Friday, November 15, 2024

UN Climate Conferences Harbor an Institutional Conflict of Interest

Whereas people become instantly upset upon hearing that someone has self-aggrandized oneself by exploiting a conflict of interest, by, for example, embezzling funds for personal use, our species has the tendency to ignore the institutional variety of conflicts-of-interest. We don’t want to hear of another person incurring a privately-held benefit by ignoring the duties of one’s office, such as fiduciary responsibility, but we are fine with countries whose dominant industry is oil hosting the UN’s annual climate conferences. The sheer denialism entailed in assuming that the governments of such countries can be expected to steer a conference from the interests of the domestic oil companies is astounding. If there were ever a case of private benefits being at odds with the public benefit from mitigating climate change from carbon emissions by humans, this instance would be it. As had been the case of tobacco companies that promoted smoking even to minors while knowing that smoking kills or at least shortens a person’s lifespan, oil companies place their own profits, which are only a benefit to themselves, their managements, stockholders, and their external sycophants (i.e., governments) through more tax revenue and higher political contributions, above whether the planet warms more than 2C degrees—1.5, the prior limit, being passed in 2024. In other words, greed (i.e., the desire for more) can render board directors and managements oblivious to even forecasts of catastrophic impacts from global warming. In 2024, as COP29 was in progress in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, Al Gore, who had been the U.S. vice president during the eight-year Clinton administration in the 1990s, was astonished by how blatant (and undercutting relative to the conference’s goal) the institutional conflict of interest has been in allowing petro-states to be the hosts. I’m skeptical, given the lapse that seems to be inherent in the human brain when it comes to assessing and even recognizing such conflicts of interest, whether Gore’s “wake-up” call would make more than a ripple next to the power of the oil industry, given its private wealth.

With regard to allowing oil states to host COP conferences, Gore said, “I think it’s absurd to have, for example, what we had last year with the CEO of one of dirtiest oil companies on the planet serving as the president of COP.”[1] The 2023 conference had been hosted by Dubai. As though wielding a club to knock some sense into the cognitive ability of the species’ collective mind, he stated, “It’s a direct conflict of interest.”[2] Perhaps I should use only capital letters for Gore’s last point to indicate just how incredulous the human blindness to institutional conflicts of interest is. That the governments of Dubai and Azerbaijan, in 2023 and 2024, respectively, would ever use their position as hosts to protect those countries’ respective oil companies is a point that seems to allude human thinking and consciousness.

Lest there be any doubt, the president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev, was “very much in sync with [Azerbaijan’s] reliance on fossil fuels,” given that 90% of the country’s balance of payments was coming from the sale of oil and gas.”[3] Even though Babayev had worked at the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar) for two decades, he was chosen at the beginning of 2024 to preside over the conference in Baku. It was really Russia’s President Putin who “made this choice,” Gore said.[4] He continued, “One of the reforms that I have proposed is to give the [UN] secretary general a say in who hosts the COPs, and not just leave it to allow voices like Valdimir Putin’s to determine who gets this one, and let the petrostates of the Middle East decide.”[5] At the time, Russia itself was an oil producer, so its own interests were tied with those of the interests of oil.

How might such an institutional conflict-of-interest skew the output of a COP conference in line with the host’s domestic oil industry at the expense of the survival-interest of our species? “Gore singled out carbon capture and storage (CCS), which typically involves pumping CO2 underground or below the seabed into depleted gas fields” as being in the commercial interest of oil companies, who could then sell as much oil and gas as they like while counting only on technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere without having to curtain CO2 emissions, and thus sales.[6] CCS has “been proven to be completely ridiculous and totally ineffective,” Gore asserted, before crucially adding, “Of course, the fossil fuel companies want to pretend that that’s the solution—anything other than reducing the amount of fossil fuels that are burned or reducing their markets.”[7]

Considering that 2024 was the first year that the planet’s atmosphere surpassed the limit set by the Paris Conference in 2016, a “both-and” approach was required, but this assumes that the interests of our species are more important, even vital, than are oil profits, which are only privately-held rather than species-as-a-whole benefits. I contend that the good of a whole surpasses the private good, and thus interest, of a part, especially if the latter’s good is at odds with the former. Out of jealousy and puffed up moral outrage, we get so angry at individuals taking advantage of, and thus exploiting their respective positions, but no one blinks an eye when Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan was steering the climate conference in Baku in 2024 towards a climate-strategy that is in the financial interest of the oil industry in Azerbaijan, which is state-related so there is another institutional conflict of interest, at the expense of biting hard to reduce CO2 emissions, especially given that the world had just sailed through the limit of warming from pre-industrial levels. With most countries having failed to reach their own targets of CO2-emission reductions, COP29 could ill-afford to be handicapped by being limited to means in line with the financial interests of oil companies. Unlike the tobacco case, it might not be merely a matter of more people dying from climate change; the species itself could conceivably go extinct. That oil CEOs and their governmental sycophants would put the financial “health” of oil companies above the survival of the species ought to lead the rest of us to discredit the oil interest to the point of sidelining it at climate conferences, which, by the way, have been inundated with oil-industry lobbyists. That the global population looks the other way, and may not even recognize the institutional conflict of interest, reflects very badly on our species, and might be its undoing while God, disgusted with our species, looks on in utter disbelief. If disbelief comes to inhabit God, then we really are in trouble.



1. Robert Hodgson, “Al Gore Calls for Reform of COP Climate Process,” Euronews.com, November 15, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Why a Stronger E.U. Is Needed in International Affairs

As 2023 and the following year made clear, the world still faced additional challenges in rebuffing incursions that violate human rights, including crimes against humanity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s military incursion into Gaza both demonstrate how easy it had become, especially with advanced military technology, to kill civilians so as to decimate an entire population so the land could be filled with the people of the aggressors. If this sounds like Hitler’s policy to make room for the German people in Eastern Europe, you are not far from touching on the real motives behind the aggression. It would be a pity were such motives to become the norm while the world looks on. I contend that the U.S. enabling of Israel has unwittingly contributed to the establishment of such a norm, and that therefore a stronger E.U. was needed not only domestically, but also internationally, as a counter-weight in defense of the human rights of civilians in Gaza.

UNRWA Gaza director Scott Anderson, speaking on the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza as of November, 2024, said, “We haven’t been able to get food to those people for over a month. If we don’t do something quickly, it could devolve into a full-blown famine, which would be a manmade condition and something that could easily be corrected if we just get enough aid in to take care of everybody.”[1] The key here is the word, manmade, for as officials in the Israeli government had been openly admitted, including the president, everyone in Gaza is culpable and thus deserves to suffer the consequences. Ironically, as the case of Nazi Germany demonstrates, it is very easy to go from the supposition that a certain people is subhuman to the sordid instinctual urge to exterminate the group. The “meta-premise” is that identity-politics by group is valid and based on ontological rather than merely cultural differences.

A month earlier, the “Famine Review Committee [had] called the situation in the north of the Strip ‘extremely grave and rapidly deteriorating’ and said all actors in the war much take immediate action ‘within days not weeks’ to avert a humanitarian disaster.”[2] During that month, the amount of aid entering Gaza dropped dramatically due to yet another offensive by Israel’s military in the north of Gaza.[3] “By the end of October, an average of just 71 trucks a day were entering Gaza,” whose population at the time was over a million.[4]

Anderson’s assessment in mid-November suggests that his demand had not been heeded, especially by Israel, but also, and this is important, by its strongest ally, the United States. Even though less than a week before the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration “accused Israel of ‘not doing enough’ to answer international concerns over indiscriminate strikes on Gaza,” which in turn was a factor in the reduction of food-aid getting into Gaza, “Israel’s military chief . . . said the Israel Force needs to be larger, as the war expands to different fronts.”[5] U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said of the Israeli government officials, “They are not doing enough to get us the answers that we have requested.”[6] Of course, the token U.S. resistance to Israel did not win Michigan for Harris, as Arabs in Grand Rapids did not take the bait.

A few weeks after the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration declared that Israel was not violating U.S. law after all in terms of killing and limiting food-aid to the residents, who by then were almost all displaced, and thus homeless, of Gaza. Back in May, the administration had said “that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law.”[7] Of course, the administration provided for itself a caveat that would enable a reversal after the election: Wartime “conditions prevented U.S. officials from” collecting enough evidence to go beyond stating that Israel likely violated international humanitarian law, which, by the way, would mean that Israel had been violating U.S. law too. Even at the time, the media noticed that “the caveat that the administration wasn’t able to link specific U.S. weapons to individual attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza could give the administration leeway in any future decision on whether to restrict provisions of offensive weapons to Israel.”[8] In November, 2024, after the election, the Biden administration stated that the U.S. would continue to supply Israel with weapons. Exactly a week after the election, the administration announced “that it would not without weapon shipments to Israel,” even though the “30-day deadline” for Israel to “significantly alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza [had] expired.”[9] U.S. State Department spokesmn Vedant Patel said that Israel had not violated the U.S. law that “bars offensive weapons from being transferred to countries that block aid from reaching civilians.”[10] A report written by aid groups and requested by the Biden administration “determined that Israel had failed to meet the vast majority of the requirements laid out by” the administration—Israel having failed to comply with fifteen of the 19 measures that the U.S. had indicated must be met to avoid a delay in weapons shipments, and yet the administration announced that the U.S. would continue to ship weapons to Israel.[11] That this occurred just after the election is relevant, as this strongly suggests that the strategy was based on domestic U.S. politics—namely, trying to get as many votes as possible for Harris from Muslim Americans.

It is also significant that on the very same day, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign minister, “proposed formally to suspend political dialogue with Israel over the country’s alleged violations of human rights and international law in the Gaza Strip.”[12] Unlike the U.S., the E.U. was not politically beholden to AIPAC, the American Israeli Political Action Committee. Even by the report that the Biden administration had requested, the Israeli government had been violating humanitarian law by restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, perhaps to rid the Strip of its remaining population as the final solution. The world needed an active E.U. with sufficient competencies (i.e., enumerated powers delegated to the E.U. by the states) to stand against U.S. policy in defense of humanitarian law—even that which had been enshrined in U.S. law! Especially with Russia invading Ukraine with many civilian casualties there, the world very much needed a world-power, which the E.U. could be, to push back on violators.

Clearly, the world could not count on the allies of violators, such as China and North Korea in the case of Russia, and the U.S. in the case of Israel; in fact, those allies went beyond merely standing quietly by to actively enable the aggressors. With regard to Muslims, I suspect that the U.S. Government was still too oriented to redressing the attack that took place on September 11, 2001, to accurately and fairly even perceive the one-sided over-kill being committed by Israel in Gaza.

The Israeli government’s perception was biased, which is why John Locke argued that government should exist to impartially judge cases of injury because victims tend to exact too much punishment by being swayed by emotion (hatred). Following Locke, Adam Smith wrote that the administration of justice should be “exact,” meaning not disproportional, and “equal and impartial.”[13] Victims who have been injured are in no position to determine and dispense justice in such a matter; hence the need for government. But what if governments are themselves the victims?

Holding onto resentment more than twenty years after the Muslim attack on the World Trade Tower in New York City may explain why the Biden administration was tacitly going along with Israel’s excessive “pay-back,” also known as punishment-as-vengeance, against the civilians residing in Gaza. Even allies should not be entrusted with being able to reasonably assess and contribute to punishment. Israel had been woefully excessive in inflicting suffering on the civilians in Gaza, acting with impunity in part because the E.U.’s states had not transferred enough sovereignty to the union in foreign policy and defense for the E.U. to be able to act as a counterweight to the United States.

It is dangerous when a sovereign country, such as Israel, can act with the presumption of de facto impunity internationally. That the rest of the world had not acted with sufficient force to arrest Israel’s aggression and deflate the sense of impunity suggests that if the UN could not be given real power, at least the European Union should be strengthened at the federal level. More to the point, the delusion that the E.U. is but an international organization or alliance and thus should not be given more power by its states has cost not only the E.U., but also the world. 



1. Stefan Grobe, “UNRWA: Risk of Famine in Gaza without Swift Action,” Euronews.com, November 15, 2024.
2. Euronews, “UN Warns Famine Is ‘Imminent’ in Northern Gaza as Israel Siege Continues,” Euronews.com, September 11, 2024.
3. Euronews, “14 Killed in Israeli Strike on UNRWA School Used as Shelter for Displaced Gazans,” Euronews.com, August 11, 2024.
4. Ibid.
5. Euronews, “US Accuses Israel of ‘Not Doing Enough’ to Address Concerns over Strikes in Gaza,” Euronews.com, October 31, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Ellen Knickmeyer, Aamer Madhani, and Matthew Lee, “US Says Israel’s Use of US Arms Likely Violated International Law, but Evidence Is Incomplete,” The Associated Press, May 11, 2024.
8. Ibid.
9. Jacob Magid, “US Says It Won’t Withhold Weapons to Israel, as Deadline to Address AidCrisis Passes,” The Times of Israel, November 13, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Borrell Proposes to Suspend E.U.-Israel Political Talks over Gaza War,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.
13. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 38. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), V. i. b. 1, 15, and 25.


Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Advancing the E.U.’s Strategic Autonomy: Beyond Security by Regulation

Faced with the return of Donald Trump as U.S. president in early 2025, the European Parliament debated on November 13, 2024 how the E.U. should respond and, if needed, protect its strategic interests with respect to Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine. “In their debate, MEPs considered hw to engage with the new administration to address challenges and leverage opportunities for both regions as the E.U. seeks stable transatlantic relations.”[1] The possibility of the incoming U.S. President pulling back on NATO and with respect to contributing military supplies and money to Ukraine, and issuing protectionist tariffs on imports from the E.U. had added urgency for the E.U. to come up with ways of countering those external threats from the West just as Russia’s latest forays into Ukraine were external threats from the East. On the same day, Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s secretary of state/foreign minister/foreign policy “chief” “proposed to formally suspend political dialogue with Israel over the country’s alleged violations of human rights and international law in the Gaza strip.”[2] This alone put the E.U. at odds with Israel’s stanchest defender/enabler, the U.S., and with its incoming president, Donald Trump. From a human rights standpoint alone, both with respect to the governments of Russia and Israel, the trajectory of the E.U. in incrementally increasing its competencies (i.e., enumerated powers delegated by the state governments) in foreign policy and especially in defense (given the new post of Defense Commissioner) was in motion. The question was perhaps whether the E.U.’s typical incrementalism would be enough to protect the E.U.’s strategic interests, which includes protecting human rights at home and abroad. Fortunately, on the very same day, Kaija Shilde, Dean of the Global Studies school at Boston University, spoke at Harvard on the very question that I have just raised. I will present her view, which will lead to my thoughts on how viewing the E.U. inaccurately as a mere alliance harms the E.U.’s role internationally from within. That is to say, the continuance of the self-inflicted wound, or category-mistake on what the E.U. is, was compromising the jump forward in defense that the E.U. needed at the time to more competently address the crisis in Ukraine.

Shilde began by noting the important role that the private sector had been playing within the E.U. with regard to providing Ukraine with military assets. Any state-actor has to harness markets to generate defense items, and the fact that the states were still commanding their respective militias, or armies, does not nullify this federal competency (enumerated power) that has been difficult to fully recognize given the contribution of the private sector. The E.U. and the U.S. both had been regulating their respective markets and thus encouraging their respective military-industrial industries. Therefore, both unions were more important than NATO, which has only been an alliance since its inception, in pushing against Putin who, in 2014 and again in 2022 invaded Ukraine militarily. In 2024, the E.U. was in fact doing things to generate military power. Direct lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine, enhancing defense integration within the E.U., and coordinating a war economy have been just three of the contributions at the federal level since the invasion of 2022. In 2024, the E.U. was the third largest military spender in Europe. Combining financial aid and military allocations, the E.U. allocated more money than did the United States.  

Europeans have been in favor of a role for the E.U. in defense. As of 2024, over 70 percent of Europeans in a poll every year since 1999 have said that the E.U. should have a role—that it shouldn’t be left up to the states. Only around 20 percent disagreed during that interval. Asked which level of governance best addresses defense threats, 43 percent said the federal level, which is to say, the European Union. In fact, the Europeans polled had specific ideas of what a E.U. army should do. Defending the E.U.’s territory was number one on the list. Shilde concluded that there must be something organic about pan-European defense, but would popular opinion be enough for the E.U. to augment its defense competencies (powers) in time to help Ukraine push back the Russian (and North Korean) army?

Since 1950, European integration proceeded by occasionally taking back-steps, and has been pushed forward by external threats. In the 1950s, the European Defense Community was prompted by the Soviet threat. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, France proposed a federal union for Europe rather than the extant Economic Community. Whereas the U.S. began with an emphasis on defense, for obvious reasons, the E.U. took off from an economic core of competencies (i.e., enumerated powers). Federal governmental sovereignty can be at both poles, as well as in the incremental powers that both unions have been able to add at the federal rather than state level. To be sure, starting with defense is more typical of federal levels than with economic regulations, which have traditionally been made at the local, provincial, and state levels.

A plurality of Europe’s military power has been due to the E.U.’s regulatory power; this is a modern way of generating military power—a modern way of exercising governmental sovereignty even if defense competencies are added later. The role of European companies in the E.U.’s shaping of markets to deliver military goods should not be minimized. In 2024, E.U. private firms spent 3 times that of American firms on defense research and development. This is because of E.U. regulations. For example, the E.U. facilitates some infant industries by means of protectionism. To be sure, given the Russian military incursion into Ukraine, the E.U. needed to become a large scale buyer of military goods and it needed a defense industrial policy in 2024, according to Shilde, even if the upcoming U.S. President were to decrease the American military support not only to Ukraine, but even NATO. Should he make a retreating dent in these respects, Shilde predicted that the E.U. would see a sizable enhancement of its role in defense, including in regard to helping Ukraine. It may not make any difference, she said, whether the federal level directly commands any military units; after all, the Confederate States of America relied on the armies of its member-states in the 1861-1865 war between the USA and the CSA.

I contend that the comparison between the E.U. and the CSA is not nearly as accurate as a comparison between the E.U. and U.S., even in 2024, especially if you take account of time, and thus development, by comparing the E.U. of 2024 with the U.S. of 1820—both unions being around 30 years old. Even comparing the E.U. and U.S. as they were in 2023 allows us to exclude the claim that one of the two was merely an alliance or an international organization. Federalism had already come to Europe within the E.U.’s borders, and, like case of the U.S., both the federal and state levels of the E.U. already enjoyed some governmental sovereignty. Hence both unions could be classified as having modern federal systems rather than being confederations, in which the states hold all of the sovereignty.

Importantly, getting the comparison right, and being realistic about what the E.U. was even as of 2024 is important to eliminating the self-inflicted handicap that had held the E.U. back since 1993. Classifying the E.U. as a mere alliance, and thus like that of NATO, has held the E.U. state governments back from agreeing to delegate additional defense competencies to the E.U. so a stronger united and collective defense of Ukraine could possibly tip the scales against Russia’s President Putin. This would be as if to say, with action as well as words: invading another country is no longer allowed. Such a twenty-first-century advance in international relations would truly be a Hamiltonian feat. Perhaps it would also be such a feat to get enough E.U. citizens to admit to themselves that the E.U. had already become a federal system, and thus has not in fact been inherently limited to the roles of an international organization or alliance. To put on a united front with one arm tied up, and to be doing so unwittingly or at the behest of an ideology is a self-infliction that the E.U. could have done without, especially with American isolationism rising in the West and Russian militarization intensifying in the East.



1. Euronews, “MEPs Debate Future E.U.-U.S. Relations Against Backdrop of U.S. Administration Change,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.
2. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Borrel Proposes to Suspend E.U.-Israel Political Talks over Gaza War,” Euronews.com, November 13, 2024.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Resolved: The E.U. Should Join NATO

I contend that the European Union rather than its states should be in NATO. Besides eliminating duplication from the E.U. having a nebulous observer status while the states are formally in the alliance, the increasing role in defense being played by the Commission, including there being a Defense commissioner (secretary/minister), calls for being formally in the alliance. Whereas the U.S. began as a military alliance of sovereign states, the E.U. can trace its beginnings to the European Economic Community. Both unions have since incorporated powers or competencies beyond the respective starting points. For the E.U. this has meant moving beyond economics and trade to include social policy and, last but not least, defense. It is in NATO’s interest to adapt to this change. Lastly, that the E.U. and U.S. are both instances of (early) modern federalism, which at its core has the attribute of dual-sovereignty wherein both the federal and the state levels enjoy at least some governmental sovereignty, whereas NATO, as an international alliance, is confederal in that all of the sovereignty resides in the members of the alliance, justifies the E.U. being a member of NATO rather than being misinterpreted as a comparable international organization as the state-rights Euroskeptics like to believe.

On November 6, 2024, at his confirmation hearing at the European Parliament, the Commission’s nominee to be the union’s first defense commissioner (defense secretary in American parlance), Andrius Kubilius (of the European People’s Party) said, “If we want to defend ourselves, we need to spend at least €10 billion up to 2028.”[1] In addition, €200 billion would be needed over the next decade to update infrastructure and €500 billion to build an air-defence shield. “We need to spend more,” he said, “not because it is a demand of President[-Elect] Trump, but because of Putin”, the President of Russia, who, not coincidentally, was in the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.[2] Showing “that we’re able to defend ourselves” would “convince Putin not to start another military campaign” within the E.U.’s territory.[3] Strength comes in numbers, and at the time that meant 27 states united to thwart Putin’s military expansionism.

A united force would carry over into NATO, within which the E.U. would have more clout than any of the 27 E.U. states had ever had in the alliance. Furthermore, were the E.U. to replace its states in NATO, the seven E.U. states that still had not met the commitment to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense would be wiped clean because the only requirement would be that the E.U. spend at least 2% of its GDP on defense, and Kubilius was clearly signaling that the Commission was in favor of doing so.  Of course, whether the Parliament would go along is another story. For NATO, no longer would 27 states in Europe have to be watched as far as defense spending is concerned, and the integration of military infrastructure at the E.U. level would also be easier for NATO to connect to instead of doing so separately to 27 state military forces (militias in American parlance).

Perhaps most important, with the E.U. being a member of the NATO alliance and spending €200 billion over a decade on infrastructure that would integrate the fractured militaries at the state level, the chances would be lower that war would erupt within the E.U. between the states. Nineteenth-century American history reminds us that such a war is possible in an empire-scale federal system wherein the state governments are powerful, and twentieth-century European history contained two world wars that began in what would become the European Union. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is very much in the interests of the U.S. that the E.U. not only be able to defend itself, and thus rely less on American money for the purpose and be better equipped to fend off Russian expansionism, but also join NATO. Having one voice rather than 27 to speak with would simplify the communicative tasks on both sides of the Atlantic. I suspect that the foremost obstacle to further European integration on the defence front is ideological in nature, and this resistance, not coincidentally, aligns quite well with the personal and short-run political interests of the heads of the state governments in the European Union, for it is human, all too human, to relish being in the spotlight.



1. Paul Soler, “Boost E.U. Defence Capabilities Against Putin, Future Commissioner Warns,” Euronews.com, November 7, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Friday, November 1, 2024

Taoist Climate Change on Halloween

In the midst of the intensification of the very polarized and thus divisive U.S. presidential campaign “season” (i.e., year) during its last week, Halloween of 2024 occurred in Boston, Massachusetts not only without the need of trick-or-treaters and their parents to wear winter coats, but also with the option of wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts without even having to wear a light jacket. That this was so as late as 8pm was nothing short of surreal not only to New Englanders, but also to any transplants from the northern-tier Midwestern and Plains states.  It being around 70F degrees well into the dark hours was nothing short of unprecedented, and so much so that the negative impact of the cold climate in detracting from the holiday in prior years could finally be grasped. I had realized this more than a decade earlier when I was in Miami during Halloween. There is indeed a silver lining to global warming for people living in places that are cold during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons, even as contrary to political correctness it is to admit this even to friends. The proclivity of the human mind/brain to divide up the world in terms of dichotomies of mutually-exclusive, antagonistic poles does not necessarily fit with empirically with the real world. Taoism speaks to this.


The full essay is at "Climate Change on Halloween."


Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Be Fruitful and Multiply

John Locke claimed that “the main intention of nature” is “the increase of mankind and the continuation of the species,” the “preservation of all mankind” being a “law of nature.”[1] Centuries later, Locke’s assumption that an increased population necessarily makes the preservation of the species more likely could be challenged in a way that he could hardly have imagined. The human population reached 8.16 billion at the end of 2023, as compared with only 2 billion of our species having been alive in 1900. The exponential increase of energy-consuming organic hominoids has undoubtedly been a cause of the increased carbon emissions arising from human sources, and therefore of climate change in the Anthropocene. The biblical permission to be fruitful and multiply may have come from an eternal source (i.e., Yahweh), but that the divine decree is to be applied regardless of the size of the population as well as the impact that the human imprint is having on the environment, including the climate, is, I submit, a faulty and foolhardy assumption to make in the twenty-first century. The decree in the biblical narrative could be interpreted as a mandate that the Hebrews, freed from slavery in Egypt, follow to fully occupy the promised land.  Empirically, it may even be time for humanity to take stock of its increased numbers globally.

By suggesting that the human population has grown too much, given the finitude of our planet’s resources, I do not mean that wide swaths of the human population on this planet should be plagued, starved, or blown up. Such a specious ends-justify-the-means rationale for harm is the theme of one of the DaVinci Code movies, wherein the bio-destructive antagonist is clearly crazy. Even the Rev. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), relegated to Nature the clean-up role of using disease, famine, and increased conflict to get the number of humans on Earth back within ecologizing constraints, which is to say, to get human population down to a number that is consistent with the resources on Earth. In the twenty-first century, we might add, and does not ruin the planet in the process. Theoretically stated, a population growth rate that is behaving like a maximizing variable in mathematics, even if the derivative is negative (i.e., the rate of acceleration is decreasing), is a problem because such a variable has no problem piercing an ecosystem’s boundaries. Yet this is not done with impunity from Nature, according to Malthus.

According to one scholar, Malthus’ main theme is that a species’ population “inevitably grows beyond what the food supply can sustain.”[2] I have also read elsewhere that Malthus only claims that a population can grow beyond what the food supply can sustain. Even this throws a wrench into the deist assumption that a divine designer can be inferred from the order in Nature, so Malthus’ claim was controversial in his day.

Mitigating Nature’s devices to restore a population to good measure, Malthus admits that “the discrepancy between food and population spurs” industry, which in turn can enhance food growth and production such that the gap is closed.[3] But with the population at over 8 billion in 2024, I suspect that Malthus would have warned of impending natural limits to resources such as land and water (especially in the midst of climate change) as being something hard that even human enterprise must accept; the planet’s resources are, after all, finite. Furthermore, even if scientific advancement can render one resource more efficiently used and even augment it, another resource could then become a bottleneck, or hard constraint.

Whether as a divine decree or a natural, non-deist process, a larger human population is not necessarily beneficial for the species. Antedating Malthus’s work on population by about a half-century, however, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “invokes the invisible hand in arguing that the earth’s increasing fertility benefits humanity as a whole, despite [economic] inequality and the monopolization of land ownership by a few. The landlord can only eat a tiny portion of his land’s produce, the rest of which feeds the people who provide his luxuries.[4] The rich, despite their ‘natural selfishness and rapacity,’ are thus ‘led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.’[5] The rich man, motivated by ‘luxury and caprice,’ rather than ‘humanity’ or ‘justice,’[6] thus promotes a salutary ‘end which was no part of his intention.’”[7] In other words, industriousness has the unintended presumably beneficial consequences of advancing civilization and increasing the human population. Whereas a civilizing influence is arguably good under any circumstance, Smith’s assumption that increasing the size of the population is not in our day as unqualifiably beneficial as Smith assumed it to be in population growth from prosperity being limited to being in proportion  to its additional largess.

In Wealth of Nations, “Smith argues that the accumulation of capital and the increase of national wealth help ‘the great body of the people’ to ‘thrive,’ and that population growth is ‘the most decisive mark of prosperity.’”[8] This result of thriving is constrained rather than unlimited, for Smith maintains that, “’Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence.’”[9] An increase in population is an unintended beneficial consequence only in some relation to a period’s economic prosperity. But Smith undercuts Malthus’ claim that industriousness can catch food production up to a given population level because the prosperity resulting from the increase in industriousness or productivity causes the population to increase, albeit proportionately rather than maximally. Prosperity begets more people, perhaps to such an extent that the benefits from improved food-production productivity may not be enough to feed the larger population. Admittedly, Smith’s claim that family planning can be used to keep the standard of living up during a period of industriousness—rather than decreasing as the economic benefits of the additional industriousness are spread thin (i.e., decreasing GNP per capita) as the population increases due to the prosperity—could also mean that the proportioned population growth does not outstrip the enhanced food production. Perhaps it can be realistically said, therefore, that closing the gap between food availability and population can be expected to be problematic.

Similar to the idea that a tax cut can “pay for itself” by stimulating economic activity (GNP) and thus generating more tax revenue going into government coffers—a theory that has been empirically disproved since Reagan’s tax cuts in the U.S. in 1981—growing ourselves economically out of a gap between food production and the global population is too idealistic. Once that population reaches a certain level, “hard” constraints in terms of resources, which were not something that Malthus would have considered given the low population of humans on Earth in 1798 relative to the planet’s abundance, can become relevant in functioning like a “brick wall” that even scientific and technological advancement cannot penetrate. Yet Smith had written of an upper-bound, or “full complement,” of “riches” that is “allowed” in a geographical area by “nature,” such as in the soil, there, but this is geographically limited whereas in the twenty-first century, the human impact on the worsening conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could essentially move that brick wall closer in, hence narrowing the distance that human industriousness can go.[10] There is a big difference, in other words, between the limits to industry given the nature of a local ecosystem and running up against the limits of resources globally, such as in having drilled up all of the deposits of oil in the earth.

Unfortunately, reducing the extent, or depth, of the human imprint on the planet, whether in terms of the population or its offshoots such as pollution, warmer oceans (and air), and soil erosion, is an externality as far as markets, whether competitive, oligarchical, or monopolistic, are concerned. The political muscle of large concentrations of private wealth, whether of billionaires or large corporations, can styme government regulatory action to protect the overall good. Plato and Aristotle claimed that a passionate crowd is the downside of a demos (i.e., democracy), but perhaps today plutocracy, or the rule of (privately held) wealth, is the downside or even the inexorable eventual result of representative democracy.

So, where are we as a species if even the unintended beneficial consequence in the efficient allocation of resources, goods, and services in a competitive market is not enough to outweigh the baleful consequences of self-interest not only in terms of maximizing the chances of self-preservation, but also the preservation of one’s genes in offspring? Even in their 80s, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two famous Hollywood actors, became fathers yet again. Lest it be contended that they were selfish in knowingly fathering children that could not be expected to know their respective fathers for many years, the obverse possibility, namely, that science may one day extend the human lifespan even possibly indefinitely, could mean that population size could jump like the burst of new acceleration of a rocket from its second state igniting and adding a jolt of added thrust. No one would seriously contend that economic industriousness could close the gap between such a population size and the natural limits of the planet’s resources.

I submit that countries with low or even declining birth-rates should not feel the need economically or normatively to promote population growth by public policy. Furthermore, China, much of Africa, and especially India should take more seriously the interest of the species in prudently getting its population size down to size while doing so is still possible, and, absent these regions taking an interest in the good of the species, multilateral global governance should be strengthened particularly in terms of enforcement powers in the interest of the species. In this regard, the United Nations is a bad joke—an embarrassment, actually. For the species cannot rely on Smith’s unintended benefits of competitive markets to redress externalities; even Smith recognized the need for government, and he even warned of the likely collusion between business and government at the expense of labor, and, I might add, of the species itself.  For short-term economic prosperity to be more pressing than the longer-term interests of the species can be reckoned as a vulnerability in the very constitution of the human mind itself, and of course corporations like to invest in elected representatives and people tend to vote, both with their wallets and purses in mind.

This writing draws on my multidisciplinary studies that unfortunately kept me out of the much-siloed ivory towers of American provincialism that have been so populated by epistemological and administrative pedestrians of incrementalism. To be sure, seeing connections between seemingly far-ranging academic areas is not much valued by folks whose eyesight has been trained on minute analytical distinctions that fail the “so what” question yet satisfy Adam Smith’s claim that specialization of labor boosts productivity in business. Even so, I have been writing publicly to apply my eighteen years of formal university education and four more of post-doctoral study under a scholar of historical moral, political, and religious thought for the good of humanity in spite of our species’ narrowness and yet paradoxical arrogance that functions as if on stilts during a flood. Why the inclusion of benevolentia universalis in addition to my interest in connecting seemingly unrelatable ideas or theories and making societal (and global) blind-spots transparent is a question that I have not so far been able to answer. From my multidisciplinary perspective, from theology to political economy, I am struck by how interrelated human phenomena are, and by how much flies under the proverbial radar screen at least in societal public discourse. Both the interrelatedness and the societal and global “blind spots” pertain to population and climate change, as well as to ethics and political economy; Smith’s field, after all, was moral philosophy rather than economics, the latter of which, as a field, subsequently materialized in large part because of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Why does anyone seek to contribute to the species in spite of its stubborn, selfish refusal to change—to develop—even for its own good? Entrenched ignorance on stilts during a flood is not a very attractive beneficiary of charitable benevolence, and yet perhaps instinctually we feel the urge to help the human gene pool to persevere. Perhaps my judgment is overly negative or pessimistic. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time. Such creatures tend to dig and travel cognitively, whereas most people remain in their hometowns. Perhaps I have been writing for another and you are along for the ride. Nevertheless, I do hope that my thinking stimulates your own, because I believe our species very much needs new thoughts this century.



1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, sec. 59 and Second Treatise, sec. 7.
2. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 291n31.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 124. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
5. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
6. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
7. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.9.
8. Ibid., p. 127. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.21-23, 43.
9. Ibid. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.viii.39-40.
10. Ibid., pp. 126-27. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ix.14.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

China Castigates the E.U. on Taiwan

“Act prudently.” This was the warning addressed to the E.U. by China’s president Xi after the European Parliament voted 432 to 60 on October 24, 2024 on a resolution urging China to immediately cease its “continued military operations,” “economic coercion,” and “hostile disinformation” directed at Taiwan.[1] Whereas in the West, warning by shouting and slamming a fisted hand on a tabletop may be viewed as signaling vehement protest, the relative soft-spoken, be prudent connotes a very serious threat. The early twentieth-century U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, would likely miss the force of Xi’s intent to retaliate against the E.U. should it interfere with China on Taiwan. If my reading of Xi is correct, (and this may seem a leap), then the world coming to grips with constructing a global order commensurate to address global risks, such as climate change, starvation, and war in a nuclear age will face entrenched resistance in departing from the noxious principle of absolutist national sovereignty that has stymied collective, multilateral action. How dare you even hint that you will encroach on China’s sovereignty! This is essentially what President Xi was saying. Even in the post World War II global order of sovereign nation states, China’s claim that its sovereignty includes Taiwan is dubious, which in turn can be taken as evidence that resting the global order on the sovereignty of nation-states is problematic. In short, that principle allows for over-reaching without accountability.

In reacting officially to the E.U.’s resolution, China got right to the point, “warning that ‘the Taiwan question concerns China’s sovereignty’ and ‘it is a red line that must not be crossed.’”[2] The pith in the determination alone suggests that China would fight “tooth and nail” to hold onto all of its sovereignty rather than delegate some portion of it to a multilateral entity on the global level even so carbon-emission targets could be enforced on otherwise self-aggrandizing economic nation-states.

In explaining its warning, China also stated that it “strongly deplores and opposes this egregious breach of the one-China principle and interference in China’s internal affairs.”[3] But at the time, did the China-Taiwan dispute fall under China’s internal affairs? On the one hand, the UN Resolution 2758, which had been adopted in 1971, recognizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed the seat that had been assigned to the “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (in other words, Taiwan).[4]  Even in 2024, “the E.U., the U.S. and most” of the unitary single-states in the world maintained diplomatic relations only with the government of mainland China, “leaving [Taiwan] without official recognition.”[5] The resolution does not imply, however, that China has the UN’s permission to invade Taiwan, as the resolution does not even mention Taiwan (or the Republic of China). The E.U.’s resolution says as much, as it recommends “Taiwan’s meaningful participation” in international organizations.[6] It would be silly to say Taiwan can participate, but not exist apart from mainland China.

A more fundamental problem with China’s internal affairs claim centers on the ethical conflict of interest in one party of a dispute claiming the unilateral or sole authority to decide the question. That whether Taiwan was at the time included in China’s internal affairs was not definitely answered can be immediately realized by recalling the statement of Taiwan’s president, William Lai, that Taiwan was already de facto independent and thus did not even need to declare independence from the mainland. China’s claim of internal affair thus represents an overreach in terms of China’s beliefs and perception regarding its own sovereignty, and, by implication the lack thereof of Taiwan’s own. In other words, a nation-state’s own view of its sovereignty is subject to expansiveness and this in itself can give rise to state conflict internationally. Basing a global order on an absolutist interpretation of the sovereignty of the nation-state unit of political organization is inherently problematic. The absolutist interpretation includes the conflict of interest such as the one that China was exploiting in presuming to have the sole authority to decide what constitutes its sovereignty even in respect to territory that is in dispute with another nation-state. This is like a corporation’s management declaring that it would take over the National Labor Relations Board’s authority in the U.S. and rule on complaints made by the company’s labor union unilaterally without even bothering to put of the façade of being an impartial intermediary. At the time, Starbucks’ management would have liked to assume such a role; it could have cited China on the Taiwan question.

So in addition to the national sovereignty basis of the extant global order making enforcement of UN resolutions and international law nearly impossible, absent a voluntary “coalition of the willing” among nation-states—which can no means be relied upon even on an occasional basis—the sovereignty of nation-states is itself a problematic doctrine. Interpreted to be absolutist, national sovereignty even contains an unethical conflict of interest. I have elsewhere argued that even unexploited conflicts of interest are unethical, given the foreseeable tendencies in human nature; exploited conflicts, as evinced by China, are most definitely unethical. A global order that allows for such a thing is inherently flawed; that global-scale threats to our species have both increased and become more severe in the twenty-first century just adds to the urgency in replacing the flawed system, even if China warns us to be prudent in doing so.

It would be most imprudent to let China hold the world back from catching up with the twenty-first century. It is precisely such absolutist opportunist nation-states that justify extending sovereignty beyond the regional, or “empire-scale,” historically compounded polities, such as Russia, India, the E.U., the U.S., and China to the global level.



1. Jorge Liboreiro, “Act Prudently’: China Slams E.U. Parliament over Taiwan Resolution, Warns of Red Lines,” Euronews.com, October 25, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, italics added.
4. Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.