![]() ![]() Policymakers will remove fossil fuel subsidies and eventually nationalise utilities. Activists will push for massive changes across industries and society, starting with policies like the Green New Deal in the United States. Within the next decade, Holthaus predicts that hundreds of millions of protesters around the world will regularly march in the streets to demand climate action. He imagines Earth on an ambitious trajectory for only 1.5º Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels, the best-case scenario put forth by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In the world he foresees, the next 30 years turn out to be tumultuous, as humanity unites to steer the ship from the iceberg, avoid the worst climate disasters, and rebuild a greener and more equitable society. Instead, he believes that if we persistently focus on positive views of what lies ahead, it could create enough of a cultural shift so that radical change becomes possible, giving a chance of survival to all vulnerable peoples.Įnvisioning the next three decades, Holthaus deftly deploys “speculative journalism” as if he has time-traveled, reporting from the future to inform and spur us in the present. “We will have to share with one another alternative visions of a shared future, stories about how climate doom is not inevitable,” he writes. But rather than dwell on such apocalyptic predictions – ground that has been thoroughly tread by other writers – Holthaus seeks to craft an aspirational vision of the future of our planet and society. Even if carbon emissions decline gradually, scientists’ projections for rising sea levels, stronger hurricanes, deluging floods, and more intense droughts and wildfires threaten many people and communities. In his new book, The Future Earth, climate journalist and meteorologist Eric Holthaus describes this and other imminent human impacts of climate change. One resident, Selina Leem, spoke at the Paris climate summit in 2015, passionately arguing that she refuses to lose her homeland, which will be inexorably enveloped by the seas unless governments worldwide take dramatic and rapid action to mitigate climate change. But the islanders are facing the grim and very real prospect of losing their entire country in their lifetimes. I n a remote pocket of the Pacific Ocean lie the Marshall Islands, which nearly 60,000 people call home. Photo: Asian Development Bank/Flickr, CC BY NC SA 2.0. Low-lying atolls comprising the Marshall Islands could be completely engulfed by sea-level rise. ![]()
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