I’ve repeatedly argued that were already seeing climate collapse in places like Mexico and Sudan. And when I do, someone will inevitably counter that it’s not climate change at all, but rather all sorts of other reasons things are going poorly in those places. It’s war, it’s poverty, it’s imperialism, it’s weak states, etc etc.
And…I’m always so disappointed by that reaction, because I feel like it goes without saying that a) nothing is monocausal and b) systems don’t collapse just because the weather is warmer or rainier or whatever.
But climate change is pushing us outside of a climate niche we’ve lived in, as a species, for 12,000 years. Every institution, system, and piece of infrastructure we’ve got is designed for this niche. If we’re prepared to adapt to or accommodate changes within that niche, it’s only in the sense of very gradual change that sticks close to a mean.
And instead the climate crisis is pushing us out of that niche, rapidly, and erratically. And this is stressing states in all kinds of ways that drive conflict:
States depend on predictable, regular income and legible subjects. But every time a flood destroys crops, or a heat wave makes it too hot to work, or a drought drives people to migrate, those incomes become unpredictable and irregular and those subjects become less legible.
Infrastructure that was built for narrow and predictable climate parameters is failing and has to either be replaced, at the cost of resources, or abandoned, at the cost of whatever capability that infrastructure provided. Roads that melt and railways that buckle in a heatwave can no longer move goods to a market or troops to a battlefield.
More frequent, less predictable, and more intense weather disasters, like the hurricane currently destroying the Caribbean, require immense resources just to restore the status quo ante. At a certain point, states have to choose between constantly rebuilding or abandoning territory that is too costly to hold onto.
A changing climate is making resource availability less predictable, which makes it more likely that people will fight over control of what is left. People are on the move as their homes become uninhabitable. People are angry and scared.
So no, climate change is not a monocausal factor in global conflict and state collapse, but it is driving a world-wide geopolitical catastrophe. It is already happening. It has been happening. Migration crises didn’t just coincidentally appear in both the US and Europe at essentially the same exact time, in the early 2010s. It wasn’t happenstance that millions of people all started fleeing south to north at the same time, just like people have been predicting about climate change for decades and decades.
It is no surprise that most of the world’s armed conflicts are happening in the hottest part of the world, where the world is warming the fastest, and where weak post-colonial states that face imperialist exploitation and grinding poverty have the fewest resources and least resilience to face a changing climate.
The silver lining is that the state as an institution probably cannot survive climate change. Not that we can’t imagine states under other climactic conditions, but rather that states in general probably cannot endure the kind of extended environmental unpredictability that we’ve already entered.
It’s already immensely expensive for the state to maintain its hierarchical control; throw in a whole bunch of new costs to replace infrastructure, unpredictable income, and illegible and mass-migratory subjects, and I doubt the state can survive.
Of course, many of us won’t either. But I do take solace from the fact that a lot of people who have laughed at the idea of statelessness as childish idealism or unworkable chaos are about to experience it whether they want to or not.