Future 2050: An autocratic odyssey

To raise the level of transport debate for a bold new one-day conference – Future 2050, held in June, in London – SYSTRA’s Director of Low Carbon Mobility, David Connolly, considers a future world where climate change has restricted life as we know it

Human colonies on Mars by 2030! That is the battle cry of SpaceX and its billionaire owner as they blast ever more rockets into the stratosphere. But while the techno-optimism it embodies may sometimes be infectious, we might do better to focus on the much darker prospect that Mars may be coming to us.

By 2050, there is a real chance that living conditions on Earth will be on an unstoppable path to be becoming dangerously Mars-like for us all.

In fact, the whole project of Martian colonisation is at least in part motivated by that very threat: the looming possibility that humans will soon need to find another home in order to survive, as we have messed up this one. Every climate indicator is in the red.

Ideas such as freedom of movement and assembly begin to seem quaint and old-fashioned. The average person’s daily struggle to satisfy basic needs leaves less and less energy for concerns about the corrosion of democratic norms

Predictions of catastrophe are revised upwards with each passing summer heatwave. The struggle towards greener technologies is creating resource pressures that we have hardly begun to understand.

The public debate on climate change has so far been mainly limited to the technical aspects of our carbon addiction.

These are important, necessary questions, but they disguise from us the social, political and economic costs that come with a successful global transition to renewable energies if it can’t be achieved before we hit the various climatic tipping points.

Mini-ice-age-like winter conditions by 2050?

It is easy to imagine a near-future where the price of electricity has become the central political and economic issue everywhere. Under current climate trends, much of northern Europe is likely to become subject to mini-ice-age-like winter conditions by 2050 if the Gulf Stream weakens and the AMOC – the deep Atlantic current system that moderates winter temperatures in northern Europe and elsewhere – weakens or diverts away from us, as some climate scientists warn that it might. 

The challenges created by plunging winter temperatures, ice and snow will be exacerbated in coastal areas by the chaos created by rising sea levels. The electricity grid will strain under the increase in demand created by these conditions and the movement away from other energy sources.

It is likely that our entire transport network will be electric or at least fossil-fuel-free well before 2050, but ironically this only exacerbates the strain. Governments will find themselves forced to step in to ration electricity usage.

Electricity rationing and more-frequent and more-violent storms will lead to regular power cuts and higher prices and so more and more people will start moving into large urban areas where the electricity supply is slightly more reliable.

This population movement in turn threatens the viability of rural communities and farming, at a time when the European population will have increased dramatically from emigration from those countries now uninhabitable due to the global warming.  For the first time in hundreds of years, Europeans will have to consider the possibility of local food shortages, even famine.

Faced with these threats, governments will take greater control of the agricultural sector. War-like economies will develop with ever-more centralisation of powers. For the average citizen, private travel will become exorbitantly expensive and subject to intrusive demands and rationing by government agencies. Public transport will be little better.

Ideas such as freedom of movement and assembly begin to seem quaint and old-fashioned. The average person’s daily struggle to satisfy basic needs leaves less and less energy for concerns about the corrosion of democratic norms. 

And general morale will be affected by the realisation that we have passed one climate tipping point too many and a Mars-like long-term future has become almost inevitable.

These are conditions that no state will be in a position to unilaterally resist, and global coalitions will come under increasing strain because of them. The crisis in demand for electricity and the resources required for a fossil-fuel-free economy will be global but the international infrastructure is likely to remain vulnerable and incomplete, making global solutions difficult to achieve.

Renewable technologies, including synthetic fuels, will have leapt forward and be at close to full capacity, but the failure to replace fossil-based electricity generation networks quickly enough will have left an ominous gap in potential energy supply.

The international scene in these circumstances is likely to become dominated by increasingly nervy and antagonistic struggles to control the essential resources necessary to manufacture technologies such as battery storage.

Essential resources

An alarmingly large amount of these essential resources required for this post-fossil-fuel economy – such as for batteries, wind turbines, solar panels - will continue to be controlled by an increasingly assertive and expansive China, with Europe, Russia and the USA each badly hampered by a lack of access to the raw materials. There will be ongoing turf wars over raw materials and processing infrastructure.

Just as any human colony on Mars will need rigid social organisation in order to survive the extreme conditions, environmental collapse on Earth will force the hand of government into every area of social and economic life.

All energy spent will have to be accounted for to the governmental bodies tasked with ensuring that the lights stay on for as long as possible. Where and how you work and play will no longer be a choice you are free to make alone, even if you are one of the few who has the resources to cope with the ever-increasing living costs.

A Martian colonist will live inside a structure or sealed suit for every moment of their life. They just need to glance up or look out to recognise how flimsy the barrier is between the comforts of life and obliteration. Each breath for the Martian will be a reminder of the fragility of life. For Earth dwellers, though, the delicate contingency of the things that protect us is much harder to see, because it is the water we swim in.

The need to avoid complacency

Those of us privileged to live in the wealthy west exist in a moment of abundance beyond anything experienced by humans before. It has made us complacent. Even when we think we are attending to the risks, fighting for better, greener places and modes of transport, our actions are generally conditioned by assumptions of security and continuity that we are not justified to hold.

You may ask - is burning carbon-based fuels to get more humans to Mars really that necessary? But this shouldn’t be a council of despair. We have seen climate respond to human activity in one direction and we have good reason to believe it can be corrected by human activity if we take the right actions at the right scale and at great pace.

Our future Martian counterpart noticing a crack spreading in a pane of their living module will not have to be encouraged to react with urgency. We need some of the same urgency now. 

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