We Know How to Do This – Will We?

With Eight Billion People we can solve the climate crisis

The Bill Arrives

We knew this was coming. The scientists told us, the models told us, and the summers of 2003, 2019, and 2022 told us in language that needed no translation. Yet here we are, in June 2026, and the second heatwave of the year is descending on Europe’s soil that never recovered from the first - because this isn’t weather, it is the result of neglected climate change and it is a civilizational stress test, arriving ahead of schedule.

France’s wheat is in its final grain-fill stage - the most heat-sensitive window in the crop cycle - and temperatures in the Beauce and other bread-basket regions are touching 40°C. Vineyards across Bordeaux and Burgundy are in fruit-set, the moment when berry size and yield are determined, and vines are responding to extreme heat by shutting down. Rivers are ok for now, but for how long? Soils are desiccated. The Loire, along whose banks four nuclear power stations depend on adequate cooling water, risks falling to levels that force output curtailment - at peak electricity demand, in a heatwave, with air conditioning running flat out across two hundred million people.

But the deeper problem isn’t this heatwave. It’s the pattern of what’s happening. We’re no longer dealing with extreme events separated by adequate recovery periods. We’re dealing with compound, sequential shocks landing on ground that cannot absorb them. Dry soil from May’s record heat became drier still through June. Depleted river flows from spring fell further as summer arrived. Grasslands that feed dairy cattle are producing twenty percent below normal before August has even started. At these limits, the next shock isn’t an additive pressure; it may well be a trigger for a downward cascade that flips the system into an entirely broken new regime and the damage multiplies.

The food system isn’t built for repeated shocks. It’s designed for averaging - bad year here, good year there, global trade smoothing the gaps. That logic collapses when France, Spain, Germany, and Italy are simultaneously in crisis, when U.S. wheat is already twenty-five percent below last year due to drought and freeze, when global grain reserves are thin and shipping routes are stressed. At that point, food price inflation isn’t an economic abstraction. It’s families in Lyon and Madrid and Naples choosing between the electricity bill and the grocery bill, in the middle of a heatwave, in cities built for a climate that no longer exists.

This isn’t worst-case speculation. It’s the median trajectory of a summer that seasonal forecasters described as a major drought event before it began, driven by El Niño, anomalous Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and the structural drying of Western European soils that has been underway for a decade. The worst case is simply that July builds on June, and August on July, and the self-reinforcing loop - dry soil, hotter air, less evaporation, drier soil - tightens another turn.

We’ve had the science for thirty years. What we’ve lacked is the political will to treat a slow catastrophe as urgently as a fast one. What makes me despondent and full of rage is that we know how to turn this around before global collapse makes it impossible to stop the avalanche. And as I said so often before: we are running out of time. What can we do still?

Restoring a World Worth Living In

The way to restore a world worth living in isn’t one grand rescue. It’s a mutirão - the old Brazilian word borrowed from the Indigenous Tupi language: the collective work party where neighbors roll up their sleeves and tackle a shared task together. Nearly every culture has carried some version of it: the barn-raising of rural America, the minka of the Andes, the puxirum of the Amazon, the ngayah of Bali.

It begins with a shift in how we see the world: there is no separation between my wellbeing and the world. My environment isn’t something to plunder but to use carefully and care for, so it cares for me in return. And it is about action, not words. Our political divides are fired up by words, but our differences disappear when we work together.

This translates from the local to the global: see our planet Earth is a living body we belong to, not a treasure trove to strip. The healing is in doing, not in talking. The eight-hundred-page reports and the endless global summits that agree on nothing have never restored a single watershed; only hands in the soil do that. So, begin, everyone, everywhere, now, and heal the future, locally, through action that strengthens the community, relieves the pain of the weak, and restores the beauty and abundance of nature.

Restore the water cycles at the scale of watersheds, cover the bare soil, regreen the drylands, and let the forests come back, so the living world increasingly cools itself on hot days. If we do that everywhere, with everyone, the household’s grocery bill stops carrying the cost of local and distant droughts. Grow food closer to where it is eaten, hold the seed and the soil and the knowledge in our common heritage, take it back from the monopolies of powerful companies. Learn from the Subak farmers of Bali, whose thousand-year-old governance of shared water flows from Tri Hita Karana - the philosophy that wellbeing has three inseparable roots:

Harmony with the divine, harmony among people and harmony with the living land.

Move the planetary nervous system we’ve built - the internet, AI, the sum of human knowledge - away from private dominance. These belong to us all, to the Earth, to future generations. Put them into a Global Commons too, our common heritage. Used well, we can repair every square meter of damaged land instead of abusing it to harvest our attention and our rage relentlessly via vile algorithms. And refuse the misdirection: stop letting the anger of the mess be aimed at the migrant or the minority instead of the structure, because the energy in the streets is the same energy that, turned the other way, becomes the mutirão that rebuilds the commons from below. It will not come from existing political structures, we have to retake those structures to retake our hold on a liveable future.

None of this requires a technology we don’t have, or one more report to tell us what we already know. It requires only that we stop talking and start doing: a planet-wide work party of eight billion hands repairing the future for all of us in sync with Nature and the Living Planet and with future generations as our prime responsibility!

The Happy Return of Abundance

And here’s the part few seem to realize: this isn’t grim duty. The spirit we can unleash by putting our hands back to work collectively for something that actually matters is one of hope, courage, community. The very thing we have been starved of comes flooding back: purpose, belonging, the electric feeling of being alive and useful. The repair will become our happiness; being in service to life returns to the centre of our existence.

There’s a deeper logic under these community efforts, and Charles Eisenstein names it better than anyone writing today. In The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, and in Sacred Economics before it, he makes the case that scarcity isn’t simply a fact of the world but partly a product of the story we tell about it - that a worldview of of competing people fighting over scarcity creates that scarcity it claims to merely describe. When a community shares, gives - labor, food, time, attention - freely rather than counting every exchange, it doesn’t deplete itself; it thickens the web of relationship that is the real wealth, and abundance follows the generosity rather than the other way around. This isn’t sentiment. It’s the oldest economics there is, the one the mutirão and the ngayah have always known: a gift creates a bond, a bond creates a community, and a community, in deep reference for the abundance of nature, is the only thing that has ever actually kept anyone safe.

Our Living Planet Creates Abundance

Peter Bunyard and I spent years working it out and put it in our book Cooling the Climate, and the heart of it is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: the planet has cooled itself for hundreds of millions of years and has increasingly created the conditions for life to thrive. It did that first and foremost through photosynthesis, and not mainly through the carbon that everyone fixates on, but through water - the vapor that plants breathe out, carrying its absorbed heat up to the high atmosphere and seeding the clouds that shade us. In a living rainforest, that water-cycle cooling does something like a hundred times the work of the carbon drawdown. Once you understand that, the way out stops being mysterious. You restore ecosystems, restore water cycles with vegetation, cover the bare soil, regreen the drylands, let the forests come back, and the planet starts regulating its own temperature again, the way a healthy body does. Local peak temperatures can come down within years with between 2 and 5 C.

The knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. The bottleneck is us: the pressure of the ignorant and dark forces in our own human pool, the people who would rather sell a mirage than tend a future, who profit from the fire and from our distraction while it spreads. We aren’t failing for lack of a map. We’re failing because the map is being shouted down and drowned out by men with bigger bank accounts, louder microphones and worse intentions.

A House of Cards

Look at what’s actually happening in the world this month, not in the abstractions of melting permafrost and slowing ocean currents that are easy to file under someone else’s decade, but in the supermarket, at the petrol pump, in the streets, declining mental health, increasing agitation.

The UN’s cereal price index has now climbed for four straight months, and the overall food index is holding near its highest level in over three years, driven by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz pushing up the cost of energy and the fertilizer that energy makes. Wheat has risen for four consecutive months on drought in the United States - where winter-wheat condition is among the worst in decades - and the expectation that farmers, facing fertilizer they cannot afford, will simply plant less. This is the faltering of the living planet arriving not as an abstraction but as the price of bread, of cooking oil, of sugar.

And underneath it all sits a financial system carrying a mountain of debt now standing at more than three times global output - a system that looks less like an economy than a house of cards in a strengthening storm that is just beginning.

And the cards are starting to fall, in real time, also in places I know on the ground.

A Global Spring?

In Indonesia, where I co-founded two companies, the government held petrol prices steady through the Iran war and then, last week, could no longer afford to - a thirty-two percent hike, the rupiah at a historic low of 18,000 to the dollar. By Friday, students in yellow university jackets were marching on Jakarta’s Bundaran HI under the banner “Heading to Bankrupt Indonesia,” tearing down police barricades, demanding lower fuel and food prices. This is on top of last August’s eruption, when a police armored vehicle crushed a twenty-one-year-old food-delivery driver named Affan Kurniawan - still in his green work jacket, out earning a bag of rice for his family - and the rage spread to all thirty-eight provinces.

In Bolivia, the fuel subsidies that propped up daily life for twenty years finally collapsed under a dollar shortage, prices doubled, and by May the capital was under what the reporting calls a siege of blockades, with seven dead. In Albania, thousands are in the streets of Tirana - partly over corruption, partly over a five-billion-euro luxury resort backed by Jared Kushner being dropped onto a protected wetland of flamingos and sea turtles while ordinary Albanians are told the country is open for sale.

And these aren’t isolated. Across 2025 and into this year, youth-led uprisings swept more than a dozen countries on three continents - Nepal, Madagascar, Peru, Morocco, the Philippines, Kenya, Indonesia - and toppled governments in at least three of them. While youth-led uprisings have shaken a dozen nations, they unfold against a backdrop of deeper, more crushing tragedies - from the devastating conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan, to the long-standing horrors in the Congo and Iran. Yet beneath this entire landscape of political failure and systemic violence, the fundamental truth remains: the vast majority of ordinary people do not want this destruction; they desperately want peace, decency, and a safe future for themselves and their children where the basics for living are not out of reach.

People keep asking me whether we’re heading toward another Arab Spring. I’ve come to think the question is already out of date. We’re not heading toward it. We’re in it, and it’s no longer regional. In 2010 the pressure was a single spike in a single region, and we told the story afterward as one about dignity and dictatorship, when underneath it was triggered by the price of bread. What’s bearing down now is structural and global and arriving through several channels at once - energy through the closed Hormuz strait, water through the droughts the price of vegetables quietly inflates, debt past three times the world’s output, and wages that crept up just behind prices in the rich world and seem to move in a wider split for the poorest since the pandemic.

Different countries are different rooms, but it’s the same wall. People in Jakarta and La Paz are putting their hands against it, and so, more quietly, are for instance farmers across the American Midwest, where family-farm bankruptcies jumped almost fifty percent in a single year, total farm debt is climbing toward a record of more than six hundred billion dollars, and the median farm now loses money outright while the suicide rate among those who work the land runs at three and a half times the national average. The richest agricultural economy on Earth is one where fewer than five percent of farms turn a profit and one in four families is buying groceries on credit.

And the pressure is about to get worse from a direction the receipts have not yet registered. As I write, the forecasters have just confirmed it: El Niño has formed in the Pacific, and the June model runs are no longer hedging - they’re pointing at what could be a record-breaking event by autumn, with the warm water piling up against the South American coast at anomalies the models put as high as four degrees above normal, on top of an ocean already warmed by everything else we’ve done. The last events of this size, in 1997 and 2015, rewrote weather across half the planet. This one is coming, arrives at a world on edge, with 2026 and 2027 likely the warmest years ever. It’s the clearest illustration of the argument I keep making: the biosphere doesn’t send its invoice as an abstraction in some distant decade. It sends it as the price of bread and the failure of a fishery, arriving first of all in the places where people are most vulnerable, which then has a domino effect often thousands of miles away, multiplying tensions throughout the world. The heat wave forming in the Pacific right now will reach the supermarket till before it reaches the headlines. The mainstream media have been structurally behind the curve on all these important topics for over a decade now.

The Bombardment

And here’s the part where it gets really scary. The energy in the streets of protests is real and it’s justified. Inflation statistics are way lower than the increased food bill. The stress feeds fear and anger and viciously, the dark forces are extraordinarily good at direction its aim, deflecting it from the real causes and feeding on the chaos.

They do it by keeping us bombarded non-stop with messages meant to keep us too busy to think calmly. While the house of cards shakes, the most powerful country on Earth is run by a man whose chief talent is the manufacture of spectacle - the tacky, ceaseless craving for attention that fills every screen so that nothing else can. Russia’s disinformation machinery intentionally floods the zone with manufactured nonsense, not to make us believe any one thing but to exhaust our capacity to believe anything at all aimed at making many more angry and our societies more brittle. The trillionaires sell their fata morganas - the metaverse, the Mars colony, the AI utopia arriving soon - beautiful mirages shimmering over a world that is, meanwhile, on fire. And all of it pours through the same phones we carry, a bombardment of impressions engineered to leave us agitated, fragmented, and too dazed to act.

The Trap

This is the trap, and it’s more elegant and perhaps crueller than simple villainy. The very conditions that make the repair urgent: the cost-of-living rupture, the faltering biosphere, the vertigo of AI arriving faster than we can stand on, are the same conditions that drain the exact human capacities the repair requires. You cannot rebuild a world in perpetual crisis as it creates collective paralysis. A frightened, exhausted, doom-scrolling population isn’t one that can find the faint path in the fog. It’s a population in the fingernail hold - present only enough to hang on, switched off everywhere else, and therefore exquisitely available to whoever shows up promising an enemy to blame and a fight to watch instead of a feasible future to build.

When a society is bombarded by a relentless convergence of crises - economic precarity, ecological dread, and the dizzying velocity of technological change - it falls into a profound systemic trap. The sheer weight of these structural shocks forces our collective nervous systems into raw survival mode, narrowing human capacity to the single, exhausting reflex of simply getting through the day. In this state of perpetual burnout and doom-scrolling, our collective imagination is the first casualty; we become too cognitively depleted to envision a better world, too paralysed to map a path out of the fog. We master the HOW of staying afloat while entirely losing our orientation toward any meaningful WHY.

This collective exhaustion and loss of purpose is not just a tragic byproduct of modern life - it is an in part deliberate political vulnerability, a state of mind expertly exploited by some at the top that are just aiming for power. A population that has stopped asking what it is surviving for, is a population that will readily accept raw, baseline survival as the ultimate prize. When people are too tired to do the cooperative work of building a fairer future, their horizons shrink to the immediate here and now of basic needs and tribal security. They ripen to fall for the demagogue who steps into the void, offering a simple script of manufactured enemies to blame and a public fight to watch instead of a better future to build. Ultimately, a corrupt status quo doesn’t need to defeat our arguments; it wins simply by making us too tired to imagine alternatives.

So Why Not Just Hide Out Collapse?

This is a question I have asked and answered for myself. If the knowledge to save ourselves exists, but the forces blocking it are this entrenched, and this brutally efficient at drowning our voices out, leaving us numb, is the honest move not simply to stop working on solutions? Is it not wiser to accept the cliff, prepare for the fall, and find somewhere remote to dig in? Perhaps the only sane path left is to wait out the dust until our numbers have come down, allowing whatever survives to begin again after humanity has reached rock bottom.

It definitely is an option. There are mornings I think it’s the only clear-eyed reading of the data. It is for this reason I bought a remote farm in the mountains of Bahia sixteen years back and that I know exactly what that retreat would look like, and that it would work, for a while, for a few. Independence of water, food and energy. The company of birds and farm animals. The protection of reviving rain forests cooling our surroundings.

It is definitely an option to stop spending yourself on a structure I doubt very much that it can be saved, and to protect instead what can actually be carried through - there’s real, sane logic in that.

And Yet - Two things won’t let me rest there.

The first is that the retreat is surrender. To prepare for collapse and wait out the dust to settle, is to make survival the whole point - to let life shrink back to food and fuel and whether the night stays quiet, which is precisely the orientation-less existence I’ve spent my life refusing. The moment I make my own survival the ultimate priority, I’ve conceded the exact thing the dark forces most want me to concede that there’s nothing left worth tending but my own skin. Which is an even more preposterous attitude at the age of 70 after a lucky life full of adventure and abundance...

The second is harder to say and truer. The evolutionary leap I keep writing about - the living planet slowly learning to know itself, four billion years of accumulated life pulling into a single connected layer of intelligence and self-awareness - is unfolding on the very same timescale as the collapse, pushed by the very same forces, and it’s genuinely undecided. The merger that created the complex cell, the one Lynn Margulis was mocked for till the DNA proved her right, didn’t happen because conditions were gentle. It happened under pressure, as a desperate cooperation between creatures that could not survive apart. We’re in that kind of pressure now. To dig in and wait is to absent myself from the one moment in four billion years when the absence of people like the hundreds I know who think similarly, might be the thing that tips it the wrong way.

How to Stand While It Is Undecided

So, I can’t resolve this for you. I don’t know whether we will make the turn. The odds seem against us, I feel the energy slipping, I can feel it going quiet, and writing this is my attempt to report on this process between hope and desperation.

What I have, instead of a resolution, is the posture of the old Buddhist story Peter and I retell at the close of Cooling the Climate - the Shambhala warriors, who appear precisely when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, who carry no guarantee of winning and do the work anyway, armed only with compassion as fuel and the insight into our radical interdependence that keeps the fuel from burning them alive. That story is deliberately beyond optimism and pessimism. It doesn’t tell you whether you make it. It tells you how to stand while it’s undecided.

Eisenstein has a line for the place I’m writing from, too. He argues t

hat the crisis of our civilization and the despair we feel about it spring from a single source - the old story of the separate self in a dead and hostile universe, which is at once the engine of the extraction and the thing that tells us our small acts cannot matter. His answer isn’t to argue the despair away but to walk through it: true hope, he says, lies on the far side of despair, not on the near side. The small, uncounted acts which the old story dismisses as pointless - caring for one sick elder, tending one watershed, keeping faith with one community, random acts of kindness - are not a distraction from saving the world. In a living, connected world they are the saving of it, because there is no separate world to save and no separate self to save it. The energy of these acts resonates through the whole of reality.

What we lost, somewhere in the long Cartesian centuries, was the intuition that thought and matter are not two separate stuffs but one - what Spinoza meant by Deus sive Natura, God or Nature as a single substance, the mind of the world not hovering above it but woven through every living particular of it. We built a civilization on the opposite assumption - mind here, matter there, ours to measure and take - and the wreckage of that split is the whole of what I have been describing. To put cows back under the trees, making space for cooling trees, to care for the insects, to revive the thirsty soils isn’t only an agronomic act. It’s the beginning of reversing the separation itself.

And here’s the thing I’ve seen with my own eyes, on worn-out land made green again: when we work with nature rather than against it, with something like love and respect rather than the cold arithmetic of extraction, nature answers. Not metaphorically. The water comes back, the soil deepens, the birds return, the rains soften. Abundance isn’t something we wring out of a reluctant world by force; it’s what a living world freely offers back to those who tend it. The land recovers its vitality and we recover ours, because they were never two things in the first place.

Because here’s the other half of the picture, the half the bombardment is designed to hide from you. The repair is also real, and it’s already happening in a thousand places too small for the news cycle to notice - food grown closer to where it’s eaten, water held in the land at the scale of the farm and the watershed, the commons of seed and soil and knowledge defended against enclosure, the Subak of Bali governing shared water as a sacred thing for a thousand years, binding temple, community, and land into one whole. The thousand goat-paths that lead the planet away from the cliff are the same paths that let an ordinary family’s daily life breathe meaning and happiness again, able to put food on the table, clothes on their kids and with access to a doctor if needed.

And - this is the part I have to keep saying against my own despair, because the numbers are real and I’ve checked them - it’s affordable. Not in some utopian accounting, but in the plainest arithmetic. Peter and I, with others, calculated what it would take to actually halt the warming through strategic regeneration of the biosphere both on land and in the oceans, together with a transition of our wider food system toward something climate-resilient. The price comes out around three to five hundred billion dollars a year for for the whole planet for twenty years - something like 0.3 to 0.5 percent of global output or 12 cents per person per day. Set that beside the debt mountain three times the size of everything the world produces, and it’s a rounding error. A tax of a tenth of one percent on global financial transactions, paid into investment-grade restoration funds, would be enough to bring this money together, sprinkling it on projects without torturing the project makers with thousands of questions. Do the clouds ever demand a due diligence of the forest to prove that it will make good use of the gift of water to grow its trees, before they decide to rain?

The emergency list is brutally short and brutally clear: five years to pull the Amazon back from its tipping point, ten to revive the ocean biology that seeds half our clouds, then the long work of regreening the deserts and stabilizing the poles. Almost none of it requires a technology we don’t have. All of it requires that we not be too dazed, too divided, and too frightened, perhaps too psychotic to begin and really save ourselves.

We’re far enough into the endgame that many of us will live to see which way the path moves - toward the cliff and into the abyss or onto one of the thousand quiet paths home weaving a future together that is worth living. Those are the times we’re.

Rob de Laet

June 2026

Sources and Further Reading

Peter Bunyard & Rob de Laet, Cooling the Climate (Ethics Press, 2024) - the full argument behind the water-cycle cooling, the regeneration plan, and its costing. Project and ongoing work at coolingtheclimate.earth.

FAO Food Price Index (May 2026): the benchmark held near a three-year high, with the Cereal Price Index up for a fourth straight month. fao.org/worldfoodsituation

Global debt: the Institute of International Finance tracks total world debt at a record level above three times global GDP. iif.com

Indonesia: the June 2026 “Heading to Bankrupt Indonesia” student protests followed a roughly 32% fuel-price rise and the rupiah’s fall to historic lows; the August 2025 unrest, sparked by the death of food-delivery driver Affan Kurniawan, spread across all 38 provinces. Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera.

Bolivia: the December 2025 end of fuel subsidies amid a dollar shortage roughly doubled prices and triggered the 2026 protests and blockades. Al Jazeera, Associated Press, Buenos Aires Herald.

Albania: the 2026 protests in Tirana against corruption and the Kushner-backed luxury-resort project. Al Jazeera and AFP.

The global protest wave: youth-led uprisings across more than a dozen countries in 2025–26. Bloomberg, Associated Press, Institute for Economics and Peace.

El Niño: NOAA issued an El Niño Advisory in June 2026, with model ensembles pointing to a potentially record-strength event by autumn. NOAA Climate Prediction Center, cpc.ncep.noaa.gov.

US farm crisis: Chapter 12 family-farm bankruptcies rose sharply in 2025; total farm-sector debt forecast toward a record above $600 billion in 2026. American Farm Bureau Federation, USDA Economic Research Service, Farm Aid.

On collective work traditions: mutirão (Brazilian Portuguese, from Tupi motirõ), minka (Andes), puxirum (Amazon), ngayah (Bali), and Tri Hita Karana - the Balinese philosophy of three harmonies underpinning the Subak water-temple system.

Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and Sacred Economics (2011).

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), and his formula Deus sive Natura.

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis on Gaia and symbiogenesis; Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning; Joanna Macy’s telling of the Shambhala Warrior prophecy.