So this is no longer about future generations – a generation or two has passed since the problem was identified. We are now it. We are the ones that will inherit the problem. This is going to happen on our watch. Get ready for The Crash. Scream Crash Boom - Paul Gilding

The human race is rushing toward a cliff, saddled to an internal combustion engine that thrills us to distraction with its loud roar that screams progress. At the start, the novelty of motion swept us away and we stared awestruck at the bounties of possibility our ingenuity could muster. But looking ahead, some of the passengers have noticed that the horizon looks awfully close. Some have, in fact, been throwing their arms up in the air for decades, begging their fellows to apply the brakes or at least steer us away from danger and in a new direction.

But few wanted to listen and valuable time was squandered. Remarkably, with our proximity to the precipice ahead so close, the world still refuses to take emergency measures. We delay, debate, and willfully ignore the crisis fast approaching. In the process of dallying all these years aboard our industrial machine, we have likely lost the opportunity to save ourselves. There is now too much kinetic energy built up in our global warming juggernaut to avoid certain catastrophe and a growing number of scientists doubt we can steer clear in time to avoid at least some very terrible consequences. It appears, it is our destiny to find ourselves plummeting over that cliff, into an uncertain future. As Paul Gilding put it:

So we have got a Big Problem. A problem not of esoteric philosophical concerns, but of basic stuff that matters to us monkeys – food to eat, water to drink, energy to heat and move us and so on. The Crash? Think of it as a giant collision, as the mighty power of the globalised market economy crashes into the planet’s physical limits. We already have a Big Problem, and we are still on course to increase the population by 50% by 2050 AND keep growing per capita wealth and consumption. So The Crash is in my view not a doom and gloom prediction, but an inevitable physical reality.

It is estimated that billions will likely perish in the crash to come. And as they are thrown about, they will probably wrestle for the steering wheel in vain attempts to save themselves, taking many more with them.

Some argue that there is still time to respond to the coming crash, if only to reduce the damage it will inflict. Paul Gilding is one. Gilding admits that catastrophe is unavoidable, arguing that if we stop arguing and focus our efforts as if we were on a “war footing” we might at least be able to reduce the damage to ourselves when we reach the cliff’s edge. Essentially, he is calling for the drivers of civilization to transform the fossil fuel-powered car we have been riding in for the past 100 odd years into a solar-powered glider.

Other analysts share his perspective. Certainly Thomas Friedman would agree that there are amazing opportunities for humanity to invent its way out of the climate crisis. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded is filled with optimism about the technologies being developed that will transform our economy, and make saavy, forward-looking investors rich.

Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets would concur. Arguing that innovation is born of crisis, Rubin believes that the prospects for post-oil technologies is bright and inevitable. As the saying goes: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

But all three men assume that there is still enough time to make the change. Of course, nobody can say for sure, but what is quite certain is that our computer models tell us that dramatic impacts on our water and food supplies will begin to hit us hard beginning in ten years, especially in nations with large populations and nuclear weapons (the United States, India and China).

And history is not on our side. Jared Diamond knows the pattern of climate change and social collapse well. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Diamond explores the responses of several such historical cases, including the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders and Greenland and Icelandic Vikings. What he found was that in most cases, the environmental collapse moved faster than these civilizations could change, with only a few exceptions.

In one of the few survival stories that Diamond tells, the Icelandic Vikings barely managed to pull out of collapse (caused by a combination of global cooling and over-farming) by dramatically reinventing their way of life. In fact, as Diamond reports, modern Icelanders, the descendants of the original Viking explorers, continue to value sustainability over other considerations such as commercial gain and short-term opportunity for “progress.” But Iceland’s Vikings still paid a heavy price, having to face a difficult population collapse with centuries of poverty to follow.

But the Icelandic Vikings were the exception. In most other cases, these doomed civilizations moved too slowly to respond and the environment collapsed under them. Soon, their governments were uprooted, their gods abandoned, chaos ensued, famine took its toll and, often, the survivors turned to cannibalism. And just a few centuries later, little is left of them other than silent ruins…and lessons we ignore at our own peril.

To be fair, Paul Gilding knows Diamond’s work and even points to it as fundamental to his thinking. In fact, it was partly Diamond’s influence that brought Gilding to once stare out upon a raging sea, heavy with thoughts of inevitable catastrophe, to which he finally shrugged and conceded: “It is what it is.”

So here we are, climate discussions in the US government put on hold until the Autumn and bickering continuing between the major polluters, the US and China. And, meanwhile, the industrial joy-ride plows ahead to the edge of Earthly limitations, unimpeded, toward oblivion.

I want to be optimistic, but I have to be true to the facts first.

It is what it is.