Imagining 2040: A Practice in Climate-Optimism
By Jenna Clark
Can you imagine the year 2040? Where will you live? What job might you have? What will the global climate look like? It feels far away, but 2040 is arriving far sooner than you might think.
Uncertainty about the future is one of the critical psychological barriers to climate action. Science and modelling might project a series of fairly accurate numbers that we can use to describe a probable future, but these projections aren’t concrete. Because of this, the human psyche easily justifies inaction. Can you visualize your life in a world with four feet of sea level rise, a very realistic scenario for the city of Boston? If collectively we cannot imagine the future that we aim towards, it’s difficult to believe that we will ever create the transformative change we need.
On April 18, I attended a scenarios workshop held by Amy Myers Jaffe and the NYU Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, where attendees were asked to imagine the year 2040. We, an assortment of students alongside faculty and professionals, were sorted into four scenario groups. Each was given a different set of future characteristics and told to create a storyline about the world in 2040.
A skeptic might look at this scenario workshop and ask why it is useful to imagine future scenarios when this is, at best, well-informed guesswork. Isn’t it a waste of money, time, and effort to prepare for situations that may never actually occur?
Far from throwing away time and money, this type of forward thinking cultivates community resilience, and it is actually financially smart. According to NOAA, in 2022, the U.S. experienced 18 $1 billion weather and climate events, or single events with damages greater than $1 billion. Most of this cost is created by physical damage to buildings, public infrastructure, agricultural assets, and ecological restoration. Not all is preventable, but smart, climate-minded planning could drastically reduce this price tag.
From NOAA Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters
We might not know exactly what the future holds, but there is a significant amount of overlap to what makes a community prepared for a variety of ‘unexpected’ events, be it a pandemic, extreme heat event, or hurricane. The qualities that make a community resilient to unexpected events make it a better place to live regardless of any disaster occurring. For example, a variety of social vulnerabilities, such as age, respiratory co-morbidities, and income, increase the likelihood of illness or death during extreme heat events. Policies that expand access to affordable cooling and healthcare then serve a dual purpose of preventing deaths from extreme heat.
At the workshop, a yellow dot on my name tag told me to move to the low climate impact and low technological advancement table, a scenario which at first seemed to stretch the realm of possibility. If you’ve ever taken a climate class or done an online climate simulator, you’ll find that the quickest way to net zero involves technological advancement. Green hydrogen has the potential to cover more than twenty times of global primary energy demand by 2050, but relies on the development of ammonia technology to make its transport affordable. Nuclear fusion could produce nearly unlimited low-carbon energy, but researchers are still not able to contain and maintain the reaction for more than a few minutes, below the threshold of net power gain. If this process of advancement ground to a halt, it’s hard to imagine a future without extreme climatic impacts.
The nature of innovation is another one of the uncertainties about climate change: we can’t say with absolute certainty what type of technology might exist in twenty years, let alone one hundred. For example, artists in early twentieth century France thought firefighters in 2000 might fly on personal sets of wings. However, in an era of rapid technology growth, where AI, virtual reality, and self-driving cars are now a reality, innovation itself seems a certainty.
As we considered why in the year 2040 there might be both no further climate-related technological development and minor climatic impacts, we jumped almost immediately to dystopian scenarios: another major pandemic, more drastic, that decreases human population by 30%, or, pushed to adapt by rising global temperatures, a mind controlling fungus invades millions of human hosts, a plot inspired by HBO’s the Last of Us.
Then someone asked, what if we just ensure total deployment of the technology that we currently have? What if in the next ten years, the U.S. has a continued rise in telework, near total uptake of EVs, and nationwide investment in electric, high-speed rail? A reversal of fossil fuel subsidies, which decreases their price competitiveness. Subsidies for renewable energy makes it cheaper to power your house with wind or solar than natural gas, leading to rapid growth in renewables’ share of the energy market. Growing support for nature-based solutions increases carbon uptake and improves ecological resilience alongside an explosion in use of ancient land management ‘technologies’.
All of this together might feel unlikely, but most of us attending the workshop agreed that the technological solutions to climate change already exist. The biggest hurdle that we face is implementation; more technological advancement would certainly make the task easier and less costly, but it isn’t necessary. This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep investing in renewable technology development - we absolutely must- but acknowledging that the technology to significantly curb the negative effects of climate change already exists removes one more question mark from the human psyche around this topic, and one more excuse for inaction.
At the conclusion of our event, the overall mood in the room was optimistic. Despite the extremely damaging futures that may occur in the near term, most of us genuinely believed that we are heading in the right direction, and I at least had fresh ideas about what that future will look like.
Jenna Clark is a Program Coordinator at Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.