Maybe Bahrain and other countries can get through the climate crisis without a global catastrophe, although that door is closing fast. And maybe we can cope with the huge loss of jobs caused by the revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) without a social and political calamity. But can we do both at the same time?
We should know how to deal with the AI revolution, because we have been down this road before. It’s a bit different this time, of course, in the sense that the original industrial revolution in 1780-1850 created as many new jobs (in manufacturing) as it destroyed (in cottage industries and skilled trades).
The AI revolution, by contrast, is not producing nearly enough replacement jobs, but it is making us much wealthier. The value of manufactured goods doubled in the US in the past 30 years even as the number of good industrial jobs fell by a third (eight million jobs gone). Maybe we could use that extra wealth to ease the transition to a job-scarce future.
The climate emergency is unlike any challenge we have faced before. Surmounting it would require an unprecedented level of global co-operation and very big changes in how people consume and behave, neither of which human beings have historically been good at.
These two crises are already interacting. The erosion of middle-class jobs and the stagnation (or worse) of real wage levels generates resentment and anger among the victims that is already creating populist, authoritarian regimes throughout the world. These regimes despise international co-operation and often deny climate change as well (Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil).
And there is a recession coming. Even Donald Trump is worried, which is why he postponed the harsher US trade tariffs against China that were due this month.
The best bet for getting politics back on track is a guaranteed minimum income high enough to keep everybody comfortable whether they are working or not.
And the best way to win more time on the climate front is to start geo-engineering (direct intervention in the atmosphere to hold the global temperature down) as soon as we get anywhere near +2º C.
There will be protest from the right about a guaranteed minimum income, and from the greener parts of the left about geo-engineering. Both will probably be indispensable if we want to get through these huge changes without mass casualties or even civilisational collapse.
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