wonders, but in the last decade, it has been politically disastrous, creating giant unaccountable private monopolies, driving income inequality, shaping the most potent machines for disseminating propaganda yet known, and giving authoritarian regimes methods of surveillance beyond their wildest imaginings.

The potential political effects will be even greater in the next decade as data mining and artificial intelligence create both vast new systems of social control and further economic disruption as whole areas of employment become redundant.

The struggle to break the monopolies and make technology compatible with democracy will be one of the defining battles of the new era.

5. Will the UK break up, and will there be a united Ireland?

At the parochial level, the most obvious manifestation of all of this political instability on our islands will be the potential fracturing of the UK. Brexit will not be “done” anytime early in the decade. It is both a symptom of more profound social, national, cultural and geographic divisions and a force that has made all those divisions even deeper.

It would be optimistic in the extreme to assume that all of this is going to just settle down. Ireland could well be faced, sooner rather than later, with seismic shifts in the political architecture of the archipelago – including the prospect of a united Ireland that Irish nationalism has long claimed to desire but has not prepared for.

In the context of all the other global challenges, such concerns may seem like what Sigmund Freud called "the narcissism of small differences". But from where we are, this will be one other arena in which the new epoch takes its dark or dazzling shape.