According to independent curator, Gavin Wilson, the world is lurching toward “an environmental eclipse”. A lot of scientists and environmentalists would be ready to agree with him and provide the evidence. As for the rest of us, it’s perplexing where the debates about climate change now stand. In the United States, which exerts an overwhelming influence on the rest of the world, the Biden administration took a constructive stance on climate issues. Yet when the 2024 election campaign came around, the Democrats seemed terrified of mentioning the environment, treating it as a guaranteed vote loser.
In 2021, a large part of humanity was gripped by existential terror over the impact of global warming. By 2024, a populist countermovement had emerged, claiming the climate threat was vastly exaggerated: a piece of left-wing alarmism that would cost workers their jobs. Although the science remained the same it was the political rhetoric, fuelled by social media rabble-rousing, that was altering public opinion.
For governments supposedly committed to climate targets, the rational way to proceed would have been to double down on the argument that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables did not herald an employment crisis but a necessary transfer of jobs between industries, as a new, cleaner form of energy took centre stage. One can’t say the same about an AI revolution set to decimate the workforce with the complicity of corporate and political leaders. For those replaced by AI there is no fall-back.
Beyond economic logic, which calls for a gradual changeover to renewables to minimise the effects on employment and industry, there’s a moral argument. Even if it hurts the profits of major multinational corporations and forces governments to rethink their policies, isn’t it better – in an absolute sense - to phase out fuel sources that are polluting the environment, despoiling the planet for future generations, and causing endless global conflict, as we’ve seen with the fracas over the Strait of Hormuz?