World survives Equal Rights Day
Civilisation is “more or less unlikely to collapse this century”, world leaders warn, despite the inconvenience to companies from global carbon rationing.
The findings, announced at an Arctic G5 summit, suggest the Make Doomsaying History campaign could be working. Despite fears it might still spark meltdown, yesterday’s first Equal Rights Day passed off peacefully.
“For the first time ever, all human beings have the same rights, if only to meagre carbon quotas,” Verna Soylent, the Planetary Pasha, told G5 leaders. “It’s instant Enlightenment for everyone: no more are some of us more equal than the rest.”
Like the millennium bug that didn’t bite, party poopers were drowned out with champagne. But the euphoria may not last long. Within 30 years, we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero, demanding even more radical action than in the Decade of Unprecedented Innovation.
Although newspapers and business visionaries have already brought about a sea change in human habits, it doesn’t mean we’re home and dry yet.
As dawn bathed the South Pacific islands, moods were sombre. Revellers on the retreating shorelines of Kiribati are soon to be homeless, despite pleading for help before the Kyoto Protocol postponed real solutions.
Like Vanuatu’s grass-skirted conch-blowers, they refused to accept the rich world’s terms at climate talks, which amounted to signing their atolls underwater. Until Australia agreed to welcome immigrants, the process valued Western lives more highly than everyone else’s.
“It was the economics of genocide,” recalled Nigel Feasting-Piranha, the British entrepreneur, who today won the Nobel Peace Prize for riding rising tides to a clean-tech future. “No glove was velvet enough to cushion the iron fist of business as usual.”
As Brazil’s president once warned the G5: “the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.”
Our pursuit of endless growth meant more emissions, hotter weather and the prospect of an uninhabitable Earth. Even nuclear power couldn’t save us in time. And if we’d found a magic technofix, the energy needed to make it would have forced us to cut consumption quicker still.
“There was no way of avoiding a crash diet,” said Donald McRonald, the post-American Localisation Tsar. “Everything we consumed was full of carbon.”
It was only once our systems crumbled that modern answers made sense: everyone had to use less, and we all had to get a fairer share. For years, this was shunned as simplistic, but fears of further chaos made it viable.
“The people who called it Utopian weren’t seriously looking at the alternatives,” said Mao Min Max, the Chinese American life coach who dreamed up the blueprint. “Fetishising growth was clearly a death wish.”
As late as 2009, journalists still asked if Depression made the environment yesterday’s news. That was the start of the end of the Age of Stupid. Unless we reined in climate change, there wouldn’t be a future to report on. And if billions died, who’d get richer? Those left would be struggling to survive.
Eventually, a middle way prevailed. At last-ditch talks in Denmark, there was nothing left to try but facing facts. Fearing Mao was a crypto-Communist, world leaders barricaded themselves into a conference hall with activists. They emerged with the Copenhagen Consensus, a rewrite of Mao’s Contraction & Convergence plan, but with one key difference: they’d go faster.
Nothing like it had ever been tried except in wartime. Detroit retooled in weeks, scrapping gas-guzzlers to supply wind and solar farms. Direct current triumphed, and power was quickly decentralised, like everything else.
When markets finally failed, trillions of pre-Crash credits were simply leveraged into charity. It was our altered expectations what swung it, and all we needed was a bit of plain speaking. With media making the case for meaningful action, millions of people demanded it, and leaders felt empowered to use their power.
“By far the biggest shift was in people’s heads,” Dr Soylent said. “Most of the old dualities were illusions: there was no choice to make between ancient and modern, us and them, or people and planet. We all just had to adapt.”
Since Gross Domestic Product gave way to Net International Contentment, global standards of living have begun to improve. For centuries, human wrongs mocked human rights. But on the brink of wiping out the lot of us we, the people, thought again.
