Adaptation Termination Shock: The Nightmare Scenario
An adaptationist economy needs a catastrophe to adapt to. If one isn't available, will it make one?
My work-in-progress novel is set in a near-future world where economic and political investment into climate change adaptation becomes so great that corporations and governments are unwilling to fund any initiative that could rapidly reverse it. This is my personal “nightmare scenario” for the next two decades. I wanted to share it with you because, if I’m right, we have be on alert for some very specific, very important signals.
Note: I just picked up Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. He may have gotten to this point before me; let me know. The book’s 900 pages long on my e-reader—it’ll take me a while to get through.
The logic behind adaptation termination shock is simple: say I have a job, a business, or am part of a government agency that only exists because of climate change. A simple example could be shipping through the Northwest Passage. As the Canadian government, I could have dollar signs in my eyes because if we charged the same amount that Panama does per ship to travel between the Atlantic and the Pacific over the pole, the country would have an immense revenue stream. Part of this would be invested in the infrastructure needed to keep the passage open and safe, so there would be new military bases, ports, supply depots, and so on. Access to that coastline opens up gigantic potential mining reserves as well, so billions more could be spent in Arctic communities by extractive industries. As a young Canadian, I would have one more alternative to the Tar Sands as a megaproject to work in. Maybe I’d move to the Arctic coast, put down roots, start a family. Why not, if continued global warming is inevitable?
Now let’s say someone proposes a system that might not remove the CO2 in the atmosphere or reverse ocean acidification but can return global temperatures to preindustrial levels in a decade, and do it cheaply. If that happens, my career, my company, my government agency is threatened with extinction. If I’m the guy who moved north to start a family, I’ll vote against funding it. If I’m in the extractive industries, I’ll pay for bad press, viral campaigns, even resort to outright slander and lies—whatever it takes to preserve my position in the emerging adaptive economy.
There are billions, maybe trillions to be made by betting on the world going to hell.
Termination Shock
A primary argument against geoengineering technologies is the potential for termination shock: for instance, if we use high-altitude aerosols to block sunlight and reduce global temperatures, what happens if we suddenly stop? There could be a kind of climate whiplash, where temperatures suddenly soar. We may actually be experiencing that whiplash right now, because the end of widespread coal use and bunker oil in shipping has reduced the aerosol load from pollution, which may have been mitigating temperature rise all along.
This is a good, but not decisive, argument against geoengineering; it’s not decisive because the question always remains whether the negative impact of termination shock will be greater than the positive impact of the original temperature reductions.
The question for all geoengineering projects is whether their negative side effects will be worse for the planet than continuing with business as usual or relying solely on emissions reductions.
Termination shock as I’ve seen it discussed is a geophysical concept. What I’m talking about here is an economic version of that. It’s interesting to postulate the collapse of mining and shipping interests in the Arctic, for example, if it froze over again. Why this is particularly concerning—actually, why alarm bells should be going off everywhere—is that we’re debating the impact of termination shock for geoengineering before we start it, but at the same time we are collectively engaged in thousands of economic adaptations to a rate of climate change that we assume will continue or even accelerate. We are already set on the adaptationist course, without having had a societal conversation about whether there is an alternative, and how we should respond to an economic termination shock.
I’m writing this on the day of SpaceX’s first fully successful Superheavy/Starship launch system flight. The last unanswered question about the feasibility of space-based Solar Radiation Management (SRM) was whether Starship would work. Seems it does; even if it’s ten times as expensive as Musk is advertising, we can now afford to place an orbital sunshade at the Earth-Sun L1 point. It won’t cost trillions of dollars; even if the price was half that, renewable energy interventions alone have saved the world $250 billion over just the past four years. (An investment in space development on the scale of the sunshade would also kickstart a space industry, lowering the price for solar power satellites, for example.) A sunshade could pay for itself in just a few years from reduced insurance costs alone.
Now that Starship exists, no outstanding technological or economic barriers remain to launch a system that could return global temperatures to preindustrial levels without adding SO2 or other pollutants into Earth’s atmosphere.
Two things to note about the orbiting sunshade are that it does nothing to address ocean acidification, which is at least as big a problem as global warming; and that the long pulse of heat moving into the oceans over the past half-century is not going to vanish overnight. It will take decades for that to subside, and we will need a similarly long campaign of oceanic remediation to address the acidification issue. For these reasons, complete decarbonization of the economy is still absolutely mandatory even if we stabilized global temperatures overnight.
And by the way, just because geoengineering and SRM are likely to have unanticipated consequences does not mean that staying the course will not—quite the contrary. More energy in the climate system means more unpredictability. Unless you can demonstrate that putting less energy into the climate system is likely to make things worse than putting in more, putting in less is the rational choice. Nor does the argument that we shouldn’t act until we’ve sufficiently studied SRM fly, because we’re out of runway. We no longer have time do to the long-term studies that could surface any potential issues with geoengineering techniques. We’re almost certainly going to have to choose a deeply uncertain solution. If you prefer the certainty of a known doom over the uncertainty of a possible salvation, that does say something about you, but nothing about which is the correct choice of action.
The Nightmare Scenario
I can see at least two versions of an economic termination shock. In the first, a system such as the orbital sunshade is deployed. This might happen just as some major economic shifts are occurring, such as a move from using the Panama Canal to the Northwest Passage. In this case, gutting the adaptationist economy causes whole sectors to experience a failure to launch, resulting in mass unemployment, economic slumps, and yet more political unrest potentially everywhere in the world.
The second scenario is the nightmare: the world succumbs to the sunk cost fallacy and refuses to deploy climate-remediation technology even though it’s proven it will work. People do this because as individual rational actors, it’s in their short-term best interests. Corporations and governments will make the same calculation. The result: lock-in of the apocalypse, because our jobs depend on it.
Dark Signals
To sum up: within a few years, so much money will have been sunk into retooling the world economy to accommodate mass migration, species loss, crop failures, and drought, that stopping those accommodations could result in an economic termination shock. The amount of inertia, opposition, and outrage we’ve seen against relatively modest interventions such as carbon taxes suggests that stakeholders who stand to lose billions by the sudden cessation of global warming (again, not the same as ending ocean acidification) might react violently against an effective solar radiation management system.
There’s a foresight technique called horizon scanning, where you look for signs, or ‘weak signals’ that some specific change is happening in society, technology, or the wider world. It can be a preliminary technique to developing scenarios of possible futures; a list of signals to watch for can also be the outcome of a foresight exercise, because spotting one may suggest that some scenario you’ve already worked up is coming true.
With that in mind, watch for systematic, well-funded attacks on the practicality and economics of global temperature-reversal projects over the next few years. Those will be signals that the adaptation termination shock scenario is developing.
This is what foresight is about: anticipating bad outcomes before they become inevitabilities. If you see any of these happening, then you need to organize, take political action, and educate people on the concept of economic termination shock:
Well-reasoned propaganda pieces objecting to geoengineering are normalized in the media and scientific journals.
Governments or the UN placing moratoria on research into certain solutions, such as aerosol SRM or space-based approaches.
Nobody is studying or publishing comparisons of species loss in a business-as-usual or emissions reductions-only world versus one where SRM is combined with reductions.
All governmental long-term planning is based on an assumption of continued global warming.
Uh oh
Huh. Looking at the list I just wrote, I can see that all of these are happening (or not happening) right now.
What do you think? Are the world’s major economies locking themselves into adaptation to such a degree that the sunk costs will cause them to bury any technical solution that could quickly end global warming?
What’ll it be? Sunk costs and a certain apocalypse? Or uncertainty, termination shock, but the likely avoidance of a mass extinction?
The choice may be upon us sooner than we think—and as my list of signals suggests, we may have already made it.
> He may have gotten to this point before me; let me know. The book’s 900 pages long on my e-reader—it’ll take me a while to get through.
I remember Termination Shock being more about geopolitical termination shock from the sudden termination of climate change. There aren't really adaptive vested interests like you talk about here, just unequal geopolitical impacts on the climate from the SRM. Stephenson's point is also that things like UN directives and long term plans from the big players don't necessarily rule out geoengineering since SRM is cheap enough to be done by a small, rogue actor with narrow regional interests (who might not care that it hasn't been studied extensively before deployment).
This reminds me more of a dark side version of Ministry for the Future, which was all about ways to leverage vested interests, financial systems etc. to drive mitigation changes. I think this kind of "adaptation industry" was one of the blind spots of that book.
Anyway, looking forward to the book. I read Ministry back-to-back with Termination Shock and I remember thinking halfway through that I'd love to read a Karl Schroeder take on this type of novel.