Spurred on by the myriad
inventions from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the related
consumer demand for the conveniences, the Industrial Revolution itself played a
major role in what would come to be known as global warming or climate change.
In 2015, the Paris Agreement stipulated, notably without any enforcement, a global
temperature rise of 1.5C as a ceiling. Just a decade later, scientists were
saying that the threshold would be exceeded. Even amid the searing heat in the
E.U. during the summer of 2026, the fear around the world in halls of
government was less oriented to the what the new normal climatically would
bring than to whether Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, which was known as
an oil checkpoint through which over 20 billion barrels of oil were being
transported per day. It was as though our species no longer had any control
over how far global warming would go.
Just after that summer, “the
UN warmed that it is no longer possible to keep global warming below 1.5C.”[1]
Simon Steill, of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), pointed
to what he called the “spiralling costs of the climate crisis caused by
humanity’s addiction to burning coal, oil, and gas.”[2]
A report by Climate Central had recently “found that nearly nine in 10
Europeans experienced a month’s worth of ‘risky heat’ during the June-August period,
making [Europe] the most ‘unusually hot place on the planet.’”[3]
Whether from this, or that “hundreds of millions [of people were] impacted
across Asia and Africa,” or the “relentless record-breaking temperatures in
North America,” it was clear, at least to Kristina Dahl at Climate Central “that
“human-driven warning is pushing communities beyond safe physical limits.”[4]
The Paris Agreement had not plucked 1.5C arbitrarily out of a hat; that governments
had not taken the threshold seriously enough in terms of quickly shifting from
fossil fuels to clean sources of energy was already taken a noticeable toll on
the species. As the E.U. was warming at double that of the planet as a whole in
2026, a report by the UN Environment projected “a best-case 1.8C of warming and
over 2C in other scenarios. ‘Overshoot, peak and decline’ is now our best bet,’”
the report states.[5]
Electorates and government officials around the world had not stepped up to the
(baseball) plate to make hard political choices, and the parts-per-million of
carbon in the atmosphere were still increasing as if there had not been an
agreement in Paris in 2015.
Even though in 2025, “wind and
solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time, marking
a major milestone in the transition to clean power . . . green power only [met]
around 40 per cent of the increase in [energy] demand” due in part to “energy-intensive
air conditioning and the boom in artificial intelligence.”[6]
That same year, a consultant with BP told a small group at Yale that even with
the increased use of clean energy sources worldwide, the year’s increase
in the demand for energy was greater.
At the very end of the summer
of 2026, U.S. President announced that the U.S. had majority control of more
than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves. The deal was oriented
to reducing the price of gas for Americans; the supply disruptions in the Strait
of Hormuz had driven up the global price of oil, and Americans were paying the
price in driving and flying. Lower oil and gas prices would translate into more
demand for and use of fossil fuels, and thus more carbon emissions; an
even warmer atmosphere and oceans could be expected. The deal marks a clear
divergence from the urging by scientists that the world should transition as
much and as soon as possible to clean energy. That summer had showed Europeans
and even the world hearing of heat wave after heat wave in the E.U. just what putting
off a transition that would at least cover the annual increase in the world’s energy
demand looks like.
It would be ironic were the large
and increasing energy-draw from AI computing and data-storage putting
our species’ survival at risk. Securing access to more oil and building AI data-centers
as if they were popcorn represent gross negligence, given the “intel” coming
out of the UN and Climate Central in 2026. As a species, we can develop
technology by leaps and bounds, adding great convenience and sheer fun to living,
but if our species goes extinct, the fruits of our innovativeness will be for
naught as our descendants struggle to survive or die outright at some generation.
The summer of 2026 suggests that the bill from our species’ penchant for
instant energy-gratification was already coming due, and yet more AI centers
were being built especially in the U.S., and President Trump scored a lot more
oil for the American consumers, whose sight was narrowly fixed on the weekly price
increases at the pump and to fly.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. “Researchers defined ‘risky heat’ as days that were hotter than 90 per cent of what a local area experienced between 1991 and 2020 for this time of year, representing the point at which health risks from extreme heat begins to rise.” This metric may, however, be flawed with respect to the E.U.’s northern states such as Finland and Sweden because of their relatively low 1991-2020 bases. Being hotter than those may not be so hot for the human body, whereas hotter than the bases in the E.U. states of Greece and Spain could be expected to have adverse biological impacts. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
