Boundaries of Imagination: An Interview with Writer and Futurist Jamais Cascio

“I CAN’T SAY HOW MUCH I WOULD LOVE TO BE WRONG ABOUT IT. I REALLY HONESTLY WISH THAT CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS WERE RIGHT.”

For people who spend their professional lives modeling our planet’s potential futures under catastrophic climate change, the present is a dark time. The Paris Accord, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change document that is as close as we have managed to come to a global (voluntary) consensus on capping carbon emissions that might prevent a permanent temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius, has recently come under increased criticism from many climate scientists for its flawed methodologies. The Paris Accord is largely dependent on “negative emissions strategies” that will remove carbon dioxide from the air to keep us under 2 degrees of warming. But these technologies do not yet exist, have never been tested at anything approaching scale, and may never be viable—either practically, or economically. A recent paper published in Science found that our slow adaption of carbon neutral energy alternatives to fossil fuels—the step that is absolutely necessary and doesn’t include relying on removing carbon from the atmosphere, somehow—at the going rate, will take us 400 years to replace our current carbon economy.

Doing this doesn’t mean only finding ways to make cars and transport greener (itself an enormous challenge), but vastly reducing our reliance on mass agriculture (particularly meat), on textiles, on 24/7 refrigeration and electricity generated by fossil fuels, diesel-fueled global shipping and trade, aviation, the production of cement and the smelting of minerals for construction materials and electronics components, including batteries.

At the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, a think tank which grew out of the RAND Corporation, researchers are considering the many factors that are stymying our collective political ability to address global warming in time to mitigate the worst of its forecast effects that will be felt much sooner than 400 years from now, but rather in the next 20-30 years: ocean acidification, clean water shortages, wildfires, sea level rise, desertification, resource depletion, crop die-offs and the mass migration that will result from millions of people no longer having access to life-sustaining, arable lands. In 2014 the Pentagon identified climate change as the number one emergent threat to global security.

One area of this research at the Institute is the psychology of climate change. This work holds that cognitively, it is very difficult for our minds to grasp timescales beyond the immediate short term, and equally as difficult is to understand our individual role inside the larger systems of...