A reckoning is coming which will make Donald Trump appear a mere blip

In Scotland, our expectations of year-round moderate drizzle have been banished forever after spending March snowed in and June and July basking in extraordinary sunshine. In reality, we’re just catching up: across the world, weird weather has been the norm for several years, if not longer. For us, for now, a break with “normal” weather has been fun. But if you’re a scientist, these erratic trends hint at problems for human civilisation that make Donald Trump look like an inconsequential blip.

It’s easy to forget, when we’re inundated with “green” products whenever we walk down the high street, that we’re still consuming the earth’s natural resources at an unprecedented rate. This time next week, on August 1, with the sun still beating down outside, we’ll reach “Earth Overshoot Day”, the point at which our consumption is greater than the earth’s ability to regenerate.

It’s arriving two days earlier than last year, according to the Global Footprint Network, and it’s the earliest date ever recorded. In other words, we’re wearing out the planet faster than ever before.

Mathis Wackernagel, CEO of Global Footprint Network, compares our attitude to the earth to a Ponzi scheme. Like many financial transactions, we’re borrowing from the earth now on the basis that we’ll do better later. However, these expectations are built on next to nothing, and the inevitability of a crash is built in: it’s just a matter of “when” it happens, and “who” is the unlucky sucker who pays for it. Despite high-tech propaganda about electric cars and solar power, we’re still heading in the wrong direction, and borrowing more from the planet than we can ever pay off. All we are doing is postponing the reckoning, leaving it to future generations, hoping, without ever saying this, that the blowback will happen in some other time or some other place.

Or, at least, that’s how it looks from the Global North with its calmer climates and service-oriented economies. Elsewhere, the effects are immediate. It’s not just mass extinctions, bees dying out and melting glaciers. Whole swathes of humanity are being displaced by the weather. There’s been a staggering, largely unacknowledged rise in climate refugees, and in climate-related civil conflicts, and officials estimate that these will be the major security problems of the 21st century.

It’s a horrible irony of history. These shifts in the climate have been caused by an economic system established 150 years ago. It was established to meet the demands of industrialists, financiers and consumers in the Global North. The countries of the Global South had barely any say. They were colonised. When they became independent, and tried to establish different economic systems, Western governments conspired to overthrow their leaders, whether democratically elected or not.

Now, most of the repercussions of this system are focused on these poorer countries, doubling misery on misery. So far, we are largely immune, save for occasional refugee crises. As a result, many continue to believe that “normality” is possible, that crises are caused by outside agitators, refugees or “populists”. In reality, emergencies will be the new normal, and that will only increase. Mass migrations of people, destruction of huge swathes of farming land, unstable weather systems, rising sea levels, political extremism, end time religion – that’s the future. To really come to terms with this reality, we need a bigger political crisis, a 2008 multiplied by 10. And, even with so much uncertainty, I’ll predict one thing as inevitable: a major reckoning is coming.

Of course, it shouldn’t have to be this way. There’s a scientific consensus about the trends. We can trace it in history, to roughly 150 years ago with the coming of industrial capitalism. We know our economic system cannot live without constant, unsustainable expansion. There is no room for doubting any of these things. The only question is, can we live without this system? Can we imagine anything beyond capitalism?

It’s not just Paul Mason and Naomi Klein asking these questions. Bill Gates, for example, is open about the fact that the market systems that created the climate crisis cannot solve it. The link between private ownership, unplanned, unregulated expansion and a colonial attitude to the earth is very easy to establish.

However, the picture has been confused. Green capitalism is central to official political ideology. Politicians of all parties rush to announce their eco-friendly credentials, from Boris Johnson and David Cameron cycling to work to Michael Gove, whose friends call him a “full-throated environmentalist”. Meanwhile, walk down any high street, or any line of shops in a well-heeled suburb, and you can’t breathe for messages encouraging you to “buy green”.

This translation of the climate question into political consensus and affluent, niche consumerism, laced with smugness, with its attendant separation of “good” consumers from “bad” people who can’t or won’t pay the green premium, is undoubtedly the biggest distraction and political threat to an effective solution to the planetary crisis. Individual solutions can’t possibly work. Yet we’re bombarded with propaganda telling us they can.

Because the crisis is so pressing, and understood as such even in official politics, we are encouraged to “put ideology away”. We should create the widest possible consensus, we’re told. Rich and poor, boss and worker, male and female, black and white, north and south, capitalist and socialist, we’re all under threat, and under those circumstances carving up the movement may seem perverse. But in movements without class or political division, dominant interests and ideas will neutralise anything that threatens their power. The result is a wide, hand-wringing consensus for deploring the problem without the conflict necessary to generate change.

Faced with this hypocrisy, this wide consensus for action with zero effective action, many will retreat into misanthropy. Maybe our species is doomed by genetics. Maybe greed and hypocrisy are a built-in feature of humanity, with no opt-out option. Maybe, if we can’t control production and consumption, the only variable we can control is the number of humans living on the planet.

In current political ideology, it’s becoming easier to imagine a mass, hyper-genocidal reduction in human numbers than to contemplate a modest historical change in our system of ownership and production. That’s the real worry.

An effective political strategy depends on a clear sense of the enemy. And targeting the bad apples, the climate deniers, the Donald Trumps and the oil executives, isn’t enough. Nor is it acceptable to retreat into misanthropy: human nature is a tremendously variable thing, and our current problem is only a century and a half old. The real enemy is the absence of collective, democratic control over the expansion of production. Solve that, and crises are unnecessary.

Alternatively, as if discovering worrying bumps on our collective body, we can ignore the medical advice, persist in denial and carry on as normal, hoping it will go away, reassuring ourselves that we buy green and recycle, so it’s not our fault if the planet burns. Sadly, that’s the most reckless illusion of all.