What would a life without climate change look like? In this world,

• Carbon emissions would be down to the pre-industrial levels,
• White reflective Arctic and Greenland ice cover would be intact,
• AMOC would persist,
• Forest covers would be up to their preindustrial level. The land used for farming would be much less.

As side effects,

• Seasons would be predictable,
• Loss of crops would be less due to unpredicted weather events,
• People would need to endure less heat and less cold and less rain and less storms,
• Healthcare system would be less affected by cumulative effects of climate change on health,
• Less pressure on societal systems would render insurance easier.

But what would day to day life look like? Without fossil fuels, private yachts, flights, and even large scale ocean and atmospheric modes of commute are difficult to imagine. Even the manufacture of semiconductors depends on fossil fuels. Perhaps, many industries that have been historically dependent on fossil fuels including the printing press might have stagnated.

The question “What would the world look like without X?” can be interpreted in two ways. One, we can go back in time and intervene and then try to imagine what life would have been like. Two, one can imagine an intervention at the current moment and try to imagine what life would be like. The latter feels extremely disruptive until we already have a world with renewable energy powering every aspect of our lives. So to speak, this world where fossil fuels suddenly return to their grave and there is no energy to fuel our day to day activities is unimaginable. But even in the first case, where we go back in time and intervene, it is still unimaginable what life would be like without an equally-early discovery of renewable energy to power the printing, semiconductor and transport industry. In other words, this world too is unthinkable.

Imagining negation is tricky. One does not negate wills and desires and possibilities. The mind does not seem to like negations. Instead, one creates positive ones that serve as alternatives to the ones we do not want. Thus, to imagine what would a world without climate change look like, we should perhaps ask, what is the kind of world we want to look at.

Now, we have already broadened our thinking horizons a bit by travelling back 4-5 centuries in trying to imagine the alternative world where printing press did not take off due to a lack of energy. We can continue further and look into the far past to envision the possibilities for the far future. Is it useful to look this far? Aren’t things always transient and in a constant flux of change? Apparantly, that is not always the case! Rather, it seems that, for many things, there is a period of time in which things are more “flexible”, so to speak. But after a period of time, things become “rigid”. To give a few examples -

• Around sixth century BC in China, there were several dozen distinct schools of philosophical and cultural experimentation. But later on, only four schools remained. Of these, only one thrived until the start of the 20th century and still continues to influence East Asian cultures.
• Despite twenty (or fifteen) centuries, many cultures remain deeply entrenched in Abrahamic religions. Bible was the most sold book in 2025. And that’s ignoring the even higher number of copies that are simply distributed without being bought. Indeed, from AD 40 to AD 350, Christianity grew by about 43 percent per decade, from a population of about 1,000 to 34,000,000. A similar story holds for Islam and Quran.
• Consider the English language itself as another example
• Or the use of Javascript in browsers
• The prominence of vegeterianism in India was apparantly not before two or three millenia (It’s difficult to find sources for these that are not just verbal anecdotes or chatgpt/claude generated conversations.)
• Constitutions of countries, including long lived ones such as the United States

MacAskill, in his What we owe the future, calls this “lock-in”.. Initially, some state of affairs is rather flexible or mutable or easily changeable. But as time passes, these become harder and harder to change. The causal pathways by which this happens seems underdiscussed. (Hint: It’s often not merit that determines what becomes popular or what persists through time.)

With reference to the world we are looking for, the recommendation is this: We must strive against a lock-in of state of affairs that are harmful for the long run. At least until we find the most optimal state of affairs, and perhaps even after we do, we must allow a plurality of approaches. Let time do its weeding. Try to avoid weeding out ideas prematurely. The hard to digest implication of this is the tolerance of intolerance. I myself have a hard time accepting it. But even if you reject tolerating intolerance, the central idea remains: allow plurality and diversity, since they keep a civilization flexible.

Thus, an alternative to the current world with climate change is a world that values freedom.

Enter Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom.

If the goal of life is to live and thrive, the best way to achieve that is by giving each individual the freedom to experiment and influence others in their own ways. Now, this is a claim at the population level. It makes no claim for individual choices: whether one should choose a life that “keeps their options open” or another that lets them “walk or run in peace with their chosen option even if it closes other options” is not something I have an answer to. The mere claim is we should work towards a society that allows individuals to choose differently at least in principle across different lives. Of course, we only have one life and we only live once, but that we can imagine a different life. If the society you live in permits that, that is a good society. In contrast, if merely imagining a different life seems impossible, that is not the kind of society you (or at least I) want to lock humanity in.

Caveat, I haven’t read Development as Freedom yet. So far, I touched some chapters of What we owe the future - particularly, 1, 2, 4. My own thoughts on the book are that it has some insights, but it seems to get carried away. Particularly, I disagree that a life choice that enhances humanity’s survival by 0.0001% as being better than another life choice that enhances the life of a million or even a few thousand. Because, by enhancing the life of a thousand others, especially in significant ways and endowing them with freedom, you raise the chances that someone (perhaps many) amongst these would go on to make choices that ultimately enhance humanity’s survival by not 0.0001% but by 10% even! And there are other critics.

For the more technical minded there, you cannot make optimal worldly interventions basing them on probability distributions formed out of observational data. For, the act of intervention changes the distribution and you will need to resample again! A potential alternative is to build a causal model of the world, but that seems an open topic for research!