Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

S
54 politics and governance
already committed to a future with unprecedented ecological
stresses. The ripple effects will include economic disruption,
political unrest, increasing turmoil in fi nancial markets, growing
numbers of climate refugees, wars fought over diminishing
resources, and international turmoil. Some in the global economy
will make substantial profi ts in those conditions, but most will
not. We may plausibly expect that public order here and elsewhere
will be severely tested, and in a growing number of cases
it will fail, as it has in Darfur and the Dominican Republic. The
conditions ahead could be analogous to wartime emergencies that
require rapid and decisive action. If so, the imperative of survival
would then trump democracy, with its procedural dawdling, endless
debate, delays, compromises, evasions, and half measures. The
upshot is that under conditions of multiple and mounting stresses,
some degree of authoritarianism will become increasingly attractive
for many, and unavoidable should democratic governments
fail to respond effectively and quickly to the demands of the long
emergency.
From the work of Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter, Thomas
Homer-Dixon, and other students of societal collapse we know
in great detail that societies sometimes fail catastrophically due
to their inability to solve environmental problems and adapt to
changes in the regional climate. 4 Jared Diamond attributes the
collapse of previous societies to the failure of elites to anticipate
problems, perceive existing problems, and solve known problems.
And sometimes, as Diamond notes, problems can exceed the
capacity of the particular society to solve them—what Homer-
Dixon describes as an “ingenuity gap” (Homer-Dixon, 2000). But
the collapse of earlier societies had relatively little, if any, effect on
others, and so the various human experiments continued elsewhere
without interruption.
Global climate change, however, is unlike the challenges that
toppled previous societies. It is, after all, global, and will affect
every part of the world, albeit in different ways and varying levels