From ... in Climate Change — Feb 25, 2025

The Gauntlet. Where is Thrutopia?

COP27 at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, 2022. Sean Kidney steps onto’ stage and prepares to deliver his opening remarks. He is the CEO and co-founder of the Climate Bonds Initiative, a climate finance NGO dedicated to turning bond markets and other financial sectors ‘green’. This will, so the theory goes, provide both markets and governments with the financial resources needed to meet the 1.5C Paris Temperature Targets—and thus prevent catastrophic climate breakdown.

When he is ready and the crowd has settled, Sean begins his speech:

“We’ve lost the fight against climate change…”

CBI’s leadership are aghast, the comms team panic. The audience shifts uncomfortably.

His speech goes on to predict a significant breach of the 1.5C temperature target, the horrors that will bring, and the monstrous efforts adaptation will entail. True to form, he still manages to end on a positive note, but that isn’t what remains in the audience’s minds. CBI emphatically ban him from ever uttering this line again.

In 2022, these sentiments were still beyond the pale. Scientists had long been harbouring private doubts about 1.5C without them spilling into the public discourse. But bit by bit, the question of ‘overshoot’ has crept its way into the mainstream. After global temperatures ‘temporarily’ breached 1.5C in 2023, popular outlets started questioning if we might indeed overshoot the Paris agreement. In 2024, most articles asked when. Now, early in 2025, it is already common to claim that the 1.5C target is already over.

Though overshoot is still ultimately an outcome of collective choices, rather than immutable facts of nature, it doesn’t mean we should cling to the hope that it will not occur. Or, as machine learning expert and climate modeller Carl Edward Rasmussen puts it:

“It may be possible [to avoid 1.5C] in the same sense that it is possible for me to walk from Amsterdam to Beijing. As in not a verifiable physical impossibility. But it’s not going to happen.”

So, what does that mean? We breach 1.5C and, in optimistic scenarios with massive mitigation efforts, still end up around 2C. This is, it should be noted, a much lower temperature rise than existing commitments are expected to take us to—and even these are goals we are not currently adhering to.

Even if we ‘limit’ overshoot, the chance of reducing temperatures in the future seems increasingly unlikely, according to new research. So whatever temperature we get to, we should expect to stay there for a long time, if not permanently: “There is no time machine waiting in the wings. Once 1.5°C lies behind us, we must consider that threshold permanently broken” (Andreas Malm). And even if we somehow do reverse overshoot, decisionmakers have erroneously assumed that a world after overshoot will be the same as before. This is not necessarily the case: “[The] global and regional climate change and associated risks after an overshoot are different from a world that avoids it”.

All this promises a future of fires, floods and storms. Of endless droughts and inferno cities where outdoor labourers drop like flies. Where billions of work hours are lost to extreme heat and millions must migrate. A world where hydroelectricity ceases and food prices skyrocket. Waterfronts drown and northern forest collapse into vast permafrost craters, belching methane into an already stewing atmosphere. A world where, in short, no amount of mitigation will preclude the need for radical adaptation.

You’ve probably read some similarly apocalyptic sounding paragraph prefacing a climate change article before. Swap out the disasters and economic impact, but it’s all to the same effect. They are largely written for shock value even if they are factually accurate. Yet what does it really tell us? These presentations of our climate future were traditionally employed to demonstrate a ‘future to avoid’. The theory was that, if dramatic enough, the public and decisionmakers would be jolted into action, and work to avert this nightmarish visage coming to pass. But what happens when we subtract avoidability from the equation?

The old binary of a future with climate change and one without is collapsing because we can’t really present climate change as a ‘future to avoid’ anymore. It’s here, and will get a lot worse regardless of how hard we mitigate. But there is still a long way between worse and worst-case scenarios.

The doomer perspective is that it is essentially too late to prevent catastrophic—and potentially existential—breakdown, and the only path now is to brace for and accept what is to come. This is a community characterised by grieving and survivalism. Yet this is not an approach that the majority will take. They will not surrender just because conditions worsen. Neither will states, nor businesses—even if it’s only because of some emergent inertia that perpetuates their struggle to exist. People will still work, live, and love in this future. The economy will probably still get a lot bigger, even if climate chaos punctuates it with systemic meltdowns and the fruits of that growth become wildly asymmetric along climatic lines. Geopolitical rivalries will continue to fulminate, and technology advance even as vast regions become uninhabitable. Our spluttering transition has already reduced the potential height of anthropogenic warming from the truly apocalyptic 4-6C. In his introductory book to climate change, scientist Mark Maslin’s[1] only comment on this level of warming is the prosaic “Don’t go there”, and points out that “even the IPCC has avoided discussing a world that hot”. Yet it is now an anachronism to assume overshooting 1.5C is in any way ‘safe’, and we are still on track for 3C.

This is the world we are stepping into. Neither a clean-cut apocalypse nor a successful avoidance of climate change. And all this will happen in a context that has its own systemic issues outside of climate. Adaptation is now a necessity, but for many will be simply impossible. Climate induced retreats, relocations, and abandonment are an inevitability, managed or not. Many are already underway. Just as likely and far more unjustly, many places where adaptation is possible will not receive the resources to do so and, in short, fail. Vulnerable regions will drain of people and others will degrade from former heights, continent wide rust belts forming in unstable latitudes. One might be tempted to call this future dystopic, yet when it comes to the full breath of possible climate scenarios, a modern world wracked by upheaval is by no means the worst it could be. As though our efforts have steered us away from the worst possible scenarios, unexpected tipping points could thrust us into a world completely unsuitable for complex human civilization.

This is in many ways a novel narrative of the future. Neither the continuous progress which underlies much modern political thought nor its reactionary and apocalyptic inverse.

One conceptualisation of this new narrative is as a ‘Thrutopia’. This is the middle passage between utopia and dystopia. The hour is too late to avoid reaping the destruction we have sown, but neither is complex human civilisation beyond hope. It is a future of overcoming challenges without blind faith in our ability to easily resolve their underlying causes. This is a significant change from how environmentalists and climate activists have traditionally approached the future:

“Instead of pushing the public into a ‘fight-or-flight state’, environmentalists need ‘a story of how we make it through’”

A chaotic and unstable world awaits many, though our adaptive capacity could ultimately steer us through the storm. The challenge is not just to brace against the chaos or prevent it getting worse, but to resist the outcomes of that chaos derailing our efforts to resolve its underlying causes and survive its impacts.

Finding Thrutopia

Though Thrutopia it is useful framing, it can be misleading in one crucial way. The concept of Thrutopia has a great strength in helping us see beyond the binary in climate scenarios. It dispels the win-lose framing. A hotter, more unstable world is still one where cities will survive, nations could prosper, and the (even more) urgent work of emissions reduction must still take place. Yet this anti-binary thinking can be projected too far into the future when the framework is taken literally. Just because there is no immediate cliff edge to avoid, it does not mean there are none down the road—nor that, even if some should avoid them, everyone will do so likewise.

A ‘Thrutopia’ is necessarily a scenario where you ‘make it’, yet the coming overshoot era can absolutely be lost. In a sense, Thrutopia is the map but not the territory. It is how you traverse the future, and that future is a gauntlet we must run.

And many, including entire nations, will fail this trial. It is not now, nor may it ever be, politically palatable to consign whole states to extinction, yet it will happen. Island nations are what spring to mind but they are not the only who could succumb to the gauntlet. Larger and relatively prosperous nations in the global south are at risk, and only by seriously considering their failure can we assess the necessity of change. Will Bangladesh, a country in acute fiscal crisis and with nearly a third of its agricultural land due to be submerged by 2050, be able to survive the gauntlet? And even if it does, what does its ‘Thrutopia’ look like? Survival is, of course, only avoiding the worst of possible scenarios.

It is easy to protest that climate alone is not what grants stability to a nation’s socio-political institutions. You could point out that social cohesion, institutions, financial architecture, and geopolitical conditions are all arguably more important than underlying climate to stability. And you would be correct. But climate impacts do not remain just climate impacts. They affect productivity. They affect borrowing costs. They impact national health and break infrastructure and cascade through all aspects of economic, social, and political life in and across nations. They are ‘threat multipliers’ that erode baseline stability—as Mark Blyth puts it, climate breakdown is “a giant non-linear outcome generator”. Research by Allianz has shown how every day of extreme heat is the economic equivalent of half a day of strike. In 2023, for example, it is estimated that excess ‘heat exposure’ caused half a trillion hours of work to be lost; costing some countries 8% of their GDP. Most of the nations which are increasingly experiencing these conditions—such as India and Pakistan—also have large informal workforces who primarily work outdoors. Unregistered and poorly monitored, the climate impacts on this sector will only be perceivable downstream. India’s largest food delivery service Zomato, for example, blamed its falling earnings in 2024 on ‘heat stress’ in the workforce.

Even the more rarified heights of sovereign finance are not immune, and a team of academics have demonstrated how climate impacts will raise the borrowing cost of sovereign debt across the developed world. Putting additional strain on developed nations like the UK, already struggling to pay for its basic state functions. Aside from the aforementioned island nations, it is these second and third-order impacts that will form the gauntlet to be survived as much as the visceral disasters and disrupted natural rhythms that precede them.

And we should also remember that, even now, national outcomes are not homogenous. Some regions within nations will be neglected or abandoned. When Pete Routledge was asked what Canadians affected by insurance hikes (rising in response to climate-induced wildfires) should do, he responded “…they may [just] have to move”. In Florida’s hurricane wracked coastlines, the rich can afford to stay whilst the poor are displaced by disasters and the unfolding insurance apocalypse following in their wake. The gauntlet will cascade through existing fissures of society: profession, class, race, gender, and even individual lifestyles. The futurist Alex Steffens’ work is dedicated to developing these strategies of personal ‘ruggedization’. Though he acknowledges that absolute safety is determined by collective choices, there is still ‘relative climate havens’ for individuals and their families. Yet when hurricane Helene ravaged the ‘climate haven’ of Asheville, it demonstrates the increasingly illusory nature of even this relative safety.

Even so, people can survive and thrive in the future. And more importantly, they must do so with enough adaptive capacity left over to navigate through true ‘game over’ scenarios.

Derailment risk

“I’m feeling a little helpless here”, the Filipino president said in a leaked recording. His nation had just been battered by four severe storms and typhoons in just ten days, and another was on its way.

The Philippines is no stranger to extreme weather, so had a well prepared and well-funded disaster response mechanism that kicked into action. But the scope, scale, and rapidity of the disasters was beyond anything they had experienced before, and in many places, it was too much to bear. Warehouse workers distributing aid dropped from exhaustion, and the aid they did distribute was frequently blocked, with roads to affected areas washed away by previous storms or flooded by new deluges.

This is Derailment Risk, a new category of climate risk coined by Laurie Laybourne and James Dyke. It a type of risk where the outcomes of climate change erode our capacity to deal with its causes and impacts. When disasters eat into a nations budget, resources must be moved from elsewhere to fill the gap. This process creates a perverse incentive, stripping the ability to adapt and mitigate in the future in order to prop up the present, but in doing so all but guaranteeing a future we are less well adapted too. In turn, this unprepared, more chaotic future will require more resources to weather the storm, and perpetuate the cycle.

Derailment risk is also particularly acute in its cascading impacts. In the wake of climate disasters like the 2024 Valencia floods, or the climate-induced food price inflation in the US, anti-climate populists rode the wave of public discontent to political power. Rather than a worsening climate driving action, it seems to feed the very forces that exacerbate it. With the war feeding itself, preventing worsening conditions may be seen as a key step in circumventing denialism and predatory delay.

So, tackling derailment risks means never losing sight of the end goal. Adaptation is vital, but in the end, mitigation must always be the overarching priority. There are, after all, scenarios that will simply overwhelm adaptive capacity. Avoiding them is the twin goal of navigating the gauntlet. You have to make it out the other side whilst weathering the blows that come along the way—and if you get to the other side and find a shutdown AMOC, collapsed arctic ice sheets, or any other major climate tipping point has been crossed, then adapting to the immediate causes will have been for nothing.

If mitigation is not ultimately successful, we are simply forced to run the gauntlet again. A Thrutopia may be presumed to be underway because we are successfully weathering the present, but this is not necessarily the case. Many preeminent voices in the climate movement, including Rupert Read, are now promoting this adaptation-based approach to climate breakdown:

“The recent unprecedented worldwide epidemic of flooding, followed swiftly by the dire Los Angeles fires has woken another significant tranche of people up. Devastating climate impacts are here. Climate chaos is here. The adaptation challenge should now be getting strategic pre-eminence. “

This logic has it’s appeals. For one, it foregrounds the immediacy of issues rather than appealing to some vague future scenario caused by an excess of a ubiquitous and invisible gas. It also makes actions more tangible and their outcomes more obvious. Climate mitigation is an inherently global effort. Adaptation is inherently local. I can see a flood barrier preventing my home washing away, but it is more difficult to see how a carbon-tax on top of my rising energy costs has aided my prospects.

But adaptation effectively accepts us running the gauntlet again and again. To a degree, we must accept this. But there is a limit to both adaptive capacity and our tolerance for it. Each run of the gauntlet is a hard thing to do, and makes further investment in passing it seem less and less worthwhile. This increases the incidence of derailment risks and reduces willingness to try mitigate them. As the Irish Times recently described the aftermath of Storm Eowyn: “This is not climate resilience, it is suffering”. Not only is climate breakdown likely to make many unable to adapt to it, but it will make many unwilling.

In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is faced by a similar choice:

“A courtmartial sat upon him, and he was asked which he liked better, to run the gauntlet six and thirty times through the whole regiment, or to have his brains blown out with a dozen musket–balls?

… he determined[…] to run the gauntlet six and thirty times. He had gone through his discipline twice, … which laid bare all his muscles and nerves from the nape of his neck to his stern. As they were preparing to make him set out the third time our young hero, unable to support it any longer, begged as a favor that they would be so obliging as to shoot him through the head; the favor being granted, a bandage was tied over his eyes, and he was made to kneel down.”

All this is not to say that people will choose apocalyptic climate conditions willingly over mitigation and adaptation, but that the worse the impacts get the less appealing the effort will be. As mentioned earlier, it will be the second and third order impacts that most people feel. If the basic costs of life become more onerous, from a certain vantage point wide scale re-allocations of resources (even for the more immediate needs of adaptation) become increasingly undesirable:

“When the marginal cost of investment in complexity becomes too high, various segments of the population increase passive or active resistance, or overtly break away. The insurrections of the Bagaudae are a case in point. In the later [Western Roman] empire the marginal return on investment in complexity was so low that the barbarian kingdoms seemed preferable. Decline can often form an economising process that occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organisational investment to a more favourable level.”

Just because you are making it for now, it doesn’t mean it’s a winning strategy in the long run. This is the risk of a Thrutopian perspective completely overtaking the conversation, with its focus on adaptation and responding to the present, a perspective that Adam Tooze calls ‘In Medias Res’ (In the midst of things). Though it is a useful analytical way to approach current challenges, the impacts of climate change degrade our ability to weather them, either making them exponentially unmanageable or, more likely, making us less capable of bearing the costs of that ‘management’. Even if we are adapting successfully through huge systemic effort, such a response can become less desirable than the alternative. Though the need for adaptation is now acute, it can never be enough in a world without deep and enduring mitigation.

We have, for all intents and purposes, crossed 1.5C. Other milestones surely await. Loss will follow. Some will be grand; others will be small. Town centres hollowing from repeated flooding, local cuisine disappearing as conditions change, and the background stabilities that so many take for granted coming apart, thread by thread. But the future isn’t a uniform apocalypse. New ideas, solutions and distractions will spring up to fill these voids in many places—just not all. A Thrutopia is a path through the gauntlet, but we must accept two things. First, not everyone will make it. And secondly, if there is not a viable path beyond the gauntlet, then giving up may seem more preferable to suffering through it, again and again.

[1] Climate Change, A Very Short Introduction, Mark Maslin (2014)

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The Gauntlet. Where is Thrutopia?

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