Earth Transformed: What is America's grand strategy on climate change?
A special series of newsletters leading up to my 1 May open online presentation
Nobody …
is speaking about climate change in grand strategic terms right now. They talk mitigation or else! And provide all sorts of scary trajectories regarding the or else.
Or they’re busy — like the vast bulk of America’s foreign policy establishment — publishing op-eds and books proclaiming World War III! Containment! Cold War! as if those 20th century answers still apply in blanket fashion today.
The American people, businesses, and government all need to move past the Oh my God! phase of the discussion and into the What do we do now? portion, which, for most people today is triggered by a letter from their insurance company canceling their homeowner’s policy.
The imperative to mitigate climate change is a given, but, frankly, that effort is more about the year 2100 than the journey from here to there, which will be all about adaptation to a world being pervasively transformed.
That’s the inevitability, but here’s the inconceivable part: Scientists tells us that species throughout nature are being compelled by climate change to evolve at roughly 10,000 times normal speed.
Apply that logic to humans and we’re looking at revolutionary-speed changes throughout our communities, businesses, and nation-states. Everything will be impacted. Humanity is past the point of leaving behind a better world for our children; now, it’s all about prepping them for life in a very different world.
So the question begs: What will be America’s grand strategy for adapting to the inevitability of climate change across the rest of this century?
Between now and my online executive roundtable on 1 May (to which invites are easily obtained by contacting Liz Gaither [lgaither@throughline.com]), I want to convince you — step by step — of this profound need.
To start off, here’s data that I typically find resonate best with audiences around the world:
Species the world over are systematically moving up in elevation (about a meter a year) and/or poleward in latitude (roughly 1700 meters per year).
That migratory “speed” is about 2-3 times faster this century than last.
That speed will only increase in coming years and decades.
These mammals, birds, insects, viruses, fish, plants, etc. … they don’t care about humans and our science and our debates over science. They’re simply moving in response to changes in the weather.
In many ways, we’re witnessing a real-world version of Noah’s Ark: Everybody climb aboard and let’s head to safer ground! Except there’s no boat, and the journey is incremental-if-constant. But, like that Biblical story, one either goes with God (here, climate change) or risks God’s wrath.
When a species moves in response to climate change, it’s really moving in concert with a shifting climate — the phenomenon described as “climate velocity.” Species aren’t migrating to change their climate but to preserve it. Having spent thousands or even millions or years evolving to flourish within a certain clime, species have little choice in the matter. They either move (easiest), or figure out how to adapt (extremely hard, if not impossible in time for most species), or they die (go extinct).
Evidence abounds about mass extinction right now, and we’re seeing more and more studies indicating how species are changing as fast as they can (like birds getting smaller). So, no real surprise that we’re witnessing an unprecedented — in both scope and speed — migration of basically all of nature.
Think about that for a minute: all of nature is being put on the move, in effect reorganizing our world in response to a climate dynamic that is already baked into the next half century or more of human history.
Doesn’t that sound like a big enough challenge that America should have a grand strategy for dealing with it? Are you hearing anything along these lines as we hurtle toward national elections this fall?
I know that American companies across the board already sense and are responding to these tectonic changes, and I know from personal experience that they’re eager to think through the various scenarios our nation and world will face in coming years and decades.
That’s why I’m inviting any and all of you to my online executive roundtable on 1 May at 5pm Eastern.
Grand strategies cannot merely be imposed from on high. They require whole-of-nation buy-in and that begins with all of us. So, if you’re willing to engage this ambition with Throughline and I, then I’ll be happy to see you on the 1st for my briefing and discussion.
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I would need that spelled out a bit more to figure out if we're in agreement or not. I don't know who the implied "they" doing this are. Need your scorecard. Are you with the devil here or the saints?
Speaking peer-to-peer, Tom, as someone whom really big organizations used to pay to predict the future, and then advise them on how to deal with it, strategically, it has struck me that on this topic, almost uniquely, eschatological comparisons and excoriations of "deniers" have come to the fore to an extent rare outside of religious contexts. As such, it has *already* engendered (and, one might argue, even entrenched) just the sort of top-down authoritarian impulses characteristic of mens' bad, false, useless-invented religions of hubris, reliant on human power and wisdom, while marginalizing (if not shouting down and punishing) the zeal for truth-wherever-it-leads sort of heart-by-heart repentance from mens' top-down deluded (but safely common) notions which Jesus preached.