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.

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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.

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."

Pope Francis on Families and the Environment

On a trip to Indonesia in early September, 2024, Pope Francis signed a declaration on religious harmony and environmental protection at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta with the mosque’s grand imam. The Pope said that our species was facing a “serious crisis” bought about by war and the destruction of the environment.[1] Of war, the tremendous destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and Gaza that had been taking place was doubtless on the cleric’s mind. Of the environment, climate change was undoubtedly on his mind. In addition to volcanoes and wild fires, human emissions of carbon into the atmosphere were poised to push the global temperature increase above the critical threshold of 2.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. What connects the two problems at the root—the source of the two problems—went unmentioned. In fact, the Pope made a statement that, if acted upon, stood to exacerbate the underlying problem: the exponential explosion of growth of the human population in the twentieth century.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis on Families and the Environment."

1. Joel Guinto, “Pope and Top Indonesian Imam Make Joint Call for Peace,” BBC.com, September 5, 2024.

On Europe’s Nonlinear Climatic Future

The probable impacts of climate change are anything but straightforward, and thus predictable. From the standpoint of mid-2024, huge changes could be in store for Europe and other continents. The magnitude of the shifts is particularly worthy of notice, such that the changes being unleashed even as of 2024 and especially in the decades following the 2020s will be difficult to reverse or even change even if a Green revolution were to take hold. It bears noting that in 2023, the increase in energy usage globally outstripped contribution from alternative or clean energy, such that even more fossil fuel was used to meet the post-pandemic demand. A look at Europe provides a good case study of the unstoppable magnitude of some of the changes already underway.  

I cropped Duncan Porter's photos so the area covered in the background would be the same.

Duncan Porter took a photo of the Rhone glacier in Europe on August 4, 2024. He had taken a photo fifteen years minus one day earlier at the same spot. The loss of ice is palpable, reflecting the fact that Europe was as of 2024 the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures running 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels whereas the global increase stood at 1.3 degrees higher—very close indeed to the baleful planetary threshold of 1.5 degrees.[1] In short, Europe had already crossed that boundary set by scientists, and the empirical evidence could be seen in the massive loss of ice at the Rhone glacier.

When Porter took his “after” picture in early August, 2024, Europe was in the midst of “one of the most prolonged and intense” heatwaves on record, with temperatures consistently exceeding historical averages, “with some areas experiencing unprecedented highs. This prolonged heat . . . led to significant ecological stress, particularly on heathlands, which are critical stopover points and breeding grounds for migratory birds.”[2] With temperatures at 2.3 degrees higher on average than the pre-industrial level, Europe could expect such heatwaves as a matter of course, or the new normal, with significant ecological shifts resulting.

Lest linearity be assumed, Western Europe also faced the prospect of the end of the Gulf Stream, which is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). That current sends warm ocean water  over to Northern Europe from Florida and warms Western Europe, especially during the winter. Should this current cease from an influx of melted fresh water, European winters would be much colder (think Moscow). By 2024, it had been well established that melting freshwater from Greenland’s ice sheet was slowing down the Gulf Stream, and earlier than climate models had suggested. The question was when rather than if. In 2023, Politico reported, “A collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was likely to occur ‘around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions’—perhaps as soon as 2025 and not later than 2095, said Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen from the University of Copenhagen in a per-reviewed study published in Nature Communications.”[3] In other words, for Europeans sweating out the long heatwave during the summer of 2024, the perplexing news was that “Atlantic Ocean current that keeps large parts of Europe warm could come to an abrupt and catastrophic stop any time in the coming decades.”[4]

From the vantage point of 2024, prolonged heatwaves during summers and much colder winters could thus be the volatile, nonlinear climate-future of Europe. Uncharted territory is a good way to describe the possible, even probable changes in the offing. I don’t believe even scientists knew how the colder ocean water during the summers would impact the heatwaves, and how the average 2.3 degree temperature increase would impact winters that would otherwise be colder the loss of the Gulf Stream. Such interaction effects may pale next to severe heatwaves and no Gulf Stream, such that hot summers and very cold winters could run for decades through the 21^st century.

Meanwhile, in North America, the Midwest was projected to get much hotter, with some places in the Southwest possibly becoming uninhabitable, while Florida and the East Coast would be cooler than otherwise if the Gulf Stream shuts down. So, Europeans were not alone in being beset with unknown interaction effects. Going into uncharted territory may be titillating, but when the reality of a changed world sets in, the excitement will likely quickly wear off. With such huge changes as the Gulf Stream shutting down, climatic shifts will be of such magnitude that shifting back would not be likely.

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1. Euronews Green, “It Made Me Cry,” Euronews, August 6, 2024.
2. Luke Hanrahan, “Heathlands under Siege,” Euronews, August 5, 2024.
3. Karl Mathiesen, “Gulf Stream Shutoff Could Happen this Century, Scientists Warn,” Politico, July 25, 2023.
4. Ibid.

On the Role of Agribusiness in Global Warming

Agriculture is a major source of carbon and methane emissions, which in turn are responsible for the general trend of the warming of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. In fact, agriculture emits more than all of the cars on the roads. 10 percent of the emissions carbon dioxide and methane in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector. Livestock is the biggest source of methane. Cows, for example, emit methane. Methane from a number or sources, including the thawing permafrost, accounted for 30 percent of global warming in 2023. As global population has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, herds of livestock at farms have expanded, at least in the U.S., due to the increasing demand.[1] We are biological animals, and we too must eat. More people means that more food is needed, and the agricultural lobby in the U.S. is not about to let the governments require every resident to become a vegetarian. Indeed, the economic and political power of the large agribusinesses in the U.S. have effectively staved off federal and state regulations regarding emissions. It comes down to population, capitalism, and plutocracy warping democracy.

In the early 80s, the farm lobby in the U.S. “began to get concerned about environmental regulations” and made sure the FDA would not regulate American farms.[2] The EPA has delegated permits to the States, but they have been “uneven in issuing permits. In 2009, a law barring the EPA from applying clear air regulations to livestock” took effect.[3] The agriculture lobby has thus been “extremely effective.”[4] This has been so even in spite of the Paris Agreement reached in 2016, and the steadily increasing average global temperatures. A U.S. Government-sponsored report admits that increased demand/consumption of meat impacts climate change, which in itself is interesting given all the political donations and lobbying by the agribusiness companies in the U.S., but the report concludes that people in developing countries should eat less meat.[5] Apparently Americans are uniquely privileged to die of heart-disease. Perhaps the hospital lobby wants to encourage more business thanks to third-party payors.

The figures on the political contributions and lobbying by agribusinesses (and oil companies) are mind-blowing. For instance, American agribusiness spent a record $165 million on federal lobbying in 2022.[6] A total of $128 million went to political contributions to campaigns in the 2021-2022 cycle.[7] The sheer amounts spent lend credibility to the claim that wealth rather than votes rule: plutocracy over the veneer of democracy in America. The capture of regulatory agencies by the companies or industries being regulated has existed in the academic literature since at least the 1980s. So too has the strategic use of regulation. For example, the capture of methane at farms through technology qualifies for government subsidies, but only the bigger agribusinesses can afford this technology. Additionally, JP Morgan and other large banks have been lending primarily to large agribusinesses because they are less risky than smaller farms. It is no surprise, when all is said and done, that medium and small farms have been going out of business for decades. I submit that this cannot be explained by economies of scale alone.

To be sure, a lot of agribusinesses have pledged to be more transparent on the emissions from operations, but very few of the businesses report on the bulk of their emissions.[8] Transparency only goes so far until entrenched concentrations of economic wealth (e.g., agribusinesses) find that holding the curtains open too much can hurt business. Moreover, both the political donors and their “elected representatives” both have an interest in maintaining the veneer that the public interest is being served. Adam Smith’s invisible hand only works in a competitive market, whereas neither agribusiness nor the market for political donations in Congress is a competitive market. In Wealth of Nations, Smith does not apply the competitive-market price mechanism to government. In fact, political contributions from businesses can be thought of as a special case of price-fixing.

The encroachments of plutocracy on representative democracy are largely hidden from view, and the corruption does seem to be ineluctable. Given large enough concentrations of private wealth, the buying of political power seems inevitable. Smith wrote as much concerning the use of government by managements outweighing the ability of labor unions to do just that. He predicted the strikes and the one-sided involvement of police and even military troops. The cost of plutocracy at the expense of the public good is much more since public good and the viability of our species came to depend on our baleful impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystems.  Even so, the negative impact of a political economy of business is dwarfed by the negative impact from the sheer growth of the human population on this planet since the 1800s. As intractable as the partisan, self-serving, and narrow involvement of business in government is, it would be difficult for a population that has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in the twentieth century to begin to trim the sails by discouraging population growth. For one thing, reducing the number of potential consumers would be bad for business.

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1. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Madison McVan, “GRAPHIC: Agribusiness Spent a Record-breaking $165 million on Federal Lobbying Last Year,” Investigate Midwest, February 16, 2023.
7. “Agribusiness Top Contributors,” Open Secrets.
8. Georgina Gustin, “Climate Change and Agriculture,” Yale University, February 22, 2024.

Energy and Global Population

There is a temptation, especially since the global average temperature reached the 1.5C increase threshold in 2023 much faster than anticipated, to focus narrowly on the progress in renewable energy sources without placing it in perspective relative to the total amount of energy being used globally, the annual increases in energy demand, and the root cause, the explosive growth in human population since the early 20^th century. The strategic geo-political international interests of countries impacted and should thus be considered as well.  

According to Nick Butler, a former advisor at BP, a European oil company, the global use of energy increased 4-fold by 2024 since 1965. The increased use of energy commercially has led to increased trade as supply has become global. The world has thus become even more interdependent, which means that yet another basis for political instability has sprung up. Interruptions in supply led to a political push in the U.S. for energy independence. Even though as of 2024 every country still depended on the global trade in energy, the U.S. was trending towards energy independence and could eventually even be in a position of being able to export energy supplies without importing any. It’s debatable, however, whether exporting energy increases a country’s power. It had not worked for OPEC in managing prices, although the oil shocks in 1974 and 1979 gave the impression that OPEC could have considerable leverage over the U.S. As it turned out, substitution and the development of new supplies undercut OPEC’s higher prices. In contrast, Butler contends, building up sources of energy is a source of wealth, though political instability can also result as fights can break out over the new wealth.[1]

Besides being at odds with efforts to reduce carbon emissions if the stock is exported to be consumed, maximizing stocks of oil, natural gas, and coal as a source of a country’s wealth be wrongheaded. It may suffer from the same fallacy that is in mercantilism. Under that economic policy, a country minimizes imports and maximizes exports in order to accumulate as much silver and gold as possible. According to Adam Smith, “The exportation of gold and silver in trade might frequently be advantageous to the country.”[2] Historically, “the exportation of gold and silver in order to purchase foreign goods, did not always diminish the quantity of those metals in the [British] kingdom. That, to the contrary, [the exportation] might frequently increase that quantity.”[3] This still assumes that increasing the stocks represents an increase in a country’s wealth. Before critiquing that assumption, let’s look at the argument wherein exporting gold and silver to pay for imports actually winds up increasing the domestic supply of those metals to a net-increase.”

How could trading away some of those precious metals that were used as money increase a country’s wealth? If a country has gold and silver in surplus, part of it could be exchanged “for something else, which may satisfy a part of [the domestic] wants, and increase [the people’s] enjoyments” at home.[4] The benefits from the exports of the metals to pay for imports of goods extend back to domestic manufacturers being able to produce more output, given the increased demand, and thus increase the division of labor—Smith’s big thing!—and thereby produce goods more efficiently.  According to Smith, “By means of [the increased demand], the narrowness of the home market does not hinder the division of labour in any particular branch of art or manufacture from being carried to the highest perfection.”[5] The increased division of labor enhances efficiency of production, which in turn makes the pricing of exports more competitive, and thus demand increases. As exports to satisfy the increased foreign demand for the goods rise, the gold and silver that are used abroad to pay for the goods come into the home country and thus increase its supply of the two metals.

As for the need to increase the holdings of gold and silver as much as possible, the assumption that this enhances a country’s ability to fight a war is something else that Smith contests in his text. Regarding the need for stocks of silver and gold from which to be able to send abroad some in order to pay for the home army while it is fighting abroad, “(t)he commodities most proper for being transported to distant countries, in order to purchase there, either the pay and provisions of an army, or some part of the money of the mercantile republick (sic) to be employed in purchasing them, seem to be the finer and more improved manufactures.”[6] These, rather than sending silver and gold, have the benefit of increasing the demand of manufactures. “The enormous expense of the late war,” Smith contends, “must have been chiefly defrayed, not by the exportation of gold and silver, but by that of British commodities of some kind or other.”[7] So the need to accumulate silver and gold by minimize the imports of manufactured goods while maximizing exports—the key tenet of mercantilism—is, according to Smith, less beneficial than free-trade. Moreover, he holds that the market mechanism is much better than government fiat in allocating goods, services, and even metals used as money and wealth.

Similarly, perhaps exporting other commodities than coal, liquified natural gas, and oil might benefit the U.S. more by enhancing the efficiency of domestic producers of other goods (and services), especially if economies of scale exist, and increasing employment since more workers would be required and each could be more efficient and thus valuable to the companies. Additionally, carbon emissions would not be as high were the U.S. to sit on, rather than export, its stockpiles of “dirty” energy sources.

Admittedly, the pressure from unmet energy demand in other countries that are not energy-independent would tempt the U.S. Government and American companies to respectively allow and make more exports of coal, liquified natural gas, and oil because such sales would be lucrative. Behind this pressure is the relationship between a steeply growing global population and the ongoing prevalence of the “dirty” energy sources in meeting the increasing demand from an exponentially growing population. Indeed, because of shale, the US had become the largest exporter of natural gas in the world by 2024.

As of February, the world had 4 billion more people than in 1970. That translates into a 10,000 increase per hour, which in turn means 200 million new customers for commercial energy supplies every year.[8] Along with the increased global population, oil consumption increased by 150% since 1970. Because renewables were still focused on electricity, which was only one fourth of energy demand globally in 2023, the “dirty” sources were still supplying most of the increased demand.[9] Put another way, the increased supply of renewables was not even keeping up with the annual increases in demand for energy. In spite of the carbon-emission targets, oil and gas still accounted for 80% of global energy in early 2024.[10]

Most of the increase in energy demand and all the increase in carbon emissions during the previous 20 years was in Asia Pacific (esp. China).  By 2024, China was importing a lot of energy supplies—even markedly changing the patterns of global trade away from the U.S. being the dominant import market—and accounted for about a third of total global emissions.[11] Crude oil imports doubled from 2013 and 2023.[12]

Unfortunately, forecasts did not include a dramatic reduction in oil and coal use. In China, 300 million poor people in China were projected in 2024 to move into the middle class by 2050. This means more energy use, and thus more oil and gas. Nuclear energy was being developed there, but coal was still a major source of employment in 2023, and fit the Party’s goal of shifting wealth inland. Also, wanting to be the world’s leading industrial power is not in the direction of decreasing the commercial demand for energy.[13]

It is important to include the impact on international relations. As of the start of 2024, China was dependent on imports from Russia and the Middle East. As the U.S. strategic oil-imports interest in policing the Middle East diminishes as the U.S. gets closer to energy independence, the increased interest of China in exercising control in that region meant that a new conflict-zone might open up between the two empires. 

With the world going from over 8 billion people in late 2023 to a projected nearly 10 billion in 1045, we can anticipate more demand for energy, and with it, more international (and domestic) instability. With plenty of oil still in the ground and decreased demand due to substitutes such as electric cars and nuclear energy, the world won’t run out of oil.[14] This is bad news for our species as the planet continues to warm. Even as the press highlights the increase in renewable energy sources, the default is much, much larger and thus diminishing the share of “dirty” sources will not come as quickly as we might think. In short, we are in quite a mess as a species both because it isn’t easy to reduce our sluggish reliance on sluggish oil and invisible gas, and our global population grew so fast and so much in the 20^th century and has continued to increase in the first two decades of the next century that, as biological organisms needing external sources of energy, the energy demand of our species is likely to keep on increasing even if we become more efficient. The expediential increase in population can be so large that its baleful effects outweigh any gain from increased efficiency. Again, the baseline is so massive that changes from greater efficiency merely mitigate the increased harm done. 

Similarly, the large amount of energy consumption from “dirty” sources relative to the increased supply from renewables renders any shift very gradual. The Titanic could not turn fast enough to avoid the iceberg in 1912 because the rudder was too small for the mass, and thus momentum, of the ship. We would like to turn away from “dirty” sources of energy, but our rudder pales in comparison to the magnitude (and proportion) of those sources. We need a bigger rudder, or we too may flounder. The global economy does not “turn on a dime.”

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1. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 4^th edn., R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, ed.s (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1776/1976), sec 9, p. 433.
3. Ibid., sec 7, p. 431.
4. Ibid., sec 31, p. 446.
5. Ibid., sec 31, pp. 446-47.
6. Ibid., sec 29, p. 444.
7.  Ibid., sec 27, p. 443.
8. Nick Butler, Lecture on Energy and Security, Yale University, February 15, 2024.
9.  Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know what is pleasing to God outside of divine revelation was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of human knowledge and the presumption to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate a personal ideology were firmly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that it could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from its intellectual raison d’être to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution in getting at the underlying source of climate change. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms.

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

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1. A.M.C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology Since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211. 

2.  Ibid., p. 212.

Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20^th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.  

In 2023, Earth “shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency,” Coernicus announced on January 9, 2024.[1] The use of the word, shattered, seems hyperbolic, or exaggerated, to draw attention, but sometimes small differences in numbers represent significant change that is difficult for us non-scientists to perceive. “Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit).”[2] Very gradual change is the default for the Earth’s climate, which is why a long-term perspective is needed even to assess the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.

“The agency had calculated that 2023 was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming,” the agency’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said.[3] To be sure, not all of the 1.48 Celsius increase from pre-industrial times was due to pollution. “Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes. . . . Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere.”[4] Even so, 1.3 accounts for most of the 1.48 degrees, and is thus significant. This can also be inferred by the estimate that “2023 was probably hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. Our species, homo sapiens, has only been around for 300,000.

It looks like hope is running dry on whether economies will push us—or, more accurately, whether we will push ourselves—beyond the 1.5 Celsius limit of global warming agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement. To be sure, “(f)or the first time, nations meeting for annual United Nations climate talks in December [2023] agreed that the world needs to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, but they set no concrete requirements to do so.”[5] However, even though renewable sources of energy had “expanded at record rates, fossil fuels maintained an 82% share of total primary energy consumption” in 2022.[6] Even at the same share, “carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose 0.9% in 2022 to a new high of 34.4 billion metric tons, indicating lack of progress in curbing worldwide carbon output.”[7]  Emissions thus “moved further away from the reductions called for in the Paris Agreement.”[8] Juliet Davenport, president of EI, said, “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”[9] So even in the midst of shattering records, governments generally were still allowing their respective economies to increase their emissions, or at least enough governments were resisting taking measures that would reflect knowledge of how rapidly the planet was warming overall.

The lack of concrete requirements had rendered the Paris Agreement toothless, and thus no match for the pressures that governments are always under to facilitate and not thwart economic growth and not to stand up to corporate donors to political campaigns in democracies. More abstractly stated, non-binding international treaties are no match for the human urge for instant gratification and the desire for more wealth (i.e., greed). In spite of our great reasoning ability, our species also has expediency “hard-wired” into our biology. A big unanswered question is whether research into means to “capture” carbon in the atmosphere (and oceans) will undo the damage caused by our species’ heedless impulsive refusal to self-regulate itself.

In the movie, “The Matrix,” agent Smith likens our species to a virus because we keep spreading. In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion; by 2024, 8.1 billion humans were alive on Earth. Clearly, such a enormous increase in just 123 years must be significant for the planet's ecosystems, even a shock. Few of us even realize that, in line with Thomas Malthus’s thesis that human population can outstrip the world’s supply of food—which stirred controversy among Deists who could not accept such a large flaw in God’s design of the Creation—the exponential increase of our species’ population is a, or even the, underlying cause of the rising carbon emissions from cars, trucks, heating, agriculture, and industrial production levels. Simply put, more people means more cars, and thus more exhaust; more people means more widgets, which means more factories as well as more freighters on the seas, more trucking and more freight-train hauls; and more people means more dwellings, which means more heating and air-conditioning, and thus more demand for heating oil and on coal plants for more electricity. These relationships are really quite simple at the macro level of aggregation, though admittedly I am putting to the side the shift from coal and oil to renewables. We are all organisms, and thus we cannot but consume and use resources; the more organisms, the more food, for instance, is needed. Malthus, an Anglican priest and political economist, was right in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, when the global population of humans stood at 1 billion (1900, a century later, being just 650 million more). If an intelligent design of Creation can indeed be inferred—an inference challenged by Malthus’ theory of over-population wherein geometrical population growth can outstrip arithmetic expansion in resources—self-regulation would presumably be crucial in our species and yet the laggard responses to the Paris Agreement would suggest that we suffer a want of self-discipline on a collective (and individual) level.

From the susceptibility of elected representatives to being beholden to big business, and the insatiable greed etched into the very raison d’etre and being of a company and the manager function, we can infer the very weakness of the human urge to self-limit or voluntarily restrain ourselves relative to an otherwise maximizing, or schizogenic, inbred and culturally-encouraged tendency to resist or ignore soft limits (i.e., those not subject to enforcement). Fortunately, the jury is still out on whether the technological advancements that human reason is capable of (e.g., carbon capture) will rescue our species from its own intractable instinctual urges that are felt so strongly in the moment that our species would even allow itself to deconstruct in the long-term as if this were pre-determined without free-will.   

1. Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in 2023,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Rapier, “Why the World Keeps Setting Global Carbon Emission Records,” Forbes, August 1, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

Will Breakthroughs Save the Planet?

The dire predictions concerning the probable impact of climate change on ecosystems, ocean-levels, and food-production, as well as on our species itself have understandably been made without taking into account the countervailing impact of technology yet to be invented. Instead, the focus has been on governmental, rather than business, efforts aimed at reducing carbon emissions. This too is understandable, as companies have consistently been oriented to their own profits rather than reducing externalized costs, such as pollution. This focus has left the element of technological innovation or invention out of the equation. Moreover, because it is not possible to predict whether our species will have invented technology in time for it to counter the predicted impacts of climate change, relying on such technology so as to obviate the need to act so as to limit or reduce carbon emissions would be foolish and reckless. Put another way, it was irresponsible as of 2020 at least to say that government restrictions on carbon emissions were not necessary because technology will be invented that will substantially reduce emissions or even remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere. This does not mean that such inventions will not be made in time to make a significant positive impact. It is indeed possible, moreover, that our species, homo sapiens, will be saved by its own knowledge after all, even though we do not seem capable of regulating the innate desire for instant gratification even if the species’ survival lies in the balance. An invention by Heliogen in 2019 was such a breakthrough that it was arguably the first invention capable of giving people such hope. That is, the step-forward represented by the invention was such that people at the time could hope that the most noxious future impacts of climate change might not be inevitable.

Heliogen, a 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.”[1] These industries were “responsible for more than a fifth of global emissions, according to the EPA.”[2] 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.”[3] Such statements have been unusual, to say the least. They connote hope even beyond their particular instance because they show that such breakthroughs are indeed possible. Indeed, more such breakthroughs would still be necessary to stave off the feared effects of climate change.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, was an early backer of Heliogen. He characterized the invention as “a promising development in the quest to one day replace fossil fuel.”[4] As laudable as this, as well as a titan’s investment in such a widely beneficial venture, is, replacing fossil fuel does not reduce the accumulated carbon (and methane) in the atmosphere. At 410 ppm, the carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere was already highly problematic from the standpoint of eventual harm to the planet. At least at the time of Heliogen’s invention, it would do nothing to reduce carbon that had or would enter the atmosphere (or the oceans). Ultimately, staving off climate change due to carbon emissions would entail extracting carbon (and methane) from the atmosphere and oceans.

Therefore, the breakthrough itself was not enough to relieve governments and businesses from pressure to drastically reduce carbon emissions. Indeed, carbon would continue to accumulate in the atmosphere from the cement and steel industries before the full implementation of the ovens (and storage for rainy days), as well as from business more generally in which the new technology is not applicable. Methane would still be emitted from permafrost as it melts at northern latitudes. In short, the breakthrough could be expected to reduce the emission of carbon while the remaining emissions increase the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere and oceans. Even so, the sheer existence of one breakthrough pertaining to climate change can give us hope that other breakthroughs, even pertaining to reducing accumulated carbon and methane, will happen even if we could not factor them in.

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

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

China's Population: Demographic Imbalances and the Climate Emergency

In his treatise on Understanding, David Hume posits that we don’t know as much about causation as we think we do. Often times, positive correlation (i.e., two or more things present at the same time) is confused with causation (i.e., one thing causing another). That umbrellas tend to be out when it is raining does not mean that umbrellas cause rain (or that rain causes umbrellas). Rain and umbrellas have their own distinct causes, which Hume would say we don’t understand as well as we think we do. It is very difficult, for example, to determine whether climate change caused by methane and CO2 emissions caused October 2019 to the hottest October globally on record; more data-points covering long stretches of time are needed to distinguish even a few outliers from being part of a broader trend. By October of 2019, not only had scientists obtained and analyzed enough samples over a long enough time-frame to be confident (99%) that climate change had been occurring due to human carbon emissions. Not since roughly 60 million years ago had the carbon parts per million in the atmosphere stood at 410 ppm. In having to repeatedly accelerate their forecasts regarding the various impacts, such as sea-level rise due to melting ice (on land, such as Greenland), scientists had demonstrated that our understanding of the causation on the various impacts was still far from perfect. Even so, 11,000 scientists knew enough by November 2019 to declare unequivocally that humanity was facing a climate-change emergency. That is to say, drastic changes in terms of carbon emissions (e.g., energy sources, lifestyles) would have to be quickly made to avoid the worst-case scenario (e.g., mass food shortages, mass migrations from coastal areas and the loss of cities, and disease). This scenario is in line with Mathias’ theory of population ecology wherein a population of a species increasing without reaching an equilibrium maximum faces an increased risk of war, disease, or starvation. Once a species’ population pierces the semi-permeable constraints of the wider ecosystem (i.e., natural environment), Nature has its own ways of arresting the schizogenic growth of a species if it fails to limit its increase. During the twentieth century, the global increase of our species’ population was expediential, going from 1.6 to 6.1 billion. Sadly, even many policy-makers were oblivious to the fact that such a huge change must surely have consequences, at least some day. China’s one-child policy was an exception, making the relatively unconstrained population growths in India and Africa more noticeable as potentially problematic. Why did China need its policy while India, also with a population of over a billion, did not? In fact, the growth mantra generally subscribed to by countries across the globe acted as an incentive to make matters worse! Even a population with a low birth rate was generally taken as a problem. The negative impacts on a labor force and economic growth more broadly gave governments an incentive to increase birth-rates and thus populations (even though immigration served as an alternative). I want to look further into the case of China as a means of assessing how seriously the world was taking the climate emergency.

China’s one-child policy, wherein a couple could only have one child, was instituted in 1980 and abandoned in 2015, when couples could have two children (but not more). With one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, China faced the “prospect of fewer and fewer workers to support retirees amid a rising median age.”[1] In other words, the pressure of a temporary demographic bind had come to outweigh concerns about the population level even though 1.3 billion people was a significant part of the species’ distended population level of 7.5 billion.

Considering that as living beings, humans must consume energy, 1.3 billion people cannot but have a considerable impact on how much energy humanity consumes. Even were fossil fuel sources entirely eliminated in China and abroad, food scarcity would still be strained, especially considering that India’s 1.3 billion people are also consuming energy. This goes back to the point that a huge increase in the species’ population must have significant repercussions concerning energy (including food). 

To their credit, even though China’s policy-makers in 2019 were “well aware that a rising crop of retirees threaten[ed] to drain household savings and derail [economic] growth” and that the population could start to decline in 2030, birth limits remained in effect in the two-child policy.[2] Policy-makers argued that technological advances and automation would increase productivity such that fewer young workers would be needed. I submit that the government could step in to increase funding to retirees to take the financial pressure off of their family members who are working. Even absent immigration, demographic tight-points can be managed such that the overall goal of a smaller population is not compromised. Therefore, it is irresponsible to say that China should abandon its two-child policy, even if China’s demographic pinch would turn out to be worse than expected in 2019 when the global population stood at 7.7 billion, heading in the wrong direction!

Given the climate emergency, the scientists strongly advised the world that drastic measures needed to be taken as soon as possible. Correcting for the incredible increase in our species’ population that occurred in the twentieth century can be considered a necessary part of the drastic measures. The world would be wise to offer China assistance (e.g., knowledge) such that the corrective is successful, and to pressure India to make a similar corrective. In the culture of growth, it is important to point out that an economy can be expected to contract as its population decreases significantly. Productivity advances, however, can mean that a lower quality of life does not go with the contraction. Indeed, economic contraction is itself part of the decreased demand for energy that goes with a smaller population. To sustain itself rather than be cut down by natural processes, our species must decrease its demand overall rather than only shift off fossil fuels. The planet contains limited resources, including habitable (and farmable) land. Overpopulation can trigger war, disease, and starvation, and even changes to the atmosphere that could render the planet itself very uncomfortable or even uninhabitable for humans.

Listening to a talk given by a NASA public-relations person, I was stunned that he admitted that in NASA’s view we can no longer rely “on this rock” for the survival of our species. Hence the plans to colonize the Moon and Mars.  My reaction was that those are artificial environments for us, and thus inherent unstable, whereas we are suited naturally to living on Earth—just not 8 billion of us! Getting back in sync with our natural environment seems to me to be vastly superior to relying on artificial environments. The twentieth century—the bloodiest century ever as of its close—can turn out to be a population bubble or a jump in terms of population. The bubble-effect requires our species to push itself back down, whereas a jump goes to a higher-population plateau. China deserves credit for resisting the temptation to see its population increase unabated in the false assumption that economic growth is most important.

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1. Liyan Qi and Fanfan Wang, “China Left One-Child Policy Behind, but It Still Struggles With a Falling Birth Rate,” The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2019.

2. Ibid.

Hidden Warnings of Climate Change: A Paralyzed Species Looks On

Global warming has been so difficult to slow down through political means at least in part due to the fact that most of the action has been going on in the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding permafrost land (which, it turns out, is not so permanently frozen after all, so methane is leaving that ground for the atmosphere). All this is far from almost all of the world’s population, so social consciousness has not been changed nearly enough for demands by voters that governments act in enforceable ways, globally. In short, what has been occurring in that far Northern region has both dwarfed consciousness of the impact of human-released carbon/methane.  The proverbial canary in the coal mine has been hidden from view for all but a few (e.g., scientists). The implications are truly astonishing.
According to Alan Buis at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in 2013, “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”[1] In general terms, if the pace of global warming outstrips the ability of the ecosystem sustaining the human race to adapt, the species can be expected to suffer with inadequate prior notice. The planet's climate may get warmer too fast to allow us to adjust, for instance, in terms of such essentials as food and water. Hotter summers may be just part of the challenge. Lest it be forgotten, the more complex the organism, the less adaptable it is to external change. In addition to the biology of complexity, the motive of greed makes us even less adaptive when the costs are up-front and the benefits totally or even mostly in the future. 
So what is it that was going on up North that had Alan Buis so concerned in 2013? In his article, he points out that over “hundreds of millennia [that’s a very long time], Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon [because dead plants and animals do not decompose in the top soil]—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons).”[2]  This amount of carbon is significant for two reasons. 
First, the carbon is in the soil that is likely to thaw. Once thawed, that soil, which has been warming even faster than the Arctic air, releases carbon into the atmosphere.  Second, the 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams dwarfs “the 350 petagrams of carbon that have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850.”[3] If you are reading this essay while eating in a restaurant, this is when you flag down your server and calmly say, “Check please!” so you can get your affairs in order.
In the frozen soil that covers 9 million square miles, melting would also emit “massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere,” according to Terrell Johnson of weather.com.[4] He adds that methane is “much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year period.”[5] Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the E.U. have predicted tremendous economic costs as a consequence of the expected release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane in thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.[6]. That is by no means all of the permafrost up North.
According to Buis, climate models at least as of June 2013 had not yet adequately incorporated the impact of carbon and methane that could be released into the atmosphere from the “permafrost” soils, which, by the way, had warmed as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees F (1.5 to 2.5 degrees C) in 30 years.[7] Regardless of the decade, we could have absolutely no idea where the Earth’s climate would be headed—and thus whether our species would even survive.
Although humans beings have not been holding blow-torches to the frozen tundra as if playing some sick joke on nature in the middle of the night, the vast majority—98 percent—of climatologists agreed in 2013 that the “human contribution” had been a significant factor in the carbon dioxide having reached the 400 ppm (parts per million) benchmark for what Johnson calls “a new danger zone."[8]
We as a species may have inadvertently helped light the fuse on a process even more significant than carbon in impacting global warming. To be sure, at the time, it was difficult to ascertain how much or even whether that methane-process would be mitigated or reduced in its extent should reducing our burning of fossil fuels mean that the Arctic air would not warm up quite so much as would otherwise be the case. Nevertheless, the sheer magnitude of the carbon and methane still caught in the frozen soil and the gigantic effect those gases would have if released into the atmosphere suggest that it is in our own best interest as a species to do what we can to reduce the amount of additional warming of the Arctic air as much as possible.
Making the matter more confusing, the warming at the Arctic has been more than at the equator. The slope between cold and warm air between the two areas fuels the Arctic jet-stream, or "the Polar Vortex." Less energy means the circling river of air around the Arctic is loosens and thus can belch Arctic air southward. Think of that high river of air as like a wobbly rubber-band. The wobbles send more Arctic air further south, the last week of January, 2019 being but one instance. Together, the instances give the false impression that global warming is not occurring. "We had a really cold winter last year," a man in Chicago, Illinois or Berlin, Germany, might say. He might conclude that global warming is a hoax, then he might vote. Hence Jefferson and Adams agreed that a viable republic (and we might generalize to world) requires an educated and virtuous citizenry. 

For all our amazing accomplishments technologically beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the human race has shown itself to be remarkably blind concerning not only its own footprint, but also what might be unleashed in nature itself as a result of our thrashing about. In the film Avatar, Neytiri chastises Jake Sully, saying “You are like a baby. Making noise, don’t know what to do,” on account of his ignorance on how to conduct himself in the forest. The irony is astounding in that we humans have been able to get to the moon, and yet we are so ignorant—arrogant even—regarding how we are impacting our climate and ecosystems, both of which we rely on for our very survival as a species. In all likelihood, the sheer clumsiness in our corporate footprint and the astounding arrogance in our socialite swagger will be outstripped sooner than we suppose by the subtle yet enduring ways of nature. For all our power and money, for all our numbers across many lands, we are indeed a small species that presumes itself to be great.

[1] Alan Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?” NASA News and Features, June 10, 2013. Accessed July 16, 2013.
[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs,” weather.com, July 15, 2013.  Accessed July 16, 2013.
[5] Ibid.

[6] Nina Chestney, "Arctic Methane Release Due to Climate Change Could Cost Global Economy $60 Trillion, Study Reports," Reuters, July 24, 2013.

[7] Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”
[8] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs.”