The news arrived the other day with another record humanity should never have wanted to break:
August 2026 was the hottest August ever measured—and, together with July 2023, the hottest month ever recorded globally. The average temperature was 16.96°C, approximately 1.65°C above the pre-industrial level. The surface of the world’s oceans also reached record temperatures.
Western Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, accompanied by persistent heatwaves, drought and forest fires.
This is not a prediction about some distant future. It is happening now.
And the primary cause is no mystery:
human greenhouse-gas emissions, above all from burning fossil fuels.
That is the terrifying part.
But it is also the clue.
Still Burning
Climate change is not something that simply happened to us. It is not an entirely natural force over which humanity has no control. We are actively producing it every day.
Every ton of coal we burn, every barrel of oil we consume and every cubic meter of fossil gas we burn and release adds to the problem. Every forest destroyed, every unnecessary product manufactured and every resource extracted, processed and transported requires more energy and puts further pressure on the living systems that sustain us.
We are not merely living with climate change.
We are continuously creating more of it.
The Good News
The good news is that we can change what happens next. But only if we are willing to confront what the situation actually requires.
Living and Thriving
If humanity wants to continue living—and thriving—on this planet, and not perish, we must reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as quickly as physically possible. Not through another collection of distant promises, voluntary targets and carefully negotiated compromises, but through immediate physical action.
We must stop burning fossil fuels wherever they are not absolutely essential. We must stop unnecessary extraction, unnecessary transportation, unnecessary production and the deliberate manufacturing of short-lived and largely useless products. We must stop using vast quantities of energy and resources merely to keep money circulating through the economy.
We cannot wait until 2050 to begin behaving as though our survival matters.
We have to do something now. Like, next week.
The Predicament
But here we encounter an enormous problem.
What happens to the economy if we suddenly stop all nonessential fossil-fuel use and unnecessary production and consumption?
Factories close. Airlines cancel flights. Oil companies collapse. Retail sales fall. Advertising agencies lose their clients. Transport companies lose their contracts. Millions of people lose their jobs. Investments lose their value. Pension funds are threatened. Tax revenues disappear. Debts cannot be repaid. Governments face economic crisis.
Under the monetary system, reducing production and consumption rapidly enough to protect the climate would trigger a global depression.
The physical world needs us to stop.
The economic system needs us to continue.
That is the trap.
Harmful Dependence
Almost everyone depends upon the continuation of harmful activity in one way or another. People need transportation. Workers need wages. Companies need sales. Governments need taxes. Banks need debts to be repaid with interest. Investors need returns. Entire national economies depend upon continued growth.
Even when something is environmentally destructive and physically unnecessary, it may remain economically essential because someone’s income depends upon producing it.
Slow Response
This is why the response to climate change remains so slow. We are trying to save the planet without disturbing the system that is causing it.
Enough Energy
The Sun provides Earth with more than 6,000 times as much energy as humanity currently uses.
Read that again.
6000 times. More than we currently use.
Energy is not the problem.
However, we capture only about 10 exa joules of solar energy annually, compared with approximately 620 exajoules of humanity’s total energy use today. With today’s technology, however, we could rapidly expand solar production to meet that demand ensuring all our energy needs are covered without pollution.
. And in a resource-based economy, without today’s enormous overproduction and waste, we would need far less energy in the first place.
Not every fossil-fuel-dependent machine can be replaced overnight though. Electrical grids must be expanded. Storage must be built. Ships, aircraft, furnaces and heavy industrial processes require new systems. Some essential fossil-fuel use would therefore have to continue temporarily while alternatives were introduced.
But we could decide immediately that fossil fuels would henceforth be reserved only for absolutely essential functions that cannot yet be replaced.
We Could Stop
We could stop almost everything else next week.
- We could stop producing disposable products designed to be replaced rather than repaired
- We could stop manufacturing endless variations of essentially identical goods merely so that competing companies can remain profitable
- We could stop transporting resources and products back and forth across the planet when they could be produced locally instead
- We could stop extracting materials for things nobody genuinely needs
Easier Transition
By reducing unnecessary production first, we would also make the energy transition much easier. We would not have to replace every unit of fossil energy currently consumed because an enormous part of that energy serves the needs of the monetary system rather than the physical needs of humanity.
We already have enough energy to create a sustainable civilization.
What we do not have is an economic system capable of accepting enough.
Next Week
Suppose humanity decided to do it next week. We collectively decide that enough is enough. We decide we want to continue living and thriving on this planet together. Together we decide to save the planet, save nature and save ourselves.
All nonessential fossil-fuel burning would stop. All nonessential extraction would stop. Factories producing unnecessary and deliberately short-lived products would stop. Advertising intended to stimulate artificial demand would become obsolete.
Food production, water supplies, medicine, sanitation, housing, communication and emergency services would continue. Remaining fossil fuels would be carefully allocated to essential purposes while renewable infrastructure is developed as quickly as physically possible.
But nobody would lose access to food because their workplace closed. Nobody would lose their home because an unnecessary factory stopped producing. Nobody would be denied healthcare because their employer no longer needed them.
Instead of losing their livelihoods, people would be liberated from work that humanity no longer needs. Those who wanted to participate could contribute to building renewable-energy systems, restoring forests and wetlands, developing durable products, repairing infrastructure, growing food and caring for their communities.
Resources would no longer be allocated according to profitability or purchasing power. They would be mapped, monitored and coordinated according to availability, sustainability and actual human need.
That would be the beginning of the global resource-based economy.
The entire physical transformation could not be completed next week. But the new world could begin next week.
Ending Money
Money would no longer determine who was allowed to access the resources necessary for life.
There would be no wages to lose, no mortgages to default on, no companies forced into bankruptcy and no governments deprived of tax revenue. The end of unnecessary production would not produce mass poverty because access to life would no longer depend upon employment.
No Separation
This is why we cannot separate the environmental crisis from the monetary system.
If we merely order companies to stop producing, society collapses economically. If we ask them to reduce production voluntarily, most cannot do so without losing revenue, laying off workers or being overtaken by competitors. If we leave the transition to the market, every essential decision must first pass through the questions of cost, profit and return on investment.
A resource-based economy would ask completely different questions:
What do people actually need?
What resources does Earth have available?
How can those resources be used sustainably?
How quickly can we replace fossil fuels?
How can we provide everyone with a secure and meaningful life while restoring the planet?
For the first time, our social system would be aligned with physical reality.
Ready Together
Such a transformation cannot simply be imposed from above.
Governments cannot announce the end of money on Monday and expect everyone to understand how to live on Tuesday. People must be ready for it. They must be able to imagine a world in which nobody buys or sells anything, yet everyone can access what they need.
That may be the greatest obstacle of all.
Humanity has been conditioned for thousands of years to think in terms of money, trade, ownership, debt and exchange. We struggle to imagine production without profit, contribution without wages or access without payment. The monetary system feels like part of nature because everyone alive was born into it.
But money is not a law of nature.
It is a human arrangement. And human arrangements can change when they no longer serve life.
The Vision
Before we can create a resource-based economy, enough people must be able to see that it is possible. We must understand that a world without money does not have to mean deprivation, authoritarian control or the destruction of individual freedom. It can mean exactly the opposite:
- security without employment
- access without money
- contribution without coercion
- and freedom without the constant fear of economic exclusion
We do not only need new infrastructure.
We need a new understanding of what civilization can be.
Waking Up
That is why I wrote Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.
The novel is not a manifesto or a blueprint. It does not claim to possess a complete plan for how the monetary system should end or precisely how every resource on Earth should be coordinated.
It is an inspiration.
Through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels, who awakens a century into the future, it offers a vision of what everyday life in a moneyless, resource-based civilization could be like. It allows us to experience a world built upon sharing, stewardship, cooperation and intelligent resource management before that world physically exists.
The articles on this website explore these possibilities more directly and from many different perspectives. Readers who want to go deeper can also sign up for the newsletter and download the free companion book.
Humanity already has the energy.
We already have the technology.
We already possess the knowledge and productive capacity.
We could stop most nonessential fossil-fuel burning, over-extraction, overproduction and waste next week. We could protect every person during the transition by replacing the monetary system with one designed around resources and human needs.
The planet would not heal overnight. But we could stop deepening the wound and allow the healing to begin as quickly as physically possible.
The new world is not waiting for another invention.
It is waiting for humanity to wake up.
We could begin next week.
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