"… almost no one will ever want to give up the comforts of modernity, even if they claim to. So all countries will continue with trying to grow their economies and, for countries with some semblance of free elections, no politician or party will run on a platform of contracting the economy or of aiming for a steady state economy, without the rest of the world also doing the same (and without a world government, that won’t happen). As the various planetary boundaries get left further and further behind, the rhetoric about wanting to do something will increase, but the actions, if any, will be meagre and wholly inadequate for the task of getting us back to near some of those boundaries. Add to that, resources becoming harder to extract and collapse of civilisation is inevitable, at some point in the future… this [is] because humans act like any other species. There is no such thing as free will and so rational actions are not possible. We’ll just have to get used to business as usual playing out. A few environmentalists see the polycrisis for what it is but most seem to concentrate on climate change, so think that all we have to do is stop using fossil fuels… [and] that isn’t possible but, even if it is, those people’s primary objective is to preserve civilisation, a profoundly unsustainable enterprise. It would be satisfying to see the transition clearly fail (because it’s unsustainable in itself and can’t make an unsustainable civilisation sustainable) but only from an academic stand-point. Satisfying but also disappointing because, if the rest of our predicaments haven’t yet reached their outcomes, a true transition might keep the climate moderately liveable, for many or most, for a few decades longer, provided the air conditioning doesn’t pack up."