It’s the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions of climate upheaval. Many of the world’s major powers have spent the last several decades focusing on themselves. Borders have closed. International investments in education and technology have declined. The divide between the developed and undeveloped world has widened.

No sane soul denies now that the world is warming, though some keep trying. Still others in the camp of nationalist reaction have taken to insisting the earth’s wrath is God’s punishment instead of humanity’s folly. But the evidence is all too crushingly plain that the violent, convulsive new world order taking shape in this moment of climate reckoning is entirely the handiwork of a fatal set of preventable human system failures. It’s been an excruciatingly slow-motion disaster, engineered by shortsighted, power-obsessed leaders hell-bent on denying scientific truths—and blocking the basic measures to mitigate carbon emissions and stave off drought, rising ocean tides, and mass migrations of climate-traumatized populations to higher ground in increasingly xenophobic and belligerent rich Western nations.

With all these catastrophic scenarios now daily facts of life, the specter of climate upheaval—long held forth as the urgent, and quite possibly final, imperative to overcome tribal political divisions and the human race’s retrograde hoarding instincts—is acting as an accelerant of global conflict, plunging nationalist powers into a regressive rivalry to seize scarce resources and deny access to putative outsiders of all descriptions. The lineaments of a more equitable, sustainable, and cooperative world sketched out by advocates of a Green New Deal have given way, in stunningly short order, to a race to a new global bottom, equal parts Thomas Hobbes and Mad Max.

The endgame was distressingly rapid, and looks especially so in retrospect. Following Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency in 2020, the United States failed to implement aggressive climate policies necessary to avoid the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold. America’s continued abdication of any serious leadership role in the climate crisis touched off a series of other high-profile defections from regional and international climate accords that were already insufficient in their target goals. Plans to decarbonize developed economies ground to a halt in many countries. Developing countries, heeding the now-malign neglect of many leaders of industrialized nations, continued relying on traditional, resource-intensive forms of moneymaking: farming, mining, and fossil fuel burning. Their populations kept growing, too, since part of the global surge into nationalist reaction was a rollback of basic contraception and family planning services.

So the world kept getting hotter. The global community sailed past the 1.5 degree Celsius “‘safe’ threshold of warming” mark around 2038, and summers of Saharan intensity became an annual norm in Europe—often in North America, too. These extreme bouts of heat—too routine now to be dubbed “heat waves”—claimed annual death tolls of thousands in many countries, while wildfires courted the specter of mass famine by burning up billions of dollars’ worth of cropland. Around 80 percent of Earth’s coral reefs died off, tanking fishing and tourism economies around the world. The ocean rose about 1.5 feet, exposing an additional 69 million people every year to regular extreme flooding. Residents of the tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which sits an average of a little less than six feet above the precrisis sea level, began to flee to Australia and New Zealand en masse.