Looking back to look ahead to 2025: Economy, climate, and politics

The year 2024 will mark the year when the world changed in more ways than one. Each day some part of the world was hit by extreme weather events; when a new record of heat or cold stress is made and then broken; when communities already living on the margins of survival are devastated to the point of being unable to recover from the frequent disasters. Scientists describe this as the “anthropocene epoch”, which in geological time is defined as the period when human activities have significant impacts on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Everything that we have done for human progress — for increased well-being and wealth generation — has breached national as well as planetary boundaries. 

It is also the period of momentous change — in the way we behave with each other as human beings; in the global norms of what is right and what is wrong; and in the power of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which will drive virtually everything in the next few years. 

We have changed the “nature” of public discourse so that we can say what we feel, even if it is vile, hateful, and destructive. We believe this is the freedom of speech that protects our democracy. But in all this, we have put our faith in the business of new-age technology. Today’s big-tech companies are all-controlling empires — they make the multinational corporations of the past look puny — as their scale of influence transcends countries and touches our lives like never before. Think of the way we consume news; the way we shop; and the way each part of our lives, wherever we live, is infused and firmly integrated into these businesses. Today, their leaders are driving change, not just in technologies and in media, but also in politics. They seek influence and as governments weaken, they get stronger. Most governments are under the illusion that they are deciding policies and that these are still in the public interest. The fact is, governments have ceded that space to big consultancies, investment banks, and private businesses. 

The public space is now privatised. It is not that democracy is dead, but that it has been fundamentally modified by this nexus of business and the consuming classes — you and me. 

Today our world is more insecure and more anxious as each super-cycle of cataclysmic change is feeding the other. We live in an increasingly inequitable world where the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. This, combined with bad governance, climate change, and resource squeeze, is leading to more migration, as desperate people seek new opportunities. All these add fuel to the anger and insecurity, which then make democracy prey to hateful and polarised rhetoric in this age of big technology, controlled by new business leaders with superpowers. 

This anger is not confined to the poor in the world. The rich feel betrayed — or at least this is how they perceive it. When the world moved to stitch up economies in the 1990s, it was the poor that were most worried about the loss of jobs. Today, the situation has reversed. It is the workers in the already rich world that have been left out of the new economies. They are turning against what they call the “educated elite and the experts”, who have benefited from the service and financial economy of this interconnected world. The worst outcome of this class war is the rejection of ideas. People see knowledge as tainted and compromised, and feeding private interests — also an outcome of the way we have organised the world’s information and business systems. This, then, means that what is in the public interest, like climate change, is also viewed with suspicion and, now with the second coming of Donald Trump, with rejection. 

This is also where economy, climate change, and politics intersect. When the world moved towards interconnected economies it was believed that it would lead to a prosperous and safer world order; countries would not attack one another because they would be driven by the self-interest of cooperation. But the real reason for moving industry was to reduce the cost of labour and environmental safeguards. It was too expensive to manufacture if these costs had to be paid. This meant that production moved and so did emission. We know that from the carbon dioxide balance sheet of countries as China became the world’s manufacturer with others joining it. Today, as the world needs a green transition, it faces new realities. The production of all things green is still cheaper in the “other” world, China in particular. Mr Trump has promised a trade war to bring back business to his country. But this will add costs, financial and environmental, as the world is just too integrated and interconnected on its trade to disengage easily. It will also derail the momentum for a low-carbon economy as what is green is foreign-made and so must be shunned. 

This is why at the beginning of the epoch of climate change when the world moved into a different reality, we must plan for a different tomorrow. We cannot be prisoners of yesterday. We must be vanguards of a new dawn, a new promise, but with the reality of the mistakes of our era. Otherwise, we will squander away coming decades to nothingness — all into a vortex of spiralling climate-change impacts. This is what we must change.  

The writer is at the Centre for Science and Environment sunita@cseindia.org, X: @sunitanar