On the Transition to Clean Energy: Heedlessly Modest, Hardly Draconian

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.  

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Europe Was the ‘Most Unusually Hot Place on the Planet’ This Summer. Can Renewables Cool Us Down?” Euronews.com, 17 September, 2026.
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.

On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

I went to Yale to study for four years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S. state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC² was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival, and certainly comfort.

Regarding the impact of human-caused carbon (and methane) emissions on the heat-waves gripping Europe in the early summer (at least) of 2026, Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London said at the time, “The science of how climate change is worsening heatwaves is settled. Continued fossil-fuel emissions are directly responsible for the disruption people are experiencing this week in their homes, schools and workplaces. The speed of change is startling. Every few years we are seeing heat records shattered in Europe. This year it has been in consecutive months.”[1] That the speed was startling can be taken as a red flag, or very significant warning, that, as an old proverb states, the chickens are coming home to roust. In other words, humanity could no longer pretend that climate change is only an abstraction without “real world” consequences.

Science from World Weather Attribution (WWA) “found that both the daytime highs and overnight temperatures seen during the heatwave in late June, 2026] would have been ‘virtually impossible to occur at [that same] time of year’ as recently as 1976—just 50 years ago. A similar heatwave occurring in that historic climate would [have been] 3.5C cooler.”[2] In that year, in early July, I was a mere boy using tacks to pin an American flag I had made to the wood-front of my parent’s house for the bicentennial, and I don’t recall the heat (other than that which was released by my parents) being all that unbearable then in Illinois, which admittedly is a U.S. rather than an E.U. member-state. Even though the expression, virtually impossible, is itself startling, so too is an increase rate of acceleration, as was evinced in the melting of glaciers in central Europe in June, 2026.

Due to the heatwave that was holding on in Europe, the snow and ice accumulated over the previous winter on existing glaciers in the Alps was expected to have completely melted away by 29 June, 2026. In other words, from that day on, “every additional day of melting” would “shirk the size of the glacier[s].”[3] Since 2000, that point, known as glacier loss day, has usually not been until mid-August. Matthias Huss, the director of GLAMOS in Europe, warned that the glaciers were “shrinking at an unprecedented rate, accelerated by the ongoing heatwave.”[4] Huss stated, “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state” of the glaciers.[5] This all points to, or suggests, that the rate of acceleration of climate change was increasing; the derivative was positive as of 2026. Indeed, the melting of the glaciers had been “relatively modest until recent decades,” and the melting during the first month of summer in 2026 in turn made the rate in those recent decades look relatively modest.[6]

Among the many implications of an increasing rate of acceleration is the likelihood that the climate-change models being used to forecast warming going forward were in need of being adjusted, with dire impacts being predicted as coming sooner than had been expected even in the early 2020s. Another implication is that the continuing increase in carbon (ppm) in the atmosphere really needed to be stopped sooner rather than later. As of 5 June, 2026, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was at 432.34 ppm, according to the NOAA (measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory), whereas the corresponding figure had been 429.61 ppm a year earlier. Besides the increasing global population, part of the reason for why reductions in overall fossil-fuel usage continued to be so difficult was that not every continent was facing extreme heat, and thus the dire consequences already, so sufficiently broad-based political will was still lacking even though virtually every European in June of 2026 was doubtlessly convinced that global warming is real and that carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere had already reached unacceptable levels. Similarly, not every place on the planet was at risk of increased flooding from sea-level rise. Italy, California, Greece, Florida, the Netherlands, and New York, for example, can easily be distinguished from Czechia, Illinois, Poland, Colorado, Luxemburg, and Arizona with regard to probable impacts from higher oceans. Fundamentally, both democracies and autocracies are vulnerable to not acting sufficiently in anticipation of yet-unfelt dire consequences; our species is not as rational as we may suppose, and this weakness “comes home to roust” especially amid increasing rates of acceleration.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Climate Change is Running Rampant: Europe’s Heatwave ‘Virtually Impossible’ 50 Years Ago,” Euronews.com, 26 June 2026, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid.
3. Evelyn Dom, “Swiss Glaciers Melting at Alarming Rate in June as Europe Faces Extreme Heat,” Euronews.com, 28 June, 2026.
4. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters

It is likely due to natural selection having formed our present-day species overwhelmingly in the hunter-gatherer very, very long period of our species 1.8 million years of existence (agriculture just having begun around 7000 BCE!) that we tend to take notice of a foreground and leave the background along because any threats it holds are immediate. Tigers, for example, become particularly dangerous when they are up close rather than several fields away. During the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer of 2026, as the E.U. was sweltering in successive heatwaves, the El Nino current event in which warm equatorial water in the Pacific Ocean moves eastward readily became a target as the culprit producing the heat far away in Europe. In actuality, according to scientists (but what do they know?), the gradual (i.e., background) warming of the planet’s atmosphere, especially in the Artic as well as in Europe, was behind the heat breaking records in the E.U. as well as in bordering sovereign states like Britain, where on 25 June, presumably in London, an all-time-high temperature for the month of June was recorded. Global warming, once safely in the background, was coming home to roust in the foreground.

Earlier in June, NOAA in the U.S. had declared “that El Nino conditions are officially underway in the tropical Pacific.”[1] Even though “Super El Nino” was not a scientific category, this did not stop the media coverage of “a so-called ‘Super El Nino.’”[2] At the  time, Ioanna Vergini, founder of the global weather-forecasting platform, WFY24, stated, “The Pacific isn’t in a strong El Nino state now, and even when it is, its direct influence on European summer heat is weak and poorly constrained.”[3] Referring to the successive heatwaves, she added, “This is a classic jet-stream blocking event acting on a record-warm background. The dome is the mechanism; long-term warming is the amplifier; El Nino is a distraction.”[4] Disruption from El Nino is largely in the tropics. Moreover, El Nino tends to temporarily increase global average temperatures by just 0.2C. According to Euronews, “this impact “is not as significant as human-made climate change, which” by the summer of 2026 had “pushed the global surface temperature up by approximately 1.3 – 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.”[5] The human-made impact was warming the E.U. “more than twice as fast as the global average, with temperatures up by around 2.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.” In fact, the northern reaches of Europe “extend into the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth, where temperatures [were] rising at three-to-four times the global rate. As snow and ice melt, less sunlight is reflected by the Earth’s surface [back into space], while the darker surfaces that are exposed absorb more heat, amplifying the melting.”[6] In short, Europe, in its successive heatwaves breaking temperature records, was demonstrating for the rest of the world why an increase of 1.5C was selected in 2016 at a climate-change global conference in Paris as the threshold not to surpass. It is not as if delegates had stood by at that conference as someone flipped a coin.

Running up against a threshold that has been reasonably thought out and thus determined effectively moves climate change from the background to the foreground. To be sure, scientists working to ferret out the impact of climate change on a current weather-event face difficulties, but this does not mean that human-made warming of the atmosphere has not become a major factor. The shifting of climate change from a “back burner” to the front of the proverbial stove can be taken as a negative verdict on how governments around the world did in implementing the Paris Accords to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. So, part of the motivation to blame El Nino could be to avoid self-blame, which includes not only government officials, but also voters, at least in the world’s republics. In other words, recognizing that climate change has moved to the foreground does not come cost-free. Indeed, quite a verdict goes along with the species risking its own survival.

Even so, perhaps we should not be too hard on our species, for the vast majority of natural selection occurred when a focus on the foreground at the expense of background was necessary for immediate survival. That so much of our species’ natural selection in evolution took place in such a different environment than our own today, together with the glacial pace of evolution, may be why our species goes extinct sooner rather than later if the planet establishes an atmospheric equilibrium that is uninhabitable for humans.

To be sure, we are homo sapiens, the wise species of homo (man), and as of the summer of 2026, the jury was still out on whether technological invention would save the day in reducing carbon and methane from the atmosphere (and the warming oceans). Already, technology was in operation, albeit at too small a scale, to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Additionally, energy from renewable resources was increasing, though not as fast as the increasing global demand for energy so as a consequence the use of fossil fuels was still increasing, at least as of 2025 according to a consultant to BP whose talk I attended at Yale. Our species hope lies not with government officials standing up to the fossil-fuel industry and profit, and not even in evolving to be more attentive to what is in the background; rather, our savior would have to be technology, as per the already extant technological society. The question even in 2026 as the E.U. sweltered as never before was whether the massive scale of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could be impacted (fast) enough by technology that, at best, was only in the beginning stages of development. This is not to say that human rationality could not have been applied, with sufficient political power, to reduce carbon emissions more since the Paris Accords were adopted.

Resisting slavish attachment to instant gratification is, according to Nietzsche, possible for our species and can even be viewed as the completion of mankind. Whereas a person who is slavishly devoted to momentary pleasure cannot be trusted as a promise-keeper, “the man who has his own independent protracted will and the right to make promises” has “a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion. Is emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he deserves all three . . .”[7]  We are capable of promise-making and promise-keeping—the human will is strong enough for that, at least in principle, and not by relying on a supporting lattice-work of moral constraints issuing out in “Thou shalt not!”  We have seen how shallow mere political protest has been as up against the power that governments have nonetheless had to protect fossil-fuel industries under the subterfuge of saving jobs.

Rather than looking to moral pressure, humanity can look for its fulfillment at the human will as sovereign and thus as capable of self-confident assertion as a dominating instinctual urge (i.e., pride in being able to take oneself, and by others, as a promise-keeper rather than a weakling enslaved to momentary pleasure). Hence the negative verdict; as a species, we have not looked to the strength of the human will to make up for the glacial pace of natural selection. Perhaps the question is whether mankind will reach completion, or be completed as in being made extinct.

Even with respect to people being dreadfully uncomfortable in the European heat and humidity in June, 2026, humanity itself could be seen as having blood on its hands, and yet news of its self-inflicted wound will not have reached the culprit, like light from the farthest star that has not yet reached Earth. Nietzsche uses this imagery on the self-inflicted discrediting of the Abrahamic concept of God, so I adapt the language to apply to the discrediting of our species as yet another self-inflicted wound committed as if the human will had been deactivated and put on auto-pilot.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “’El Nino Is a Distraction’: Why Europe’s Deadly Heatwave Isn’t Down to a Natural Weather Phenomenon,” Euronews.com, 24 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.  Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.

Global Warming Accelerating

When I took calculus in my first college-degree program, the graduate-student instructor didn’t bother to tell the class that a derivative signifies changes in the rate of acceleration. A derivative is not the rate itself, but, rather, the change in the rate—something much more difficult to detect empirically, as in watching an accelerating car. Formulae were the instructor’s focus, as if they constitute ends in themselves. By the time the climate numbers for 2025 came in, scientists could confidently say global warming was accelerating. The rate itself may have been increasing (i.e., a positive derivative), but attention to that by the media would have taken an educational reform as to how calculus was being taught. We think in terms of speed and acceleration. In this respect, we may be deficient in climate change itself as it has been unfolding. More decades than I care to admit had passed by 2025 since I had that course in calculus; only now can I say that I have used the math, albeit theoretically rather than via formulae.

Looking at the numbers for average global temperature for 2023, 2024, and 2025, Robert Rohde, the chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth Monitoring Group, said in early 2026, “The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that.”[1] A linear trend represents no acceleration, so the rate of acceleration only became positive in 2023. Relative to the prior years, the averages for 2023, 2024, and 2025 “seemed to jump up,” said NOAA climate-monitoring chief Russ Vose.[2] The average for 2024 was 1.6C degrees above pre-industrial levels, hence slightly above the internationally agreed-upon limit of 1.5C degrees, and the averages for 2023 (1.48C above) and 2025 (1.47C above) were essentially tied so close to 1.5C that the average of the three years is above 1.5C. Even though the “leap” from the previous years since at least 2015 instantiates an acceleration, more years may be needed to assess whether the rate of the acceleration was increasing (mathematics majors would know this). At the outset of 2026, the three preceding years appeared as a plateau rather than evidence of continued acceleration, but a plateau could exist within a trend even of a positive derivative. My point is that we should have been more focused on changes in the rate of acceleration, for if the rate itself was increasing, then it would not be long until the threshold of 1.5C is surpassed and more extreme symptoms of climate change occur.

One of the weaknesses of democracy is that such symptoms may have to be experienced and seen before electorates treat climate-change as an important issue in voting. Human nature itself, a product of natural selection, still prioritizes the immediate over the long-term, especially in regard to threats. Instant gratification too is “hard-wired” in us all, which is why we tend to vote to keep gas prices low rather than to cut off the further manufacture of gasoline-powered cars. Whereas these contributory drawbacks in our nature, inherited from the gradual process of natural selection in evolution (mostly in the hunger-gatherer period of our species), have been associated with the lack of sufficient political will in the world since 2016 at Paris to keep the average global temperature from surpassing 1.5C above the pre-industrial level, our cognitive impairments that are also contributory are less well-known. This is the idea.

In addition to difficulties in conceptualizing and keeping attuned to what the derivative represents (i.e., change in the rate of acceleration, rather than the rate itself), our arrogance of pride in what we think we know also holds us back from grasping the magnitude of the human contribution to climate change. Just days before writing this essay, a man aged 75 declared to me that climate change is “just the natural cycles.” I don’t know whether that person had gone to college, but I do know that he was not a scientist. So the man’s declaration itself rang out as being out of place, given his actual level of knowledge on climate science. Similar to how we tend to focus on acceleration rates rather than changes in those rates, most people would be attuned to the content of the man’s statement—that climate change is merely part of a long-term natural cycle that will eventually reverse itself—rather than to the declaratory form of speech with which he made the statement. It is too difficult for us to grasp changes in rates of acceleration and focus on the presumption of entitlement that can be detected in the way a person makes a statement, whether it is written or verbal, and yet we tend not to realize that we have trouble with both. As one consequence, we understate the severity of climate change.

Lest anyone needs a refresher, “Rohde said nearly all of the warming is from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. . . . Samantha Burgess, strategic climate head of the Copernicus service, said the overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.”[3] Lest it be conveniently assumed that the burning has been going on somewhere in nature away from humans, Burgess doesn’t mince words: “Climate change is happening. It’s here. It’s impacting everyone all around the world and it’s our fault.”[4] Climate change is not just from a natural cycle that would be occurring even if there were no homo sapiens species.

So, Joe the plumber, a person let’s say who barely graduated from high school, would not only be incorrect in declaring that climate change is just part of a natural cycle; he would also be presumptuous in slighting the contradicting knowledge of climate scientists, whose years of study are indeed superior to Joe’s opinion. Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, Joe’s self-love issuing out in puffed up “knowledge” may one day be underwater if he happens to live on a coast when enough of the polar ice has melted to rise the level of oceans appreciably. That Joe would likely react angrily to being corrected even though his declaration of knowledge actually has no foundation is yet another indication of the presumptuous that may be endemic to the human mind but seems to be more salient in uneducated people. Formerly known in Western civilization as the sin of pride, which Augustine and Paul set as the worse (and thus intractable) sin, treating one’s own opinion as a fact of knowledge can be added to the list of the deficiencies in our nature that may wind up causing the extinction of our species as the Earth’s climate approaches a new equilibrium sooner rather than later. How much sooner depends at least in part on whether the relevant derivative is positive.

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1. Seth Borenstein, “Scientists Call Another Near-Record Hot Year a ‘Warning Shot’ of a Shifting, Dangerous Climate,” APnews.com, January 14, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid. Italics added for emphasis.

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

With the U.S. fed up and only 100 governments left willing to attend COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress from COP30 should be placed.

At the end of the pre-COP30 meetings, the “European Union and Brazil launched an appeal calling on other nations to recognize carbon pricing as a pragmatic way to cut emissions and fun the green transition.”[1] Crucially, the “declaration . . . is a symbolic way to encourage world nations to develop strategies and establish markets akin to the EU’s emissions trading scheme, ETS, in place since 2005. Under the ETS, the EU makes companies pay for the emissions they produce.”[2] Below the nice headline of the declaration and assurances of “partnerships” lies the key word, symbolic. To characterize countries as partners is already a red flag, for that is weaker than even alliances, which can be broken at a moment’s notice with impunity.

Immediately after the “declaration” was made public, critics were saying “that putting the spotlight on carbon pricing could divert attention from real emissions-cutting, like investing in restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and oceans.”[3] Even in putting “real emissions-cutting” in terms of restoring forests and oceans—COP30 ironically being held near the increasingly deforested Amazon rain-forest—minimizes the urgency in staving off warming from greatly exceeding 1.5C degrees. Real decreases in carbon-emissions were needed, and yet only 100 national governments were meeting in Brazil to consider voluntary action at the country-level.

The elephant in the living room, invisible to almost everyone, is the assumption that voluntary decisions by national governments in the face of economic and political immediate costs can be relied upon to solve the problem, even when it was clear in 2025 that the 1.5C degree maximum “decided” at the COP15 in Paris would be surpassed. Like the tremendous risk of destruction to the species from nuclear war, which the belligerence of the Russian and Israeli governments for two years as of 2025 means that the irrational decision to unleash nuclear weapons is not at all unrealistic, the risk to the species’ very survival from climate change justifies the establishment of a world federation with just enough governmental sovereignty, backed up militarily, to push back against wayward national governments in order to keep the worst of human nature from being unleashed with hitherto unimaginable ferocity and mass destructiveness. Anyone with the irrational fear that such a world federation, which Kant recommends in his writings, would produce the Anti-Christ might want to look at the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis in Gaza as of 2025 for a clue as to where in the tiered system evil has already been manifest. Stalin and Hitler provide easy examples from the twentieth century.

In short, symbolic international conferences and absolute national-sovereignty should no longer be relied on so much by our species if it hopes not to go extinct. If that does happen, the wound would almost certainly be self-inflicted. Yet even then, with blood dripping from the knife being held by our species, still word of the deed will not have reached us. As Nietzsche writes of the unconscious discrediting of God (which Nietzsche opposed, for he was not an atheist), word of the deed did not reach the culprits, as in light from a far star not having reached Earth yet and yet the explosion has already happened. So too, our species has been oblivious concerning what is sufficient to stave off the destruction even of the species itself. The human mind discounts even mass-destructive possibilities that are thought to be low-probability and far off in the future, and thus flinches from agreeing to set up adequate safeguards.

In issuing the warning here with an acknowledgement of utter futility, I may be writing only to future descendants who are already dead. I am time, the destroyer of worlds, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna in the Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita. Left to its own devices by a feckless, stubborn, and greedy species, time may indeed see the extinction of homo sapiens, the “wise” species of Man, while the gods laugh at our primped-up seriousness as if we had been children pretending to be adults. Pathetically, we even take ourselves to be adults as we marvel at our own symbolic feats.

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1. Marta Pacheco, “COP30: EU Back Global Carbon Market Alliance to Crack Down on CO2 Emissions,” Euronews.com, 10 November, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.

Complexity in Global Warming: On the Imprint of Pride

It would be incorrect to claim that the planet’s atmosphere and oceans are both getting warmer in a linear, across-the-board way. The existence of exceptions, such as the slightly cooler average summers in some places in the interior of North America, no longer allows for credible claims of climate-change denial, an agenda that was financed and promoted in part by fossil-fuel companies in the U.S. and E.U. before being totally repudiated by science. Indeed, the credibility of natural science vastly exceeds that of corporations with vested financial interests. Rather than discuss those, which have become better known to the public, I want to describe the sheer complexity of a generally warming planet, which is rarely adequately grasped by non-scientists, and delve into the sordid self-love that I contend is ultimately behind global warming. 

Comparing summers of the past 30 years as of 2025 with the 1901-1960 average, the 48 contiguous American States showed “large changes I some regions, especially the West, and very muted ones in the central and southeast” States.[1] The “limited warming and even slight cooling in some locations” was “strikingly apparent.”[2] For example, Tuscaloosa County in Alabama cooled 0.6F since the first half of the twentieth century.[3] Lest this fact be taken as a rebuttal or counter-fact to “global warming,” Joseph Barsugli, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado cautions, “There are not too many places on the planet that are showing this, honestly.”[4] In fact locations in the interior of North America that have shown slight cooling are “an oddity amid a warming climate, as the general pattern is that the world’s land areas are warming up more quickly than the oceans. Europe, for instance, is one of the fastest warming land areas on the planet.”[5]

“According to the ERA5 dataset of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)” in 2025, Europe, rather than North America, had achieved the honor of being the fastest-warming continent; in fact, it had been warming by “approximately 0.53C per decade since the mid-1990s,” and the Arctic was “warming even faster—around 0.69C per decade.”[6] Even the linearity in “0.53C per decade” is an over-simplification and thus it should not be projected out from 2025 to even 2035.  Although not directly impacting the summer heating, the Gulf Stream, an ocean current that brings relatively warm water from Florida to northern Europe, was still active, albeit slowing down, during the winter of 2024-2025. Should that conveyor-belt cease to function due to the influx of cold fresh-water from melting ice in the Arctic, European winters would be much colder, and that would lower the overall warmth of Europe annually and could even have an impact on the summer heat—which way, I do not know; the complexity easily surpasses my ken as I am not a climatologist.

My point is precisely that the complexity, including feedback loops that have already been set in motion by warming that had already occurred before the mid-2020s and are entirely natural and thus cannot be stopped, still eludes even the grasp of the scientists who study the phenomenon of climate change. The E.U.’s southern States in particular were extraordinarily hot during the summer of 2025, and no one could then predict if or when the Gulf Stream might shut down in the Atlantic Ocean. The human impact on Earth’s atmosphere and oceans had already gone beyond what human minds or computers could project in terms of the future. The negligence on population growth and pollution by business around the world during the 20^th century came with the convenient implicit assumption that the impact would not compromise or even extinguish our species, including homo sapiens being able to think its way to counter such wide-scale effects. In fact, the inherent or innate underlying human problem goes beyond cognition being limited relative to human prowess.

The preeminence of the self, in a narrow self-love according to Augustine, is pride, “the beginning of all sin.”[7] In other words, “’the love of personal pre-eminence’ (amor excellentiae propriae) . . . means not simply ‘love of money’ but that ‘general avarice’ which makes a [person] seek for ‘something more than is fitting’, ‘for the sake of [one’s] own pre-eminence and through a kind of love of possession (quemdam propriae rei amorem)’.”[8] Whereas Aquinas would contend that greed is the prime sin, Augustine hung his hat on pride as the root of all evil, from which greed, or the desire for more sans limit, as evinced by not only the executives and shareholders of fossil-fuel companies, but also consumers who refused to constrain their use of electricity and gas/petro for driving cars rather than taken buses, trolleys, and subways in the last half of the 20^th century and the first quarter of the next century. The impulse preferring instant gratification for the self over the public or common good was continuously given enough rope even to possibly choke the species eventually. 

The strategic use of regulation and contributions to political campaigns for influence rendered not only people running corporations culpable, but also elected representatives and appointed regulators in government. The comfortable, mutual back-scratching relations between people in business and government could easily betray even the medium-term general good. 

In other words, allowing a lower good to surmount a higher good, which Aristotle called misordered concupiscence, for private and thus narrow immediate gain, is incredibly short-sighted and humanity even in the mid 2020’s was coming to realize that time was catching up and it was already time to begin “paying the piper” for all the accumulated political, economic, and social/cultural lapses that had contributed to excessive CO2 emissions. 

To be sure, the extent of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere relative to a human being could easily give people the misimpression of not being able to significantly alter the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans; but humanity should also have been sufficiently concerned about the exponential increase in the human population through the 20^th century, even with two world-wars to grasp the necessity of constraining that increase as well as the consumption of energy by individuals and the pollution of companies geared to supplying the greatly expanded population’s consumption.

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1. Chris Mooney, “The Strange Divide in How Americans Experience Summer Temperatures,” CNN.com, August 19, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The E.U. Climate Change Service, “Why Are Europe and the Arctic Heating Up Faster than the Rest of the World?” 14 July, 2025.
7. Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff, as quoted in John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120.

8. John Burnaby, Amor Dei: Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), p. 120. Burnaby quotes from Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. XI. 18ff.

 

 

Climate Change in Europe: On the Culpability of the Media

A report by the E.U. Copernicus Climate-Change Service in 2024 contains the finding that “Europe is the continent with the fastest-rising temperatures on Earth, having warmed twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s.”[1] In spite of “fastest-rising” and “twice as fast” are alarming expressions, no such corresponding sense of urgency had translated into a political will capable of pushing through game-changing legislation and regulations in the European Union. The short-term financial interests of industry, cost-conscious consumers, workers not wanting to be laid off, and taxpayers would pale in comparison were a sense of emergency to take hold the domain of politics. “Weak” states (i.e., governments) that are not willing or even able to resist short-term political pressures from an electorate exacerbate the problem even in the midst of climate change, which scientists decades earlier had predicted would really begin to move the needle on air-temperatures globally in the 2020s (and just wait until the oceans become saturated with CO₂!). You ain’t seen nothin yet may be the mantra for the 2030s.

It seems to be a case of the proverbial oblivious frog in gradually yet steadily warming water in a cooking pan on a stove, as the editors at journalistic media companies have been orienting their news to reporting on specific climate-related events that are disasters only in particular locales and thus do not point explicitly to global warming. For instance, on 4 July, 2025, a wildfire in the E.U. state of Greece “prompted evacuations in coastal areas south of Athens” and mobilized “75 firefighters, including five elite ground teams . . . alongside fire engines, volunteers, four helicopters, and two aircraft” as well as municipal water trucks.[2] “(O)ngoing heatwaves, drought and strong winds” kept the fire-risk high in the area.[3] Only at the end of Euronews’ article on the fire is climate change mentioned, and then only as an attenuating factor: “While fires are common in the area, experts say climate change is exacerbating them.”[4] That is to say: Oh, by the way, the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans is in play here. Even as climate change is relegated thusly, that it is only exacerbating wildfires in the southern states such as Greece is a way of deflating claims that climate change ought to be handled as an emergency in terms of public policy. The media has thus been culpable.  

1. David O’Sullivan, “Firefighters Battle Wildfires in Greece and Turkey, Prompting Evacuations and Emergency Response,” Euronews.com, July 4, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Managing Externalities in Business: Heliogen’s Breakthrough in Combatting Climate Change

A company’s values and norms can resonate to some extent with their societal counterparts by the company providing goods and services of value to customers resulting in a reduction of their suffering or increase in their happiness. Providing a net-value (the value to the customer less the price) to people can resonate with societal values and norms that esteem happiness and frown on suffering from want. Indeed, a utilitarian ethic can apply to the provision of as much value as possible in the form of goods and services that reduce the suffering or increase the happiness of as many people as possible. Legitimate wealth can “result from having provided a significant amount of value to a significant number of people.”[1] Even fortunes, according to this ethic, are justified by the provision of “a very unusual form of value to a very unusual number of people.”[2] Utilitarianism is popularly known from the expression, the greatest good to the greatest number (i.e., of people). Of course, an ethic justifies what should be, whereas the extent to which a company’s values and norms approach those of society is a descriptive matter. Describing the degree of fit is not to say that a company’s values and norms should (i.e., normatively) have that degree of fit, or even more. Ethical reasoning would be needed to supply the normative contention; such reasoning involves argumentation that the extant societal values and norms should be held generally speaking and specifically by companies. The fact that the values and norms of many German companies in the NAZI era resonated with societal values and norms is not to say that the managements should have sought to fit organizational values and norms with NAZI values and norms. The field of business & society, which is oriented to the degree of fit that exists descriptively between a company (or the business sector) and a society (or internationally-held values and norms), is thus distinct from business ethics, which is oriented to providing ethical justification for what managers and companies should do. With regard to the former field, companies can orient themselves even closer to societal values and norms than by providing value to customers and even taking other stakeholder interests into account by being primarily oriented to taking on a serious societal or global problem. In terms of business ethics, such an orientation can be said to be one that a company should have because an unusual number of people (even beyond customers and other stakeholders) could receive an unusual amount of value. Climate-change is such a problem, and Heliogen’s breakthrough exemplifies such an extraordinary mission.

Generally speaking, a mission that is primarily geared to solving a serious societal (or global) problem goes beyond providing value to customers and even taking into account the interests of other stakeholders. In such a mission, a society or even the species itself is the main recipient of the extraordinary value even though customers receive value too. Whereas the traditional business model is geared to profiting by selling value to customers, a company’s mission that is dominated by providing extraordinary value to a society or to humanity worldwide views profiting from sales to customers as a means. An opportunity cost thus exists in such a mission due to the profit forgone from customers due to the orientation being foremost to the macro problem.

Even though spending capital to solve a macro problem is not the same as paying externalized costs of the problem, an opportunity cost can arise if the net present value of the profits in the long-term is less than the R&D spending up-front. Even if the mission fits within the traditional business model (i.e., the net present value is more rather than less), the risk taken on because the substantial R&D outlays are not met with immediate profits can be said to be an opportunity cost in pursuing an intractable societal or global problem by coming up with a breakthrough. The opportunity cost can be viewed as paying such that future externalized costs of the problem will not occur. Of course, if a company solves the entire problem, rather than merely reducing that which has been making and would otherwise make the problem worse, most or all of the current externalized costs may disappear and thus not need to be paid. Such a company has in effect taken upon itself the relevant externalities (i.e., covering those costs otherwise left to society).

By externality, I mean a cost that under the traditional business model is borne by society (or humanity) rather than by a company or the business sector. For example, as of 2020, companies had not had to pay even a fraction of the costs of climate change even though the business sector had contributed to the problem by polluting. The default stance under the traditional profit model is typically defensive; a less common proactive stance is to reduce the company’s contribution of the problem, such as airlines did in using more efficient engines. An even less common stance is to be primarily oriented to reducing the contributions from other sources and even to solving the macro problem itself. As argued above, just the risk taken on can put this stance beyond the traditional business model. Such a stance, in being oriented beyond customers and even other stakeholders to focus on a societal problem, fits under another paradigm. This is not to say that it is based on corporate social responsibility, for a company does not have a responsibility to orient itself to reducing or solving a societal problem except as may happen as a result of providing value to customers. Indeed, a company’s founding investors and management may want to tackle a societal problem, rather than feeling obligated. In the case of climate change, the likely downside for the species already known in 2019 could be enough of a motivation even if the founding investors and management do not feel responsible for the problem.

Even though a responsibility may not pertain, the organizational values and norms of a company oriented to minimizing or solving a societal problem stand a good chance of approaching their societal counterparts—closer than from merely satisfying customers and even other stakeholders. That is to say, beyond stakeholder management, externalities management can be said to be oriented to societal (or macro) level problems. Such management had been rare, at least by 2020, because few companies had been principally oriented to societal or global problems without simply relegating them to a corporate social responsibility program as if out of a sense of responsibility. Whereas the literature on stakeholder management and CSR had been around for decades by 2020, not much was written on externalities management that subordinates profit-seeking to reducing or solving a societal problem. 

 

Management geared to externalities can be problematic, especially for publically-traded companies, whose managements are bound by fiduciary duty to look primarily at the short-term returns to stockholders. This duty is firmly grounded in property rights. Can such managements afford to put solving societal problems as foremost? Heavy R&D spending upfront with (admittedly healthy) profits only if and after a breakthrough has been invented and implemented by customers is not the typical way of attracting and retaining equity capital. Language in the charters would have to specify the primary purpose of the company as meaning that expedited profiting would be excluded or subordinated to reducing or solving a particular societal problem. A company’s default purpose is admittedly to make a profit, but property-rights give the owners (i.e., the stockholders) the right to set another purpose in place of the default, in which case investors have no reason to be upset when the purpose is pursued even at the expense of quarterly earnings and dividends.

By 2020, climate change had emerged as a major problem facing humanity with dire consequences being predicted to occur in decades rather than centuries. Heliogen, a start-up funded in part by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and at least one other billionaire, commenced as such a company oriented to inventing a product that, when sold to industrial customers, would significantly reduce carbon emissions and thus hopefully stave off the worst of the dire consequences. That is, Heliogen put its capital toward discovering a breakthrough that would reduce future externalizable costs even though the company’s high R&D costs would not be met with profits for some time. With a focus on achieving a breakthrough that would be of significant value to the world even beyond stakeholders, the company’s management must have known that profits would be long-term-oriented, rather than relatively short-term profits from incremental values sold to customers.

The secretive clean-energy company announced in November 2019 that artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors could be used together to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions by industry. The invention could generate extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius—a temperature that is about a quarter of that which is on the surface of the Sun. “The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.”[3] These industries were “responsible for more than a fifth of global emissions, according to the EPA.”[4] Accordingly, Soon-Shiong, who sat at the time on the Heliogen board, said, “The potential to humankind is enormous  . . . The potential to business is unfathomable.”[5]  Indeed, the company’s mission was of such scope, rather than merely to finding a better way to make cement and steel, that a breakthrough could result. Externalities management is geared to making an enormous contribution to humanity. Even having an unfathomable potential to other industries can be viewed as lying within the purview of such management, as distinct from stakeholder management. Of course, this is not to say that something of value would or could not be sold to customers for a profit, but the emphasis lying elsewhere makes both Heliogen and externalities management distinct.

Such a mission as does not prioritize the traditional business model can be attractive to investors who have already made their fortunes by prioritizing that model and have gone on to worry about problems facing humanity not currently being adequately addressed by business and government. Heliogen provided a way for Bill Gates and at least one other billionaire to put their wealth to use on a global problem that could even render the species itself extinct. Start-up companies can be vehicles for rich former titans to turn their attention to such serious problems with a feeling not of responsibility, but, rather, of satisfaction from having saved the species. In other words, having been satisfied by playing within the traditional business model, the aspirations of former titans can shift to the societal or global level even if without having given up profiting completely.

In the early twentieth century, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller retired from business to turn to charities. Among other things, Carnegie sponsored a library in Pittsburgh and Rockefeller founded a university in Chicago. In fact, Rockefeller, through his foundation, gave away roughly half of his fortune.[6] Both men had been ruthless in business; whether their respective giving afterward justified their business conduct (e.g., Carnegie against labor and Rockefeller against competitors) is another question. Rockefeller went so far as to view both his monopoly and charitable giving in Christian terms. In God’s Gold, I untangle whether Rockefeller’s monopolistic tactics (i.e., his business ethic, or lack thereof) can be justified by his religious mission in business and giving. For my purposes here, it suffices to say that neither titan would have viewed his respective company and charitable giving as being oriented to making a breakthrough on a humungous global problem. Indeed, Rockefeller filtered requests for his charitable giving by how efficient the money would be used; he was primarily oriented to using his fortune to solve a hitherto intractable serious problem facing mankind as Bill Gates was. Gate’s orientation was doubtless on keeping climate change from being an existential threat to future generations.

Externalities management is admittedly not a good fit for the vast majority of companies, which are oriented to maximizing profits while minimizing risks, but not every company must be made to fit within the traditional business model. A company can be formed and utilized in a way that puts profit-making through the funnel of externalities management geared to reducing or solving macro problems. Such a raison d’etre is distinct from undertaking a social responsibility program or being motivated by a sense of responsibility because such a company is not likely to be responsible for the problem even if some of its investors, as former titans of industry, were in their “other life.” The priority in such a company is that of reducing the costs of, or solving outright, an intractable societal or global problem, rather than self-blame or blaming others. This priority is why profit-seeking is regarded as secondary.

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1. Rod Burylo, The Wealthy Buddhist: Buddhist Ethics, Right Livelihood, and the Value of Money (Nepean, Canada: The Sumeru Press, 2018).

2. Ibid.

3. Matt Egan, “Secretive Energy Startup Backed by Bill Gates Achieves Solar Breakthrough,” CNN Business, November 19, 2019.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

Western Banks Lending to Asia's Expanding Middle Class: Profit vs. Planet

In April 2013, debt levels in Asia were reaching record levels as international lenders were extending short-term loans to a growing middle class. Non-mortgage consumer credit in Asia outside of Japan had increased 67% from 2007 to reach $1.66 trillion by the end of 2012. This credit included credit cards and loans for cars, electronic products, and appliances. Outside of Japan, Asian car and motorcycle loans nearly doubled from 2007 to 2012, to reach a record $219.7 billion. Appliance and electronics loans also more than doubled, reaching a high of $10.9 billion. Meanwhile, credit-card loans grew by 90% to reach a record $234.1 billion, according to Euromonitor. The incentive for the banks is not difficult to fathom. At the time, more than half of the world’s middle class was expected to be in Asia by the end of the decade. That translates yearly into more than 100 million additional people per year. For the banks, this was an opportunity since at least the beginning of the decade because growth was not possible in the European Union and the United States on account of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing European debt-crisis that extended well into 2013. The European Commission of the E.U. was also working on regulatory proposals that would limit the incentives of mortgage servicers to produce too many “bubble-creating” mortgages. 
So Western banks had an incentive to look east for fruitful markets. Interesting, government regulators in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia had began reining in mortgage, credit-card and auto/motorcycle lending, perhaps in fear of an Asian financial crisis. Had Western bankers learned their lesson, or were they unwittingly bringing their reckless mentality to Asia? Two levels of concerns can be extracted from this case. I contend that the more immediate concerns were crowding out attention that ought to have been paid to the larger, but longer-term, problems.
One sort of concern suggests that the international banks may have been providing too much credit to people entering the middle class. Such borrowers, similar to the sub-prime mortgage borrowers in California, Arizona and Florida, may not be able to handle their new debt-loads. At the beginning of 2013, debt levels relative to individual income in many Asian economies, including Malaysia, China, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and India, were already up to 30% higher than in the United States. This would suggest that the Western bankers were again poised to be reckless. Citigroup’s claim that it was expanding its lending to the middle class in Asia in a “disciplined manner” can thus be challenged. More particularly, the financial-growth incentives facing the bank, given the continued weak economies in Europe and North America, can be critically analyzed. Did Citigroup's bankers accurately anticipate whether another debt melt-down might have resulted from the trend in debt-loads, or was this low-probability, high-risk scenario too long-term oriented to be factored in sufficiently? I don't know the answer to this, but I submit that baleful consequences that are larger and presumably further off tend to get pushed aside by the human mind, given the preoccupation with today, hard-wired by natural selection.
Even if we take Citigroup at its word that it was lending in Asia in a “disciplined manner” in spite of the rather unique opportunity for bank profit there, we can ask whether international banks have a responsibility to society, and even the species itself by resisting the temptation to immediately extend the rising middle class higher in spite of "growth pains" that could be anticipated. To a banker, this might have seemed like muzzling the golden goose, particularly given the soft economies in North America and Europe at the time.  What if his or her competitors would have stepped in anyway? Responsibility involves some voluntary restriction on a company’s financial self-interest that may require industry-wide commitment.  What are the chances that no one would cheat? Very low, I submit. Nevertheless, duty, a word mostly lost to today's short-sighted narcissism, is not meant to be convenient; otherwise, it would not operate as a tug on a banker’s conscience.
The upsurge in auto loans in Asia is a case in point. That is, is is responsible to facilitate an expansive auto market especially in China's major cities, which had already been known to be notable polluters. After 2000, the number of cars in use in China was doubling every year. Meanwhile, the Chinese were building an “interstate" highway-system that would dwarf the network of highways in the contiguous United States. Loans enabling an exploding middle class to buy cars increased the global demand for oil, resulting, other things equal, in a higher price at the gas pump. Would the magnitude of the surge in projected fossil-fuel use in China drain the Earth’s oil reserves before alternative sources of energy could pick up the slack, or should the Chinese too be able to enjoy a car economy like those in the West? It would be too easy for the Western bankers to resound with the latter at the expense of the former due to the allure of greater profits over duty to the species.

More people=More cars=More pollution    source: Businessweek

The viability of the species enters the equation of course because of the scientifically-proven link between carbon emissions by humans and climate change in which both the atmosphere and oceans of the planet have been warming since well before 2013. To be sure, it could indeed have been argued that the Asian middle-class deserved the same freedom and ease provided by owning a car in the twenty-first century that the American and European middle-classes enjoyed in the twentieth century. Fair is fair, right? However, the global climatic threat to the species had not been pressing during the industrial revolution and through the ensuing shizogenic (i.e., a maximizing variable) consumerism of the twentieth century. By  analogy, even though a person starting to smoke at 50 can point to a person starting at 20 and say, “I should be able to have my years of smoking too,” the person who smokes at an older age faces more health risks than the person who smokes when young. Is it worth a heart attack to a 50 year-old to insist on having years of smoking too?  Similarly, the question of the additional oil for more cars, as well as more coal-sourced electricity powering electronics and appliances—all being facilitated by the upsurge in loans—can legitimately be answered differently when it is accurately (and thus justly) feared that unless the carbon-use trends reversed themselves everywhere, the species would likely face dramatic negative effects all too soon, with the very survival of the species itself perhaps hanging in the balance further out.

As these diverging patterns demonstrate, the threat of over-population is not uniform across the globe.   source: fashionzombie.net

In terms of public policy, if corporate social responsibility is not strong enough given the addictive allure of profit-seeking to ward off even current use that could result in a very different climate, perhaps resulting in a new equilibrium beyond the bounds of human habitation, then government regulation may be humanity's only option to pick up the slack. Because the problem is global in nature, this option is also problematic. 
Because the interests of the government of China and other countries do not take kindly to economic costs inflicted on their respective peoples for fear of political unrest and economic recession,  the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty might finally have to be compromised in order, ultimately, for the species to survive or at least not be inundated even in the twenty-first century with climatic havoc. To the extent that the explosion of the human population is the root cause of the increase in carbon (and methane) in the atmosphere and oceans, even government regulation enforced at the global level would be difficult, even ethically, especially as countries fear an older demographic in a declining base. It would be a lot to ask bankers to take this on. Nevertheless, societies and governments can legitimately ask banks not to exacerbate global warming by acting so as to dramatically increase human consumption too much given the business environment. As the managerial role is profit-seeking by design and incentive, however, it is not likely that bankers would agree. Hence I have viewed corporate social responsibility as a creature more of marketing than duty, especially in societies in which the honor of duty is not valued. 

Source:

Kathy Chu, “Consumer Loans Surge Across Asia,” The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2013. 

Carbon-Dioxide Emissions: A Species’ Death-Wish?

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning rose 5.9 percent in 2010, the largest amount on record, according to an analysis released in early December, 2011 by the Global Carbon Project. According to the analysis as reported by the New York Times, “the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.” 

The researchers did not expect the extraordinary growth to persist, but did "expect emissions to return to something closer to the 3 percent yearly growth of the [2000-2009] decade, still a worrisome figure that signifies little progress in limiting greenhouse gases. The growth rate in the 1990s was closer to 1 percent yearly.” In other words, the trend has been the opposite of that which one might have expected years after Al Gore’s documentary on global warmth. Increasing knowledge of global warming did not result in a reduction in contributing to global warming; rather, more carbon dioxide has ensued. To be sure, the negative correlation is not causal in nature; knowing more about global warming has not caused people to decide to pollute more. That would really be bizarre. Even so, it does appear that mankind is not sufficiently interested in protecting the specie’s own long-term viability at the expense of more immediate interests. Put another way, governments have enabled their respective businesses to produce more (or cheaper) even while knowing that the earth is warming.

According to the New York Times, “Scientists say the rapid growth of emissions is warming the Earth, threatening the ecology and putting human welfare at long-term risk. But their increasingly urgent pleas that society find a way to limit emissions have met sharp political resistance in many countries, including the United States, because doing so would entail higher energy costs.” Short-term costs are more important than long-term survival. This, in short, is why our species does not deserve to survive. We have produced this sad verdict ourselves. “Each year that emissions go up, there’s another year of negotiations, another year of indecision,” said Glen P. Peters, a researcher at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo and a leader of the group that produced the new analysis. “There’s no evidence that this trajectory we’ve been following the last 10 years is going to change.” This was borne out in the “deal” reached for a “New Emissions Treaty” at the U.N. climate talks ending in December 2011.

According to the New York Times, “The European Union had pushed hard for what it called a ‘road map’ to a new, legally binding treaty against fierce resistance from China and India, whose delegates argued passionately against it.” Developing countries, including China and India, had surpassed the developed countries in their overall greenhouse emissions. In 2010, for example, the combustion of fossil fuels and the production of cement sent more than nine billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the new analysis found, with 57 percent of that coming from developing countries. Even so, emissions per person were still sharply higher in the wealthy countries, which had been emitting greenhouse gases far longer and thus they account for the bulk of the excess gases in the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide, the main such gas, had increased 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution. A long-term cost was being incurred simply in debating year after year without actionable results in lower emissions. For developing countries, it would seem that having an equal opportunity to pollute was worth risking the planet, at least as far as human habitation is concerned. “Am I to write a blank check and sign away the livelihoods and sustainability of 1.2 billion Indians, without even knowing what the E.U. ‘road map’ contains?” asked India’s environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan. “Please do not hold us hostage.” This way of thinking—or decision to use hyperbole—also qualifies mankind as not deserving to survive.

Even as carbon-dioxide emissions were “alive and well,” the “deal” reached in December 2011 would continue the Kyoto agreement, to which neither the United States nor developing countries such as China and India are parties, until  2017 or 2020. The terms of any agreement that replaces it would be negotiated at future sessions of the governing body, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The basic mentality behind such a wan or pallid “deal” amid knowledge that global warming is indeed proceeding is transparent in this passage from the New York Times: “Scientists say the rapid growth of emissions is warming the Earth, threatening the ecology and putting human welfare at long-term risk. But their increasingly urgent pleas that society find a way to limit emissions have met sharp political resistance in many countries, including the United States, because doing so would entail higher energy costs.” That “increasingly urgent pleas” are being essentially ignored may itself point to a “hard-wired” weakness in the species that can be characterized as “self-defeating.”

Behind the increased emissions alone, moreover, is the failure of the species to self-regulate its own size. On October 31, 2011, the global population (of human beings) was estimated to have hit 7 billion. It had passed the 6 billion mark in 1999. The 10 billion mark is expected by the end of the twenty-first century. At a basic, biological level, organisms must consume resources and expel waste products: the more people, the more consumed and expelled. It is ironic that humanity places so much reliance on its technological abilities to mitigate this basic fact even as the species seems incapable of simply acting on the basis of the extant knowledge on climate change to make emissions reduction “actionable.”

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus pointed to disease, famine and conflict (war) as nature’s trove of solutions to arrest a maximizing species from piercing a broader ecosystem, which is inherently at an equilibrium (i.e., homeostatic). Perhaps we could add a fourth solution—namely, a shift to a climatic equilibrium inconsistent with human habitation. Perhaps this is nature’s way of handling the arrogance of man, or perhaps it is our way of judging ourselves as a species. Perhaps unconsciously, the sordid species, which presumes itself to be “made in God’s image,” has a death wish—a humble sensibility underneath “just saying no” to the overweening superciliousness of the arrogance that seems almost hard-wired in the species. That is to say, the “result” of the global climate talks “attained” in December 2011 can perhaps be read as the expression of an unconscious collective will—a tacit verdict of a species on itself by procrastinating in the context of “urgent pleas.” In the context of a maximizing trajectory in terms of population, which seems to suggest dominance or victory on this planet, the species’ own verdict is certainty ironic. From the 2010 figures alone, my initial gut reaction was that the species had failed the “test” in a way that shows human nature to us as it is. Accordingly, I have no doubt that the verdict will be fully implemented in a few generations—our days being limited as a species.  

Sources:

John M. Broder, “U.N. Climate Talks End With Deal for New Emissions Treaty,” The New York Times, December 11, 2011. 

Justin Gillis, “Carbon Emissions Show Biggest Jump Ever Recorded,” The New York Times, December 4, 2011.