Isn’t it time we had a Plan B?

Last week we launched a new report through the Climate Majority Project asking a simple question:

Isn’t it time we had a back-up plan – just in case things do go catastrophically wrong?

The report argues that the severity of the risks we face, combined with the impossibility of agreeing precisely on their nature, demands a fairly fundamental shift in how we approach climate discourse and action.

For too long, debates about ecological breakdown have revolved around arguments that are unlikely ever to be conclusively resolved. Disputes about climate models, economic growth, technological breakthroughs, or the pace of transition are important. But they also risk becoming interminable debates – debates that will not resolve themselves until it is too late to prepare adequately for the possibilities being discussed.

In the report, we call these “unwinnable debates.”

The point is not that the questions themselves do not matter, but that betting our collective future on winning them is a dangerous strategy.

Instead, we argue that the most productive path forward is to focus on what we can agree on: that very serious disruption is plausible, and that prudent societies prepare for plausible dangers even when the details remain uncertain.

In other words, we need a Plan B.

Not a politics of despair, but a politics of strategic adaptation – preparing our food systems, infrastructure, institutions and communities for shocks that we may still be able to mitigate, but can no longer responsibly assume away.

This means planning for resilience at multiple levels:

local communities building mutual aid and preparedness;

and governments taking seriously the need for national resilience planning around food security, supply chains and critical infrastructure.

Given deep uncertainty about the scale and nature of coming climate impacts, prudent preparedness is not optional – it is a matter of survival.

Why the Plan B conversation matters

Our public conversation about climate risk often assumes that the crucial task is to win the argument: to prove one model right, one policy framework correct, one economic theory superior.

But when the stakes are existential and the uncertainties profound, a wiser approach is often intellectual humility.

Instead of trying to convince everyone that our preferred interpretation of the future is correct, we should focus on what a clear majority of people can agree upon: that preparing for severe disruption is simply common sense.

That is the spirit of Plan B.

Along with my co-authors, I wrote about our report in an accessible article. You can read the article here.

If the Plan B report resonates with you, please do share it. One of the central arguments we make is that preparedness becomes politically possible only when enough people recognise its necessity.

Learning from civilisations that tried to “break down well”

One of the themes I have been exploring recently is how societies respond when they recognise that their existing trajectory is no longer sustainable.

In a new essay I ask what we might learn from past civilisations that, in different ways, attempted something remarkable: to wind down or transform aspects of their systems deliberately rather than simply collapse blindly.

The historical record is uneven, but it raises a fascinating question for our own time:

What would it mean for a modern society to attempt a conscious descent — a transition designed to preserve what matters most while reducing the scale and fragility of our systems?

You can read that piece here.

Thank you, as always, for reading – and for helping to spread these ideas beyond the circles that are already thinking about them.