What kind of a world do you choose to live in?

This is a question to the ~100,000 people who could save our world.

Dear friends and colleagues. With the new year in full swing, I have a question for everyone who reads this.

But let me first raise awareness of the many environmental activists, heroes who fought for a better world, murdered last year. Thank you for fighting to make the world a better place. The world is lessened without you. You will be missed.

The question is: “What kind of a world would you choose to live in if you could?”

We (referring to humanity) are short on time to decide, and there are a select group of fewer than 100,000 people who may still be able to get us back on the right path. With a little courage. Either way, our collective actions and choices will decide our future. This post is really directed at these 100,000 folks, but I would appreciate a like and a forward from anyone who agrees with the message.

If the multiverse exists then there’s an Earth where knowledge, truth, facts, compassion, kindness, human rights, and civil rights rule, and the rule of law is respected. Where disinformation is quickly identified and squashed. Where the military industrial complex is gone because no one wants to kill anyone else. And instead of using resources to build bombs to kill people and destroy infrastructure we build schools, hospitals, and housing to educate and care for each other. A world where vertical farming has enabled humanity to feed everyone, everywhere, locally, rather than wasting energy shipping food all over the world. Where fossil fuels are gone, replaced by cheaper, more reliable, renewable energy and energy storage, and we have 9 million more people continuing to live every year thanks to the clean air and lack of carcinogens in our environment. A world where generosity is esteemed, and self-serving greed is frowned upon. This is the world I would choose to live in.

I then look at our world, and I sometimes wonder if I somehow accidentally ended up on the wrong timeline. We can’t, unfortunately, change the past and the choices which brought us to this point. All we can do is learn the truth, the facts, and hopefully make better decisions going forward.

So, I am interested to hear from you what kind of a world you would like to live in. I’m going to quantify the different results of two possible pathways of where humanity might go from here, and indicate why both are possible, and entirely up to each of us, collectively.

There are many possible pathways the world could take from here, as outlined by Gaya Herrington in her Update to Limits to Growth which utilized the incredibly prescient MIT Limits to Growth model. The MIT Limits to Growth model has fairly accurately predicted the path of humanity for decades. Herrington discusses several possible scenarios, from the Sustainable World scenario to the Business-as-Usual scenario.

I’m going to offer an additional pathway to the ones covered in Update to Limits to Growth, borrowing from the work of Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson, and compare the results of what Dr. Jacobson proposes, which I’ll call the “Decarbonization Scenario,” to what happens if we keep going the way we are, AKA, “Business-as-Usual” under the Limits to Growth model.

Figure 3 from the latest IPCC Assessment Report