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Opinion: 90 months and counting With the clock running in the climate change countdown, postEnlightenment faith in technological fixes may not be enough, argues Andrew Simms Ten months have passed since pointing out that we have, at best, 100 months left before a new, far more dangerous phase of global warming begins. The ‘chatter’ of concern is getting louder. However, at the same time, the political system in Britain has been wracked and absorbed more by its own inadequacies than by this fundamental threat to civilization. The historian Adrian Goldsworthy writes that the fall of the Roman Empire was due, to a large extent, to a system of government that became inwardlooking and weakened by internal dissent. Gone was the singular focus from the golden days of the Republic, when a small, trusted coterie of around 1,000 administrators ran the whole empire efficiently. In its place was a bloated, inefficient and suspicious bureaucracy of 35,000, seeking power and personal advantage. Worst of all, gripped with self-obsession, they took their eyes off the Goths at the gates, and paid a devastating price. Any similarities to actual people alive today and current political circumstances are, of course, entirely unintended and circumstantial. Goldsworthy points out that every age can project its own experience onto the Romans, which goes to show how much they did actually do for us. In the last ten months, support for needing to take radical action over the countdown period has been far and deep. Nobel Prize winners from Rajendra Pachaun of the IPCC to Wangari Maathai of the Kenyan Green belt movement have lent support; thousands of individuals have too, along with groups whose memberships run into millions. Yet, in spite of the support that investing in the great transition could give to a weakened economy, the new and additional resources being made available are paltry compared to the support given to the financial sector. Around the world, as states become more acutely aware of the threats to food and energy security stemming from our ecological overreach, they are taking action. But they are just as likely to be eyeing the natural resources of other, weaker states to meet their rising consumption, as they are to be changing consumption patterns to live within their environmental means. Land grabs for food and biofuels seem to hit the news with growing frequency. Technological optimism is all around us. ‘You cannot predict the future and unimagined solutions come along; they always have done,’ we are reassured. Whenever there is a great problem, human ingenuity finds a techno-fix. Who could have predicted the chemical fertilizers for our food system, which thwarted Malthusian pessimists? The problem is, with the timeframe to act on climate change, those solutions that are meant to allow us to carry on as usual should have arrived years ago and be in place now. Now, with 90 months left on our clock, we have a great challenge to face. Both terrifying and thrilling, we need to brace ourselves for the fastest decline in the use of fossil fuels that our society has ever faced. It will need technology, behaviour change and regulations to ensure fair shares and equity. During this process, I suspect that we will rediscover several important things that have been largely lost or forgotten: the importance of community, our own ingenuity and ability to do things for ourselves, and how deeply connected to, and ultimately dependent on, nature we really are. This article appeared in The Guardian on 1 June 2009.