Most threatening of all is the prospect of climate change. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and have survived numerous ice ages and warm spells. However, agriculture, cities and complex societies have existed for no more than 10,000 years. During this period, known as the Holocene, Earth’s climate has been relatively stable. Any deviation from Holocene standards will present human societies with enormous challenges they never encountered before. It will be like conducting an open-ended experiment on billions of human guinea pigs. Even if human civilisation eventually adapts to the new conditions, who knows how many victims might perish in the process of adaptation.
This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war – which is a future potential – climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gasses in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 2°C,8 resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons. These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9
Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an irresistible momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil and gas. Hence it is not enough that we recognise the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now.
Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. ‘Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.’
Where does nationalism fit into this alarming picture? Is there a nationalist answer to the ecological menace? Can any nation, however powerful, stop global warming by itself? Individual countries can certainly adopt a variety of green policies, many of which make good economic as well as environmental sense. Governments can tax carbon emissions, add the cost of externalities to the price of oil and gas, adopt stronger environmental regulations, cut subsidies to polluting industries, and incentivise the switch to renewable energy. They can also invest more money in researching and developing revolutionary eco-friendly technologies, in a kind of ecological Manhattan Project. The internal combustion engine is to be thanked for many of the advancements of the last 150 years, but if we are to keep a stable physical and economic environment it must now be retired and substituted by new technologies that do not burn fossil fuels.10
Technological breakthroughs can be helpful in many other fields besides energy. Consider, for example, the potential of developing ‘clean meat’. At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings, but it is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land and water. According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it takes about 15,000 litres of fresh water to produce one kilogram of beef, compared to 287 litres needed to produce a kilogram of potatoes.11
The pressure on the environment is likely to get worse as rising prosperity in countries such as China and Brazil allows hundreds of millions of additional people to switch from eating potatoes to eating beef on a regular basis. It would be difficult to convince the Chinese and the Brazilians – not to mention the Americans and the Germans – to stop eating steaks, hamburgers and sausages. But what if engineers could find a way to grow meat from cells? If you want a hamburger, just grow a hamburger, instead of raising and slaughtering an entire cow (and transporting the carcass thousands of kilometres).
This might sound like science fiction, but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells – and then eaten – in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of research and development brought the price down to $11 per unit, and within another decade industrially produced clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat. This technological development could save billions of animals from a life of abject misery, could help feed billions of malnourished humans, and could simultaneously help to prevent ecological meltdown.12