The connections and disconnections between an inauguration in Washington, a forum of elites in the Swiss Alps, and a conflagration in Los Angeles tell us a lot about the age we now live in.
At this mercurial point in time, the confluence of events connect and disconnect from each other, from humans, from the past, the present, and the future, from the Earth and its multitude of life forms. Exemplary among these are the simultaneous occurrences of the conflagration in Los Angeles, the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump in the United States, and the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland.
The group convening in Davos has long considered itself the elitist center of the world’s dominant political orthodoxy. Generally a bastion of neoliberalism embracing globalism and the free-market capitalism touted by corporate leadership, the annual meeting is designed to focus on pressing constraints on the global order. Donald Trump and the growing list of far-right leaders in much of the world have taken pride in standing in opposition to the WEF. Appearing remotely to speak to the Davos assembly, the newly instantiated Donald J. Trump asserted that the United States would begin “demanding respect from other nations” as he cited the challenges in dealing with China, Canada, and other countries.
WEF president, Borge Brende, described this current period as one of unclear transition: “We are in the middle of two orders” — the first being the post-Cold War era of globalization and free markets — so “now it’s an unruly time because we don’t know what the new order will be.” Far-right figures like Trump are seen by many voters as being the appropriate leaders for this transition to a new order. They’re backed up by a cohort of Western elites in both business and politics who prioritize their personal gains in money and power as income gaps grow wider and oligarchy becomes more wide-spread. This change is evident already at Davos as the customary pavilions and hosted parties promoting nations, ideas, and companies are now advocating burgeoning opportunities in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and fossil fuels even as speakers in the main hall wring their hands about the increasingly dire state of the world (at least in part because of those same opportunities).
Among the many points of difference between the relatively new wave of nationalist leaders and the Davos elites is whether or not there is a climate crisis and a need to address it. The international cohort of politicians, business leaders, and other high-level influencers in Davos have, for a number of years, prioritized climate change as a global threat. They’ve made speeches, pledges, and ongoing promises regarding the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold and net-zero goals. Nothing much has come of any of it. But in fairness, the active body responsible for bringing these promises and pledges to life is the United Nations through its annual Conference of the Parties (COP) summits and their supporting systems. But those summits have made such little impact that the most recent one in November in Azerbaijan resulted in an impassioned plea by some climate advocates to end the hypocrisy, the expense, and the emissions of the summits themselves after the 29 of them already held have resulted in endless unmet commitments. (Note that this does not mean these advocates and activists are giving up; they are acknowledging the futility of the existing structures and strategizing to develop more effective paths forward.)
In the past year, global temperatures on average have exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions have continued to rise, and countries and corporations have been rolling back their pledges as they commit to what their leaders see as the new order. On the same day the forum in Davos kicked off, the US president was inaugurated and promptly withdrew the country from the Paris Agreement, declaring it one-sided and therefore against the interests of the United States. Instead, he announced, “The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we’re going to use it.” This renewed escalation of fossil fuels will be necessary in part because the AI and cryptocurrency being put forward so forcefully at Davos (and of which President Trump is newly enamored) will require massive amounts of extraction and electricity for data centers and battery storage around the world. (It remains to be seen whether China’s new AI offering, DeepSeek, will mitigate much of this need for energy and extraction.)
The fossil fuel resurgence also will be required because of the orders put forward by Trump and other leaders for dialing back efforts on renewable energy. Even within the climate change movement, there is disagreement regarding the most effective path forward in this regard. For those who believe the only way forward must include maintenance of the current standard of living (which requires a significant profit-based model), the appropriate solutions include renewables like solar and wind energy as well as an all-electric future centered around electric vehicles and electric buildings. Others believe the amount of extraction of the Earth’s limited resources (minerals, water, etc.), the amount of land and sea real estate required, the manufacturing and waste, and the continued destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity, all make this approach too unsustainable. They see the only viable path forward as one of changing socio-cultural behaviors so that we are collectively consuming and emitting less without doing the equivalent kind of harm through extraction and overall environmental destruction. This path requires much less use of fossil fuels but also less renewable energy, no large data centers, no massive electrical systems, but ideally the addition of some as yet undeveloped form of sustainable energy that works with the Earth’s systems rather than against them.
As James Marape, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea expressed it at Davos, “My recommendation to the world is we preserve the Earth as much as possible in its natural state,” adding that it was immoral to “deplete the resources that are meant for the entire planet.” Inadvertently or not, this harkens back to the US President’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. As one of the world’s top two contributors to the climate crisis, the US affects everyone on the planet with its unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of climate change and working towards addressing the issue.
Formerly vocal about the urgency required relative to climate change, a growing cohort of tech billionaires now stand silent beside him as the US President makes one move after another to reinforce his stated belief that climate change is a “hoax”. His actions are no surprise as he clearly announced during his campaign what he would do in this regard. And these actions are entirely consistent with his stated beliefs and actions in his first term. But the world has grown progressively hotter and drier since Trump’s first term and the associated “natural disasters” have previously unfamiliar characteristics. Seasons have changed, storms have changed, water levels have changed, fire-created weather effects have changed, soil moisture has changed, wind speeds have changed . . . the list goes on.
Politics too have changed. And so has the active resistance — or lack thereof — to our current politics. And it’s not just the technocrats. There is a general silence from other leaders on the move away from the reality of climate change. Thus far, even some notable climate and environmental advocacy leaders are conspicuously quiet around the world. Of course, the dynamic overall is much bigger — much broader and deeper — than Donald Trump. The move away from climate action has been advancing as economies have declined and as disruptive technologies have come to be understood in terms of their massive demands for electric power. At the same time, the decline of the neoliberal order and its emphasis on globalism has given way to an every-country and every-company for itself approach, a winner-take-all kind of marketplace (and a very small but exorbitantly rich marketplace at that).
The media also makes it possible for people to accept the perpetuated delusion regarding climate change. As the inauguration proceeded and the Davos group searched for their next safe space, the conflagration in Los Angeles raged on. If the cataclysmic images from the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the tens of thousands suddenly without their homes, and the hundreds of thousands without electricity in one of the US’s biggest metropolitan areas did not drive home the truth of our current situation on Earth, what will? The media makes ample use of words like devastation, tragedy, and “once-in-a-generation disaster” but there is no climate-based narrative presented about how and why this is happening. The media tells us about water hydrants and reservoirs, absent mayors and underfunded fire departments, poor fire management for the state, poor planning relative to urban versus wildland fire crews, and countless other human failures at a local level. They tell us a wet season spawning ample grasses preceded a dry season now accompanied by unusually ferocious Santa Ana winds. But this is described as if it is a freak, one-time event. When the embers have cooled, the media will report to us on some percentage that statistical scientists have finally assigned to the contribution climate change made to the chance of this event occurring at all. But that too evades the real truth of the time we are now living in.
We are led to believe, by politicians and the media alike, that this can all be better handled going forward. In fact, they tell us, it can be prevented altogether with better planning. But this is patently untrue. We are well past that point now. The recent “State of the Climate Report” co-authored by an international group of august climate scientists pronounced our entry into the “Age of Consequences”. Years of false narratives, denial, and greenwashing solutions underpinned by ever-increasing consumption in wealthier nations have propelled us into this age sooner even than most climate scientists thought would be the case. No doubt they were certain we would collectively take heed and begin the steady reduction of emissions, the destruction of the planet, and the elimination of biodiversity. But we have done none of these things. Instead we’ve been fed and accepted “solutions” that require vastly more energy consumption, more excavation of the planet, and more environmental destruction of wildlands and habitats. We have continued to consume at a greater pace than ever and with the new oligarchs leading the way.
The impending collapse of the current world order is a removal of a collaborative safety-net. As limited as it was, there was some sense of a shared fate and a shared responsibility for redirecting entrenched trajectories to avoid the worst outcomes. At COP 29 a few months ago in Azerbaijan, the weakness of this net was at one of its more apparent points as the countries contributing the most to the climate effects refused to be fully accountable to those countries contributing the least but experiencing much of the worst effects. The concern for profits and power belie the truth of our intense (and collective) vulnerability to the consequences we face in this new age. The tech-oligarchs and the recently minted far-right leaders may believe they will define the new world order, but it is more likely to be determined by something else entirely.
It’s a philosophical and psychological truism that the extent to which one can be happy is directly correlated to the extent to which one believes one’s happiness is within one’s own control. Similarly, the extent to which one can survive — maybe even thrive — in the Age of Consequences is directly correlated to the extent to which one is willing to face the actual reality of this age and then act in accordance with that reality. The “new order” being wondered about and debated will be the order dictated by the circumstances in which we find ourselves in this new age. Some will think they can operate around those dictates, but that will be a short-lived delusion. Our best bet is to face the reality sooner than later (in truth, we’re already late) and begin to adapt to what is called for as a new way of life. The old standards don’t apply. Attempting to keep both feet firmly grounded in what “was” keeps us from moving forward and getting on with what comes next. Uncertainty abounds, but looking back to something no longer viable only perpetuates that uncertainty.
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