As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. According to Climate Action Tracker, 73% of existing “net-zero” pledges are weak and inadequate—“lip service to climate action.” What is more, a yawning gap remains between pledges, which are easy enough to make, and actual policies, which are all that really count. You can pledge all you like, but what we need is action. Right now existing government policies have us hurtling toward 2.7 degrees of heating in the coming decades. 

What will happen to our world under these conditions? As temperatures approach 3 degrees, 30-50% of species are likely to be wiped out. More than 1.5 billion people will be displaced from their home regions. Yields of staple crops will face major decline, triggering sustained food supply disruptions globally. Much of the tropics will be rendered uninhabitable for humans. Such a world is not compatible with civilization as we know it. The status quo is a death march. Our governments are failing us—failing all of life on earth. 

All of this makes it worth asking: What would it look like if we treated the climate crisis like an actual emergency? What would it take to keep global heating to no more than 1.5 degrees? The single most important intervention is the one that so far no government has been willing to touch: cap fossil fuel use and scale it down, on a binding annual schedule, until the industry is mostly dismantled by the middle of the century. That’s it. This is the only fail-safe way to stop climate breakdown. If we want real action, this should be at the very top of our agenda.

How fast this needs to happen depends on the country. Rich countries are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the excess emissions that are causing climate breakdown. They also have levels of energy use that are vastly higher than other countries, and vastly in excess of what is required to meet human needs, with most of the surplus being diverted to service corporate expansion and elite consumption. Zero by 2050 is a global average target. A fair-share approach would require rich countries to eliminate most fossil fuel use by no later than 2030 or 2035, to give poorer countries more time to transition. Let that sink in.

It sounds simultaneously dramatic but also so obvious. Fossil fuels account for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions, and they have to go. A new campaign, endorsed by 100 Nobel laureates and several thousand scientists, calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to do just that: an international agreement to end fossil fuels on a fair and binding schedule. Why is it, then, that politicians are so unwilling to take this necessary step?

Part of it is because they’re too cowardly to face down the fossil fuel companies and their army of lobbyists, who fight tooth and nail to prevent even the most moderate threats to their profits. And part of it is because they’ve bought into the narrative—peddled hard by billionaires and others who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, including the fossil fuel companies themselves—that technology will be developed to suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere such that we can keep burning fossil fuels for the rest of the century. This is the fudge behind “net zero” promises. Of course, carbon removal will have to play a role, but scientists have warned, repeatedly, that it is unfeasible at scale and highly risky: if for whatever reason it fails, we will be locked into a high-temperature trajectory from which it will be impossible to escape.

The tricky part is that once we accept this reality, we have to face up to the fact that scaling down fossil fuels fast enough to avoid catastrophe means fundamentally changing the economy. And I mean fundamentally. 

Think about it. Imagine next year we cut fossil fuel use by 10%.  And then the following year we cut it by another 10%. And so on the next year and the next. Even if we throw everything we have at building our renewable energy capacity and improving energy efficiency—which we must do as a matter of urgency—there’s no way we can cover the full gap. The truth is that rich countries are going to have to get by with less energy. A lot less.

How can we possibly manage such a scenario? Well, in the existing economy it would be sheer chaos. The price of energy would skyrocket. People would be unable to afford essential goods. Businesses would collapse. Unemployment would rise. Capitalism—which depends on perpetual growth just to stay afloat—is structurally incapable of sustaining such a transition.