Last Updated 3.12.2024. The article below has been read over 2.5 million times.

Prologue 

To successfully fix climate change and our runaway global heating emergency, we will be asked (or eventually ordered) to make many sacrifices, changes, and fossil fuel use reductions to save ourselves, our children, and future generations. It is, therefore, critical to understand the many benefits we can receive when we eventually make these life changes and sacrifices, which we will be called upon or ordered to make sooner or later. 

In two sections, this page covers several dozen unique and surprising direct and indirect benefits that we will receive by executing better climate change reduction management:

a. climate change and the runaway global heating benefits, and

b. the many positive recovery possibilities and benefits of the post-climate change emergency (what we call a possible Great Global Rebirth.) 

This page and its three related benefit subpages are visible when your cursor is held over the Learn menu, and you scroll down to the Benefits of Fixing Climate menu item. With your cursor held over the Benefits of Fixing Climate, you will see Evolutionary Benefits & Perspectives, and Climate Failure Dark Benefits, and Great Global Rebirth Challenges. This page and the three other benefit pages present a comprehensive examination of the positive and negative effects and benefits of maintaining a reasonable and appropriate hope that collectively, humanity will find a way to survive, or at least some small part will survive.

Introduction to the Many Positive Possibilities and Recovery Opportunities of Our Soon-Arriving Climate-Driven Consequences

After reading this page, you will be the one to decide if, by wisely, "playing" the many runaway global heating "cards" and climate consequences we have already been dealt, we still can make the best of a very difficult situation. Furthermore, you also get to decide if our accelerating global heating nightmare could be turned into a huge opportunity for a positive economic, social, and political global evolution that could not have arisen any other way.

Because of our 60 years of ineffective action on the climate, we are in the beginning stages of a runaway global heating. If left unresolved, escalating global heating will trigger a globally widespread, transitional, and temporary Great Die-Off and what we call the Great Global Collapse process. This transitional and temporary die-off and collapse will be triggered by accelerating climate consequences, tipping points, and feedbacks, and those consequences interact with and worsen our 11 other pre-existing global crises.

The good news is that by preventing the Great Die-Off of ALL of humanity and limiting the Great Global Collapse process from fully unfolding, climate emergency survivors could eventually experience equal to (or even greater than) long-term benefits in what we call the Great Global Rebirth. Moreover, these long-term potential Great Global Rebirth benefits could eventually reach well beyond the climate-related global suffering, financial losses, and massive die-offs described on this Great Global Collapse description page. 

These many potential benefits are vital to your survival because they:

a. can help you create a more balanced and healthier perspective concerning any sad, angry, apathetic, or other negative feelings you might already have about the conditions of our current climate change emergency. 

b. contain all of the good things that can happen as we work together toward achieving our new future and, eventually, the Great Global Rebirth after eliminating the threats and consequences of the climate change emergency currently looming over our heads. 

We have bolded the benefits below so you can review them quickly. This page was also designed to help provide much-needed emotional support to millions worldwide who feel climate-related: grief, worry, sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, depression, defeat, doom, resignation, or even climate apathy about our current runaway global heating emergency.

In case you are curious, here is a comprehensive and effective plan for how we can eventually realize most of the benefits listed on this page.

There are many positive benefits that we will experience in fixing and recovering from the climate change emergency 

Benefit 1 - Having the beautiful world and the livable future we get --- if we make the right and required global fossil fuel reduction choices.

The best news is that we still have a small amount of time left to fix our first stage of runaway global warming before it goes beyond our control. But, when we are successful, it will make so much of our lives better.

Imagine a world:

1. with clean, fresh air that did not kill us or make our children ill. 

2. with a new type of globalized sustainable prosperity for ALL. This sustainable prosperity for ALL comprises sustainable livelihoods and lifestyles described in full on these pages. 

3. where dramatic increases in cooperation and collaboration replace over-consumerism, distorted greed capitalism, and conflict-generating toxic over-competition.

4. where the population lives in balance with existing resources and not overshooting resource availability.

6. where former fossil fuel workers transform our transportation system. Imagine them building fast, green bullet trains and expanding universal access to self-driving electric vehicles, eliminating the need for most private transportation and parking lots. 

6. with existing parking lots and our many buildings' roofs becoming organic gardens, parks, or solar panel farms. 

7. with our cities transformed into safe and healthy places and healthy forests, soils, waterways, and oceans, helping clean our air and water and feed us sustainably.

Imagine we make the right 2025 global fossil fuel reduction target choices, and in doing this, we achieve all of the above and we also become good stewards of the world and our futures.

And finally, imagine that by creating a sustainable prosperity for ALL, we have preserved the hope for both ourselves and future generations that life will go on and that the quality of our lives will be stable and improve. By acting responsibly now, we get to experience and preserve for ourselves and future generations the opportunity to survive and thrive and experience a sustainable prosperity.

To see this super-benefit in another critical way, know that when we solve the runaway global heating emergency, we will greatly limit the painful road of continually escalating economic, political, and social chaos that is unavoidable partly because of our 60 years of ignoring valid global heating warmings. When we fix runaway global heating, we will not have to watch humanity's final members pass away with much of the Earth's other biological life. (For more on the step-by-step process of a climate change-driven collapse and extinction, see this critical page.)

If you have not done so already, we strongly recommend at some point, you read about the many principles for creating a sustainable prosperity for ALL found here.

Benefit 2  - When we fix the climate and runaway global heating emergency using principles of climate justice for all, we also help significantly improve or fix many of the world's other most threatening global challenges.

When we work together to resolve the single greatest disruptor, threat multiplier, and threat amplifier of the 21st century (climate change and runaway global heating), we will simultaneously reduce many of the other negative consequences of the world's other critical systemic challenges. Below please find a brief list of the other critical global systemic challenges that will significantly improve as we complete the many government-driven actions needed to get runaway global heating under control.

We will lessen:

the loss of animal and plant biodiversity (This is because of the global temperature rise and other global warming pollutants.)

the escalating hazardous pollution of our air (with carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases.)

the escalating pollution of our lands (with acid rain and other fossil fuel pollutants.)

the escalating pollution of our seas and waters (by overheating them and from the carbon fallout turning our waters more carbonic, making it more difficult for many animals of the seas to survive.)

the current general environmental degradation, (Fixing the global warming emergency will eventually force us all to live more sustainable and less polluting lives and livelihoods.)

rising mass migrations (growing global heating-driven mass migrations of desperate climagees (climate refugees) due to crop failures and low yields harm climagees, nations and multiple environments and animal populations.)

escalating conflicts, war, and terrorism (with rising mass migrations and resource depletion because global warming is destroying crops, water, and so many other human and animal resources, there will be more conflicts.)

increasing global economic instabilities (all of the above and accelerating global heating consequences will cause far more global economic instability.)

increasing political instability and collapsing governments (This is because of all of the earlier issues.)

economic inequality, social and racial injustice, hunger, and poverty (This is because when we prevent failing governments due to accelerating global heating consequences, the resolution of economic inequality, social and racial injustice, hunger and poverty programs, and other safety net programs can be better maintained.) 

resource depletion, to resolve global warming, we will be forced to live far more sustainable lives and livelihoods and we will therefore use less resources. This new sustainability will lead to a wise and reduced use of non-renewal and renewable resources. 

new COVID-19-like pandemics and other new or old epidemics that will likely occur every decade or less. (This is because of the stresses put on the world's health systems by runaway global heating and all of the previous issues.)

our current failure to evolve effective global governance, solving the global emergency of runaway global heating will also require and force us to evolve more effective global governance at least in the area of our common climate management. (Maybe we will not achieve full global governance. But as the climate worsens, we might at least achieve partial global governance. This is where all nations would allow new laws, enforcement, and punishment by all other nations within their territory for all issues relating to fixing the runaway global heating extinction emergency.)

overpopulation, to be able to live the sustainable lives and livelihoods that we must eventually live to get global warming under control, we will also have to collectively realize that our current population of about 8 billion far exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth (about 1 1/2 to 2 billion people.) At that point of collective insight, we will install global incentives and policies to get Earth back to a sustainable population level without Overshoot. On the other hand, suppose we fail to self-regulate human reproduction and the accelerating global warming emergency. In that case, nature will reduce the population for us through the process of global collapse. (To see what an overpopulation global warming-driven global collapse process would look like, click here.)

As we resolve runaway global heating, we will also be making most of the world's other critical global challenges (above) far, far easier to resolve! Additionally, most of our best social, economic, and political values, goals, and human rights will also become far easier and more probable to achieve once we get the greatest disruptor, threat multiplier, and threat amplifier of the 21st century (our runaway global heating extinction emergency) resolved.

The values, goals, and human rights that we can make more of and continue progress on (without the runaway global heating emergency hanging over our heads) are shown in the Sustainable Development illustration below.

Because of the severity of the coming runaway global heating consequences, we can only build a new world of far greater peace, climate justice, and security by eventually fixing the runaway global heating emergency. Said slightly differently, here are just a few of the evolutionary changes in values, goals, and processes that will be far easier to improve or create once the runaway global heating extinction emergency (which will continue to demand more and more resources if left unchecked) is finally under control.

We will be better able to:

a. end racial and educational injustice, 

b. create universal healthcare, 

c. end wealth and income equity and the excesses of extreme wealth and poverty,

d. create housing and employment equity,

e. reduce our destructive consume/pollute/waste consumerism, 

f. end critical resource depletion and overshoot and create resource rebalancing, 

g. allow for the return and strengthening of biodiversity because of reduced pollution and encroachment into natural habitats, 

h. create the next evolutionary and new economic fair exchange system beyond our current corporate over-consumption, greed-based extractive-based capitalism. This new economic system will not rely upon the false fundamental principle of unlimited growth within the closed and limited Earth system. And,

i. create effective global governance based on the collective well-being of all planetary citizens vs. our current corporatocracy to benefit the wealthy few that we have now. (To begin to repair corporatocracy, we would need to remove all personhood rights from corporations, hold them strictly responsible for the triple bottom line principles and make them pay for all pollution and harm they have caused by exporting their waste and pollution upon and into the public commons.) 

All of the previous items will help build a sustainable prosperity and a just and equitable future for ALL of humanity, including all of the biological life that sustains us. All of the above things can help create a global civil society with individual human rights and responsibilities held in the appropriate and proper balance with community and government rights and responsibilities. 

Before reading on, please take a moment and visualize how much better your life and our world will be when all of the beautiful values and goals listed above are improved and eventually achieved! 

If we do not get the global heating extinction emergency resolved, and the climate continues to de-stabilize at the current rate, there will be no practical way to fix humanity's other major global challenges or to make continued progress on, sustain, or ever realize most of the above Sustainable Prosperity and Development values, goals, and human rights. (To see a detailed and expanded description of each of humanity's other critical global challenges to better understand how important it is for us to manage our global warming emergency, click here.) 

An additional warning and a tough reality check about the challenge of meaningful change in our current world situation

Our existing human social systems (the economic systems, political systems, how we treat and think about the environment, and our religious systems) have been so co-opted and corrupted so thoroughly by multiple sources (wealthy corporations, billionaires, authoritarian leaders, authoritarian structures and belief systems, etc., that they are no longer rational or suitable when it comes to those systems truly serving the short or long-term well-being of the majority of the world's people and our planetary supportive eco-systems.

Humanity is at an environmental and resource Overshoot crossroads. Humanity will become nearly extinct if it does not immediately make simultaneous major whole system improvements.

Humanity can create finally an equitable, just, and environmentally sustainable future but only through the many processes of simultaneous whole systems improvement. This whole system improvement will be almost impossible to do with the existing power structures, which are highly resistant to change or correction.

It is probable that only through the processes of widespread collapse will there be the necessary unobstructed pathway to create the whole system improvement all of humanity needs to survive.

Receive Free Climate Change & Global Warming Info!

Benefit 3 - By being forced toward a more sustainable future to survive, we create hundreds of millions of new, well-paid green energy generation and transition jobs. 

Benefit 4 - We are intelligent and adaptive beings who can resolve or adapt to almost anything. As we fully engage with ending the runaway global heating emergency (using the Job One for Humanity Plan B), we will continue to advance the natural foundation for long-term Sustainable Prosperity for everyone.

Benefit 5 - We still have time to prepare, adapt, and build global warming emergency reserves and resilience into our local and international preparedness systems. Prudent individuals will have this done before 2025 when climate change consequences will dramatically worsen.  Click here for how to do this.

Benefit 6 - There will be positive climate wildcards that will at least benefit some parts of the world. Some wildcards might also be in the form of new technologies that could help us dramatically reduce fossil fuel usage and radically increase green energy generation and consumption to slow global warming.

Benefit 7 - Despite the escalating threats before us, we can still fully enjoy our normal daily lives for quite a while longer (depending on our current location) as we work together to resolve the many challenges of the rapidly escalating global warming emergency.

Benefit 8 - Ongoing scientific research is now more effectively warning more individuals about the great global warming challenge and extinction emergency before us. More individuals and organizations will get prepared and be more likely to survive.

Benefit 9 - Our accelerating global warming will inevitably force us into new levels of local, national, and international climate cooperation.

Benefit 10  - Without a doubt, accelerating global warming is human history's single greatest collective adaptive challenge and evolutionary adventure. As the single greatest "exterior" global threat and disruptor humanity has ever faced, it will eventually and literally force us to transform and grow in global cooperation, evolutionary maturity, and as one human family.

Seen from this transformational perspective, our global warming emergency may also become the greatest opportunity in human history for intentional, well-reasoned social, economic, and political evolutionary growth. If humanity wants to survive this emergency, it will force humanity to live far more sustainable lifestyles and livelihoods. 

Benefit 11 - As global warming accelerates, many colder areas will get warmer and will be able to grow warmer climate crops that they could not grow previously.

Benefit 12 - In resolving the global climate extinction emergency, we will be forced to pilot new and more effective models of global governance. In fact, we will have to evolve some effective form of global governance with legislative, executive, and judicial powers, or we will not be able to solve global warming in time.

Benefit 13 - We can trust 13.8 billion years of evolutionary progress, success, and momentum to help get us through this emergency and adaptive challenge. Click here for an amazing and beautiful explanation of precisely what this means.

Benefit 14 - We now face herculean challenges and unavoidable chains of catastrophes from the global warming emergency and the world's 11 other critical systemic challenges. The global warming emergency will cause many individuals to re-examine their lives, lifestyles, and livelihoods. These chains of catastrophes will be powerful catalysts for change that may not have occurred if we were not so challenged! 

When deeply understood, these catastrophes will create life-changing and life-empowering moments of metanoia (in most of its wonderful meanings here) and catharsis. These catastrophes will help us and even force us to embrace new values and behaviors and take the new paths needed to ensure a better future for all. 

Benefit 15 - There is unique spiritual, meaning, purpose, and character-building benefits for individuals and faith communities in dealing with this global heating emergency and forwarding the climate re-stabilization and a global ecological, economic, and political justice and equity re-balancing process. The fact that with accelerating global warming, we are truly facing mass to near-total extinction within our lifetimes will likely serve as a catalyst to bring many individuals closer to the Great Mystery and the origin of life. (Click here to discover why total human extinction is not realistic or probable, and the worst humanity will experience is near-total extinction (50 to 90+% of humanity going extinct.)

Benefit 16 - Resolving the runaway global heating emergency while the world's other critical systemic challenges also worsen will be extremely difficult. This means that working through the challenges of this evolutionary adventure will be equally or even more rewarding, not only in having a safer and healthier world but also in increasing the overall meaning and purpose we will bring to our lives.

Benefit 17 - We do not have to "polarize to mobilize" because we are all in the same boat regarding the global heating extinction emergency and the other global challenges we now face. To be successful, we have to do this together.

Benefit 18  - it is your privilege, honor, and responsibility should you choose to accept it, to be a part of the forward-thinking team and movement to help prepare and adapt as well as to save and salvage whatever we can while we are also doing every we can to slow down the ongoing extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century, while at the same time, we work tirelessly toward preventing a near-total extinction event. It is hard to imagine a more meaningful, exciting, and wise way to protect yourself, your family, and future generations while living out as comfortably as possible, whatever years you may have left.

Benefit 19 - If we start immediately and work together using an effective, prioritized plan like the one we created called the Job One for Humanity Plan B, many of us will still survive and thrive many now unavoidable global warming consequences. In order to create the best possible outcomes for ourselves and those we love, we are still able to squarely face this emergency and prepare for and adapt to it. (Click here for how to get started on the just upgraded Job One Plan to protect you and your loved ones, and start making the best of our difficult global warming emergency!)

Benefit 20 - In some ways, from the broadest possible evolutionary perspective, the global warming emergency and our other 11 systemic global challenges can be seen as just another period of evolutionary compression and regression. Despite our great technological advances, this social, economic, and political compression caused by many new stressful challenges and what looks like a collective human maturity period of retrogression is a natural reoccurring part of our evolution where evolution seeks to reach higher levels of unity and cooperation. (For More on this evolutionary compression and regression issue, click here for expanded positive perspectives on this natural evolutionary compression and regression factor and our current emergency and global challenges.) 

Benefit 21 - Those of us who do survive and thrive through this emergency will likely do so in part by creating a Great Global Rebirth and new eco-communities and more sustainable towns and cities. These new eco-communities, towns, and cities will be more in harmony with the natural world and become "beacons of light" and living examples that will demonstrate that some of us have learned how to live sustainably and as one human family. Hopefully, these new eco-communities will have evolved and be overseen by a cooperating and facilitating new global governance system working for the common benefit of ALL humankind, and not for just wealthy individuals or corporations or narrow national interests. These actions could become important seeds and processes for a Great Global Rebirth.

Benefit 22 - Luckily, evolution will keep teaching through pain, loss, stress, and discomfort until we get "it." Modern society has become obsessed with convenience, comfort, consumption, and waste. The world is now moving in the wrong direction when you view the global systemic challenges it now faces.

The unsustainable "consume and waste" mess that we have put ourselves in with climate change and the other 11 global challenges will cause us a lot of unavoidable pain, loss, stress, and discomfort until we adapt and make the needed sustainability changes. If we do not adapt, evolution will keep increasing the pain until we adapt or die off as a species. We will eventually adapt because "almost all people, businesses, and nations change when the pain going forward is less than the pain of staying where they are." The key here is to adapt before it is too late to avoid the worst climate outcomes!

Benefit 23 - The currently excessive power of global corporations will have to come back into balance with the collective well-being to create a more sustainable world for all. Corporations like the fossil fuel industry currently wield too much control over our politicians and over the interests of our collective well-being. We can not solve the global heating extinction emergency unless we begin acting for the public well-being and reducing the influence and lobbying powers of the mega-corporations over our governments. Addressing and fixing the global warming sub-step will also help do much to help resolve the world's other critical systemic global challenges.

Benefit 24 - Although it will take centuries or thousands of years, once we do stop adding new carbon and methane pollution to our atmosphere each year, we can eventually establish a new and stable global average temperature and a climate that will support the flourishing of humanity in sustainable ways and all of biological nature. 

Benefit 25 - Because we cannot eliminate all of the coming pain, suffering, and death due to global heating's many unavoidable consequences, we can at least still work together and build more and better relationships at both micro and macro levels to slow and MINIMIZE the damages of those unavoidable consequences effectively. This will allow us to save and salvage as much as possible so that more of us survive longer and better to be there to build the Great Global Rebirth.

Benefit 26 - There still exists an appropriate, rational, and science-supported hope that a portion of humanity will make it through the climate change emergency. It is highly improbable that humanity will ever experience total extinction because of climate change and the runaway global heating emergency. Click here to read the many powerful reasons that total human extinction is not a realistic future climate consequence and that, at the very worse, only near-total extinction is our possible fate.

Benefit 27: Please click here to read about the encouraging history of how as few as 200 mating pairs saved humanity from extinction in the past. It covers more about the "Big Picture" evolutionary perspectives on how the post-collapse Great Global Rebirth will likely occur. This is a Great Global Rebirth must-read!

Benefit 28 - The accelerating global heating emergency is a real and legitimate emotional issue! You have every right to be sad or angry for a while. The global warming emergency is real because if we do not radically change our global fossil fuel burning ways to come close to the challenging 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets, we will face a global heating-driven extinction of about half of humanity by mid-century. But, there is good news and benefits even here.

This is because even though it may no longer be possible to avoid this mass extinction event because we have done so little over the last 60 years to fix global warming and we have crossed key climate tipping points and feedbacks, we still have time left to reduce global fossil fuel use to get as close to the 2025 targets to avoid near-total extinction over the next 50-70 years (Getting very close to these 2025 global fossil fuel reduction targets will take nothing less than the greatest government-directed mass mobilization of resources, personnel, and actions ever attempted in human history. 

Benefit 29: An honest, non-politicized, and complete plan to resolve the runaway global heating extinction emergency already exists. All you have to do is begin it. It has practical actions everyone can do and start immediately.

Every other plan we know of today for fixing climate change is either incomplete, off the critical path needed to meet survival critical deadlines, highly politicized into ineffectiveness, or far too little, far too late. Click here to see the one plan that will work in time, the Job One for Humanity, Plan B.

Benefit 30: Be sure to read more details about one of the most powerful benefits of all, the possibilities of a Great Global Rebirth, farther down this page.

Never forget that we can still create the world we and future generations will love to live in. We can build a new world of far greater peace and security and be co-creators of a Great Global Rebirth! First, we must get the runaway global heating extinction emergency slowed and then resolved to do this.

Receive Free Climate Change & Global Warming Info!