I agree with the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe who maintains that we need realistic hope in order not to fall into despair and apathy in relation to the climate crisis (See her excellent book, Saving Us). I also agree with climate justice activist Bill McKibben that we have the technical and financial ability to go solar at the speed necessary to address the climate crisis (See his excellent book, Here Comes the Sun). What we don’t currently seem to have, at least in the United States, is the moral and political will to keep fossil fuel and tech oligarchs from blocking the necessary steps for a transition away from fossil fuels in time to avoid climate chaos (See David Suzuki’s recent reflections about this.)

Is it possible for us to develop the political will in time to avoid climate chaos and the mass extinction event that will come with it? Perhaps it is not too late, but with only 48% of U.S. Americans recognizing that human activity is the primary cause of climate change (see Pew Research on what U.S. Americans think about climate change), the prospects for the kind of large-scale, systemic transformation that we need are becoming increasingly slim, and even more slim with the vast amounts of new power generation required by data centers that is often being provided by fossil fuels. AI and its insatiable power and water appetite are coming at the worst possible for our climate crisis, in the decade in which we should be urgently and rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels – a transition we should have made decades earlier. 

I don’t want any of what I have written above to keep any of us from continuing the work that is needed to avoid climate chaos (we can always make things less worse than they might be otherwise, and less worse is always better than more worse), but I also think we cannot in any way downplay how dire our current situation is. Humanity may not be capable of stopping the narcissistic and increasingly nihilistic greed of oligarchs who seem to be content on profiting from the annihilation of a livable climate for all life. 

As we continue to work relentlessly for climate justice, I think we also have to prepare ourselves, our families, and our communities for the climate chaos that is likely to come, and we also must realize that this chaos will manifest itself in ways that most of us can hardly imagine (see the recent research on the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation as just one potential scenario of climate chaos). We all need to ask ourselves, “How can we keep our humanity and love one another in the process of humanity and a livable climate being lost?” What does it look like to be good, kind, just, and loving persons as we experience the end of the world as we know it?